Can French food be healthy? In the hands of epicurean wizard David Bouley it can. You may not realize it if you've eaten at one of his restaurants recently, but Bouley has long ditched the butter and cream for healthier alternatives like wheat-germ oil and bio-yogurt. Yum? That's right: His stealthily healthy dishes still taste good, even though they're good for you.
In May, Bouley will move his eponymous restaurant to 161 Duane St. with a Renaissance decor complete with stone from Versailles. Next fall, he plans to open his newest venture, West Broadway’s Brushstrokes, an upscale Japanese restaurant with an attached cooking school led by Japan's prestigious Tsuji Culinary Academy. Bouley has also teamed up with Oz Garcia, celebrity nutritionist for the likes of Hilary Swank, Donna Karan and Russell Simmons, to create healthy food products and open health-oriented restaurants around the world; the first one will debut at the St. Regis in Anguilla in about a year.
And if that weren’t enough to keep him busy, Bouley will take one lucky winner of MasterCard’s “Priceless Search”—the winning ticket will be in an April issue of either Bon Appetit, Domino, or Gourmet—to the highly exclusive L'Astrance restaurant in Paris, one of his favorite places to dine. While he’s the latest proprietor bushwacking the city’s red tape for a liquor license for Brushstrokes, Bouley took time to sit down with us for some much-needed dietary advice.
How did you develop your expertise in healthy eating?
When I came back to New York [after studying under French chefs], most of my friends were getting their real life jobs with expense accounts, and they would tell me, ‘We only eat in French restaurants every once in a while because when we do, we have to go three extra days to the gym.’ I thought, ‘This is no future for me.’ So I just put a lot of discipline into going in the opposite direction. At one point I was working with 40 different nutritionists. But they only told me what not to make, not what to make.
Tell us about your relationship with the Tsuji Culinary Academy.
Mr. Tsuji, who owns biggest cooking school in the world, and I have been friends for 15 years. He started training me 7 years ago in Japan, and they come here as well. We’re going to open a restaurant here in fall with the Tsuji school. I learned the kaiseki Kyoto cooking style—it’s the oldest cuisine of Japan and the healthiest because that’s where monasteries were. Their cooking has an incredible amount of healthy components. There’s nothing in any dish that’s not good for you, unlike in the Western world, where you have to work a little bit harder to lighten up the food because fat is a conduit for flavor. And we love that, but we don’t need all that fat. In Japan they don’t really work with fats, and ones they choose are the best for the body, like sesame and fats from the sea. The pork in Okinawa, where the pigs eat crops watered with coral water from coral reefs, has a higher level of calcium, magnesium, and zinc. That’s why they’re the longest living society on the planet.
Will everything in your new restaurant be healthy? Not everyone is on a diet.
We’re not arm wrestling. For those that are interested, information will be discreetly available to them to learn about what they eat. But the components in the dishes served are going to be very unique. For instance, we’ll use certain kinds of oils like wheat germ oil, flaxseed oil, pumpkin seed oil, or even grapefruit oil, which is very good at this time of year. People who take it have no colds any more, no cardio problems. It’s very hard to find and very expensive, but it’s amazing because grapefruit juice cleans your lungs, so grapefruit oil is extremely good for making the sinuses clean. A lot of these studies have been around for a long time, and people who are obsessed with health know about them. We’re just going to use them in a menu to create fun, tasty food with. We don’t want you to feel like you’re in a hospital.
Are there any anti-aging foods you can tell us about?
One of the things Americans need after a certain age, in this country, is more probiotics ... for the intestines and flora for the body.
So why don’t French people get fat?
The French diet is still probably one of most curious diets, from our [American] point of view because of the cheese and most of the things they eat. But they’re eating mostly raw products that are not shelf stable, and no preservatives. … If you have the highest quality and you have balance, you can eat more of what you like.
Tell us about the Priceless.Com experience you are providing.
It’s going to include a dinner in our restaurant, the new [Bouley], with a tour of everything front of the house and back of the house. Then we’ll go eat in France at a restaurant that I think is very unique, and very difficult to get in to. You would have to be friends of the owner to have this kind of experience. I’m very excited to showcase where Bouley is going in our next chapter. For me personally, where we’re going with our next restaurant has taken 35 years of preparation.
