TONY Restaurant Issue

[Wilfrid1]

So this year they had the neat idea of laying out headshots of the city's important chefs and restaurateurs over a dozen pages, with a sort of upward sprouting family tree growing out of each skull showing who has worked for and with them, including locations and dates.

 

The introduction admits that it's not an encyclopaedic guide - and it isn't (and a few things look wrong) - but it's the first time I've seen gathered in once place extensive historical information on New York chefs and restaurants. Previously when I've wanted to know exactly when Daniel became Cafe Boulud or when Wylie worked at Jean-Georges, I've had to search vaguely around the internet. Of course, you only need to know such things if you get involved in geeky conversation about New York restaurants: and that description certainly fits some of us.

 

Odd decision to treat Ducasse as a chef working in New York but not Keller: maybe Ducasse was simply available for the photo shoot.

[Jon Tseng]

Have seen occasional maps like this for London - chef "family trees" or intersecting "train lines"

 

Generally these are very interesting. Particularly when you have 3 or 4 "godfather" type chefs in a city (eg Roux... Marco... Nico... Koffman... Ramsay) who every bloke and his dog seems to have worked for at some point

 

I guess tougher in US because people have worked for places in other cities too more, right?

 

Someone should do a sort of cheffy- imdb to collate all this stuff. then we could play "six degrees of alain ducasse" on friday afternoons when we're bored... ;-)

 

J

[Wilfrid1]

An internet chef database is a great idea.

[tanabutler]

An internet chef database is a great idea.

No shit. We could do that here, couldn't we?

 

EDIT: But does Doug Psaltis get to create his own entry? I think not.