Chefs of the Future, III: Ludo Lefebvre on the Loose

Chefs of the Future! This is the third of a three-part series examining how restaurants may work in the years to come.

Ludo Lefebvre has plenty of admirers. Jonathan Gold, the country’s most respected restaurant critic, is a fan. So are millions of Top Chef: Masters devotees, who find the tattooed young French chef either downright dreamy or totally insufferable — or both. He has won Mobile 5-Star awards at two previous restaurants. And his current eatery, Ludo Bites, is one of the most popular and in-demand in Los Angeles.

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There’s only one problem. The restaurant doesn’t exist.

At least, not in the way we tend to think of restaurants. There’s no phone number, no fixed address, no Zagat entry. Ludo Bites is a roving entity: when its next location is announced — usually via e-mail first (there are 3,000 or so people on the list) and then on Facebook and Twitter — within seven hours, all reservations are snapped up at the place Ludo Bites will be occupying for the next several weeks.

(See the world’s most influential people in the 2010 TIME 100.)

Of all the chefs who are pushing the limits of dining in America, Ludo may be the one most entitled to be called Chef of the Future. He serves wildly original, French-influenced food, but it’s his business model that might be the template other young toques follow. After leaving his previous kitchen, Bastide, in 2006, Lefebvre considered opening a bistro, but even that costs a small fortune now, with all the construction and design, not to mention rent, which remains sky-high despite the recession. “I thought to myself, Why can’t I rent a restaurant the way I rent a house?,” he remembers. “I don’t have to do a major change, I don’t have to invest in equipment, build out and renovate … I’ll just put some rooster signs in the window and start cooking.”

So that’s what he has done. Typically, a Ludo Bites dinner is BYOB and costs less than $50. “The prices would have to be 35% higher if we had our own place,” he says. There are about 18 dishes on the menu. A typical one might include traditional boudin noir terrine, fried liquid foie gras, fish and chips and lacquered pork belly with mustard ice cream. Lefebvre’s ability to dazzle with his cooking has never been in question. His ability to produce it in tiny restaurants, which, in some cases, lack even something as basic as a walk-in freezer, might be. (Ludo Bites typically partners with places that serve breakfast and lunch and are usually empty at night.) Any given night at Ludo Bites resembles a Top Chef challenge: quickly turn out mind-blowing haute cuisine with minimal staff and a crappy oven you’ve never used before. He does all the ordering and the prep and oversees and cooks the entire dinner service, with four staffers and whatever culinary students he can conscript. There’s no way he can produce the same food he did at his acclaimed tablecloth restaurants, which he freely admits: “I was driving a Rolls-Royce. Now I’m driving a Hyundai, but I like it.”

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But the hassle has a big upside, in the form of flexibility, creative license and the ability to turn on a dime as he sees fit. “I have my freedom. No owner can control me. This is the real Ludo. I can do what I want. I love it,” he says. In fact, the Ludo Bites model is the epitome of the 21st century marketplace, where the chef, not the restaurant, is the name of the game, and where novelty (not to mention news value) counts far more than musty testaments to past greatness. (There’s nothing more irrelevant than a 10-year-old review on a wall.)

See more of Josh Ozersky’s Taste of America food columns here.

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It’s not by accident that Ludo Bites has flourished in the age of the blogosphere. Even if Gold, LA Weekly‘s Pulitzer-winning critic, hadn’t liked it, the place would have built up a fanatical following because of its limited access, its star’s culinary sex appeal and the fact that you get to spend so much time hanging out with him at the dinners. “It’s an intimate atmosphere, really fun,” says William Chi, a financial analyst who blogs for the foodie site fooddigger.com. “It’s like a family get-together. I feel like I’m being welcomed into their home every time I go.” The crowd, largely the kind of wired-in foodies who write and read most online food media, are exactly the sort of customer who will find out about something like this, flock to it, write about it in mouth-watering detail, and thus renew the cycle.

(See TIME’s photo-essay “From Farm to Fork.”)

Few chefs have been able to use every medium as effectively as Lefebvre has: he’s on TV, playing up his villain role on Top Chef: Masters; he has a high-concept cookbook that is packed with beefcake shots. (Los Angeles Times critic Leslie Brenner went off the deep end in her review, saying, “He’s the guy your girlfriends warned you about … He’s beautiful, with his white teeth and downy beard and all those vivid tattoos. The gold earring is set off by a nose stud.”) Most important, he’s got a tight coil of foodies who follow his site, his Facebook page, his Twitter feed and his e-mail list, and all can be counted on to reserve seats for Ludo Bites the second a location is announced. Like his generational cohort David Chang, another talented chef who has used the media to supreme advantage, Lefebvre has the skills to produce food that is more than equal to the sum of its hype; but he’s gone even further than Chang in releasing himself from the traditional strictures of his profession.

(See David Chang recipes.)

As Gold tells TIME, “Ludo is doing food on its own terms. When you owe so much money to your investors, your food becomes about something else — justifying volume, managing expectations. Ludo has taken a heroic first step for the creative chef who takes food more seriously than the restaurant power structure.” Ludo isn’t making a lot of money now, but he’s getting by. And even if Ludo could get a big place with no strings attached, the chef says he doesn’t want it: “What scares me is to sign the lease for 20 years, and to stay for 20 years. This pushes me to stay creative, stay stronger.”

(See the top 10 food trends of 2008.)

He’ll have to, without any big-name (or big-money) backing. Ludo is running on a high-octane mix of charisma, testosterone, culinary brilliance and the Will to Power. He may crash; he may sell out. But right now, he’s out there, doing new things and helping to reinvent the way we eat. For better or worse, he truly is the Chef of the Future.

Josh Ozersky is a James Beard Award–winning food writer and the author of The Hamburger: A History. His food video site, Ozersky.TV, is updated daily. He is currently at work on a biography of Colonel Sanders.

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