Patrick Clark was different from other children. While his friends spent their allowances on baseball cards and movies, he saved his money to buy cream cheese, determined by the age of nine to make the perfect cheesecake. He was turned on to cooking by his mother's fried chicken and pork chops, and his visits to the hotel kitchens in which his father worked as chef. "I started puttering in my kitchen," he says, "in a desire to recreate what I saw in those kitchens." He began his professional education as a chef at New York City Technical College, not far from his Brooklyn home. A successful student, his training then took him abroad, where he took classes at Great Britain's Bournemouth Technical College. He also honed his skills in apprenticeships at a broad range of restaurants. While a first job at the Wheeler's seafood chain in England taught him what not to do with dover sole, he then mastered the rigors of haute cuisine in a coveted position at the three-star Eugenie-les-Bains in France.

Even abroad, Clark never forgot the roots of his cooking -- his mother's heavily seasoned fried chicken and collard greens, and the creamy New York-style cheesecake that first lured him into the kitchen. With memories of his childhood in mind, Clark has developed his own brand of New American cuisine, taking from a hybrid repertoire of ingredients and flavors that combine the traditions of New York eclecticism, down-home Southern cooking, and Continental technique. Two of his most popular dishes, tuna with black-eyed pea and artichoke salad, and white chocolate banana cream pie perfectly exemplify this vision of amalgamation. Working at the prestigious Hay-Adams in Washington D.C., located just across the street from the White House, Clark fed sausages and biscuits to heads of state, and corn soup to Poet Laureates. Clark's unique repertoire of contemporary American cuisine induced the Clintons to consider him for the position of White House chef, although he declined the nomination, choosing instead to return to his native New York as executive chef of Tavern on the Green (which, its press kit emphasizes, is the highest-grossing restaurant in America).

While Patrick Clark's cooking has been exciting palates for the past twenty years, Tavern on the Green has been exciting more diners (tourists, mostly) with its illuminated Central Park milieu than with gastronomical excellence. It will take plenty of talent, perseverance, and good press for the Tavern to once again attract hungry, discriminating New Yorkers, but with Brooklyn-born Clark in the kitchen, the odds for success are sky-high.