THE COMPLEX ART OF COOKING A SIMPLE CHICKEN.

Antoine Westermann

Antoine Westermann has always had a rebellious streak. For nearly four decades, his brash but elegant spin on old-school haute cuisine won over the world’s most discerning diners at his Strasbourg farmhouse restaurant, Le Buerehiesel, in his native Alsace. By the mid-’90s, he was considered one of the top chefs in France, known for his intense, primal sauces—saffron on lobster, blood on wild duck. He was rewarded with three Michelin stars, which he held until 2006, when, in a characteristically gutsy move, he handed them back. Westermann was done with fine dining.

“I wanted to be more accessible, to leave behind the universe of luxury,” says the chef, now 70 years old. He then settled in Paris, where he’d opened a satellite bistro, Mon Vieil Ami, nine years earlier. “I wanted to do simple cooking focused on the quality of  the products,” he says.

He began to think about the recipes that made him happiest, what he most liked to eat on days off—and he realized he’s fanatic about a certain fowl. “At home, whenever it was a party, it was around chicken,” he recalls fondly. A vision for a new sort of restaurant, dedicated solely to his beloved bird, started to take shape. “I wanted every dish on the menu to have chicken in it,” he says. “If it was a piece of fish, it would be wrapped in chicken.”

And so in 2012, he opened Le Coq Rico (which means “Rico the chicken” and also plays on the French for “cock-a-doodledoo”), the city’s first “bistro-rotisserie,” where he serves the very best chickens, sourced from across France. His menu features simple fare: chicken soups and stews, chicken salads and eggs. But the star attraction is a golden rotisserie- cooked bird trucked in from Bresse, just north of Lyon.

The region’s coddled fowl finish their days on a diet of bread soaked in milk. They are the only chickens in the world that are federally protected, like Champagne or Roquefort cheese, with an official AOC designation. Nineteenth century French food philosopher Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin called them the “queen of poultry, the poultry of kings.”

Those Bresse chickens helped make Westermann’s “bistro of beautiful birds” a sensation in Paris. “Everything here is to die for,” wrote the critic from Le Point. “Real luxury chickens!” gushed L’Express. Having conquered one great food city with chicken, the chef set his sights on another two years ago, planning a second Le Coq Rico near the Flatiron Building in Manhattan. “I thought, if I’m going to do something outside Paris, it would have to be in New York,” he says. “I feel this city; I’m comfortable here.”

The transatlantic outpost, which opened in late winter, serves the finest chickens in America, sourced, like his Bresse birds from the very best farms—you can’t even import a Bresse chicken egg. To find North American specimens of that caliber, he scoured the East Coast for a year and a half.

Eventually, he enlisted the help of the country’s top poultry supplier, Ariane Daguin of New Jersey’s D’Artagnan foods. Daguin, herself a transplant from France, had been providing top New York restaurants such as Jean-Georges and Daniel with Brune Landaise, a French breed similar to Bresse that’s raised by Mennonite farmers on American soil, when Westermann poultry. But her top-of-the-line birds, raised for 80 days on surplus produce from an Amish market, were, he insisted, simply not old enough. “He wanted the best chickens possible, end of story,” says Daguin. For Westermann, that meant very old birds.

Typical supermarket chickens live, on average, just 40 days. That means they’re young, tender—and, to a French connoisseur, akin to bland mush. The Brune Landaise chickens the chef would ultimately settle on for New York’s Le Coq Rico live sweet long lives out in the country. “They’ve had time to develop texture and flavor,” Westermann says. In the name of good taste, he pushed Daguin’s farmers to hold their birds 110 days before slaughter, making them the oldest, and priciest, chickens sold anywhere in the U.S. “When you look at a chicken in dollar signs,” says Daguin, “90 percent of the price is the feed, so the older the chicken, the more expensive it is. I figured we were already at the maximum price anyone would pay for a chicken in America.” She was wrong.

At Westermann’s New York location, a whole roast chicken goes for $96. It feeds four, with à la carte fries and cream-drenched mac ’n’ cheese. You might expect a luxury flourish or two—some foie gras or black truffle under the skin?—but don’t hold your breath. The basic model is a roast chicken, plain and simple: a little salt, a little pepper, a butter rubdown, and a slow and steady turn on a French Rotisol— the Bugatti of rotisseries.  came to town demanding superior.

By Jay Cheshes in "Esquire", USA, June/July 2016, volume 165, n. 5 & 6, excerpts pp. 30-32. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.