Jean-Georges’ new chef brings Michelin-trained fine dining to Philadelphia

When Jean-Georges restaurant reopens March 10 at the top of the Four Seasons Hotel in Center City after a two-year pandemic pause, its new chef de cuisine will have two reasons to celebrate.

Not only will it be Cornelia Sühr’s 33rd birthday, she will be leading the largest (and, at a thousand feet above the sidewalk, the highest) restaurant in chef Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s far-flung empire.

Her position is remarkable, given that two years ago, the pandemic had left her jobless and living in her childhood bedroom in a small village near Hamburg, Germany.

Jean-Georges barely had a chance from its August 2019 opening; it closed just seven months later. From the day Sühr arrived in Philadelphia nine months ago, she has focused on building a kitchen team — mostly separate from JG SkyHigh’s — and setting up six-course tasting menus.

The new menu had to include snacks and starters that Jean-Georges loyalists have come to appreciate, such as the tuna ribbons and the egg toast and caviar, with hyperlocal ingredients on the rest of the menu. But it also needed a “wow” factor, something different, to catch patrons. Last year, Sühr experimented with a dressing for a vegan dish by adding dill to homemade almond milk. Searching for an umami flavor, she added caviar. At that point, Sühr didn’t create a dressing so much as she made what appeared to be caviar bubble tea. She will serve it with a glass straw.

Caviar and almond milk were not always part of Sühr’s food vocabulary. The youngest of five children, including a twin brother — all but one have worked in food in some capacity — she said she caught an interest in cooking at 8 years old when her brother, eight years her senior, used her as a guinea pig for his cooking. “He was my role model,” Sühr said. “ I thought it was fascinating: How is it possible that you just put different ingredients together and it tastes good?”

At 16, she started her career working, in a rustic restaurant that was a farm and museum — “a super-casual version of Blue Hill at Stone Barns,” she said, referring to the vaunted farm-to-table restaurant in Tarrytown, N.Y. Her day began with a trip to the garden, shears in hand, to cut herbs and lettuces. She won competitions, gaining notice and confidence.

Unlike her parents and siblings, who still live in Germany, Sühr left home after a year for a restaurant in England’s Midlands. She then returned to Germany, joining Atelier in Munich as demi chef de partie as the restaurant was aiming for a Michelin star. The work would be hard, management warned, cautioning, “Are you on board? If not, there’s the door.”

Atelier, which now holds three stars, showed Sühr the value of teamwork. “It was the greatest feeling ever,” she said of the day staff learned of the star. “Even now, 12 years later, we are still in touch.” Soon she got a call from the three-Michelin-starred Alain Ducasse restaurant at The Dorchester hotel in London in 2011, and back to England she went.

“I flew over and did a trial, and they told me, ‘You don’t speak English. You don’t speak French. So you have to start as a commis de cuisine,’” she said. A chef’s assistant. “I started from scratch, picking herbs, cutting cheese, doing amuse bouche.”

In her spare time, she redoubled her efforts to learn English by watching subtitled movies — Gladiator, King Arthur, Taken — and using Google Translate on her laptop. After about six years total, ”I was like, if I don’t leave the U.K. now, I believe I will get stagnant. I said to myself, I have to explore the cuisine outside of Europe.”

Which led her to Dubai as chef de cuisine at the Ritz-Carlton. Sühr said she quickly learned to make a good chai. Most important, she learned more about management. The kitchen workers from all over the world were “super appreciative, especially when you would teach and show. At the end of the day, yes, we had to do a task and the job needs to be done. But for me, it’s always important that the team and the individuals take something away from it, that they really learn.”

When the Ritz-Carlton’s executive chef relocated to New York in 2018, Sühr followed. She was chef de cuisine for The Carlyle hotel and then chef de cuisine of Shun, a French-Japanese salon by Michelin-recognized chef Alain Verzeroli.

Verzeroli was the dream boss. “We had a beautiful time together,” she said. “I absolutely loved it. We had a very wonderful, great working relationship, and I told him, ‘I’m not going to go anywhere until you retire.’ That was the plan. Then COVID came and took all of that away from me. The restaurants were closed. I lost the job, and my work visa didn’t allow me to stay in the U.S..”

Back in Germany, Sühr helped out at the restaurant where she had apprenticed 13 years before.

“It seemed like the American dream was over,” she said. “Europe went into the second lockdown and it had been nearly a year. And I was like, ‘I think this is it.’ Then I saw [a job posting], wow, ‘Four Seasons Philadelphia, Jean-Georges.’”

By then, her predecessor in Philadelphia, Nick Ugliarolo, was working elsewhere in the Jean-Georges orbit.

“If I get this job, it was like winning a lottery,” she said. “It seemed impossible. My visa had to be transferred and the borders to the U.S. were closed. I applied, and here I am.”

Her first stop was Mexico City, as she waited to enter the United States, and then New York, where she met the Jean-Georges team. She immersed herself in Philadelphia, reveling in the July 4 festivities shortly after she arrived. “I think as a chef, as a person, you must be part of the community,” she said. Others were eager to show her around. “I think that I have never experienced this anywhere,” she said. “It made it very easy for me to not feel homesick. When I had to go back to my parents and tell them I’m leaving again, they were not too happy about it, but they were also very supportive.”

The COVID pandemic made her consider all options, she said. “Is it really what I want to do?” she said she asked herself. “I was very aware of my decision to come here and I felt it was right. And I feel it is right in every aspect.”

Though she’s German-trained with a focus on French techniques, “what also excites me in the relationship with Jean-Georges is how we travel and bring those ingredients in combinations [to show] where you are in the world,” Sühr said, excited to work with local growers and producers.

“So for me, the cuisine is classic in a way, but in terms of ingredients, especially what is fresh, it’s more unique,” she said. “And to give that little twist by something that I have experienced while I was traveling and to implement that into the dish, I think that is the true me.”