When Jean-Georges Vongerichten was a kid, his nickname was Jo Jo la Terreur – the Terror.
Today, Jo Jo runs more than 60 restaurants throughout the world, and has just opened Jean-Georges at The Leinster, on Lower Mount Street. The wild kid is a wild success.
Vongerichten is a chef’s chef: 4 stars from the New York Times; 3 stars from the Guide Michelin. He is also a business man’s business man, operating his empire with a small group of people who have worked with him for decades.
A transplanted Frenchman from Alsace, when he is in New York he eats breakfast at one of the 15 or more restaurants which he owns each morning. In a normal year, he will open several new restaurants. His flagship New York restaurant, Jean-Georges, turns over $25 million each year, and 6,000 people work for him across the globe, including his brother and his children.
Pete Wells of the New York Times coined a neologism for his audacious work ethic: Vongerichtenstein. His revision and reworking of his dishes in new formats has its own descriptor: Vongerichtenesque.
He has been cooking for more than half a century, and started the hard way: apprenticing for Paul Haeberlin at L’Auberge de l’Ill, then Louis Outhier at L’Oasis, and he even had a stint with Paul Bocuse, but left after 9 months.
Louis Outhier sent him to open the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, and experiencing the flavours of the Far East changed his cooking fundamentally. When his first book, Simple Cuisine appeared in 1990, it showed the work of a cook trying to lighten traditional French food, using flavoured oils and vegetable juices, whilst kick-starting dishes with Asian accents: salmon with shiitake; crab with cardamom; Thai chicken soup with coconut milk.
If you’ve had those Picasso styled plates with sweeps of intense dill oil – that embellishment came from Vong. The book is valuable for its chapter on the building blocks of flavoured oil, including shrimp oil, chive oil, root, and spice oil.
A later book, Simple Good Food is subtitled “fusion flavours to cook at home from a four-star chef”. The book brought to the world his signature dessert: Warm, Soft Chocolate Cake, which became all the rage at the end of the last millennium.
Mark Bittman, who co-wrote Simple Good Food describes Vongerichten’s food as “global basic”, the work of a cook whose “palette draws from everywhere and his palate appreciates everything.”
How does he make such an expansive empire work? “Everything in a Jean-Georges restaurant is measured to the gram, and deviations are not allowed,” Christopher Cox wrote in a lengthy NYT profile.
Restaurant Jean-Georges in the Leinster Hotel, Dublin, is open for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Monsieur Vongenrighten seems to have achieved all the unimaginable and unachievable! Profitable restaurants: chapeau!