Another time the owner told him, "I’m in it for the long haul." Next thing he knows he hears from a supplier that the restaurant has been sold and he has been replaced.
What’s a chef to do?
Pierre-Jerome, 53, and his wife, Sandy Oster, have launched a new business—Yves’ning ([email protected])—a personal catering service that provides a restaurant experience in your own home.
Another aspect of Yves-ning is pop-up dinners. The first will take place Saturday, June 8th at St. James Episcopal Church in Montclair. Each dinner can accomodate up to about two dozen customers.
Oster, a graduate of the French Culinary Institute, works in sales for a high-end chocolate manufacturer. Lately Pierre-Jerome, a CIA grad, has cooked part-time at Café Amici in Ho-Ho-Kus. The Yves’ning concept, he says, lets “clients feel they are going out to dinner, but because it’s at someone’s home, it’s more intimate."
Pierre-Jerome consults with the host, designing a menu and theme for parties of around 12 people. He and Oster prepare and serve the meal together. His flavorful, classically-based compositions aim for “many voices, but one sound," he says,”like a choir, where subtlety of flavor is blended to create a kind of harmony.”
Pierre-Jerome first gained recognition for that kind of food when he opened his first restaurant, Yves, in Montclair, in 1990. That very French-influenced, 36-seat BYO brought a new level of culinary sophistication to the town’s still somewhat slumbering restaurant scene.
Pierre-Jerome came to the United States from his native Haiti—via St. Thomas, in the Virgin Islands—with his family at age ten. They settled in East Orange.
"Like a great many chefs," he says, "I was influenced by the genius of my mother’s and grandmothers’ simple but delicious food. They fussed a great deal over the food they prepared for family and friends. It was important to them that everyone be able to taste the love in the food."
After graduating from the CIA in 1985, Pierre-Jerome worked at the UN Plaza Hotel in New York City and in the Gascogne region of France.
He served as Craig Shelton’s pastry chef at the Ryland Inn; earned raves as executive chef of Stage Left in New Brunswick; surfaced as executive chef of the favorably reviewed New American restaurant Vineyards in Hamburg, Sussex County; and learned what he calls “serious hard core barbecue” at Danny Meyer’s Blue Smoke in Manhattan.
In 2010, he opened the pub and music venue Hat City Kitchen in Orange with a soul food, New Orleans and barbecue menu, earning three stars from NJM. He then became executive chef of the short-lived Albert’s Cafe Amici in Montclair.
Back in 1995, after closing Yves—with so few seats and no liquor license, it was very hard to turn a profit—Pierre-Jerome realized that "my kids didn’t know me. I was just this guy who popped up in their lives, sometimes half a day a week. That’s when I decided to try to put family first.”
That goal has been hard to achieve. Employed by various restaurants and country clubs, the chef says he often found himself “working for some very difficult people with different value systems.”
Pierre-Jerome and his first wife divorced in 2004. She and his three children live in Texas. He sees his kids about three times a year, he says.
Pierre-Jerome and Oster, who live in Montclair, are about to move to Little Falls.
“I am a chef in search of a kitchen," Pierre-Jerome says. "I just want to cook the kind of food that I love, the kind of food that makes me happy.”
SUZANNE ZIMMER LOWERY is a food writer, pastry chef and culinary instructor at a number of New Jersey cooking schools. Find out more about her at suzannelowery.com.