Helen Pates, a Chicago financial manager, was seduced by a simple quiche.
For Jeff Wescott, a Lincoln Park resident who does private banking for Merrill Lynch, it was the horse meat filet stuffed with foie gras, although it wasn’t until months later that he learned that the meat wasn’t beef.
Tim Leahy, a Chicago caterer, has fond memories of the duck stuffed with olive relish.
Dish by dish, Otis Lebert has built a following among the food cognoscenti of Chicago. In an age of celebrity chefs, men and women who spend more time in television studios or on book tours than in the kitchen, Lebert is a different duck. He is calm, soft-spoken, not at all the kitchen diva. He does not feel a need to abuse his staff with Gordon Ramsay-style displays of kitchen machismo.
But Lebert, 33, is a studious, serious and demanding chef. He spends long hours in his kitchen — starting at 8:30 in the morning and finishing sometime after 2 the next morning — and he seems content to let the dishes that emerge do the talking.
Observing him over the course of a typical day, sampling half a dozen of his dishes (full disclosure: I was done in by the moelleux au chocolat topped with goat cheese-flavored ice cream) offers a glimpse into the ferociously competitive world of French cuisine. It is a tradition-bound and somewhat closed universe in which the work is punishing but the rewards — at least for the paying customers — are close to culinary perfection.
Lebert is the owner-chef of Le Taxi Jaune, a small, unpretentious neighborhood restaurant in the Marais, an old and trendy district of Paris where gentrification does daily battle with the legions of rag-trade wholesalers, these days mostly Asian, who have been there for years.
Taxi Jaune — Yellow Taxi — also has been there for years. It seats 48 at sturdy tables of red Formica. There’s a small bar lit by neon, and the kitchen, which opens out onto Rue Chapon, is barely wide enough for two to pass.
Lebert presides over a staff of seven that includes one sous-chef on the day shift, a 14-year-old apprentice cook, a cleanup man and a rotation of barmen and servers. Lebert lives above the store, in a sparsely furnished, fourth-floor garret. His kitchen consists of a student-size fridge and a hot plate. The main feature of the apartment is his impressive library of books on cookery.
Six years ago Lebert took out a loan to buy Taxi Jaune. In a city that thinks of itself as the food capital of the universe, this was a risky leap for an unknown 26-year-old chef.
“I sold my experience to the bank — that’s how I got the loan,” he said. Fortunately for him, his experience reads like a Michelin guide of top restaurants from Florence to London. A closer reading suggests a calculated, well-thought-out plan to master all aspects of classical cooking.
Lebert comes from Cahors, a town in the southwest of France known for its decent wine and solid cuisine. His French father and Belgian mother named him Otis after Otis Redding. But he was never going to be a soul singer; his passion was always food.
He began formal training at a cooking school in Toulouse at age 14 and by 17 had placed third in a national competition for aspiring chefs. Six months in the kitchens of a resort hotel taught Lebert he disliked “assembly line” cooking, and he began a kitchen odyssey that took him all over Europe learning various techniques and specialties.
It was in London that Lebert was exposed to the cuisine of Chicago’s Charlie Trotter. They met at Books for Cooks, the celebrated Notting Hill bookstore and kitchen run by Eric Treuille and Rosie Kindersley.
Lebert said Trotter and famed Barcelona chef Ferran Adria have been important influences in developing his own cooking philosophy.
The distillation can be seen on the lunch menu of Taxi Jaune, which changes entirely every day, and the slightly more elaborate dinner menu, which changes on the 15th of each month.
Lebert comes downstairs each morning around 8:30. Breakfast is not on the menu, but locals drop by for a cup of cafe creme and a fill of gossip. One woman sets up her office at a corner table — laptop, mobile phone and a flurry of newspapers.
The sous-chef and kitchen apprentice begin their prep work in the kitchen. Lebert joins in around 10, preparing a very hands-on chocolate mousse that could not be pinned down by any conventional cookbook recipe.
Crowded house
As the noon hour approaches, the preparations gather momentum. Suddenly, at about half past 12, the restaurant is packed. Every table is occupied, and the kitchen has become a mad ballet of skillets and knives, a muscular and graceful performance, pounding and paring, rich aromas and muttered obscenities. Lebert has a hand in the preparation of every plate.
“That’s the easy part,” he said. Much harder is melding seven employees into a team that can prepare and serve 100 to 120 meals a day.
“I’m rigorous and demanding. I’m looking everywhere. I’m always behind them, and sometimes they complain,” he said. “In six years, I’ve had seven sous-chefs. Mostly they are older than me, and sometimes they try to tell me how to work, but they have to work the way I want them to work.”
“Look, there are rules; there are basics, like the temperature of milk in creme anglais. We are not reinventing anything here. If they try to change the rules or bend the rules, then the door is open for them to go,” he said with a shrug. “Sometimes they quit at five minutes to 12. A disaster. Twice it’s happened.”
Books for Cooks’ owner Treuille and other food sophisticates describe Lebert’s meals as Michelin-star quality, but Taxi Jaune clearly lacks the expensive flourishes of decor and service necessary to be considered.
Lebert strives to keep the price of his two-course lunch under 15 euros ($20), and Taxi Jaune draws a mixed crowd of young professionals and local bohemians. In the evening, they tend to stay until closing time, using the restaurant as a kind of neighborhood social club. One of the last to leave on this evening is Katie Mascaro, an American in Paris and self-admitted foodie who works as an editor for a French publishing house.
“I’m here at least once a week just to see what Otis is up to,” she said. “I like it because there are no bells and whistles, because Otis uses really fresh ingredients and the food is presented beautifully. It matters to him that every plate looks right and tastes right instead of just trying to fill the place every night.”
Wescott, the banker, probably deserves the credit for introducing Lebert to a wider circle of Chicago foodies. It happened more or less by chance after Wescott bought an apartment on Rue Chapon, a few doors down from the restaurant.
“It’s a joint. It’s a neighborhood place, but Otis can really cook,” said Wescott.
Leahy, who runs Chicago’s Rustik City Gourmet, was introduced to Taxi Jaune by Wescott, and was so impressed that he spent four months working in Lebert’s kitchen.
“I love his restaurant and love his style of food. He’s an amazing one-man show,” said Leahy, who plans to launch his own restaurant in November. It will be called Rustik, and “certainly there will be some Taxi-inspired dishes,” he said.
Does it all
Pates, the financial manager, also has worked in kitchens and said she, too, is dazzled by Lebert’s work ethic and culinary virtuosity. “Here’s this guy, he works from 8 in the morning until 2 the next morning. He does everything, and then you watch him cook, and its amazing,” she said.
Both Wescott and Pates have hosted Lebert in Chicago where he has catered several private dinner parties. They also invited Lebert to sample a few Chicago kitchens.
“Of course, we went to Charlie Trotter’s Restaurant,” said Lebert. “Lots of flavors in each preparation. It was interesting, but with all respect to one of the great chefs, there were sometimes too many flavors.”
Lebert found the innovative and sometimes whimsical cuisine at Rick Tramonto’s Tru to be “very nice, but you can’t really remember what you’ve eaten.”
He gives Chef Christophe David’s NoMI high marks, and also Shaw’s Crab House: “Crabs and oysters with beer. I was looking for a basic restaurant with good atmosphere. It was fun,” he said.
Lebert is not sure what he wants to do next. Leafing through the glossy cooking magazines, he knows the young chefs who are making a name for themselves at some of France’s high-profile establishments; he believes he can cook at the same level.
“I’d like to have a famous restaurant; I’d like some recognition,” he said. “I know I can’t do it with this place — that’s for sure.”
But buying a fancier place in a better neighborhood would be prohibitively expensive. And Taxi Jaune still offers Lebert a good opportunity to produce exquisite food for an appreciative audience. “I really feel that here I am preparing myself for the next level, so I can afford to be patient,” he said.
At 2 a.m., a small party of regulars at the corner table is finally breaking up and heading off into the night. The apprentice and the cleanup man eat quickly, too tired to appreciate the quality of their meal.
Lebert, who hasn’t eaten anything all day — “I don’t eat, I taste,” he explained — sits at a table, sips a beer and starts working out tomorrow’s lunch menu. Then he is on the phone with his suppliers, haggling into the night over the price of fish.
– – –
Learning his way around a kitchen
Otis Lebert enrolled in cooking school in Toulouse at age 14, and three years later, placed third among 4,500 aspiring chefs in a national competition in which everyone starts with the same ingredients and must prepare a four-course meal.
That success caught the attention of an outfit that recruits young chefs and grooms them to work in the kitchens of deluxe hotels in Europe and America. Lebert was sent to work at a resort hotel in Deauville but decided it wasn’t for him.
“They eventually want you to work in a big kitchen in someplace like Las Vegas or Miami — 100, 150 cooks, clock in, clock out, an assembly line. I didn’t go along with it. I didn’t like the mentality,” he said.
After six months, he quit and took a job at a restaurant in Corsica. His goal was to learn about fish. A year later, he decided to move to Britain, which was undergoing a food renaissance and had become a magnet for top chefs.
He landed a job in the kitchen of L’ortolan, a well-regarded restaurant in Reading where he mastered the Escoffier method. A year later, he moved to London’s La Tante Claire, a Michelin three-star establishment under master chef Pierre Koffmann, who is credited with launching the career of Gordon Ramsay among others.
After a 2 1/2-year sojourn in Britain, it was back to France, where Lebert became a chef de parti, or section chef, at a restaurant in Najac, near his native Cahors, and then to Brussels, again as a section chef, this time in the Restaurant Bruneau, a three-star establishment in the Belgian capital.
From there, he went to Florence, to Enoteca Pinchiorri (two Michelin stars), where he learned about pasta and wine from Annie Feolde, one of the top female chefs in the world. Fittingly, his final stop before Taxi Jaune was for dessert, at Il Sole de Ranco, a highly rated restaurant on the shores of Lake Maggiore known for its patisserie.
— By Tom Hundley, Tribune foreign correspondent
———–
thundley@tribune.com
