David Burke

Nation's Restaurant News, Jan 25, 1999 by Andy Battaglia

From New Jersey to the Park Avenue Cafe, the kitchen continues to inspire this renowned chef

One might think the first American chef awarded France's highest culinary honor would have stories citing some sort of divine intervention as his inspiration.

Not so in the case of David Burke. Instead, you get a tale of a butcher's knife, a leg of veal and a 15-gallon stock pot.

As a wide-eyed teenage dishwasher in his native New Jersey, David Burke first was captivated, not by depth of flavor, balance of texture or wealth of imagination, but by the nuts-and-bolts inner workings of the restaurant kitchen environment: the balletic chaos, the inspired teamwork, the frenetic grace.

"It was all very fascinating to me, how the kitchen worked," Burke says, cozy at the soundproofed chef's table in his own Park Avenue Cafe kitchen. "My first restaurant memory is of seeing the chef pull out a huge leg of veal and watching him make this giant pot of soup. That's what really hooked me -- I loved how you took something so raw and made it into something so beautiful. It wasn't about the taste yet; it was about the production."

That serves as a telling statement from a chef as excited by the recent patent approval for his double-decker waiter's tray invention as by the discussion of the hyper-creative dishes that have made him a rising international star. It is telling, too, in light of his culinary calling card flashed in the form of sculptural, whimsical, sometimes surreal and always production-intensive models of the New American cuisine he's infused with a personality as dynamic as his own. He is, after all, a chef who not only serves a hollow tube-shaped potato chip concoction called pommes souffles despite their consistently high failure rate -- a whole case of potatoes often yields only five orders -- but who also plans to serve them floating over the bar in helium balloons of his own design at a future project he calls "the restaurant of my dreams.

As chef at Park Avenue Cafe in New York and corporate chef for the New York Restaurant Group -- which includes Smith & Wollensky, Maloney & Porcelli, Cite, The Manhattan Ocean Club, The Post House and also a Chicago location for Park Avenue Cafe -- Burke has been praised by devotees for both his sometimes irreverent take on fine dining and his strict adherence to its lofty demands.

"One of the things lacking in many fine-dining establishments is the ability to make people walk out the door smiling," says New York Restaurant Group proprietor Alan Stillman. "They may walk out satisfied. They may walk out full. They may even walk out amazed. But how about walking out smiling because they've had wonderful things thrown at them all evening and seen things they've never seen before? It takes a lot of guts for a chef to do that, and that's just what David does."

Serving hors d'oeuvre in hollowed-out egg shells, caviar in brass monkey decorations, desserts on antique toy stoves, and everything in vertical structures that look more architectural than edible, Burke has created his own food world that is as inspiring as it is inspired. As a chef who made a name with dishes like his trade-marked Pastrami Salmon and the Swordfish Chop, a rare cut from the fish's neck that had been discarded until he transformed trash into treasure, Burke has made a career from what Stillman refers to as "dreaming in Technicolor dishes."

"We had a critic once who wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek, not altogether positive opinion about some of the creative things David does," Stillman says. "And the review said, 'He must sit in the subway on the way to work and dream up these crazy dishes.' David came in with the article and was absolutely livid, and he said, 'How in the hell did this person know I think of these things on the subway?'"

Competing in New York's competitive restaurant market, though, requires more than a keen sense for what is unique. And while Burke's reputation stems in part from his unique sense of whimsy, his culinary sense was built from years spent in traveling the globe.

"If you're going to build a skyscraper, you have to make sure the foundation is built first," says chef John Hogan, a onetime Burke partner and current chef at Chicago's Savarin. "A lot of chefs don't have a strong foundation, so the land beneath them starts to sink. Anyone can tower food on a plate; but if it doesn't have the foundation of flavors and technique, it's not going to work. David is one of the few chefs who can have fun with food and really make it work because he understands food and what it's all about."

An eventual graduate of The Culinary institute of America, Burke first learned about food in a small cooking class in a New Jersey shopping mall.

"My dad sent me to this class because he thought cooking with a bunch of old housewives would discourage me," Burke says, laughing. "He just thought I could do better because back then it was not a very glamorous job. A chef to him was like Mel from "Mel's Diner" on TV. Or an Army cook."