DANIEL BOULUD

Daniel Boulud opened Daniel, his own restaurant, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in 1993, and five years later moved it to the room it keeps today, at Park Avenue and 65th Street. From that one house he has built The Dinex Group, with restaurants in New York and across the United States, and in Toronto, Montreal, Singapore, Dubai, Riyadh and the Bahamas. His cooking is French, from Lyon, and his city is New York.

The Apprentice

He grew up on a farm outside Lyon and went into professional kitchens at fifteen; at that age he was a finalist in France’s competition for the best culinary apprentice. He worked under Roger Vergé, Georges Blanc and Michel Guérard, then in Copenhagen, and came to the United States in 1982 as chef to the European Commission in Washington, D.C.

In New York he cooked at the Polo Lounge in the Westbury Hotel and at Le Régence in the Hotel Plaza Athénée, and from 1986 to 1992 was executive chef at Le Cirque. In 1988 Food and Wine magazine named its first ten Best New Chefs, and he was one of them, with Thomas Keller. In 1992 the James Beard Foundation named him best chef in New York City.

Daniel

Daniel is the centre of the work. The New York Times gave it four stars, and the James Beard Foundation named him Outstanding Chef in 1994, Outstanding Restaurateur in 2006, and Daniel its Outstanding Restaurant in 2010. When it moved in 1998, the first room became Café Boulud. Bar Boulud followed in 2008, opposite Lincoln Center; Le Pavillon, in One Vanderbilt, in 2021; and La Tête d’Or, his first steakhouse, in the Flatiron District in 2024. His company says that he has served as mentor to a generation of chefs who have worked in his kitchens.

The Game Feast

On 10 November 2005 he held his first Fall Game Feast at Daniel: five courses with grouse, partridge and venison. By 2010 it was an annual dinner for the Bocuse d’Or USA Foundation, which the house said “began as a private affair inspired by friends of the chef, all game enthusiasts”. That November the private room held a T-shaped table “laden with stemware and a taxidermied covey of birds”, and the menu ran to a “woodpigeon and chestnut ballotine” and a “Juniper scented grouse pâté”. The dinner closed with a live auction.

The Bocuse d’Or connection is his own work. In 2008 Paul Bocuse asked him to set up the selection of the American team for the competition, and with Thomas Keller and Jérôme Bocuse he sits on the board of the Bocuse d’Or USA Foundation; the first American selection was held that September.

The City

He has given his time to New York as well as his cooking. He has been on the board of Citymeals on Wheels, which takes meals to elderly New Yorkers who cannot leave their homes, since 2000, and its co-president since 2013, and he has given its Sunday Supper each spring since 1998. In 2005 a scholarship fund in his name was set up to send young American cooks to France to study. France made him a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in 2006, for his part in advancing French culture.

The Season

Game is a season’s food, and the Court’s own Game Dinner, to be held in a private room in New York in early November, sets his Fall Game Feast among its precedents: a dinner of grouse, partridge and venison, cooked by a kitchen that knows how, among people who care for it. The Court values in him the thing a season rests on, a house kept at one standard for more than thirty years, with its menu turning with the calendar.