David Bouley, a chef with many ideas, brought them to delicious life

Every time I spoke to David Bouley, the discerning, pioneering American chef who died Monday at the age of 70, there poured out a flood of ideas, beliefs, theories, nutritional research, probiotic preservation methods, ethnographic histories and plans to make all this knowledge to improve health and save lives through restaurants.

There may be people who could keep up with him as he sped breathlessly along in ever-widening circles of references and allusions. I wasn't one of them. Every time I called him, usually to check the facts in a restaurant review, I asked what I thought was a simple question. And then I would hold on for ten minutes or more until I heard the answer to my question, or something close to it. It sounded like he was trying to say a hundred things at once.

But while his words were hard to follow, his cooking almost never was. Mr. Bouley could run a dozen flavors at once and never lose control of a dish. Ultimately I came to the conclusion that his ideas were not at all mixed up; only the words were. When Mr. Bouley expressed himself through food, I had no doubt he was on to something.

What was he doing? Early on in Montrachet and later at the first Bouley, on Duane Street in TriBeCa, there was a common perception that fruits, herbs and vegetables could do much more than most chefs asked of them. But first you had to pay attention to where, how and when they were grown.

Other chefs began to wake up to this around the same time, but Mr. Bouley, who grew up on a farm in Connecticut, had a head start. He brought the innovations of French nouvelle cuisine to American food, making sauces from vegetables and herbs instead of butter and cream.

As time went on, he found other ways to do without these and other ingredients, including sugar and wheat flour. There was almost always a moment in every Bouley meal when you were startled by the creaminess of a dish made without cream or the richness of a sauce that contained virtually no fat.

Food and diet would become an obsession of his. He claimed that you could eat one of his long, elaborate, luxurious tasting menus without feeling indigestion. (It worked for me, but that may have been the power of suggestion.)

I was never bored in a Bouley restaurant. Every meal brought new discoveries. He was one of the first non-Japanese chefs I know to explore the power of kudzu to mimic gelatin, or to appreciate the way that quickly killing a fish and bleeding it out on the boat improved its flavor and texture . In a long telephone conversation we discussed his plan to teach this method of slaughter, called ikejime in Japan, to the fishing crews of Connecticut.

When he became interested in bread, he built a restaurant where it was the star, Bouley Bakery. When that closed, his flagship, Bouley, took over; for a time it had the most exciting bread cart in the city, and perhaps the country. The buckwheat-walnut and coconut fiber-pistachio loaves amazed me, and not just because they contain no gluten.

Mr. Bouley's fascination with Japanese cuisine resulted in at least two restaurants: Brushstroke, a subtle experiment in East-West fusion that didn't look like fusion, and its offshoot, Ichimura, which introduced many New Yorkers to the deeper flavors of Edomae sushi. .

His restless mind was constantly coming up with new ideas for restaurants, but good luck to anyone looking for a master plan for all openings, closings and relocations. He didn't seem to have the steely business acumen of other chefs like Daniel Boulud, his contemporary, with whom he was sometimes confused. While Mr. Boulud built a restaurant business that reaches from the Upper East Side to Singapore, Mr. Bouley continued to renovate the same few blocks of TriBeCa.

Finally, in 2017, he set his sights on West 21st Street, with a creative center that included a cooking school, a bakery, a test kitchen that doubled as an event space, and what turned out to be his last restaurant, Bouley at Home. . It closed for good in the early months of the pandemic.

The event space-slash-test kitchen was equipped with a Steinway Model B piano, a wall of McIntosh audio components, and two enormous chambered nautilus-shaped speakers. You have to be a little more than a casual music fan to put a concert grand piano and a sound system worth more than $100,000 in a room that is only used occasionally.

Despite the perpetual motion of his intellect, Mr. Bouley was also devoted to the senses — a good thing in a chef, and somehow not as common as you might think. He decorated Bouley's foyer with hundreds of apples, making the small room smell like an orchard upstate in the fall. The dining room was decorated with fabrics that you wanted to feel against your skin.

His cooking became increasingly focused on creating “the most nutrient-dense menus… for unbreakable health,” as the Bouley at Home website put it. But when you started eating, you would have believed that every dish had been devised by someone who had never thought for a minute about anything other than how to fill each serving with a few more grams of pleasure.

Mr. Bouley was always in the kitchen trying out new hypotheses. That was part of what made him a rare talent. But nothing he gave you showed signs of the lab. That was the rest of his gift; his experiments no longer tasted like experiments. He found ways to give them life.