You are what you eat, goes the old clichȳ. Or maybe, from a psychiatrist’s point of view, you are what eats you.
In any case, one presentation at the APA Annual Meeting in San Diego will take an insider’s look at the intersection of food and the mind. Star New York Chef David Bouley has been exploring that nexus for years, an experience he will share with psychiatrists in San Diego.
In recent years, Bouley has teamed with physicians of various specialties for his “Chef and the Doctor” series of “collaborative health-focused lectures and multicourse dinners.”
So, it’s no stretch that his talk on Monday, May 22, at 8 a.m. will focus on “living foods” that contribute to the health of the nervous system.
Bouley keeps those foods right at hand. In Bouley Botanical, one of the several restaurant spaces he runs in New York, he has constructed a window wall arrayed with more than 400 species of living, edible plants that he can harvest and incorporate individually into a guest’s dinner on the spot.
The cross-disciplinary interest should be no surprise. Bouley has been a restless soul throughout his career.
After training in France and Switzerland, the Connecticut-born Bouley worked his way up in the 1980s to be the chef at Montrachet, the three-star restaurant in TriBeCa. He went out on his own in 1987, opening the first version of Bouley, which won high praise before closing in 1996. Bouley next opened a bakery and then another restaurant that specialized in Eastern European cuisine.
Today he operates a reincarnated Bouley at Duane and Hudson streets in TriBeCa, the Japanese-inspired Brushtroke, and Bouley Botanical, home to all those edible greens awaiting their imminent demise on someone’s plate.
Bouley is not content to coast on his decades of success, however. He is going on a sabbatical, in his words, closing Bouley this spring and then lighting out for the territory.
After 30 years as a chef, he said, he wants to take classes in nutrition and travel to Asia, South America, and Europe to expand his knowledge of the nexus between food and health. Sometime late in 2018 or early 2019, he plans to open a new restaurant, one that will seat 20 or 25 guests rather than the 120 in the current iteration of Bouley. The two sides of his personality will again be on display.
“The new Bouley will tailor guests’ menus to their specific needs and will be designed to optimize the healing power of food,” he wrote on his website. “It will not be a ‘health clinic,’ but rather a restaurant of high standards, romantic and sensual in every detail.”
Attendees at the APA meeting in San Diego might just get an advance hint of what that dining experience will look like. ■
“Living Foods That Together Strengthen and Build Support for the Peripheral Nervous System, Consequently Building Health of Both the Central and Peripheral Nervous Systems” will be held Monday, May 22, at 8 a.m. in the San Diego Convention Center.
