French chef Richard brings a quirky playfulness to his food

CAMBRIDGE -- Frenchman Michel Richard looks like a shopping mall Santa Claus dressed up in a black chef's jacket. He's jolly and big bellied with a fluffy white beard and spectacles perched on the tip of his nose. For two nights recently, Richard, a restaurateur and author, cooked at Sandrine's Bistro in Harvard Square. He seems happy bossing Sandrine's owner Raymond Ost around in Ost's own kitchen, and even happier in the dining room flirting with everyone in sight.

Richard (pronounced ree-SHAR) is making a gazpacho-like eggplant soup with something he calls "tomato water." It's rich and creamy but also light and explosively flavorful. It tastes like spicy baba ghanouj. For the soup, he sautes onion, garlic, and cumin in olive oil. He likes to grate garlic on a Microplane, the very sharp grating implement, rather than chop it. "This way it doesn't oxidize and the oils go right into the dish rather than the cutting board." The smell of garlic, he says, "reminds me of my mother's house."

The chef combines the garlicky aromatics with roasted eggplant, buttermilk, tomato water, and a few more sprinkles of cumin in a blender. "In my food I steer away from chicken and veal stock," he says. "I prefer to make light vegetable broths with mushrooms, tomatoes, or leeks." He finishes the soup with a few shots of hot sauce, then chills it.

Originally from Brittany, Richard, 59, made his name as a pastry chef. He ran bakeries in France, Santa Fe, and Los Angeles and then crossed over to the savory kitchen to open Citrus in LA in 1987. Ten years later, he moved to the East Coast and focused his attention on Citronelle in the Latham Hotel in Washington. For most of his career, Richard was a well-known chef with a bunch of good restaurants. More recently, he has become a full-blown celebrity. Three years ago, he graced the cover of Gourmet magazine ; in 2006 he released "Happy in the Kitchen," a coffee table-style cookbook ; and last year he won the James Beard Award for Outstanding Chef.

With the soup done, Richard settles into a table by the restaurant's bar with a beer and leafs through "Happy in the Kitchen," which has an introduction by French Laundry and Per Se owner Thomas Keller. "I was jealous when the French Laundry cookbook came out," says Richard. "I called [editor] Ann Bramson at Artisan to see if I could do a book like that. She told me that French cookbooks don't do well. Then [Gourmet editor] Ruth Reichl put my face on the cover of Gourmet magazine. After that Artisan called me to do the cookbook."

The recipes in Richard's book are quirkier and more personal than the refined classics offered in most chefs' books. He is not typical in other ways. His food is playful and complex, but still bright and clean, or "like savory pastries," he says. The chef is sometimes known as Captain Crunch for his obsession with crispy, crackly food. In the late '70s, he drove from New York to Santa Fe and fell in love with fried chicken at KFC. "In France everything is soft," he says. "Even en croute is usually soft. We just don't have that crunchy texture."

To celebrate that crackle, Richard's chicken nuggets at Citronelle are rolled in breadcrumbs and fried in chicken fat. Other dishes are offbeat. His tomato tartare -- tomatoes dried in the oven until they take on the texture of beef, combined with capers, chives, shallots, and mustard -- looks like steak tartare. His fake caviar, which is really Israeli couscous colored with squid ink, looks like giant beluga. It's served in a tin with lobster and Hollandaise.

This spring Richard opened Central Michel Richard, an American brasserie, also in Washington. "It was always my dream to have an American restaurant," he says. "In France the food is boring, boring, boring. French chef, French vegetables, French people, French food. But here food comes from around the world and it is so exciting. It is great to be a chef."