Copyright New York Magazine
I’ve used this notebook for 25 years, ever since they first came out. It’s very durable, and it just really answers all the needs I have in a professional notebook. It holds all my calendars: my daily calendars, my monthly calendar, and my master calendar, which shows me where I need to be in a summary on the first page. So I can see in a glance exactly where the rest of my year is going to be. It also has some personal items: a copy of my passport in case I lose my passport, some of my dietary obligations, some of my workout notes, our core values for the restaurant. And there’s everybody’s name, phone number, email, and the place that they work. And then I have some specific information like my frequent-flier numbers for all the airlines, Masterclass, passwords for The Wall Street Journal, Ticketmaster — things like that. So those are the things that I keep in my Levenger. The other thing about them is the pages come in and out very quickly and very easily. So the weekly or the dailies get tossed after the day is over. There may be some things that go to archives. I have three archivists who have been working with me for about two years now. Whatever I feel is important — the documents, the letters, whatever— it’ll go down to the archive room and get photographed and stored in the database. So then we can access all these things very easily. The biggest problem that I have with shortbreads is they’re not cooked and they’re soft in the center. A shortbread uses very basic ingredients: butter, flour, sugar. If it’s not cooked correctly, then you have this gummy feeling. Next time you eat shortbread, you’ll probably notice that most shortbreads are very blonde and they stick in your molars. At French Laundry and all of our restaurants, the shortbread is cooked low and slow and cooked all the way through, which results in a beautiful golden-brown shortbread. Fortnum & Mason was a benchmark for me in producing our shortbread. They’re very well known throughout the U.K. There are many companies that produce shortbread, all of them really good. But Fortnum & Mason has a flavor profile, I think from the butter they use, that’s superior to anything else. As much as I love our shortbreads here in America, we don’t have that same kind of butter. We don’t produce that flavor of butter from what the cows eat, where the cows are raised. We don’t have that environment here. It’s a different flavor profile. I started using Kiehl’s shave cream when I moved to New York in 1984, ’85. So it’s something I’ve been using for quite some time. It has changed in its formulation a little bit over the years, but for me it’s still the richest, smoothest shave cream that I’ve tried. I admit I have not tried them all, so I can’t say unequivocally that it’s the best, but you find these products in your life and they just do what you need them to do in a perfect way. It also comes in different sizes, so the travel size makes it really easy. I just like the way it feels and how it supports my shave. I stumbled on these Lululemon pants maybe 15 years ago. I was actually using them for travel at first because of the flexibility of the spandex, the ease of care, and the durability. And then I just turned them into my work pants. I got my white jacket on, and I got my black pants on — this is what I wear every single day. Well, not every single day, but most of my days, from the time I wake up in the morning until the time I go to sleep at night. I probably have in total around the country 20 pairs, so four or five pairs in each location. They hold up very well. They’ll last me for probably 18 months to two years. The only thing that really wears a bit is the knees. They start to get a little bit of discoloration due to my apron, which goes all the way down to my ankles. I don’t really think you would see it, but nonetheless I’m the kind of person who wants to make sure that I am presenting myself in the best way possible. And if I can see a little bit of wear and discoloration on my knees, then I’m going to change. Macarons are very simple to make. It’s meringue and almond flour, for the most part. But they do take practice. They take a certain amount of expertise in making sure that when you’re mixing the batter, you’re piping it down, you’re letting it sit. The bake time is critical because you want to make sure that the center of every macaron is a little bit soft. And then you’re sorting through, making sure that they’re all the same size as you put them together and fill them. It really comes down to the quality of the mix, the quality of the bake, and of course the quality of the filling, whether it’s chocolate, pistachio, raspberry, lemon, vanilla, coffee. One of my first macarons was in Paris at Robert Linxe’s La Maison du Chocolat. I had a chocolate macaron. I was very poor. I could maybe buy one once a month, but it was a moment in time where I just savored this macaron. I don’t eat a lot of macarons now. Just maybe once every other week I’ll have one, and I’m always conflicted over which one to have. I started eating IQBARs a couple years ago on behest of my nutritionist. I’ve recommended these bars to professional athletes many times in the past couple of years, even before I had a relationship with them, because I like to share what is good in the world with others. They’re clean in terms of ingredients and have very little sugar and the appropriate amount of protein. The athletes, who would typically turn their nose up at a protein bar because they’re not as clean as they prefer them to be, they actually studied the label and said, Oh, this is great. So this was, I think, a real positive endorsement for IQBAR. I was in Chicago in May 2023 at the National Restaurant Association Show, and I was hungry and I looked down the aisle and I saw IQBAR. I thought I’d go get a couple to satisfy my hunger, and I started talking to Will, the developer of IQBAR. So that was the beginning of the relationship. We started developing this bar, with a portion of the proceeds going to my culinary foundation Ment’or so that they could benefit from this endeavor as well. He asked me for some flavor profiles, so I put together a tasting for Will and his team. I gave him our roasted caramelized chocolate covered macadamia nut, which we serve at the French Laundry for our guests as a mignardise, and that’s the one he chose.
