If Windsor had too many cooks in the kitchen last weekend, it’s doubtful anyone complained.
Newly appointed Executive Chef Geoffroy Deconinck spent his first few days on the job even as Danish chef Mads Refslund of New York City’s New Nordic bistro, Acme, was flying in to create a feast at the home of Hilary and Galen Weston.
The Saturday event, part of a weekend organized by party-planner-to-the-stars Bronson van Wyck, was to honor Danish abstract artist Per Kirkeby, whose paintings were freshly installed in the Windsor Gallery to coincide with Miami’s Art Basel.
If keeping those names straight feels like recalling a top-heavy tasting menu after a bottomless wine pairing, you can refresh your memory with a link proudly posted on the Windsor website – to Page Six, the gossip column of the New York Post.
Deconinck’s appointment has been lower-key, with residents getting the news in their in-boxes a couple of weeks ago. But his resume is gilded with even more eye-popping name-dropping: the Belgian-born father of two has worked under three of the most famous names in French cuisine: Daniel Boulud, David Bouley and Alain Ducasse.
He comes to Windsor after recent stints at two Relais & Chateaux properties: The Glenmere Mansion in the Hudson Valley, and the Camden Harbour Inn in Maine.
And if there’s any doubt Deconinck and Boulud parted ways on good terms, take note that the starred chef chose the Glenmere for his wedding a month after Deconinck took over.
No pressure there? Then include in the wedding party best man Thomas Keller (French Laundry, Per Se and Bouchon) and groomsman Eric Ripert (the record-setting star-retaining Le Bernardin).
So great is the fame of that trio that they might long for the sort of life out of the spotlight that Deconinck is in store for here.
“Privacy is our most important asset,” says Windsor General Manager Bob Gallagher. So important that he’s muzzled his new culinary asset, declining to let him do an interview with Vero Beach 32963.
In prior interviews elsewhere, Deconinck described his family life in Belgium as very food-centric. Vacations in France and Switzerland were sometimes determined by the region’s cuisine, with stops at restaurants and hotels where the local specialties were offered.
It didn’t occur to him to actually work in a restaurant until he was 22.
For six months, he apprenticed while continuing his studies at night at the University of Brussels. Graduating with honors from a Brussels cooking school, he got the ridiculously fortuitous break of a lifetime: a year-long stint as the entry-level commis de cuisine in the kitchen of Alain Ducasse at the Plaza Athénée in Paris.
In 2003, Deconinck moved to the U.S. and found a spot as chef de partie – line cook – at Restaurant Bouley. After a year and a half, he moved to Boulud’s equally famous Restaurant Daniel, eventually rising to the level of executive sous chef at the less formal Café Boulud. That was followed by a two-year stint as pastry chef with JP Morgan Chase’s corporate dining services. By then, with two sons, he and his wife Aimee decided to leave the city and move to Maine, where he worked as executive chef at the Camden Harbour Inn.
He took the executive chef post at Glenmere in spring of 2013, just as the century-old Italianate mansion on 150 acres wrapped up a $30 million renovation. Word of the re-do – as well as Deconink’s lauded arrival – drew much press, and Manhattanites sought out his tables, sometimes landing in a chopper on the front lawn.
Windsor, too, has a helicopter pad, and as guests arrive for parties like last weekend’s, Deconinck will have to segue out of the two on-site dining rooms to events at private homes and elsewhere in the tightly cloistered enclave.
No word yet of an opening for Royal Taster, but the line for applicants could be long if Deconinck’s plates elsewhere hint at what’s ahead for Windsor’s palates. His menu in Maine was described on the well-known foodie website Eater.com as “firmly French.”
Yet Deconinck provided some Glenmere Mansion recipes, amended for home cooks, to another website, Galanvante.com, that had a more local cast, at least in terms of nomenclature: Seared Hudson Valley Foie Gras and Green Apple Mustard; Seared Sea Scallops, Heirloom Cauliflower, Blood Orange, and Cranberry Marmalade; and one featuring a monkfish filet surrounded by blanched rutabaga and radish, a purée of broccoli and heavy cream, and the Alsatian meat-filled pasta rolls called fleischschnacka.
That last regional specialty would be a familiar one to the man who last ran Windsor’s kitchens. Former executive chef Stephane Becht is a native of Alsace, France.
He has since transitioned to the other side of the bridge, buying his own place in the heart of downtown: the former Melody Inn, the Swiss restaurant opened in 2004 by the late Hans Burri and his wife Margaret, which he renamed Bistro Fourchette.
Becht, whose pre-Windsor credentials included stints at the Pierre Hotel in New York and the Delano Hotel in Miami Beach, had a three-year contract at Windsor and left when it expired earlier this year.