Edition: U.S. / Global

The Restaurant That Launched a Thousand Chefs

Published: August 29, 2001

THE great French restaurants that once dominated the New York food scene, rigidly formal places like Le Pavillon and La Côte Basque, could not have a more unlikely successor than the River Café, a restaurant literally floating on a barge under the Brooklyn Bridge.

And yet this American upstart is the one restaurant still carrying on a lost tradition: its kitchen has spawned a dynasty.

In the 24 years since it opened on what was gritty waterfront in Brooklyn, the River Café has produced three of the best-known chefs in America. Larry Forgione developed his patriotic American routine there, Charlie Palmer his style of big food with big flavor and David Burke his mad scientist persona. Now Rick Laakkonen is the latest to leave to make a splash on the big island of Manhattan. His restaurant, Ilo, has had critics reaching for superlatives since it opened 12 weeks ago in the Bryant Park Hotel, with a menu balanced on a high wire between dishes like 24-hour honeycomb tripe and striped bass with fancy cousins of Tater Tots.

The spotlight on the newest alumnus naturally spills over onto the River Café itself. In the last few years, it had fallen off the restaurant radar, even with Mr. Laakkonen in the kitchen and with its 130 seats booked regularly for lunch and dinner, 365 days a year. The newest chef, Brad Steelman, slipped in with the usual lack of publicity from the restaurant. But anyone who follows chefs the way some people do ballplayers has to wonder what makes the River Café such an incubator of culinary talent.

Other restaurants, like Jean Georges, Daniel and Bouley Bakery, have turned out their share of chefs, but never a string of high-visibility chefs, and never so many with such a direct connection to one restaurant. Unlike Le Cirque 2000, the River Café has never relied on a celebrity owner for luster. Michael O'Keeffe, who goes by the nickname Buzzy, spends most of his time at another of his four restaurants, the Water Club in Manhattan.

Other restaurants also have knockout views, although none can compete with this one, all the way from the Statue of Liberty to the glitter of Lower Manhattan. But places like the Rainbow Room and Windows on the World have never been perceived as temples of creative cooking.

If restaurants were truly theater, the River Café would be Philadelphia. It's the perfect place for tryouts: it benefits from being close enough to the big mouths of Manhattan to be taken seriously, but far enough away that a chef can quietly hone his act to perfection before taking it into the bright lights across the water.

''It's an incredible stage for a young up-and-coming chef to practice his art,'' said Mr. Palmer, who left in 1987 to open Aureole in Midtown. ''It's the kind of restaurant that would be successful no matter what. There's always an audience.''

Mr. Burke, who was lured away to open Park Avenue Cafe in 1992, said: ''It was like showtime over there. Walking over that gangplank was like going onstage. And you could sell anything there because of the influx of tourists: smoked tongue, sea urchin. The Japanese and Europeans would try anything.''

AND despite personal tastes that every chef described as some variant on meat and potatoes, Mr. O'Keeffe encouraged experimentation. ''I'm more of the coach, making sure the trout tastes like trout, the chicken like chicken,'' he said. A prix-fixe menu, now $70, also gave chefs room to maneuver to keep food costs balanced.

''He wanted a great restaurant, with no compromises on quality,'' said Mr. Forgione, who was hired in 1979 after leaving Regine's and after the first two chefs had moved on. ''We made a deal: if he let me do it my way, I would give him a great restaurant.''

The two turned out to be a good match, developing one of the first networks of American ingredients -- stone crabs from Florida, fresh morels from Michigan, Smithfield ham from Virginia -- as Mr. Forgione evolved into a pioneer of regional cooking. Mr. O'Keeffe said: ''It was his preference to cook French. I got him into American, and he excelled at it just as the press was coming on strong with American cooking.'' Mr. Forgione, who had spent a couple of years at the Connaught Hotel in London, recalls it more as ''I had just come back from Europe and had started substituting American ingredients in dishes I had learned to make there.''

Mr. O'Keeffe said: ''I used to tease him, have him make mashed potatoes O'Keeffe. He'd be so fussy because he wanted to be so elegant. I'd say, 'Someday you'll be specializing in mashed potatoes.' ''

When Mr. Forgione left to open An American Place on upper Lexington Avenue in 1983, it became, he acknowledged, ''one of the first places to serve mashed potatoes instead of some fancy preparation'' of the same vegetable.

Charlie Palmer, who at 23 took over from Mr. Forgione, had worked for Jean-Jacques Rachou of La Côte Basque but was already seeing the River Café's power. ''It used to be that when you came to New York you had to work in a French restaurant,'' he said. Now the River Café could attract cooks who wanted to jump on the American express train. And the food that had seemed so revolutionary under Mr. Forgione was ready to be pushed up a notch, with even more sophisticated meldings of French influences, like duck confit in a roulade, and fewer dead-on re-creations of classics like apple pandowdy or strawberry shortcake.