David Bouley, Influential New York Chef, Dies at 70

“He got modern three-star Michelin dining to make sense to Americans,” said Dan Barber, the chef at Blue Hill at Stone Barns, who worked under Mr. Bouley for two years. “He had an otherworldly ability to create and capture flavor, and he did it without menus or recipes, night after night.”

Bouley’s entrance was perpetually stacked with ripening apples, reminding guests that they were far from the cut flowers and crystal vases of Midtown’s classic temples to French cuisine: Le Cirque, Le Périgord and La Côte Basque. Earlier in his career, Mr. Bouley had worked in all three. He also trained influential chefs like Christina Tosi, Anita Lo and James Kent.

After the attacks of September 11, Mr. Bouley turned Bouley Bakery, a few blocks from Ground Zero, into a base from which he fed firefighters and police officers. With a $5.8 million contract from the Red Cross, Mr. Bouley, with an army of employees and volunteers, also fed rescue workers and construction teams, cooking 20 to 30 thousand meals every 24 hours, rejecting shelf-stable ingredients in favor of whole salmon, lobsters and produce donated from around the country.

Mr. Bouley’s restaurant empire did not extend beyond the borders of TriBeCa, but expanded with his reach into the worlds of Japanese technique, European tradition, and — in his last decade — medicine and agriculture. In 2013, he launched a series of dinners called “The Chef and the Doctor,” working with dozens of medical professionals who shared his conviction that food can be optimized for nutrition as well as flavor. His cookbook “East of Paris; The New Cuisines of Austria and the Danube” reflected the cuisine of his restaurant Danube, which won two Michelin stars in 2006.

Mr. Bouley is the only American-born chef to receive a review from every restaurant critic for The Times since 1985, including a four-star review for Bouley in 1990 and a three-star review in 2016 from Pete Wells, who wrote of Bouley: “Mr. Bouley takes paths nobody else is on, and walks farther along them than anybody else would.”