{"id":635735,"date":"2026-03-06T06:36:35","date_gmt":"2026-03-06T06:36:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/635735\/"},"modified":"2026-03-06T06:36:35","modified_gmt":"2026-03-06T06:36:35","slug":"michelin-starred-chef-gabriel-kreuther-opens-saverne-in-nyc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/635735\/","title":{"rendered":"Michelin-Starred Chef Gabriel Kreuther Opens Saverne in NYC"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

\n Kreuther in the kitchen of his new restaurant, Saverne.
\n Photo: Francesco Sapienza\n <\/p>\n

It\u2019s just before three o\u2019clock on a Friday afternoon, mere hours before his first opening in 11 years, and chef Gabriel Kreuther is eating a grilled-cheese sandwich. We\u2019re standing in the kitchen of his new restaurant, Saverne<\/a> \u2014\u00a0a \u201cmodern brasserie\u201d named for a small town in Alsace \u2014 watching a cone of flames burst up and over the grates of a grill. He encourages me to take a sandwich, too. My teeth crunch through two slices of butter-griddled multigrain bread to find a puddle of melted Comt\u00e9. Kreuther takes another bite of his, and a single shaving of black truffle flutters down to the plate below. Andy Choi, the restaurant\u2019s executive chef, hustles past, telling us that the enormous truffle he shaved over the top was a gift, dropped off from a friend to celebrate the opening.<\/p>\n

Kreuther says he\u2019s not nervous about opening night, but it\u2019s clear from glancing around the 5,000-square-foot restaurant that even the smallest details have not gone unconsidered. Saverne sprawls across the bottom floor of the Spiral, a Tishman Speyer construction in Hudson Yards with 66 floors of captive corporates above and a shiny fa\u00e7ade that reflects the surrounding sky (today, gray). The back room of the 145-seat restaurant, which was not meant to open until several weeks into service, is already diner-ready, set with wine glasses and striped cloth napkins. Executive pastry chef Nicolas Chevrieux\u2019s dessert menu is 18 items long (six of which are different sundaes). The escargots \u00e0 l\u2019Alsacienne, says Kreuther\u2019s longtime marketing person Odine Bonthrone, was tweaked so many times to meet her approval (she\u2019s part French) that the kitchen did not finalize the recipe until the day before.<\/p>\n

The word perfectionist comes up in most any conversation with Kreuther\u2019s staff, but they don\u2019t mean it like that. It isn\u2019t a euphemism for screaming at people in walk-in freezers. Kreuther is a gentle guy. A nice, regular guy. A dad who took his 8-year-old daughter as his plus-one to the James Beard Awards. In an industry that has mythologized the tyrant, Kreuther has instead developed a reputation for decency. He mentors young chefs and \u201che\u2019s real and down to earth,\u201d says Eben Dorros, his business partner. \u201cEvery time he wins an award, he goes back to the kitchen.\u201d<\/p>\n

That head-down mentality may be why, when compared to his peers\u2019, his profile seems surprisingly low (he doesn\u2019t even have a Wikipedia page; the \u201cGabriel Kreuther\u201d entry is about his namesake restaurant<\/a>). He also belongs to a generation of chefs \u2014 now, like Kreuther, firmly into or past their 50s \u2014 who came up behind the titans of late-\u201990s haute stardom: Thomas Keller, Daniel Boulud, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, the last of whom Kreuther once worked for.<\/p>\n

Sandwiches finished, Kreuther shows me around the pastry kitchen in the basement level. I ask how he avoided becoming the sort of Machiavellian, master-of-the-universe chef that might be parodied on The Bear. He tells me he spent a year in the French army and it stuck with him that there were commanders at every level \u2014 mean ones \u2014 but then, when he got to the top level of commander, \u201cthe main honcho,\u201d he says, \u201cwas the nicest guy; we had the nicest conversation I\u2019d had in a year. I like people who have humanity. We have a word for that in Alsace: mensch.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, being nice isn\u2019t what took him from a farm in Alsace to La Caravelle and, eventually, Vongerichten\u2019s kitchen. The chef admits he was a precisionist as a kid. He remembers a time when he was 9, working on a handwritten school assignment for an hour. He messed up the last line, so he tore it up and started over. He\u2019s been thinking about his past a lot because Saverne is named for a town in Alsace\u2019s Bas-Rhin region near where he grew up. \u201cIt\u2019s not going backward,\u201d he says, \u201cbut back to my past.\u201d In some ways, he is channeling his mother, who died two years ago and who he says found ample pleasure in producing 120 \u00e9clairs for school bake sales and cooking feasts for hundreds of their neighbors. Around the holidays, she would bake 200 kilograms of bredele \u2014 small cookies \u2014 and sell them to people who came from all over Alsace. Though he\u2019d identified as a \u201cchef\u201d since he was 4 years old (\u201cI always dressed as one when I could pick my job for any game\u201d), Kreuther first became one, for real, during his school vacations spent cooking at his uncle\u2019s inn.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\n At Saverne, much of the food \u2014 like sp\u00e4tzle with a grilled napoleon of ratatouille \u2014 is designed to appear more rustic than what’s severed at Gabriel Kreuther; much of it is cooked over an open fire. Francesco Sapienza.\n <\/p>\n

\n At Saverne, much of the food \u2014 like sp\u00e4tzle with a grilled napoleon of ratatouille \u2014 is designed to appear more rustic than what’s severed at Gabriel … more
\n At Saverne, much of the food \u2014 like sp\u00e4tzle with a grilled napoleon of ratatouille \u2014 is designed to appear more rustic than what’s severed at Gabriel Kreuther; much of it is cooked over an open fire. Francesco Sapienza.\n <\/p>\n

He earned his first Michelin star after he became the executive chef at the Modern<\/a> inside MoMA. Gabriel Kreuther, the restaurant he opened in 2015, now has two. There, the sturgeon and sauerkraut tart is topped with a caviar mousseline; the kugelhupf is flavored with a chive fromage blanc. Duck breast is aged two weeks before it\u2019s cooked and plated with Sicilian pistachio and sour-cherry jus. The food at Saverne, much of it cooked over an open fire, will be a few degrees closer to how he eats at home, where his late-night snack is baby sardines with Trader Joe\u2019s salsa and he makes cr\u00eapes for his daughter during the weekend. He\u2019s embracing rusticity \u2014\u00a0at least his version of it. He explains how his staff presses dough through a chitarra to form the beet spaghetti for a dish that took him several weeks and dozens of iterations to refine. In the final version, the noodles are cloaked in horseradish cream and layered with oysters, smoked sturgeon, and roe, then topped with caviar. The loup de mer took ages to figure out, too, because they knew they wanted to cook it over the open fire but they also wanted to serve it boneless; nailing the proper cooking time was a challenge. Kreuther becomes almost professorial describing his Alsatian crudit\u00e9 \u2014 \u201cI want the American public to understand crudit\u00e9 is something more than a carrot stick,\u201d he opines \u2014 and giddy when talking about the sweets he loved as a child: chocolate mousse, yule logs with thick layers of buttercream, meringue topped with Chantilly cream. At Saverne, he\u2019ll try to replicate those joys with half a dozen coupes glac\u00e9es including a caf\u00e9 li\u00e9geois with a shot of caf\u00e9 allong\u00e9 (France\u2019s version of caff\u00e8 Americano), coffee ice cream, vanilla ice cream, and a soft heap of unsweetened whipped cream.<\/p>\n

After my pastry tour, it\u2019s time for me to leave so Kreuther can actually open the restaurant for friends and family service, but he invites me back for dinner the next night. The meal begins with a tender, buttery little pretzel served with a horseradish cream cheese. My guests and I order several rounds of his famous tarte flamb\u00e9, a sort of French cracker pizza, including the classic (onions, bacon, and cheese) and one with gravlax that reminds me of a barely toasted bagel. Beef tartare is cut somewhat roughly and served with misshapen lavash and a pool of tonnato coulis, and a supple sausage comes presliced with a dark purple mustard and kraut. There\u2019s a half-chicken, though the drumstick that hovers, perched upright above a bracing pile of tender greens and sliced raw pepper, is perfectly French\u2019d, and beneath it are velout\u00e9-smooth pommes pur\u00e9e. A lasagnette, crisped in the fire, is rustic at first glance \u2014 but each of its 17 layers is diligently crafted, with alternating tissue-thin pasta and green pea pur\u00e9e; beside it sits a cloud of Taleggio foam.<\/p>\n

These details are the tells of Kreuther\u2019s quiet perfectionism, which I\u2019m reminded of as I\u2019m walking back to my table from the bathroom. Burgundy-red hanging Amaranthus drips from a vase nestled into a wall shelf. Poking up in the center are three stems of dark ruby pincushion protea, cut to different heights, and tall sprigs of fuzzy kangaroo paw. The flowers are arranged to look simple and naturalistic, beautifully off-kilter. But when I look more closely, I see that each stem has been precisely placed, balanced against one another with extreme care and attention. A single adjustment would ruin the whole thing.<\/p>\n

This post has been updated to correct the spelling of Eben Dorros\u2019s name. <\/p>\n

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