New York City based chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten is set to open his first Philadelphia restaurant this month in the new Four Seasons hotel.
Vongerichten is headed to the top floors of the 60-story Comcast Technology Center for Jean-Georges Philadelphia and a lounge called JG SkyHigh. Down on street level, his former colleague, James Beard Award winner Greg Vernick, is just about ready to debut Vernick Fish. Both will officially open the same day as the hotel, August 12th.
Designer Norman Foster did more than simply clad the 59th and 60th floors in 40-foot windows, allowing for views from three sides. He also cleverly created a sense of place by setting up mirrors along the length of the ceiling, angled to reflect people and cars on the street. Look up from your seat, and you can see taxis and pedestrians.
The new Jean-Georges Philadelphia is Vongerichten’s 39th restaurant. Comcast chief Brian Roberts brought the legendary chef to see the location when it was a hole in the ground five years ago. He has 15 in New York alone, starting with JoJo (which opened in 1991) through the new Paris Cafe within the TWA Hotel at JFK airport. Through management deals and partnerships, he runs one in Westchester, N.Y., two in the Hamptons, two each in Las Vegas and Los Angeles, and three in Miami Beach, plus 13 around the world, including two in Shanghai and Mexico, one in Singapore, and one on St. Barth’s.
Thirty percent of the Jean-Georges’ menu will be made up of dishes from the New York flagship, with the rest overseen by chef Nick Ugliarolo. Given Ugliarolo’s past at Vongerichten’s all-vegan abcV restaurant, the menu will include vegan and vegetarian options. Some items will be changed weekly, while others will be seasonal.
Vongerichten, who describes himself as “a New Yorker with an accent,” arrived in New York in 1986. The son and grandson of coal merchants from Alsace said he got into the restaurant business at age 16 after flaming out in engineering school. His parents had taken him to L’Auberge de L’Ill, a Michelin three-star restaurant, for his birthday.
During dinner, his father was still seething about his quitting school but the son was taking notice of the action. “We never went to a restaurant,” Vongerichten said. “Maybe a bistro, we’d go once a year. But as I saw everything, I said to myself, ‘Oh, my God. This is it. This is what I want to do.’” He said his father approached chef-owner Paul Haeberlin and said, “This is my son. He’s good for nothing. If you want him to wash dishes, he’ll do that.” Turns out that the restaurant needed an apprentice. At the outset, he was assigned to cook for dogs that rich customers brought in.
After working for chef Paul Bocuse, he joined chef Louis Outhier, who sent him all over Asia, whose cuisines inform most of his menus today. While working in Bangkok at age 23, he was given profit-and-loss statements to expose him to the business side. He learned more at the Drake Hotel in New York because the Swiss owners, he said, demanded that. At age 32, he took a restaurant-business course at Hunter College in New York before opening JoJo with Phil Suarez, who is still his business partner.
His empire boasts successful alumni. Besides Vernick, Vongerichten’s former staffers in Philadelphia include chef Nick Kennedy, a co-owner of Suraya in Fishtown; My-Le Vuong, an owner of Kalaya in South Philadelphia; Hannah Taylor-Noren, director of operations of Method Hospitality (Wm. Mulherin’s Sons, Hiroki); Daniel Stern, chef-owner of R2L; Sylva Senat, chef at the Pyramid Club; and chocolatier Aurora Wold of Aurora Grace.
At the main kitchen at Jean-Georges in New York, Vongerichten said, he and his chefs try to develop two or three dishes a day for the restaurants. “This is the best job I’ve ever had in my life,” he said. “All I do is create new spaces and new food.”
All in all, Vongerichten is taken with Philadelphia, pleased to be working in proximity to Vernick, and feeling quite warmly towards the city as a whole: “It’s a great town, it’s a great food town. People are so nice and we’ve found some great talent for both front and back of the house. An exciting moment!”
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