From Le Crocodile to the Monkey Bar, Andrew Chase finds that life in the culinary jungle is a wild adventure

Nation's Restaurant News, August 2, 1999 by Bret Thorn

There are other things, too: I'm not adamant about the way things are made. I think that's silly. We're not here to try to ram something down people's throats that we think they should be eating. We're not here to try and be a school for people, to educate people into something. However, you don't want to bore people. You don't want to leave them completely unchallenged, and I think we do that by balancing the menu, more than by putting a challenging component on every dish. We leave some pretty much middle-of-the-road dishes.

How did you begin cooking professionally?

When I got out of college, I didn't know what the heck I was going to do next, so I started working with this guy We were going to do this real-estate thing together: We were going to open a restaurant. I didn't really want to do it, but I took this course at The New School anyway, on restaurant management and cooking. As soon as I started, I realized I really wanted to cook. And the second thing I realized was that I didn't want to open a restaurant with this person or with anyone else. Also I started reading a lot, about old French cooking. It's history, really, and it's incredible. I still do a lot of that. I'd never realized how seriously it was taken, and I never realized what a cultural and social barometer it was, for those times and in our times.

I didn't get a lot of hands-on training, but it really lit a fire for me.

CHEF'S TIPS

* To fillet an eel, put a spike through its head to nail it to the cutting board and fillet it like a regular fish.

* For a moister braise, boil the meet slowly and then glaze it in the oven instead of browning it in a pan and then "putting it in the oven for two hours to dry out."

* For ice cream with alcohol, use milk instead of cream in your base.