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It’s a place where you can enjoy fine food, wine and service, relax, have fun and take part in something closer to theater than a humble meal. Frank is the guiding hand that has led this famous establishment through that transition.
It was not at all relaxed. In the kitchen chefs were trying to compose locally inspired dishes that broke away from the classic European mold, yet were acceptable to the dining public. Today’s L’Espalier is a modern replacement for that tradition-bound stuffiness.
It’s a place where you can enjoy fine food, wine and service, relax, have fun and take part in something closer to theater than a humble meal. Frank is the guiding hand that has led this famous establishment through that transition.
“The restaurant wasn’t really of New England in spirit,” Frank explained. “It was devoted to classic French style cooking – white wine, cream sauces on the bottom, protein on the top.”
That was the style of the day and many Boston diners enjoyed it. “My vision was to make L’Espalier a culinary destination, but one for ordinary people,” he said. “It needed to have a sense of its location in New England and the cooking to reflect that.”
“I wanted to create my own New England cuisine based on classic techniques,” he said, “but it’s more than that, it’s about accurate service, making people feel comfortable and relaxing them.”
I asked him how that can work and not be stuffy and pretentious at the same time. “We get past that by training our staff to focus on making the guests comfortable and attending to their needs rather than ours.”
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Frank has enjoyed an enormous amount of positive press and has been lauded with awards during the last 20 years. “I appreciate the awards and what’s been written about me, but I really don’t take it all too seriously. I think about the ‘show’ tonight,” he said. Among these awards is the AAA five diamond award, something that is very hard to achieve, as it demands incredibly rigid standards in everything from the obvious food and service through table setting and even the type of cutlery used. Only a tiny percentage of restaurants (actually a fraction of a percentage) ever win this award.
“I view L’Espalier as this culinary jewel that people save up and come to for that special feeling,” he said. How does that responsibility to deliver a consistent experience affect the way he runs the business. The need to still be recognizable to diners who return annually for their anniversary and the like? His answer is complex and simple at the same time. The menu changes all the time, there are no sacred cows or signature dishes that last for years. But change has a purpose here – it’s to refresh and evolve the dining experience so it stays up to date and at the same time remains in that heady upper stratosphere that guests crave when they are splurging on a once a year or once a lifetime night out.
“I love the creative change,” he explained. “Once our staff gets used to it they love it. Our staff retention rate is very high.” Frank has a reputation of being pretty tough. “That’s not really true” he said. The man is obviously a fanatical perfectionist. He talks about leadership, something that chefs often can’t do outside of the kitchen. Somehow you believe that he does lead, his staff retention rate and his business success seem to prove the point.
The McClelland empire has extended well beyond just L’Espalier and indicates that his approach is not just one dimensional. Sel de la Terre and his other properties are in their own way innovative and impressive businesses.
I asked if there was a time when L’Espalier will no longer work. “I think there will always be a need for fine-dining, but the word fine-dining might die. It’s not a good representation of what we do. It’s a total experience, it’s a vacation. We all need that at times,” he said.
Frank feels that L’Espalier is pretty recession proof. “As things get worse the need for a way to get away remains. You still want to enjoy your birthday or an anniversary – for two or three hours you can escape the reality of everyday life.”
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Industry Luminary 
