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The Chef Who Opened His First Restaurant at 46
Photo: Lanna Apisukh
“We don’t have to eat everything. We can just taste a little of everything,” says the chef Gregory Gourdet in a slightly conspiratorial tone as we sit down to our overly bountiful luncheon of black-eyed peas, fluffy jollof rice, and assorted fiery soups and proteins (grilled fish with rice and plantains, a bowl of okra soup) at the Ghanaian restaurant Accra Express, which opened not long ago in a storefront space on 125th Street in Harlem. “I’m a New Yorker, so this is very much a full-circle, coming-home moment for me,” says Gourdet, who will turn 50 this year and who grew up in the city in the late ’90s, before he was hired straight out of the Culinary Institute of America by Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s chef de cuisine, Didier Virot, and spent close to nine years working various jobs within the Jean-Georges empire.
Virot was a family friend, “so that was my in,” says Gourdet, whose goggle-size horn-rimmed glasses, backward baseball cap, and perpetually breezy disposition make him seem less like one of the most accomplished chefs of the past decade (various James Beard Awards, TV appearances, and “best new restaurant” nods from multiple publications) and more like a regular who’s dropping in for a quick lunchtime snack. But after 25 years in the business, Gourdet now has a growing empire of his own, and he has spent the morning tending to his latest high-profile project, the ambitiously often-Haitian-accented Maison Passerelle, one of five venues he’s overseeing in his role as culinary director of the new Wall Street branch of the grand Parisian department store Printemps.
Maison Passerelle is a lavish 85-seat project with two entrances, one of which is just past the designer-shoe section, where you can purchase your pair of Christian Louboutins for several thousand dollars. The menu includes an impressive (and generally delicious) selection of fat-cat specialties (Cane Syrup Glazed Duck for $72, spaghetti with lobster for $60, strip steak rubbed with Haitian coffee for a whopping $150), although as our modest lunch proceeds ($77.49 total), Gourdet, who lives in Portland, Oregon, starts to reminisce about the homecoming moments he’s been experiencing around the city over these past few weeks and months. He takes out his phone and shows me a picture of him standing on the snowy lawn in front of the old family house where he grew up in Laurelton in Queens. When I mention that I’d visited the original Accra restaurant at the suggestion of a Ghanaian cab driver many years ago, Gourdet says that his father, a lab manager, drove a cab for a while when the family first came to New York from Port-au-Prince, and he remembers sleeping in the back seat as the father and son rumbled from place to place around town.
When Gourdet was 4 years old, his parents sent him back to Port-au-Prince to live with his grandparents for a year after his sister was born, and it was there that he experienced the first Proustian memories of homestyle Haitian cooking: Scotch-bonnet chiles from the garden, plantains with salt cod, fresh sugar cane and grilled corn from street vendors. His mother was also an excellent home cook, and on holidays back in New York, the family would travel out to his grandmother’s house in Newark for Creole chicken, or stay in the city for Tante Cecile’s rice and beans. Gourdet’s ambition in those days was to become a doctor, and he bounced around through a series of schools and scholarship programs — St. Andrew’s prep school in Delaware, backdrop to Dead Poets Society; NYU undergrad for premed; the University of Montana, where he studied wildlife biology, of all things — before applying to the Culinary Institute.
“I was getting C’s and D’s in chemistry, and I thought, Jesus, this is way too hard. Although looking back now, baking is chemistry, food is biology in terms of climate change and seasonality, so eventually it all made sense,” the chef says as the little railroad dining space begins to empty out and deliveries of ingredients for the evening service begin coming in through the front door. Culinary school “was the first time I loved what I was doing and actually cared about school,” he says. “I remember sneaking around during all my practicals, getting more ingredients so my food tasted better, getting more meat for my consommé so it was, like, double-flavored. No one taught me how to do it. I just figured it out.”
Since then, Gourdet’s career has followed a serendipitous trajectory through the different culinary epochs of the past quarter-century, from the nine-year stint with Vongerichten at the end of the ’90s star-chef era (he ended up running the kitchen at a JG Chinese concept called 66), to the great Portland renaissance of the mid-aughts (“When I got there in 2008, Pok Pok, Beast, Le Pigeon, and Paley’s Place were all happening — it was like being in Haight-Ashbury at the beginning of the psychedelic ’60s, for better or worse”), to the strange vagaries of reality-TV stardom (he came up with the name for his first restaurant, Kann — sugarcane in Haitian Creole — on a victorious episode of Top Chef’s “Restaurant Wars”), to the blossoming of a new generation of cooks who have found their collective voices and styles by traveling back, down the old foodways, to the dining traditions of their ancestors.
Along the way, Gourdet, like many of his peers, struggled with problems of addiction and drug abuse, which, he says, are still all too common in the pressurized life of the professional kitchen and which he was lucky to survive. He’d developed a taste for daylong drug-fueled raves in college: “Speed, crystal meth. Ecstasy was new; Special K was new. All that stuff — you name it!” he says in his terminally merry way. When he started working on the line at Jean-Georges and then at Nougatine, great rivers of alcohol entered the equation. Gourdet was ultimately fired from the 66 kitchen by his mentors (“I’m still very close to them. Honestly, I think they just hung on to me a little longer than they should have”), and found himself working at a random restaurant out in San Diego, where one morning at seven, after another 12-hour drinking binge, he flipped the car he was driving on a freeway.
“That was not a come-to-Jesus moment; that was an I-almost-died moment,” Gourdet says now, as we finish lunch and get ready to head out into the hot sunshine. The car landed, miraculously, on all four tires, and though he walked away from the accident, the police took him to the ER and read him his rights as he lay, still drunk, in a hospital bed.
In AA parlance, there’s a concept called “doing a geographic,” which means removing yourself from your addictive surroundings, which is how Gourdet found his way, at long last, to Oregon, where he fell on and off the wagon before getting sober for good (“I’m 16 years sober on March 30 — that’s my 16th birthday”). He wrote his excellent cookbook based on his new healthy lifestyle, Everyone’s Table, which won a James Beard Award in 2022, began running marathons, and finally, with help from his mother (who taught him many of the old family recipes), opened Kann, the restaurant that put him on the country’s map, in a space next to Le Pigeon with an open wood fire in homage to the open-fire barbecue of the Caribbean.
Chef Gourdet’s parents live in Atlanta now, where his sister works in AIDS research at the CDC, and I see her name pop up on Gourdet’s caller ID as we’re leaving (“Trump’s cutting all the jobs, so she’s hella freaking out”). When I ask if he considers himself to be a late bloomer, at the age of 50, he ponders the question for a moment in uncharacteristic silence. “I was working on the line at JG in my early 30s. I didn’t open my own restaurant until I turned 46. I was washing dishes alone at 1:30 in the morning on my birthday at Kann — that’s how I turned 47,” the chef says as he gets ready to head back downtown to go back to work. “You could say I’m a late bloomer, but I don’t feel that way, really,” he says, laughing his infectious laugh. “I think I’m more like a kind of a whirlwind.”
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