The Boulud Effect: Beyond his chic Palm Beach restaurant, a world-famous chef helps transform the county's dining scene

Daniel Boulud may be a world-famous Michelin-starred chef whose restaurants, including his Café Boulud in Palm Beach, draw a chic set, but don’t mistake him for a trendy type. Trendy is fleeting. Boulud is here to stay.

“I’m looking forward to the next 20!” Boulud told a lively crowd at the 20th anniversary celebration of Café Boulud at the Brazilian Court hotel on Jan. 18. Around him in the hotel’s courtyard were samba dancers, drummers, fire-twirlers, restaurant industry friends and socialites. Quite different from the very first Café Boulud, an outdoor café and village social hub operated by his grandparents near his native Lyon in the early 1900s.

The name and its legacy, says Boulud, has "sentimental value to me.” Which is why he opened a (fancier) Café Boulud in New York in 1998, and five years later debuted the Café in Palm Beach, his first restaurant outside of New York.

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Now, 20 years after he opened the Palm Beach restaurant, some of his most notable guests at the anniversary party were the local chefs Boulud has hired and inspired.

When Boulud brought his brand to Palm Beach County in 2003, he did more than open a restaurant. He established roots here, not only at the Café but also via the chefs he trained. Many have gone on to national acclaim and to open their own restaurants.

?  Café Boulud’s inaugural executive chef Zach Bell, who led the kitchen at the restaurant until 2011, was a finalist for a prestigious James Beard Award for “Best Chef” in the South four times. Today, the Central Florida native is executive chef at the high-end private club Lost Tree Country Club in North Palm Beach.

?  Former Café Boulud executive chef Rick Mace traded in his fine-dining chef whites for a barbecue pitmaster apron when he opened Tropical Smokehouse in West Palm Beach in January 2021.

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?  A half-mile south of Tropical Smokehouse, a former Café Boulud executive sous chef, James Strine, is preparing to open an outdoor Tex-Mex/smoked meats concept called Austin Republic in the former Braille Club of Palm Beach location on South Dixie Highway.

?  Another Boulud protégé, Jeremy Hanlon, is the energetic chef who revved up Benny’s on the Beach and recently expanded the brand to include a second Benny’s beachfront restaurant on Lake Worth Beach.

?  And chef/restaurateur Jeremy Bearman, who creates refined, locally inspired dishes at his breezy Oceano Kitchen restaurant in Lantana with his partner/wife and acclaimed pastry chef Cindy Bearman, spent his formative cooking years in a Daniel Boulud kitchen, at DB Bistro Moderne in New York City. His mentor and former boss Jean-Francois Bruel is now executive chef at Boulud’s Michelin-starred Restaurant Daniel in Manhattan. Also in New York, Cindy Bearman worked at DB Bistro Moderne and Café Boulud.

?  The Bearmans and Mace are among five Palm Beach County chefs who made the semifinals list for a 2023 James Beard Award in the “Best Chef: South” category.

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Daniel Boulud's style: 'Technique, discipline and speed'

The chefs’ chosen styles and restaurants could not be more different. But they share a Boulud-kitchen discipline, an exacting sense of reevaluation that continues to challenge them.

Zach Bell speaks about practicing “benchmarking,” thanks to his Boulud years.

Hanlon, who served as saucier at Boulud’s Michelin-starred Restaurant Daniel in New York, carries that sense of discipline in his daily work at Benny’s on the Beach.

“It’s built into my mentality. I always tell myself, ‘You have to run through the line and everything! Did you check everything?’” says Hanlon, who calls Boulud “a truly great mentor.”

After a few years in the New York kitchen, Hanlon went off to expand his culinary skills in the north of Spain, southern France and Italy, all thanks to Boulud. Later, the young chef worked at Café Boulud Palm Beach for six months before striking out on his own.

At Tropical Smokehouse, chef Mace credits Boulud for boosting his sense of self-trust in the kitchen.

“It’s really easy for me to give Daniel a lot of credit for the level of confidence that I possess. He’s always been a person to challenge you with work. What I learned at Café Boulud was more than technique. You learn cuisine. You try to become the best chef you can become,” Mace says. “I developed a lot of confidence.”

Strine, whose time at Café Boulud overlapped with Mace’s, says the three most important of the many skills he learned from Boulud are “technique, discipline and speed.”

“I honestly believe there are chefs who’ve worked for Daniel and there are the other guys,” says Strine.

'Never a conversation about failure'

But there’s another theme as important as discipline that runs through the chefs’ memories of working with Boulud: a contagiously positive attitude.

“He has generosity of spirit,” says Mace. “To see him so supportive of me is really humbling. He’s done for me what he’s done for so many young chefs, and I’m super-grateful.”

Hanlon echoes that thought.

“Daniel has always been this incredibly passionate and talented chef. With him, there was never a conversation about failure,” he says.

Different, but not trendy

When Boulud opened his Palm Beach restaurant, French cuisine on the island was defined by tradition, most notably by the classic (now-closed) French bistro Chez Jean-Pierre, which became a favorite of Boulud’s.

Boulud recalls the late chef/restaurateur Jean-Pierre Leverrier “was a great, great chef, and so loved in Palm Beach.”

“I felt I was in a good place because if they loved Jean-Pierre, maybe I could bring a complement to what he was doing,” Boulud says. “But at the same time, I wanted to make sure we were different.”

Different, but not trendy, he says. "Café Boulud always followed the trend without being trendy. When you are trendy, people move onto the next thing,” Boulud says.

What he envisioned for the Café, Boulud says, was “a place that leads through the times, classic enough in the application of food.”

It would be refined but not stuffy, and not as high-end as Restaurant Daniel.

“It was Daniel in blue jeans, but we always had high standards,” Boulud says.

Opening the Café in Palm Beach “was a natural,” he says.

“There was a density of our customers here, customers from all along the eastern corridor. So even on our first day, it felt like home,” Boulud says.

When he recounts the Café’s years in Palm Beach, Boulud’s thoughts often turn to the chefs that have worked with him.

“We have so many alumni of Café Boulud Palm Beach now, and some of them have their own restaurants. I feel very proud of having been able to cross-train a lot of chefs,” says Boulud of a Palm Beach County that’s very different from the one that first greeted his Café two decades ago.

Café Boulud Palm Beach

Located in The Brazilian Court Hotel, 301 Australian Ave., Palm Beach, 561-655-6060

Executive Chef: Dieter Samijn

Hours: Open for breakfast daily from 7 to 11 a.m., lunch Monday through Friday from noon to 2:30 p.m., dinner nightly from 5:30 to 10 p.m. and brunch Saturday and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 2:30 p.m.

Liz Balmaseda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA Today Network. She covers the local food and dining beat. Follow her on Instagram and Post on Food Facebook. She can be reached by email at [email protected]. 

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Daniel Boulud's transformed Palm Beach County's restaurants scene