N.Y. Chef Blends Vision With Hard Work as Recipe for Top U.S. Rating : Food: American-born David Bouley keeps an eye on every detail in his restaurant as he seeks to serve the best French cuisine this side of the Atlantic.

David Bouley is obsessed. Day after day, night after night, he stands in the kitchen of his splendid, four-star restaurant, inspecting each Limoge plate twice--once when it leaves and once when it returns. If it returns with uneaten food, he wants to know why.

At the same time, he is sauteing fish over a torrid range, choosing from a dozen sauces and oils for each dish and keeping an eye on the cooks at work around him. Bouley is the master of every detail in every corner of the restaurant that carries both his name and his vision of the finest French meal this side of the Atlantic.

This is one of America’s best chefs at work--up to 16 hours a day, Monday through Saturday.

“It’s just not the same without me there,” said Bouley (pronounced boo-LAY). His staff “can share my vision, but it’s my vision. Some nights I go home and think there’s 72 people and there’s not one of them I don’t have to support in some way.”

And it’s not just Bouley’s work habits that are slaves to his vision. Nothing is spared:

When an upstate farmer who grows little fingerling potatoes decides he would rather take out his kayak than make a delivery, Bouley buys a bus seat for a 50-pound box. Bouley’s purchasing agent, Charlie Campbell, is dispatched to the station.

* Pastry Chef Bill Yosses is baking creme brulee with cream taken from cows that morning. It’s twice as expensive as ordinary cream.

* Farmers consult with Bouley before they plant. He studies growing seasons and soil. And he searches out people to fish just for him, like a marine biologist who scuba dives for scallops off Maine.

* Before each meal, a VIP list is posted, so Bouley knows which politicians, actors or executives are there, as well as who is celebrating a birthday or anniversary, and who is proposing marriage.

* Flowers run more than $80,000 a year; Champagne glasses cost $21 apiece. Diners eat 300 pounds a week of hand-picked baby lettuces.

* Bouley asks cabbies who regularly pick up customers outside to eavesdrop for their reaction. “I’m really well networked,” he said.

The restaurant displaced two institutions--the Four Seasons and Lutece--at the top of this year’s Zagat Survey. In 1990, the New York Times anointed the restaurant with four stars, just three years after it opened, but 22 years after Bouley got his first restaurant job. And last year, the James Beard Foundation named it the country’s best restaurant.

These days, it can take three months to get a weekend dinner reservation.

“It’s what he wanted, what everyone wanted who was involved,” said Yosses, who helped build Bouley. “David never intended to settle for less.”

Bouley transports its patrons from frenzied Manhattan, seven blocks north of the World Trade Center, to a French country inn of graceful vaulted ceilings, a profusion of flowers, and stunning food.

The cream-colored walls of the dining room are set off by a 17th-Century imported window frame. Halls are lined with dried and potted flowers, copper pots and wooden boxes of fresh fruit. On the way to the restrooms, there’s a big window into the wine cellar.

But its chef-owner rarely seems to experience the serenity he created for those who come through his heavy wooden door--imported from Provence, along with an artisan to hang it--for the luxury of three-hour meals and checks that top $200 for two.

Bouley’s modular, sparkling kitchen is surprisingly quiet but far from calm. There is some banter, in French and English, reminiscent of a rather refined boys’ club. (The are no women in the kitchen, although there have been in the past.)

“He doesn’t like it if everyone gets tense,” said Jay Cohen, the sous-chef. “If you can free yourself from thinking about every little move, you can open up and work on the nuances of flavor. It’s all sort of heady stuff.”

Connecticut-born but with four French grandparents, Bouley relies on fresh American flavors from line-caught fish and organically raised meat, herbs and as much organic produce as he can get his hands on.

All of it is imbued with classic techniques he learned from some of France’s best chefs: Roger Verge at the three-star Moulin de Mougins in southern France, Fredy Girardet (the world’s best, “soulful food,” says Bouley) in Switzerland, Paul Bocuse in Lyon, Joel Robuchon in Paris.

The result is both exalted and down-to-Earth: lemon thyme that sings out from a tiny tart; a pale, clear tomato consomme with a strikingly intense tomato taste. Bouley strives for a sensual experience of essential flavors. He relies on flavored oils and vegetable purees for sauces, sauteing in butter but mainly reserving dairy products for desserts.

Diners are shown the same respect as the food. Regulars get little wooden boxes of exquisite chocolates or copies of the Zagat Survey as they leave. There is nearly one employee per seat, and the leisurely pace (a source of some complaining from reviewers) and a liberal policy of complimentary courses means that tables don’t turn over quite twice in a night.

Everyone is expected to leave happy.

“If a plate comes back and they don’t finish something, it’s not unusual for David to tell the captain to offer them something else,” Cohen said.

Bouley is rewarded with a corps of regulars; he claims 100 people eat there two or three times a week. And sometimes he is rewarded with extravagant gifts--Cohen says one customer sent a $400 bouquet in thanks for a meal.

The demands of this rarefied kitchen have often driven employees away, but some have returned--Cohen and Yosses included--after trying other restaurants.

“I don’t think I’m a tyrant. I am really with the team. I work,” said Bouley, who unlike many chef-owners cooks at every meal.

“At Bouley, you do what David Bouley wants,” said Suzy Dayton, his pastry chef for a year and now at the Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, N.M.

Bouley also demands the best ingredients and gets them fast, combining old-style farming and fishing with high-speed delivery, computers and cellular phones.

A fisherman who takes off from Massachusetts in a small boat, for instance, calls his wife from the boat, and she then lets Bouley know what he is catching and when he will dock. Yellowtail tuna arrives from Japan five days a week. Crabs sometimes are delivered by an overnight service.

Surrounded by the best, Bouley’s own junk-food habits, he says, are limited to popcorn, high-quality potato chips, and pizza. “I believe when you eat well you become hooked. It’s like a drug,” he says.

His maternal grandparents’ Rhode Island farm provided his early schooling in the pleasures of food. He claims to have first eaten store-bought bread at 14, though he admits to trading Grandma’s bread for schoolmates’ Twinkies.

He went to work in a restaurant as a teen-ager, but headed to the University of Connecticut to study business. He quit for a restaurant job, later enrolled at the Sorbonne, and again quit to cook in several French kitchens. That was it; he was hooked.

Later, in New York, he worked at Le Cirque, Le Perigord, La Cote Basque and Montrachet. At Montrachet, he earned three stars in under two months, but along with some of his staff was fired, apparently in part because it was known that he planned to move on, to work on his own.

And move on he did, finding the old warehouse in the Tribeca neighborhood, across from a little triangular park that is the last remnant of a 350-year-old farm. He found a backer and recruited his contractor brother and six cooks as construction workers. The crowds found Bouley from the start.

He has, however, sacrificed. At 38, he is single and childless. Recently, he says, he and an actress girlfriend split up, partly because he never found time to see her performances.

“It’s a devastating factor that I’d rather do this than anything,” said Bouley, curly haired and darkly handsome, with a voice so soft that it demands attention.

“He’s married to this business, it’s his love affair, it’s his life,” said David’s 36-year-old brother Martin, a contractor. “Fortunately, the restaurant business provides many of the experiences of life--it’s social, there’s good food. He has many friends, he meets many people who come by.”

But Bouley hopes to have a family one day, and give up the food business, he says, perhaps for a career in research.

But that’s one day. For now, he plans to expand. He and his brother are looking for a building suitable for a bistro, banquet facility and retail store.

Of course, this will only accelerate a pace that already makes him regularly late and sleep-deprived. Bouley is too busy to drive to see his suppliers, so his older brother, Henry, often flies him to farms or fishing towns. And Martin says any of the eight siblings who want to see David have to come to the restaurant.

One recent Friday morning, Bouley began work at 6 at the Fulton Fish Market in Lower Manhattan. He had gotten home from the restaurant just 4 1/2 hours earlier.

Wandering among the dozens of varieties of fish, Bouley rejects most of them as poorly handled or too long dead. He looks at the luster on a slab of tuna filet and can tell how it was caught and whether it will taste tender.

“This is the pickiest guy in the fish business,” said David L. Samuels, president of Blue Ribbon Fish Co. “He’ll go to the ends of the Earth, and pay more for something that’s 1% better.”

Later, at the restaurant, Bouley inspects the morning deliveries, comes up with a specials menu and changes into starched “chef’s whites,” with his name embroidered in maroon at the breast and matching piping at the collar and cuffs.

He usually heads the fish station, overseeing more than a dozen cooks. To his right is the “expediter,” whose job is not unlike that of a symphony conductor. There are nine buckets of fresh herbs nearby for garnishing plates just before the waiters scoop them up and parade them out.

At his range, Bouley tastes constantly but rarely eats meals. He sips orange juice from a tall glass to clear his palate and give him energy.

Around him are a dozen one-quart saucepans holding brown, green and red oils and purees made from such things as shallots, black olives, blood oranges, chives, tomatoes or capers. From them he creates sauces.

Grilled Portuguese sardines get a dill oil and a balsamic vinegar sauce. Black bass gets a sauce made from fresh clam juice, onion and garlic purees, and dill, chive and basil oils.

A crab appetizer is decorated with several asparagus spears, a spoonful of chopped tomatoes and two sauces. Foie gras is served with Brussels sprouts, a quince puree, hazelnuts and a vintage Armagnac sauce.

He works in a small space but never stops moving, especially his hands, large, rough and nicked, with a wide burn scar on one wrist.

“It’s never dull there,” Dayton says. “That’s how you get creative, it’s sort of serendipitous. He’d come over and say, ‘Hey let’s try this.’ As frustrating as it could be there, it’s also very exciting.”

Around 5 p.m., lingering lunch customers are sipping coffee. For Bouley, there are dinner specials to select, books to go over, perhaps time for a cappuccino and a little conversation before returning to the stove around 6 for seven more hours.

Martin Bouley recalls his brother’s first restaurant job, when David was 16.

“He came into the driveway on his motorcycle and took his helmet off and threw it down, and said ‘I love cooking, and I’m going to be the best chef in the world.’

“He doesn’t remember that story, but I do.”

Bouley’s goals haven’t changed much. He wants his customers to have an “experience that they remember for a very long time, a ceremony that was significant. They were moved. They can feel all our efforts. I made them happy.”

But success also gives him pause.

“I’m always nervous. I always think they’re going to cut my head off. They build you up and knock you down,” he says. “I’m a little crazy. Bill Cosby says you can’t please them all, and I still want to to do that.”

Often, David Bouley comes close.