Central Park’s New Chef

When a chef takes over a restaurant, he usually starts by thinking about new menus. For Brian Young, the newest chef at Tavern on the Green, the first order of business was learning everyone’s names. It took him a full week: There are more than 90 people working in the 13,000-square-foot kitchen, to which Mr. Young has added $100,000 worth of new equipment.Mr. Young’s first menu will make its debut on April 8 — Easter Sunday — with 2,000 reservations already on the books. He’ll try out dishes like “surf and turf” of lobster with an oxtail potato cake, and white sea bass with spring onion purée and white truffle oil vinaigrette. His first à la carte menu goes up in June.“Finding a chef for Tavern can be somewhat difficult,” the CEO and owner of Tavern on the Green, Jennifer LeRoy, said. “Of course they need to know how to cook, but it’s much more about management.” The restaurant, which is tucked into the west side of Central Park, serves more that 700,000 meals a year. Management says it is the highest-grossing restaurant in the country, with revenues close to $40 million annually. Between opening prep-work and closing down the house at the end of the night, the restaurant runs almost 24 hours a day. “This kitchen is like a muscle car,” Mr. Young said gleefully. “It gets like 2 miles to the gallon but when you hit the accelerator it flies.”Mayor Fiorello La Guardia opened Tavern on the Green in 1934 with a brass key and breakfast with the parks commissioner, Robert Moses. Over the next 40 years the restaurant had a series of owners and renovations to varying degrees of success, and was finally shuttered by Restaurant Associates in 1974. Warner LeRoy, Ms. LeRoy’s father, then acquired the lease and began an ambitious and extravagant renovation. “My dad took it because no one wanted it,” Ms. LeRoy said. His theatrical vision cost $10 million to realize. The restaurant reopened in 1976. When LeRoy died in 2001, Ms. LeRoy took command of what is now a globally recognized landmark.Despite its fame and sales volume, however, Tavern is not on the city’s gastronomic radar. Perhaps that is because half its business comes from private parties and banquets, and 60% of its total visitors are from out of town.John Milito ran the kitchen in relative anonymity for four years prior to Mr. Young’s arrival, replacing the little known chef Gary Coyle. The restaurant has not been reviewed by a major publication since the 1990s, when chef Marc Poidevin was replaced by Patrick Clark.While there are Tavern classics on the menu, such as prime rib and lobster bisque, “there is no house style,” Mr. Young said. “Patrick’s was Southern, Marc’s was French.” Mr. Young, 39, said he hopes to bring a modern multi-ethnic tone to the menu that mirrors his own diverse heritage: He was born in Canada to Chinese parents, and is married to an Italian/Irish woman. “Is it a risk?” the restaurant’s chief operating officer, Michael Desiderio, asked of hiring Mr. Young. “A little bit. But there’s more upside than downside.” Mr. Young said that constructing a menu at Tavern is difficult. “You have ideas to create dishes, then you have to translate it to a large format, to volume-ize fine dining.” It will be easy to see how customers like the new menu. “Because of the volume, we can look at the numbers real fast and know what works,” Ms. LeRoy said. It took six months and a long interview process to find Mr. Young, who was recommended by a former colleague of Mr. Desiderio’s at Windows on the World. His résumé includes stints at several high-end restaurants, from Le Bernardin to Citarella to Harvest on the Hudson.It seems the burnout rate for chefs at Tavern on the Green is about four years. What does Mr. Young hope to achieve by 2011? “Well, in 2009, the lease is up with the city,” he said, “so we’ll have to get over that first.” (Donald Trump told the New York Post earlier this month that he is interested in taking over the restaurant.) “We have a great relationship with the city and we try to be great members [of the park],” Ms. LeRoy said.In the meantime, she opened a small restaurant called the Equestrian Club by Tavern on the Green in Wellington, Fla., in December. A historical Tavern cookbook is in the works, a line of food products will make its debut this spring, and there’s talk of opening Taverns in Tokyo, Atlantic City, and Las Vegas. Ms. LeRoy describes the latter as an over-the-top version of the already-extravagant venue. “I know it’s what my dad would have wanted.”

Central Park’s New Chef

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