Kreuther in the kitchen of his new restaurant, Saverne.
Photo: Francesco Sapienza
It’s just before three o’clock on a Friday afternoon, mere hours before his first opening in 11 years, and chef Gabriel Kreuther is eating a grilled-cheese sandwich. We’re standing in the kitchen of his new restaurant, Saverne — a “modern brasserie” named for a small town in Alsace — watching a cone of flames burst up and over the grates of a grill. He encourages me to take a sandwich, too. My teeth crunch through two slices of butter-griddled multigrain bread to find a puddle of melted Comté. Kreuther takes another bite of his, and a single shaving of black truffle flutters down to the plate below. Andy Choi, the restaurant’s executive chef, hustles past, telling us that the enormous truffle he shaved over the top was a gift, dropped off from a friend to celebrate the opening.
Kreuther says he’s not nervous about opening night, but it’s clear from glancing around the 5,000-square-foot restaurant that even the smallest details have not gone unconsidered. Saverne sprawls across the bottom floor of the Spiral, a Tishman Speyer construction in Hudson Yards with 66 floors of captive corporates above and a shiny façade that reflects the surrounding sky (today, gray). The back room of the 145-seat restaurant, which was not meant to open until several weeks into service, is already diner-ready, set with wine glasses and striped cloth napkins. Executive pastry chef Nicolas Chevrieux’s dessert menu is 18 items long (six of which are different sundaes). The escargots à l’Alsacienne, says Kreuther’s longtime marketing person Odine Bonthrone, was tweaked so many times to meet her approval (she’s part French) that the kitchen did not finalize the recipe until the day before.
The word perfectionist comes up in most any conversation with Kreuther’s staff, but they don’t mean it like that. It isn’t a euphemism for screaming at people in walk-in freezers. Kreuther is a gentle guy. A nice, regular guy. A dad who took his 8-year-old daughter as his plus-one to the James Beard Awards. In an industry that has mythologized the tyrant, Kreuther has instead developed a reputation for decency. He mentors young chefs and “he’s real and down to earth,” says Eben Dorros, his business partner. “Every time he wins an award, he goes back to the kitchen.”
That head-down mentality may be why, when compared to his peers’, his profile seems surprisingly low (he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page; the “Gabriel Kreuther” entry is about his namesake restaurant). He also belongs to a generation of chefs — now, like Kreuther, firmly into or past their 50s — who came up behind the titans of late-’90s haute stardom: Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the last of whom Kreuther once worked for.
Sandwiches finished, Kreuther shows me around the pastry kitchen in the basement level. I ask how he avoided becoming the sort of Machiavellian, master-of-the-universe chef that might be parodied on The Bear. He tells me he spent a year in the French army and it stuck with him that there were commanders at every level — mean ones — but then, when he got to the top level of commander, “the main honcho,” he says, “was the nicest guy; we had the nicest conversation I’d had in a year. I like people who have humanity. We have a word for that in Alsace: mensch.”
Still, being nice isn’t what took him from a farm in Alsace to La Caravelle and, eventually, Vongerichten’s kitchen. The chef admits he was a precisionist as a kid. He remembers a time when he was 9, working on a handwritten school assignment for an hour. He messed up the last line, so he tore it up and started over. He’s been thinking about his past a lot because Saverne is named for a town in Alsace’s Bas-Rhin region near where he grew up. “It’s not going backward,” he says, “but back to my past.” In some ways, he is channeling his mother, who died two years ago and who he says found ample pleasure in producing 120 éclairs for school bake sales and cooking feasts for hundreds of their neighbors. Around the holidays, she would bake 200 kilograms of bredele — small cookies — and sell them to people who came from all over Alsace. Though he’d identified as a “chef” since he was 4 years old (“I always dressed as one when I could pick my job for any game”), Kreuther first became one, for real, during his school vacations spent cooking at his uncle’s inn.
At Saverne, much of the food — like spätzle with a grilled napoleon of ratatouille — is designed to appear more rustic than what’s severed at Gabriel Kreuther; much of it is cooked over an open fire. Francesco Sapienza.
At Saverne, much of the food — like spätzle with a grilled napoleon of ratatouille — is designed to appear more rustic than what’s severed at Gabriel …
At Saverne, much of the food — like spätzle with a grilled napoleon of ratatouille — is designed to appear more rustic than what’s severed at Gabriel Kreuther; much of it is cooked over an open fire. Francesco Sapienza.
He earned his first Michelin star after he became the executive chef at the Modern inside MoMA. Gabriel Kreuther, the restaurant he opened in 2015, now has two. There, the sturgeon and sauerkraut tart is topped with a caviar mousseline; the kugelhupf is flavored with a chive fromage blanc. Duck breast is aged two weeks before it’s cooked and plated with Sicilian pistachio and sour-cherry jus. The food at Saverne, much of it cooked over an open fire, will be a few degrees closer to how he eats at home, where his late-night snack is baby sardines with Trader Joe’s salsa and he makes crêpes for his daughter during the weekend. He’s embracing rusticity — at least his version of it. He explains how his staff presses dough through a chitarra to form the beet spaghetti for a dish that took him several weeks and dozens of iterations to refine. In the final version, the noodles are cloaked in horseradish cream and layered with oysters, smoked sturgeon, and roe, then topped with caviar. The loup de mer took ages to figure out, too, because they knew they wanted to cook it over the open fire but they also wanted to serve it boneless; nailing the proper cooking time was a challenge. Kreuther becomes almost professorial describing his Alsatian crudité — “I want the American public to understand crudité is something more than a carrot stick,” he opines — and giddy when talking about the sweets he loved as a child: chocolate mousse, yule logs with thick layers of buttercream, meringue topped with Chantilly cream. At Saverne, he’ll try to replicate those joys with half a dozen coupes glacées including a café liégeois with a shot of café allongé (France’s version of caffè Americano), coffee ice cream, vanilla ice cream, and a soft heap of unsweetened whipped cream.
After my pastry tour, it’s time for me to leave so Kreuther can actually open the restaurant for friends and family service, but he invites me back for dinner the next night. The meal begins with a tender, buttery little pretzel served with a horseradish cream cheese. My guests and I order several rounds of his famous tarte flambé, a sort of French cracker pizza, including the classic (onions, bacon, and cheese) and one with gravlax that reminds me of a barely toasted bagel. Beef tartare is cut somewhat roughly and served with misshapen lavash and a pool of tonnato coulis, and a supple sausage comes presliced with a dark purple mustard and kraut. There’s a half-chicken, though the drumstick that hovers, perched upright above a bracing pile of tender greens and sliced raw pepper, is perfectly French’d, and beneath it are velouté-smooth pommes purée. A lasagnette, crisped in the fire, is rustic at first glance — but each of its 17 layers is diligently crafted, with alternating tissue-thin pasta and green pea purée; beside it sits a cloud of Taleggio foam.
These details are the tells of Kreuther’s quiet perfectionism, which I’m reminded of as I’m walking back to my table from the bathroom. Burgundy-red hanging Amaranthus drips from a vase nestled into a wall shelf. Poking up in the center are three stems of dark ruby pincushion protea, cut to different heights, and tall sprigs of fuzzy kangaroo paw. The flowers are arranged to look simple and naturalistic, beautifully off-kilter. But when I look more closely, I see that each stem has been precisely placed, balanced against one another with extreme care and attention. A single adjustment would ruin the whole thing.
This post has been updated to correct the spelling of Eben Dorros’s name.
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