David Liederman, whose confections redefined the chocolate chip cookie and whose chain, David’s Cookies, eventually grew to more than 100 stores nationwide, died on Thursday in Mount Kisco, N.Y., near his home in Katonah. He was 75.
His wife, Susan Liederman, said the cause of his death, at a hospital, was a heart attack. He was also being treated for myelofibrosis, a type of blood cancer.
Mr. Liederman’s innovative version of the chocolate chip cookie will keep his name alive.
The cookie’s unique feature was that it was not made with standard Toll House chocolate chips but was studded with irregular pieces of dark Swiss Lindt chocolate. He chopped the chocolate by hand, the way Ruth Graves Wakefield did when she created the Toll House cookie in 1938 in Whitman, Mass., before Nestlé took over and began manufacturing its little chocolate drops. Mr. Liederman called his cookies chocolate chunk, a term that has become widely understood and used in the world of baking and confections.
But long before his revisionist cookie came on the scene, creating his reputation and cranking up his income, his career in food, as a chef, was starting to simmer like a good pot-au-feu.
He was 19, still an undergraduate, when he went to France. Intrigued by Michelin three-star restaurants, of which there were but a handful at the time, he decided to eat at Troisgros in Roanne, near Lyon, because it seemed to be the cheapest. The meal set him back $19 (the equivalent of about $172 today); the food was an epiphany.
He persuaded the Troisgros brothers to let him hang out in the restaurant’s kitchen and work for the next few summers, despite his lack of culinary training. While he was studying for a degree at Brooklyn Law School and clerking for Judge Maxine Duberstein of the New York State Supreme Court, he began taking classes at night in the culinary program at New York Technical College (now the New York City College of Technology) in Downtown Brooklyn.
After graduating from law school and passing the bar, he worked for a time at a law firm. But after a few months he took off for France for a full-time job at Troisgros, where he eventually became a line cook. He was the first American employed in that kitchen; it would be decades before chefs of every nationality began working in top kitchens in France and elsewhere.
His talent for innovation and for meeting challenges head-on was showing its colors. “He was always trying to do something that no one else thought of,” his younger brother, William Liederman, said in an interview.
Mr. Liederman then used his French culinary expertise to start manufacturing Saucier, a high-quality sauce base meant to be a superior replacement for bouillon cubes. His business partner was the book publisher Herb Nagourney.
“They were two dear enterprising if quixotic fellows easily seduced by entrepreneurial ideas,” Mr. Nagourney’s wife, Ann Bramson, said in an email; “neither had a fondness for authority figures.”
While on a publicity tour for Saucier, Mr. Liederman went to a chocolate chip cookie store in San Francisco. He did not like the cookies and decided he could do better. He also figured that cookies might do better than French sauces.
He opened his first cookie store, David’s Cookie Kitchen, on Second Avenue and 53rd Street in Manhattan in 1979. Shops around the country had begun selling chocolate chip cookies and finally started popping up in New York. His cookies were clearly the best, in large measure because they were made with high-quality ingredients, including good butter, fresh nuts and that chocolate. A little-known sideline of his enterprise was bread, namely fresh baguettes made from scratch.
A chain of more than 100 David’s Cookies stores followed, nationwide and in Japan, along with several restaurants and a number of entrepreneurial efforts, including an unsuccessful attempt, in 1985, to buy Zabar’s, the Upper West Side food emporium, and turn it into a national chain.
He sold David’s Cookies to Fairfield Foods in New Jersey in 1995 and retired from the company, which is still thriving, though he often said the quality of the cookies no longer met his standards. At his death he was tinkering with the notion of going back into the cookie business.
David Liederman was born on March 15, 1949, in Manhattan. His parents, Donald Liederman, who had an investment company, and Adele Kaplan, who became the head of the Small Business Development Center at Rutgers University, divorced when he was 3 and his brother was a year old.
He was raised in Princeton, N.J.; his stepfather, Arthur Adlerstein, was a professor of psychology at Princeton University, and David graduated from the Hun School there. He attended Denison University in Granville, Ohio; graduated from the State University of New York at Old Westbury; and then went to law school. Having a law degree became a useful string in his entrepreneurial bow.
He valued his cookie business at around $35 million in the mid-1980s, but his passion was the restaurant world. Soon after leasing the location for his first cookie store, he opened Manhattan Market in the same space with Susan Vare, an actress, who became his wife. “Cooking the Nouvelle Cuisine in America,” the 1979 book he wrote with Michele Urvater, who owned a cooking school in Manhattan, connected him to the latest food trends coming from France, where cutting-edge chefs were turning their backs on Georges Auguste Escoffier’s fat and flour and opting for a fresh, lighter approach.
But nouvelle cuisine with small decorative portions on big white plates was not what Manhattan Market was serving; rather, with its emphasis on fresh, top-drawer ingredients, it was a forerunner of the farm-to-table movement.
A number of well-known chefs worked there, including Michael Romano and Matthew Tivy. Mr. Liederman was as generous a mentor as he was a host, all of which worked to his advantage.
“As a chef and a cook it was more important to him to have flavor, texture and quality products; he was not a showman,” said Eberhard Muller, a chef who worked at Lutèce, where the Liedermans dined frequently, and who is now a partner in Satur Farms, a fresh produce company on Long Island.
The actor and writer Michael Tucker, who bonded with Mr. Liederman over cooking, said he “was smart, he knew how to cultivate people of influence, and he was also incredibly generous.”
He was also willing to learn from other chefs. On another trip to France, after dining at the venerable and purposely shabby bistro L’Ami Louis, he was so impressed with the roast chicken that he befriended the owner and chef, Antoine Magnin, and eventually replaced Manhattan Market with Chez Louis, whose specialty was a memorably delicious roast chicken and a few other items, like a garlic potato cake, based on L’Ami Louis’s menu. Bryan Miller gave Chez Louis two stars in The New York Times in 1987.
Another of his restaurants was Broadway Grill, near Times Square. And with his brother, who owned the New York Restaurant School, he opened a Rockefeller Center restaurant, Television City. “I credit him with getting me into this business,” William Liederman said.
In 1994, after moving to northern Westchester County, he opened Restaurant Luna in Mount Kisco, N.Y. It is no longer in business. (He also served on the board of directors of Citymeals on Wheels and was a founding member of the New York Metropolitan Lacrosse League.)
Mr. Liederman’s love for food showed in his girth, which he knew was a problem — he even wrote a book in 1990 called “David’s Delicious Weight-Loss Program.” And a number of years ago, he said, his physician advised him to lose weight “or you’ll never live to see grandchildren.” So, despite being a connoisseur of French wine, he gave up drinking. But he continued to sniff glasses of wine, prizing their qualities from bouquet alone, as experts can. And he did live to see two grandchildren.
In addition to his wife, his brother and those two grandchildren, he is survived by his daughters, Katie Liederman, a psychotherapist, and Elizabeth Liederman Rossi, who worked in marketing for the Yankees; and a half sister, Ann Liederman.
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