NEW YORK -- In the 50-year-old basement kitchen of La Caravelle, half a block from Fifth Avenue and a floor below the restaurant's extravagant fittings, French chef Michael Romano is a maestro.
He gazes across the gleaming metallic counters with the eye of the artist. His 19 employees await his instructions. An order comes from the dining room and it's time to strike up the band.
Romano tells the butcher how to cut the veal, he tells the saute specialist what he wants from the vegetable department, he gives the pastry chef instructions about dessert.
And when the preparation of the food is finished, Romano nudges a partridge just so on a plate, adds a pinch of tarragon for flavor, and rubs his delicate and precise hands on his starched white uniform.
Voila, the meal is ready; the show can go on.
La Caravelle, which in the 1960s was the favored spot of the Kennedy clan, suffered a slump in the early 1980s but is again at the forefront of French restaurants in the hotly competitive New York City market, where 20 major league French restaurants vie for the $100 bills of the world's richest diners.
Romano, who has been the chef at La Caravelle since 1984, is given the credit for its resurgence.
Remarkably, Romano is an Italian from East Harlem, a 35-year-old precisionist who lives the American dream; a man who grew up watching his grandmother make pasta; a man who worked his way from a waiter to the level where he competes with the finest French chefs in the world.
'Food was a major part of my childhood,' he said, sitting smartly, his delicate hands carefully folded.
'I loved to watch my grandmother, my mother, my aunts preparing dinner. We had a large extended family and food was always a great source of pleasure for all of us.'
He was attending Fordham University in the Bronx when the urge to stop studying and start cooking hit him. He decided to ask cookbook mogul James Beard how to undertake a career in cooking.
'Beard told me how to go about it and I enrolled in New York Technical School in Brooklyn.' Romano graduated at the top of his class and in 1974 found a job at the Bristol Hotel, a grand hotel of Paris, where he met current La Caravelle co-owner Andre Jammet.
Jammet was born in Room 732 of the hotel and carries the classic French cooking tradition in his soul, a tradition that can be tasted in each morsel served at La Caravelle.
Romano was an outsider in Paris, however. He understood how to make French food by the book. But the book is different than the kitchen.
'I spent a lot of time in Paris not understanding and a lot of time learning. It was a case of sink or swim.'
Swim he did.
In the next decade, Romano worked for Michael Guerard at Regine's in Paris, then at the Chateau de Bonmont in Nyon, Switzerland, and at Chez Max in Zurich, a restaurant considered by many food critics among the best in Europe.
'I found I had a great affinity for the quality of life in Switzerland,' he said, a statement that dovetails easily with the Swiss love of precision and Romano's clipped manner and love of detail.
By 1984, that attention to detail was on display at La Caravelle, where Jammet had hired Romano after joining Roger Fessaguet as owner of the restaurant.
Gradually, with the care of a loving father, Romano has reshaped La Caravelle's menu.
'French cooking is a precise art,' he said. 'It is a tradition that represents hundreds of years of trial and error. Many of the foods themselves have been invented. Mayonnaise, for example, was invented.
'The techniques are handed down. Each vegetable must be sliced properly. If you cut tarragon with the same stroke as parsley, you get black tarragon.
'It is similar to ballet. You must learn the steps before you can dance. Or music, you must know the notes before you can compose.'
In the La Caravelle kitchen, which hasn't changed much since the restaurant first opened as Robert's a half-century ago, Romano composes and conducts.
His sauces are lighter than other French restaurants, his plates arranged more artfully, his tomatoes diced so small they seem to puree inside the mouth with a burst of flavor.
'The satisfaction of cooking is giving people pleasure. I have a love of fine things, good suits, excellent music, well-prepared food,' he said.
And in the dining room the pleasure is obvious in the faces of the customers, who can taste Romano's art in every bite of salmon and lobster appetizer, every morsel of Louisiana shrimp salad, every spoonful of duck consomme, every mouthful of partridge and in every forkful of carmelized pears.
La Caravelle is at 33 W. 55th St. The fixed price for dinner is $51 per person; with wine, dinner for two averages about $160.
