Peas in guacamole? The French chef bringing plant-forward cuisine to London
There wasn’t much that President Obama and Texan Republican hopeful Jeb Bush agreed on back in July 2015, the latter having just announced his intention to run against the former in the presidential elections the following year. Except that guacamole should not have peas in it. On this they were united – unlike those who, like me, love that extra sweet little pop-in-the-mouth sensation they give.
The controversy had been sparked by The New York Times running its version of the offending recipe, dreamt up by Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the New York-based French chef often credited with bringing nouvelle cuisine to America. GIVE PEAS A CHANCE! cried multiple ensuing newspaper headlines.
ABC Cocina, the Latin-inspired restaurant where he’d introduced the notorious guac, was one of three that Vongerichten opened on East 18th Street and around the corner on East 19th, within the upscale ABC Carpet & Home store in New York, two blocks from Union Square Greenmarket, the farmer’s market that inspired them. First came ABC Kitchen, in 2010, then ABC Cocina (2013), then ABCV (2017). Each is unique, but they are united by the drive to be plant-forward and sustainable, and all three have been major hits.
Which is probably why Vongerichten has launched ABC Kitchens, fusing all three concepts together, at The Emory in Knightsbridge. This brand-new all-suite hotel is the sixth within the Maybourne Hotel Group, which includes London landmarks Claridge’s, The Connaught and The Berkeley. ‘It will be farm to table, small fishing boat to table,’ says Vongerichten, ‘using the best produce, with Spanish, South American and vegan leanings.’
Vongerichten, aged 66, and with 66 restaurants around the world, has just celebrated 50 years in the kitchen. He is famous for his French cooking techniques coupled with Asian influences, for his fresh, local, organic ingredients, and for dishes that are refined but never fussy. According to New York Magazine, he has probably had more influence on New Yorkers’ dining habits than any other chef.
In many ways, ABC cooking is about simplifying: ‘Back in the 80s and 90s, everything was too touched, tweezered and manicured,’ says Vongerichten. ‘So I thought, let’s throw a bundle of baby leaks in the water for a minute and a half, take them out, add vinegar, olive oil, cracked hazelnuts, salt and pepper, – finish. Grill a piece of bread, spread on a little mayo, a little crab meat – done. Roast scallop with a little chilli, olive oil, salt, pepper – done.’
The relationship between Maybourne and Vongerichten is long-standing. ‘We have a lot of trust and respect for each other,’ he says of the now Qatari-owned group. He opened Vong at The Berkeley to great acclaim in 1995. It was here that he really unleashed upon London his fusion of French and Asian flavours.
In 2017 he launched Jean-Georges at The Connaught, an all-day neighbourhood restaurant still going strong today, with a dedicated caviar section (this is The Connaught, after all), but also pizza, truffle cheeseburgers and fish and chips. So being invited to bring his ABC concept to the newest Maybourne hotel seems like a full-circle moment.
The Emory sits next door to The Berkeley, opposite the green expanse of Hyde Park, and the two complement each other. The Emory is a modern, all-suite new-build with striking rooftop sails soaring skywards, designed by the late Richard Rogers, who began work on the project more than 10 years ago (he died in 2021). With just 61 suites (The Berkeley has 184 rooms) and an entrance tucked away around the back near the tiny, wonderful Grenadier pub, it’s all about discreet, quiet luxury.
The nine floors have been fitted out by different world-renowned designers including André Fu, who created the new spa at Claridge’s and has worked on numerous Maybourne projects; Rigby & Rigby, who did suites at The Maybourne Riviera, which opened in 2021, and have designed the penthouse at The Emory; Pierre-Yves Rochon, who also designed Claridge’s Mayfair Pavilion Suite last year; Alexandra Champalimaud (recent highlights: The Plaza, New York, and Badrutt’s Palace, St Moritz); and Patricia Urquiola (Six Senses Rome, Il Sereno on Lake Como).
The restaurant itself is by Rémi Tessier, best known for private yacht and jet design, but more recently for the Cédric Grolet patisserie at The Berkeley and the penthouse suite at Claridge’s, with its rooftop pool and 76 Damien Hirst artworks (he and Hirst are friends, so expect more at ABC Kitchens).
Filled with pale wood curved banquettes, marble countertops, copper wall panels and soft lighting, Vongerichten’s new restaurant, which has an open kitchen, feels intimate and cosy. Overlooking the park through floor-to-ceiling windows, it’s just high enough to have a view over the passing cars. There’s also a market table display of produce, and an amber glass wine cave that serves as a giant lantern.
‘I’m so excited about bringing this to London,’ says Vongerichten when I meet him in New York a few weeks before the opening (on 4 April). ‘You get the best vegetables in London (incredible asparagus!), the best seafood – I can’t wait to have langoustine, Cromer crab, Dover sole and fish and chips.’
We meet up at the Tin Building, a 53,000sq ft food hall (Eataly meets Harrods in a retro shell), which he launched in 2022 in the old Fulton Fish Market building by Brooklyn Bridge. It’s now home to six restaurants (all his), six casual dining counters, four bars (four blocks from Wall Street, it attracts the after-work crowd), butchers, bakers and market stalls selling both ingredients and ready-to-eat food.
‘Everything you see here that isn’t bought during the day will get used in one of the restaurants tonight, so nothing is wasted,’ Vongerichten tells me as we wander past stands laden with rainbow carrots, organic butterhead lettuces, kale and big, fragrant bunches of thyme. I’m soon lost in a haze of dry-cured salami, smoked-salted butter and tubs of Vermont mascarpone.
I scan a chalked-up list of suppliers with names like Cherry Lane Farms, Norwich Meadows Farm and Two Guys from Woodbridge, before pausing at a magnificent ice-heaped fish counter (‘this is the best of New England’s oyster, lobster, razor clams, scallops’). We stop at a cheese and wine bar – a winning combo, we agree – before continuing on to a little flower shop (‘it’s so peaceful in the Bloom Room – sometimes I just come in here and breathe’).
Driven by a desire to promote clean eating through sustainable, organic, GMO-free food, Vongerichten is encouraging a new generation of chefs to think that way too – and to follow their passions. We stop at a pizza stand, The Frenchman’s Dough, where he introduces me to a young Korean chef. ‘She is incredibly talented and had no desire to do Asian food. What she wanted more than anything was to make pizzas,’ he tells me afterwards.
‘I grew up in a family of coal handlers in the Alsace… We lived three generations under one roof, and my grandmother and mother would cook for the workers each day – sometimes there were 35 people, with a big pot in the middle of the table of whatever they’d found in the garden or the market, put out at 12.30,’ he recalls. ‘If you arrived at 12.40, you’d miss it, so it taught me the importance of precision timing.’
Vongerichten was expected to go into the family business, which he was determined not to do. He had never been to a restaurant until his parents took him to Michelin-starred L’Auberge de l’Ill for his 16th birthday. When renowned chef Paul Haeberlin came to the table, his father said, ‘My son’s good for nothing, can he come and wash dishes?’ He spent the first six months learning how to make ice cream, crème anglaise and pastry – all of which require exact science to come out right. It was the best training.
‘When I was 23, I went to Asia for five years, which changed everything for me,’ he says. ‘Master chef Louis Outhier, who I’d worked for at Restaurant L’Oasis near Cannes, phoned me up and said, “I want you to go and be a sous chef at the Oriental in Bangkok.” That’s where I learnt to substitute butter and cream with soy sauce, fish sauce, lime juice, fresh spices and coconut. Everything was super light. On that first journey from the airport to the hotel, I saw guys cooking satays on the street. It was mind-bending. Rather than boiling things for six hours, I started to do stocks with lemongrass, ginger, chilli, shrimp and mushroom, seasoned with fish roe. Make a soup in three minutes.’
When he got back from Asia, he worked as executive chef at Lafayette at the now-demolished Drake Hotel on Park Avenue. It was here he introduced New Yorkers to vegetable juices and infused oils, lemongrass and ginger, demonstrating that lighter food could be equally delicious. It was also his first experience of an open kitchen (there wasn’t room for a closed one), and the diners absolutely loved it.
‘That’s when we stopped tasting things by sticking a finger into the pot and started using clean spoons. It also led to better behaviour as chefs couldn’t scream at each other in front of the public,’ observes Vongerichten. ‘It was the first time I cooked with total transparency between diner and chef.’ Other JG hits followed, including JoJo on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 1991 – his first restaurant as both chef and co-owner – and then his flagship New York restaurant, Jean-Georges, which had three Michelin stars for 10 years and still has two today.
Union Square Greenmarket has always been one of his favourite places. He is there regularly, checking produce and meeting suppliers, along with every other reputable New York chef. ‘Everyone’s standing around remarking on how good the spinach is,’ Vongerichten’s right-hand man Daniel Del Vecchio tells me. ‘Jean-Georges, his son Cédric, Daniel Humm, Marco Canora, Angie Mar, Flynn McGarry – they’re all there.’
He won’t be deprived in London, where he plans to spend considerable time ‘bedding in’ the restaurant and enjoying all the city has to offer. ‘I’m a big fan of Borough Market, the South Kensington Saturday market and Marylebone Farmers’ Market on a Sunday. We also had some amazing meals when we were in London last. I love Tomos Parry’s Basque restaurant Brat in Shoreditch, and his new place, Mountain. Then there was the restored pub The Devonshire, and I can’t wait to go to Arlington, the latest incarnation of Le Caprice, which I have always loved.’
I am curious to know whether the arrival of ABC in London means that Maybourne has had a change of heart on vegan menus since Vongerichten’s friend Daniel Humm, the chef behind three-Michelin-starred Eleven Madison Park in New York, opened a new restaurant at Claridge’s to great fanfare in 2019 but parted ways with it after announcing in 2021 that he wished to make the menu entirely plant-based, and finding the group unreceptive to his vision.
‘There’s no question plant-based food is important,’ says The Emory’s general manager, Knut Wylde, who has been GM at The Berkeley for the past eight years. ‘But we feel when it’s a restaurant in a hotel, you have to be inclusive, and for Humm there could be no compromise. I would never have brought ABCV over by itself. Jean-Georges is a pioneer in plant-based menus but not to the exclusion of meat and fish.’
Heading up the London restaurant will be Ben Boeynaems, who came up through the ranks working for Gordon Ramsay and Eric Chavot, and was most recently executive chef at The Beaumont Hotel in Mayfair. Vongerichten is excited about the appointment and feels Boeynaems really gets his vision.
‘The way I look at it, the food groups are very limited. With meat, you have beef, pork, lamb, then game – venison, wild rabbit, hare. Seafood – shellfish, lobster, crab, shrimp, octopus. But when you look at plants and vegetables, there’s no limit. Spices, herbs, thousands and thousands of different combinations, it gives us a huge palette of flavours to work with.’
The kitchen units were literally being unwrapped when I visited the new London restaurant, but there’s already an impressive list of suppliers in place, including London-based The Wild Room (for foraged mushrooms), crab from Portland Shellfish in Dorset, Smokin’ Brothers in the Cotswolds for salmon, and Vinegar Shed in west London, for its small-batch artisan vinegars, oils, herbs and spices.
On the London menu you will of course find spring pea guacamole (loaded with sunflower seeds and green chilli), plus other dishes I tried in New York, including crisp fish tacos served with aioli and cabbage-apple slaw, and pretzel-crusted calamari with spiced tomato and grainy mustard sauces.
‘What I’m bringing to London will have a more informal vibe than a traditional hotel restaurant, all about relaxing, socialising, sharing,’ Vongerichten insists. ‘We have six to eight dishes from each concept, so there is something for everyone.’
I can’t help wondering if he ever switches off, and ask him what he does to relax. Married twice but currently single, he says he loves roasting a chicken for his three children and four grandchildren on a Sunday, at his home in Westchester.
‘We all love our food,’ he says. ‘My son Cédric is a chef, I’m very proud of him. We have one restaurant together, Perry Street, and he has five more including two French-Indonesian restaurants. My daughter Louise runs a charity called Food Dreams, which raises funds to help kids from disadvantaged backgrounds go to cooking school. My younger daughter, Chloe, wasn’t an adventurous eater at the beginning and I thought, “Oh, my God, I’ve been cursed.” Now she eats everything.’
‘Oh, and tonight I’m going round to a friend’s apartment to cook for him,’ JG tells me, spectacularly stretching the definition of the word ‘relax’, in my books. ‘It’s me, Daniel Boulud, Gabriel Kreuther and our friend – all four of us cooking, just for fun, for six people, including ourselves.’
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