The Chefs : A simple recipe for success

Last year’s great restaurant experiment gave us Fennel and the “shuttle chefs”-- four chefs who jet into Los Angeles--one at a time--from France every month or so. Last month, Roland Gibert and Maurice Peguet opened Tulipe, a restaurant where two head chefs work side-by-side. Do too many chefs spoil the fumet?

“He’s the meat man; I’m the fish guy,” Peguet says, and then--he can’t help himself--he bears his teeth in a grin.

You have to understand that at this moment, barely two months after Tulipe grilled its first squab, Gibert and Peguet are two happy chefs. Chat with them together for awhile, and you hear the kind of shy snickering you might associate with 12-year-olds who’ve just realized that girls don’t necessarily have cooties.

What Gibert and Peguet have rediscovered is the joy of cooking. Each comes to Tulipe from a huge hotel kitchen (Gibert from Bernard’s and Califia; Peguet from L’Escoffier), the kind of place where haute cuisine is more management skills than art. (Costing out butter swans typically becomes more important than a perfect beurre blanc.)

“It was frustrating,” Gibert says.

” . . . Very impersonal,” Peguet chimes in.

And so Gibert and Peguet traded in their hordes of prep cooks and their gleaming hotel kitchens for relatively compact quarters--the open kitchen at Tulipe.

“In a restaurant like this,” Peguet says, “we have to be out there working the stoves with the rest of the gang--on the line, you know?”

“We had a little bit of stage fright at first,” Gilbert says. “And it took some coordinating to get a routine going--we’d be bumping into each other. But it was worth it. We’re back in action.”

” . . . And more in reality,” Peguet adds.