Jasper White, who was among those who pioneered “New New England Cuisine” in the 1980s, died May 11 after suffering a brain aneurysm. He was 69 years old.
Along with a slew of young colleagues who included Lydia Shire, Gordon Hamersley, Barbara Lynch, Jim Haller, Jody Adams, Roger Berkowitz and Stan Frankenthaler, White used the lessons of France’s la nouvelle cuisine that stressed freshness, creativity and local product to create a cuisine based on the seasonal provender and seafood of New England, from springtime fiddlehead ferns and shad roe to maple syrup and cornmeal. His menus teemed with both tradition and novelty in dishes like his lobster sausage with cabbage; squab with oysters; raw Cape Cod scallops with lemon, onion and capers; Indian summer chowder with smoked chicken; brown bread waffles; and maple walnut ice cream.
White was good friends with French chef Madeleine Kamman and Julia Child, when she lived in Cambridge, and won the James Beard Award as Best Chef in the Northeast in 1991.
B
orn in New Jersey on May 28, 1954, he early on learned to hunt and fish, and his fondest food memories were gleaned from his Italian great grandfather, who had been a chef in Rome (his mother’s side was Irish); his first job in a kitchen was butchering and washing dishes in his father’s inn in Pennsylvania. Of those memories he said, “What I learned was the connection between the land and the food and how one adapts to a new environment. I also learned an uncompromising attitude that disdains anything but the very best.”
Already an accomplished cook, White attended the Culinary Institute of America and after graduation in 1976 cooked his way around America in traditional kitchens—“country club jobs,” he called them. He then settled in Boston where he and Lydia Shire, worked together at the Biltmore Plaza in Providence and various Boston hotel restaurants, including the Copley Plaza, the Parker House Hotel and the Bostonian Hotel, where he focused on New England ingredients. As expected, White wanted to have his own restaurant: “I had to go to the bank and borrow all this money so I could make a roast chicken. Food is love and giving, and I remembered chicken dinners my Italian grandmother would make in New Jersey that no head of food-and- beverage [in the hotels] would ever let me make one.”
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He proudly called his new place Restaurant Jasper in 1983, and while it was a fine dining experience, White wanted it to be more casual, less stodgy and to shy away from Boston’s provincial reputation.
Sadly, White shuttered his restaurant in 1995 because the never-ending construction of Boston’s “Big Ditch” made downtown business impossible. He then was a consultant for Roger Berkowitz’s Legal Seafood chain and wrote his first (of four) cookbooks, Jasper White’s Cooking from New England (1989) before returning to the stoves in 2000 to launch a delightfully casual Jasper White’s Summer Shack seafood eatery in Cambridge, where he cooked up lobster rolls and cod cakes. He sold that concept to the Lyons Group in 2017.
There were some health scares along the way after White gained a good deal of weight, but he worked hard to get back into shape, and in his fifties was trim again.
Upon hearing the news of White’s passing, his Boston friend, chef Michael Schlow, posted on Facebook that he was “Devastated. Jasper was an icon, a ‘chefs chef’ and an inspiration to an entire generation. More importantly, he was a good, decent, trustworthy friend. It didn't matter how long in between visits, Jasper always made you feel special. No one could cut through the BS like Jasper. He was modest, humble, and honest.
I first met Jasper when he was the chef at the Bostonian Hotel at Boston’s historic Faneuil Hall, across from the very traditional Durgin Park Café, which had opened in 1827. Jasper’s menus were highly innovative and his pan-roasted lobster became one of the iconic dishes of the developing New American Cuisine. I recall vividly how the same basic flavors and simple dishes one could have across the street at Durgin Park served by surly waitresses were transformed by White into sumptuous, impeccably updated versions served in a refined dining room on the hotel’s top floor.
White himself was a gentle giant of a man, excited by so many possibilities tied to the seasons: to cull bay scallops from Nantucket, mussels from Little Compton, Rhode Island and baby lamb from Martha’s Vineyard.
Back in 1987 I was hosting a PBS TV series on American regional food and restaurants, and I called Jasper to do a spot on the Boston segment. Instead of inviting me to his restaurant and kitchen to cook, he said, “Can you meet me in Little Compton? We do family and friends clam bakes on the beach on Sundays.”
It was one of my most indelible food experiences, not only because White’s deft cooking of cherrystone and little neck clams, ears of freshly picked corn, russet potatoes, mussels, crabs and 24 lobsters steamed for hours in a pit layered with seaweed was deeply delicious but because it was also suffused with the long history of similar seaside dinners that the Native Americans and European settlers had made over centuries.
It was a cool autumn day, everyone in sweaters, children digging up clams in the wet sand and the waves rolling in and out with a gentle lapping. Sitting on blankets with our plates from the clambake dumped onto newspaper, we drank cold Connecticut wines and Sam Adams beer. Serving up the bounty, Jasper White was wholly in his element, one he had absorbed from generations of New England cooks and played out on a cloudy, windswept beach. I’ve rarely seen anyone quite so happy as Jasper White that cold Sunday afternoon.
