A Day on Long Island with Alex Lee

By Francis Lam

It was a February night in the back room of Gramercy Tavern, at a dinner for Ed Behr and the Art of Eating. Every guest—writers, chefs, editors—was a household name for American food nerds. All, except for one: an Asian man, maybe in his late forties, with close-cropped hair and a sturdy look. He smiled graciously but had a visitor’s air amidst the cheek kissers. Every once in a while someone called him “Chef.”

We introduced ourselves eventually. “I’m Alex,” he said as we shook hands. Alex… Alex… a name I’d only read before jumped into my mind, and I could feel my eyes grow wider. “Alex Lee?” I asked.

Way back, before Daniel Boulud was President of the Restaurant Universe, when he was still just a young star with a lot of promise, when he’d just left Sirio Maccioni’s Le Cirque to strike out on his own, Alex Lee was right there with him. He was trained by Ducasse in Monte Carlo, by a grandmother in Italy (a grandmother who happened to have three Michelin stars at Dal Pescatore), and by his own Chinese grandmother. He spoke perfect French with long Long Island o’s and, straddling the divide between Boulud’s French and American cooks, became Restaurant Daniel’s first chef de cuisine. He was one of the first chefs to braise pork belly in American haute cuisine, to season roasted lobster with soy sauce in the foie-and-truffles world.

Michael Anthony, executive chef, Gramercy Tavern: Restaurant Daniel was my first job in New York, in 1995. Back then, Alex was one of the first guys who started digging deep in his personal history, his family history, searching for flavors that were seductive and exploring how these Asian ideas would fit into the mix. That’s very normal now, but those were the first baby steps. In one meal, can you move from foie gras and truffles to soy sauce and roasted lobster? I can remember the juxtaposition of some of those flavors and thinking, Huh? Does that really work? And I think that opened the door wide open for all sorts of cooks to not even hesitate to try that in a fine-dining setting. For me at least, he threw the door wide open.

But this was 1993, before the Food Network made chefs into living-room fixtures, before Tony Bourdain made them into pirate heroes, before the Internet made them buzz. Back then, it was really just work. Work, and, if you cared, craft. Alex Lee cared.

He poked and prodded every box of ingredients that came into the restaurant, constantly writing ideas and combinations on his clipboard, making eight or nine specials a night in a restaurant where diners might come only once in their lives.

Daniel Boulud: For me, that was the adrenaline: “So and so is coming in: oh, let’s cook something special for him!” The more Daniel became an important restaurant, the less risk we took, in a way. But back then, we didn’t care. We took all the risks in the world—we could risk doing dishes we never did before. At the time, there were no phone cameras, videos, recording… if we could have recorded everything we did, it would have been beautiful. But we didn’t give a fuck; we just wanted to cook.

With Alex, every day we pulled each other out of the hole. Today I am surrounded by a whole management company, HR, PR, a director of purchasing. We have so many people to give support today. But in the early days, there was never any support anywhere. It was us.

He giddily called cooks around to show them a new squash he’d grown on his rooftop, and he destroyed their mise en places—and maybe them—if they were doing it wrong. Daniel’s kitchen was a constant hurricane as it cooked furiously for its fourth New York Times star, and he stood at its center. He pushed and yapped and yelled and willed it into the most celebrated restaurant in New York, blowing 200 minds a night and training a whole generation of brilliant, steeled chefs in the process.

Andrew Carmellini, chef / owner, Lafayette: If he would have a blowup—which could be a pretty substantial blowup—the first thing he did when he walked into the kitchen, he would go around and shake everyone’s hand. To acknowledge the fact that yesterday was yesterday and today was today. I always respected that.

And yet there was, I guess, a reason that I didn’t even know what he looked like. He ran the kitchen at Daniel with seemingly no sense of ego. He didn’t seek out reporters to give interviews, rarely even went into the dining room. Daniel did that; Daniel mastered that. Alex stayed with the cooks. And then, ten years later, he was gone: decamped back to Long Island, to run the kitchen of a country club, to grow vegetables, to be with his family. When I called him to tell him I wanted to write a story about him, he said, “I love talking about food, so if there’s anything I can tell you about, I’m happy to help you out.” I wanted to say to him, “No, man, the story isn’t about food; it’s about you.” In a world where we cover and cover and cover chefs—who’s hot this morning and who’s hotter this afternoon, plywood reports and blogs shedding each other’s blood to get the scoop on someone’s off-duty eating habits—he’s like a ghost.

Glen Oaks is the kind of country club where members decide in the morning whether they feel like coming in for some golf or just to play the day’s round on their own personal courses. Its dining rooms rival anything in Manhattan for grand comfort: rich woods and clean lines, hushing upholstery, and light that makes everything glow slightly gold. If a member would like, Alex will prepare a tasting menu—seasonal, refined, lovely—but the club’s kitchen is strictly big-kitchenesque: a cook fed heads of cabbage into a buffalo chopper, shooting ribbons of coleslaw-to-be into a massive bowl set in a garbage can. Dozens of chickens sat brining in tubs big enough to bathe triplets, and a few feet away was a rack of sweets, an orgy of pies on stainless steel, ready for Summer Sunday Barbecue Night on the veranda.

Sitting amidst all this was a cart of vegetables, arranged with obvious affection: the tomatoes gently pressing on one another, the yellows and greens of squashes peeking from their crates, eggplants so plump they seemed to be smiling, a bouquet of sunflowers. It was like a cartoon of a farm stand, a postcard of the good country life.

Alex Lee was cutting tomatoes. I walked over to him, reintroducing myself. “I was just making a dish for you,” he said, as if that’s the normal way bare acquaintances greet each other. I glanced at the plate he was working on: a perfect rectangle of twelve tiles of tomato, every one different—one the lusty pink of ripe watermelon, one striped white and green, one cooked-carrot orange, one so dark it looked like dried blood… and then I was stunned with a sudden recollection: I once read that when Ruth Reichl came into Daniel, Alex made her a mosaic of his tomatoes. That was how he greeted the queen of the VIPs, and I flashed through four feelings: flattered to be in that company, thrilled to taste what that life is like, nostalgic for a time in a restaurant I never lived through, and then worried that I might be too entranced by Alex’s past. At some point, you have to let the quarterback be more than the touchdown he threw in high school, right?

He put down his knife and came to shake my hand, walking with rigidity, an ex-boxer’s gait. “I don’t know what you want to talk about, but I can talk anyone’s ear off about food,” he said. We decided to sit down in his office, to affect something like a formal interview, and for the next hour, I went tubing on a stream-of-consciousness exaltation of country cooking (“I love country cooking… how do you capture the flavors of country cooking?… We need to preserve country cooking… Ducasse was so great about concentrated flavors, country flavors…”); gardening (“I’ve had gardens since I’m thirteen. If I wasn’t a chef, I would have wanted to be a farmer, but boy, do they work hard”); Desserts Traditionnels de France by Gaston Lenôtre (“I love that book, because he’s this amazing pastry chef, but the book is all about country pastry”); his management style (“Believe me, I was very tough in the kitchen.

Johnny Iuzzini, ex-executive pastry chef, Daniel and Jean-Georges: This was a different time period. It was a fucking tough time, man. It wasn’t Thomas Keller whispering in your ear, or cutting blue tape with scissors. It was: the scissors might get thrown at your head. Alex was European trained—that old-school, militant style of running a kitchen. It was about dominating the kitchen, having that intimidating presence. He ran a very difficult kitchen, a lot of pressure from Daniel, four stars on the line at all times. And he did it the only way he knew how.

Once, I was cleaning strawberries, and he was already arguing with someone else, and he takes all my scraps and dumps them on my station in front of me. “You see what you’re fuckin’ doin’?” I was lopping off the tops, not even thinking about it. He made a point of coming back, and weighed what I was wasting. From that day on, I always taught my cooks—without smashing their face in—hey, this is how you clean a strawberry.

Alex not only taught technique, he taught discipline. I remember him saying, “The true test of being a chef is: if you do something wrong and no one’s watching, do you fix it? Or do you do it again and do it the right way?” Those are the lessons I left with. As forceful as he was, he was one of the most humble guys. He never wanted anything for himself. He never cared about press, his own name. He did it for the love of cooking and the love of the team. He never wanted anything more than just for the cooks to do it right every time. To treat your work station with respect, to treat your uniform with respect. It’s those lessons that made me a better chef and a better man.

But I always thought I could get people to work harder for me than anyone else. I guess because I also always made time for them;

Leslie Brenner, author, The Fourth Star: I spent a whole year in that kitchen, writing that book. You know, the most insanely famous people in the universe would come into that restaurant. The kitchen would be appropriately excited about it, but they would always be on their game for everybody. But when the family of any cooks came in, Alex would bend over backwards to make sure they had a great experience. It was almost like they were more VIP than any VIP. “So and so’s parents are in the dining room! Did you meet them?” He would be really really excited about it.

I always showed my interest in them”);

Zohar Zucker Zohar, chef / owner, Zucker Bakery: When I worked with him, I was just out of school. I practically knew nothing, and after I was scared not to talk anymore, he told me many times that my mission for the day would be to go and cook for him something that I would make at home. He would eat it, and ask about how I do it, and why, and the tradition behind it, and who in my family taught me how to do it. I was so amazed he would ask me how to cook because I knew nothing. I think that was his way of showing me that he cares about me as a person, and that he’s totally willing to learn from me.

and his favorite Haitian restaurant (“I’ve learned so much about food from cabbies”). He talked about his grandmother, how he remembered being in the kitchen with her while she made four shrimp stretch to feed six. “She was frugal, and she was a magician. I don’t want to sound cheesy, but that was her greatest joy. That type of nurturing became important to me. I love to feed people.”

During a pause, he decided to show me a Japanese cucumber he grew. “Let me get some salt,” he said, but then stopped himself and instead grabbed a pair of scissors.

I followed him to his herb garden, right outside the kitchen, and there the random-access memories he’d been calling up began to take a kind of shape, a logic. He saw the lemon verbena—la vervaine, en français—and started telling me about arriving in his first French kitchen and being made to break stock bones for seven hours, then cleaning seven cases of squid the size of your fingertip. “But the cooks were so polished. They had so much reverence. Believe me, I could watch the staff set the tables for an hour. Everything was such a ballet,” he said. We got to the basil, and he told me about working in Italy, at Dal Pescatore, where the chef, Bruna, would wake him up, open a book on the traditional cooking of the region, and show him what they would cook that day. “Then her son would go out fishing and bring back what we’d need,” he said. “It was the most moving experience.” For him, every ingredient carries stories, and just laying eyes on one calls them up. The entire time we talked, he never referred to them as “product,” the way all chefs do. They were always “ingredients,” they were always individual and real, not abstracted and at arm’s length.

Zohar Zucker Zohar: Alex never gave me a station. He just kept me next to him, and I would do the soups and work on the specials with him. I consider myself to be the luckiest person on earth.

There are so many people who talk about seasonal and local, all this stuff. But Alex would literally get excited like a little boy when the morels would come in. He told me, “You can’t do anything to the morels!” You have to just delicately brush them and just sauté them with a little bit of olive oil and shallots. We would have to find the pot of the exact size for that amount, the mise en place had to be cut perfectly first. There was almost a religious ceremony to do it.

He’d open the walk-in and open the bins and ask what spoke to me. We had to feel inspired by something, and that’s what we should work with. That’s how he did the specials.

A group of Hispanic men suddenly stopped their golf cart beside us. One got out to get a closer look at the garden, and then sheepishly pointed toward the patch of chilies. Alex spoke with them in Spanish; they were on a golf course maintenance crew brought in to work for a few weeks. They’d love a few peppers for their dinner, and, as soon as they said that, Alex sprang into the plants. He snipped from three varieties of peppers, and came out with his hands full for them.

They drove off, a million Scoville units richer, and Alex pointed to a plant he was now standing next to. “This is a Kyoto eggplant,” he said. “Traditionally, they would take off the top, broil them, and punch holes in them for the moisture to escape. They they’d finish them with some miso and broil them again, and it would get so soft, you’d just eat it out of the skin, like a custard.” I wanted that, more than I’d ever wanted an eggplant before. “I love to grow specific varieties of vegetables and find out where they come from, what people did with them,” he said. “I think you have to know the history of a food when you make a dish with it.”

Eventually, we got to a tiny calamansi tree, taking some for our cucumber back in the office, its fate held hostage to another hour of downloading Alex’s food brain. He talked about the floral acidity of calamansi, when he might use it in place of lime in a marinade. Then his eye caught a small pot of young bay leaves, more fragile than I’d ever seen. I said they smelled a little like vervaine. Alex smiled: yes, exactly. He looked intently at them for a moment. “I could imagine these in a delicate custard, very simple, just to show that aroma,” he said. His brain is always putting flavors into form.

Johnny Iuzzini: Alex Lee taught me how to create. Daniel kind of dropped it on me that I would be the new executive pastry chef, and Alex taught me how to think on my own.

Once, I wanted to work on something with strawberry. So he goes, “All right, write down everything you’ve ever had with strawberries.” Then it was like, what are textures that go great with strawberries? Whipped cream, something crispy. Then flavors that go great with it: verbena, mint, or vanilla. We created these columns, and then we’d go down them and go, “Ok, we know we want something creamy, something crispy, something acidic to balance it…” That’s still the way I create today, and it’s because of Alex Lee.

Finally we returned to the office and tasted the cucumber. It was quietly astonishing—sweet and grassy, with an almost melon-like scent. It crunched with integrity, like a radish. It was the proudest cucumber I have ever had. Then it was back to his station in the kitchen, where the tomatoes waited, and Alex pointed to one of his cooks, a strapping dude who looked like a cover model from a grocery-store romance novel, wrapped in what seemed like a child-sized apron that didn’t quite reach his knees. “The chicken he makes is tremendous. Fried chicken, barbecued chicken. They call him the Chicken Man. And the ladies love him. Believe me.” I imagined his face embossed on a paperback: The Farmer’s Daughter and the Chicken Man—A lust created by nature, forbidden by men.

Alex piled a full sturgeon generation’s worth of caviar on his cutting board. He formed it quickly into a thick row, then laid it down the center of the tomato mosaic. It was the exact right length, the gunmetal eggs cropped close to the tomatoes, as if they’d been cut from the same stroke. On each tile he placed a touch of herb: a small burst of fennel flowers for this one, that one a tip of spearmint, two splinters of chive for another.

“The caviar brings out the nuances of the tomato,” he said plainly. I took my time eating it, every bite different from the others: this one sweet like fruit, the next savory and deep. The unexpected cool of mint brushing up against the brine of caviar, red tomato tartness cruising overhead. Butter, nuts, seaweed. Licorice candy and peaches. Raw meat and fish belly. It looked like the most no-brainer of a dish you’d ever seen, but it went in a hundred directions. I’d like to say that the dish was an education in the flavors a tomato can take, but honestly, I was so knocked over by what was going on that the lesson washed over me. My palate wasn’t worthy of Alex Lee’s version of a tomato salad. I wondered if that’s how Ruth felt when she had it at Daniel’s gastronomic temple on 65th Street. I wondered if this is something his guests now enjoy, smelling of sunblock after a round of golf, a glass of iced tea sweating onto the table, a platter of the Chicken Man’s chicken on the way.

Over lunch—he made us the greatest diner-style Spanish omelet in history, with square yellow cheese because “nothing melts like American, man”—he told me how he came back to New York after his time in Europe. He’d been working, like an ox, at Alain Ducasse’s Louis XV. “They put me up in the Hotel de Paris—an amazing, beautiful place!—and one day Ducasse knocked on my door, saying, ‘There’s someone here to see you.’ So I went out to the lobby, and Daniel was sitting there. He wanted to talk about his new restaurant.” I chewed on my omelet. “And then the next day, Ducasse knocked again. ‘There’s someone here to see you.’ And it was Sirio. He wanted me to come back to Le Cirque.”

Did it really go down that way? Did the greatest chef of his generation come to Monte Carlo to recruit Alex one day, and did the greatest restaurateur of his generation come the next? I almost didn’t even want to write that down. Origin myths are not meant to be fact checked.

Alex wanted to take me to see where our omelets’ tomatoes and peppers came from, and ten minutes later, we pulled into the Rottkamp Brothers Farm. It’s a fourth-generation farm, sixty-five years in the game, on property someone would probably kill to turn into a stand of mansions. Instead, it’s a cornucopia laid out on dusty earth: green beans, watermelons, half a dozen kinds of eggplants, and the full family tree of tomato varieties. Squashes, pumpkins, and a football field of callaloo, grown for Caribbean markets in the city. An unreal row of beets, as if staged for a photo shoot: their leaves proud, rigid, and deep green, their single red vein diving down into perfectly round roots, gently nestled in the soil.

Alex put his feet in the dirt and beamed.

“If I see you serving a tomato from a thousand miles away when this is right in your backyard,” he said, “I just don’t see why I would need to ever come back to your restaurant again.”

Philippe Bertineau, executive chef, Benoit: Alex always loved vegetables, more than anything. He was the one who started us working with the Union Square Greenmarket. He was passionate about all different vegetables. And his knives… so many knives.

Anne Marie, one of the owners, rushed over to greet him. He spoke with her in French, and they caught up: she’s well, and her husband—one of the namesake brothers—is out cutting the callaloo. It’s been a good season; the tomatoes have been fantastic, haven’t they? The corn is coming to the end, but it’s been a great year for it too.

She turned to me, saying, “You know, when Alex calls, they all go into the field and pick whatever he wants. We could be so busy, but everyone will run out, and they all say, ‘But it’s for Alex!’ He has such a great heart. They all love him.” He looks a little bit away, into the fields, as if to avoid hearing.

Anne Marie took us through her crops, and Alex pointed out patches of purslane she didn’t even know she had. He talked about Ducasse’s favorite stuffed zucchini, with poulet roti, truffle, and parmesan. He recalled three preparations of every vegetable we walked past, every herb from every dish. It’s like he remembers everything he’s ever cooked, everything he’s ever eaten, and it needs to come out.

Zohar Zucker Zohar: When Alex makes something and he’s happy with it, it’s like an event that he emotionally connects to. When something tasted like this, and it was just the exact season for it, and in that moment it was perfect—that’s like a pearl of joy to him, and he keeps it.

The herb garden was one thing, but walking through an actual farm with Alex Lee was a little like staring at the sun.

But then we got to one of the barns, and Alex was stunned silent. There was a gray, ancient tractor, a Ford, from 1952. Richard, one of the Rottkamp brothers, found it abandoned in a stand of shrubs. It had the round, bulging nose of old cars from that era, a kind of warm muscularity. “He fixed it up himself! He looks so happy when he rides on it,” Alex said. “I love asking him about it, because he’s so proud of it. But his life is so hard. These people, they work so hard.”

It occurred to me that Alex talks about hard work almost as much as he talks about country cooking. I watched him chat with Anne Marie and Richard. He offered to cook them some of that callaloo, which they’ve only grown, never eaten. I thought about what he’d told me earlier, about making time for the people who worked so hard for him. At first it sounded like a strategy, something you put in a best-practices guide for business managers. But seeing the way Alex swelled with a kind of pride looking at this farmer’s fixed-up tractor, I don’t think it’s a tactic. I think it’s just him.

We said goodbye to the Rottkamps. Driving back to the club, I asked Alex how he came to his job there. It wasn’t exactly the question I was supposed to ask, I guess—the question anyone would want to ask of the guy who spent ten years building one of the best restaurants in New York, one of the best restaurants in the world: “Why did you leave the game?” I didn’t want to ask that question. I didn’t want to ask this man something that would sound like I was questioning his honor or his commitment. But that might have been the question he heard anyway.

We pulled into the parking lot. “I like growing, I guess,” he started. “Watching plants grow. Watching people grow. I love cooking, but the balance of my life wasn’t so good anymore.”

Zohar Zucker Zohar: The level of stress that Alex was under in that kitchen was enormous. It wasn’t the right environment for him. He just wanted to grow strawberries, pick them, and then cook with them. It always felt that once dinner service started, that was not his element. That was not where you would see who Alex was. That part was Alex doing his job. I felt that was the only time you could see him looking at the door. I was really happy for him when he left, not for me, but for him. That stress level took a huge toll on him.

I used to feel really bad that Alex doesn’t get the recognition he deserves. But I don’t think he lives for that. He lives for the connection he has with people around food. Alex is a true chef—not a New York restaurateur. He knew that, and he made the choice that was true to himself. Cooking is not a career for Alex. It’s his passion. I took that as inspiration—would I devote my life to the restaurant, or would I have a family? And I decided to leave and have a family.

“In the restaurant, you feel like it’s a fight when you walk in the door. You’re fighting the purveyors, you’re fighting during prep, you’re fighting to be perfect in an imperfect system. Then service is a battle. There’s a lot of yelling and screaming. Whether it was me or someone else, I always talked to people after to make it good. It takes so many people to put on that show, and everyone’s important: the dishwasher, the coffee guy, the bread guy. I tried to make myself available to them, but it just got too crazy, to be between my family, my staff, the menu, the ordering… In life, all these things are tradeoffs. I do miss sometimes the energy of the city. Cooking is performance, and I enjoy the aspect of creating for people, especially when other chefs, critics, real foodies are coming through. I love feeding people.”

He paused, and I couldn’t tell if he was looking for words or getting emotional.

“At a restaurant like Daniel, you work so hard.

Michael Anthony: Alex is still probably the most knowledgeable chef that I know in terms of food history, ingredients, the big picture of the dining industry, the nuances of the subculture of kitchens, both French and American.

He came at a time before this contemporary culture of immediate exchange of information, and he was the last of the chefs to transmit that day in and day out in the kitchen: Always telling stories. Every day, sometimes every minute.

He embodied this sense of full commitment to the kitchen. A dedication not just to restaurant Daniel, but to the profession. You have to give it your all. If you weren’t living up to expectations, there was a sense of threat. I felt it, I was terrified by it, but man I loved working like that. That kind of confidence, determination, that developed there was what pushed me in my career.

If you hear him talk, he’s a New Yorker. You hear it in every word. He also embodied this sense that what we do is a gritty business, a physical, gritty business. But you never stop thinking.

Like with parents, older siblings, people in your life who you desperately search for approval from but with a tingle of fear, for me and most people who worked for him, we felt that need to get his approval.

When we all got together to cook for Daniel’s twentieth anniversary, as soon as we all got in the kitchen, it was immediate that he was the leader. No one said anything, it was just immediate. Twenty years later, and Alex is saying, “Okay, why don’t you guys do this?” And everyone was just, “Oui, Chef.” He wields this real power, and he does it in this very responsible way.

I would be there eighteen hours a day, especially in the beginning, standing there and scrubbing down steel with my cooks after service. Believe me, you’re punishing the cooks. I guess I eventually just felt like I couldn’t ask that of them anymore if I wasn’t always going to be there for them, too.”

We decided to call it a day. It was hot, and his dinner service was starting. Casual millionaires were taking their seats for the barbecue on the veranda. The sushi station was set, the carving station was going up. Alex asked if he could get me a bottle of water for the road.

I waited a few minutes for him to come back out with the water, and his words turned in my mind. Alex Lee left the city for himself, for his family, but, just as much, because he was committed to the notion that if he couldn’t sacrifice everything of himself for his cooks, he shouldn’t be there at all. Could it be that he really had so little ego? Could it be that, after ten years of his life, after all the stars in the dining room and all the stars in the reviews, he didn’t think he should be doing it with his own name on the door?

A few days later, he will tell me over the phone that, just a few months ago, Daniel texted him out of the blue to say that the happiest he’d ever been in the kitchen was when he was cooking with Alex. And before I can follow up with a question, Alex will quickly change the subject and I will let it be, because some people want to keep their pride for themselves.

When Alex didn’t appear in the parking lot, I assumed he got stuck in service. I found him inside, by the Chicken Man’s fried chicken. He was munching on a drumstick, putting a few pieces into a box for me. He wanted to make sure, before I went, that he could feed me one more time.

Seven articles from Lucky Peach were nominated for James Beard awards this year. We are posting all of them this week for your reading pleasure.

The above article originally appeared in the second Cooks and Chefs Issue of Lucky Peach, a quarterly journal of food and writing. If you loved this — or even just strongly liked it — why not subscribe to the magazine? At least visit our website or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Francis Lam is the Editor-at-Large for Clarkson Potter. He was nominated for a James Beard award in 2010 and currently sits on the critic’s table for Top Chef Masters.