Hello everyone. This is Chef Peter at Matisse, for those that haven’t met me before, and are thinking about coming to Matisse, perhaps for a special occasion.
People always come here for special occasions, birthdays, anniversaries. I’ve had a lot of people get engaged here. So, we’ve had that over the years, and I’ve been here for 37 years. I’ve created a special place here, and I want you to feel like you’re coming into my home. My passion for cooking, I guess it’s always been there to some sense. I started cooking for myself at home and it’s something I enjoyed. And then I started cooking for friends.
At the time, I worked for Nokia, which was a Finish company. We did fiber optics, we made cable for Okonite, the company I worked for in New Jersey. We created cable and optic fibers and things for the energy sector of our country, but it never really was my passion. It wasn’t something that I really loved, and cooking was. So in my thirties, I decided, I think I’m going to go to culinary school. So, I went to French Culinary in Manhattan, which was a very small school at the time.
It was one floor, on the corner of Broadway and Grand. It was very special, French teachers, they did small classes. We went through three sections, intermediate, where you learned how to hold the knife and how to use the knife. And then to the middle, started doing some pastries and learning how to put things together.
And then there was a third part of the course, which was actually cooking for the restaurant. It was part of the school. It’s come a long way since I was there. I went in 1986 and I graduated top of my class. We started with a, I think it was a group of 30 plus students in the class. And we only graduated seven and I graduated first in my class, which would’ve allowed me to go to France for two years and go to the school that was connected to France.
But I chose not to. I had bills to pay as we all do. I wasn’t 18 anymore. I was in my mid-thirties. I had mortgages, car payments, responsibilities. So, I went to work in New York. My first stop was La Reserve, where I learned how to be fast. It was a kitchen that was a pre-theater kitchen, it’s not there anymore.
We used to do anywhere between 400 and 600 covers a night. That’s moving in the kitchen. So, I didn’t cook there. What they called it, a French kitchen, a tourney, and basically what I did was I would season the food and pass it to the chef, and the chef would cook it. Then when it was done, he would turn around and I would plate it. So that was my function in that kitchen. And then I went to work for David Bouley. He was down at Tribeca. David had just opened his restaurant. It was a strange dynamic because I was actually one year older than him. He was a young chef. He was very passionate about his food, and it’s where I really learned the technique of how to make food the same, consistently.
How to make it interesting, how to make it an experience. I learned a lot from David. Probably would’ve stayed in New York, but that commute got to me. A lot of hours back and forth. So, I decided to open my own place.
So I looked in the paper, and I had lived in Rutherford years ago, and I saw this little place for sale, it was affordable. And I said, I lived in Rutherford, I’ll go take a look at it. And, that’s how I ended up here. We started as a restaurant called Park Avenue. It was a little French bistro. Back in 1987 there were no cooking shows. People either wanted pasta or chicken or salad, none of which I cooked.
But I stuck to my guns, and we built a customer base here and had a great following, and I have regulars that have been coming and now their kids have grown up and they’re coming and their kids are now starting to grow up and coming. So, it’s been a pretty amazing experience. Part of what I do, the passion of cooking is the passion I feel for people, and how they care about what we do here and how we do it.
And the feedback that we get is a motivator to keep going. I’m 70. I still feel pretty good. I had a knee replacement last year. It’s been challenging, but still working, loving it. My wife is a little younger than me, so there’s no reason to retire just yet. And I keep doing it as long as I love it. I still love cooking. I’m not sure if I love all the other aspects of business but the cooking is still fun. And it’s still fun creating dishes.
People are always asking me when I’m going to write a cookbook. And I had some thoughts during my knee surgery. I started putting them down on paper and I decided, I’m not going to write a cookbook. Instead, I’m going to write a book about what inspired me to become a chef and what inspires my dishes. So, you could look for that book in the future because it’s something I have a lot of notes on. It’s something about to really start sitting down in the next couple months and giving you some real thought and putting in the paper.
Again, chef Peter, for those that don’t know me, we’d like to get to know you and you can spend some time at Matisse. There’s only a few weeks left in this beautiful garden. And then of course there’s the Jewel Box room, our main dining room, which is a beautiful room. And then the front room is, we call it the Moroccan room. Food is no different, Matisse had a part of his life where he went to Spain and Morocco, and the room is just an interpretive inspiration of his artwork. The colors and designs in the main dining room are also inspired by Matisse. We use big, bold colors and textures in our dining rooms, and bold flavors and colors to create the artful cuisine that we make in our little kitchen and lovingly serve to you!
Chef Peter. signing off. Artful Cuisine. We’ll see you soon.
Chef Peter’s Journey
