Cooking first brought
Bobby Trigg to life almost 25 years ago. Today, he stands on the cusp of opening his third and most ambitious restaurant, though it’s led him further from the kitchen.
By Scott Edwards

The early days of The Ferry House were brutal. They were comprised of all the normal trials and tribulations of opening a restaurant, only they were compounded by the utter lack of experience that shrouded just about everyone on the staff, including its owner and chef, the fresh-faced Bobby Trigg, who was barely removed from culinary school at 30-years-old. Trigg employed his parents, Patricia and Robert Trigg Jr., to man the front of the house and to help tend to just about every aspect of the Lambertville, NJ, restaurant’s operation that fell outside of the cooking. When Trigg approached his father for a loan to open the restaurant, Trigg Jr., who worked as an analyst on Wall Street for 32 years, provided his son with a 185-page document. Trigg described it as a detailed account of how his father expected him to fail. Trigg Jr. said it was a business plan. Nonetheless, Trigg read it and his father lent him the money. It was obvious from the start that Trigg had the talent to succeed, his father says. So they did everything they could to ensure that he had the opportunity to prove his place. “I felt like the biggest challenge for him was to recognize the financial side of the business,” Trigg Jr. says. “With the benefit of hindsight, it looked like he was born to be a chef. He was very successful at that right at the beginning. But he didn’t have any money. And that is the type of business where you either go into business for yourself or you stay at the low end of the totem pole.” The restaurant was small – about 50 seats – and business was almost entirely dependent on the seasonal tourist traffic. This was 1992, after all, and Lambertville did not bear the innovative reputation its dining scene does today. So they lived for three days a week, Friday through Sunday. But even then, it felt overwhelming. They bought the linens and had them cleaned at a laundromat nearby to save money. The trouble there was that the laundromat’s hours were unpredictable, which left Patricia oftentimes stuck washing them herself after a shift, at two or three in the morning, so that they’d be ready for brunch at 11 a.m. And then there was the incident with the critic from The New York Times. She arrived 45 minutes after her reservation as part of a party of four. Patricia had already given the table away. They needed to turn the tables twice to clear even a slight profit for the night, so every minute the table sat empty cost them. The critic, the soft-spoken Patricia recalls, responded, “ ‘Don’t you know who I am?’ No. ‘I’m a special person.’ All our customers are special,” Patricia said, “but they also know that they have to be here on time or within 15 minutes.” Smiling at the memory, Patricia says, “She wrote me up as being obnoxious.” At times, they wondered if they were losing their minds. What kept them coming back and what makes them recall the experience today with fondness was the sight of Trigg unfazed by any of it. “Those were very difficult days,” Trigg Jr. says, “but he seemed to love every minute of it.”

Childhood’s End
As naturally as his life jives with his career today, it’s hard to imagine a day when Trigg, who at 47 always seems tethered to work in some way, was aimless. But that’s how he considers his life prior to enrolling in The Restaurant School in Philadelphia 23 years ago. He grew up as the only boy of four children, which, Trigg Jr. says, molded him into an independent person. He and Patricia moved their young family from Massapequa, Long Island, to a ranch house on a quiet Yardley street in 1972. “Bobby was in fourth grade, I think,” Patricia says. “Yeah, because he went to Ignatius,” Trigg Jr. says. “That didn’t work out too well, did it?” Trigg drifted in and out of small-time trouble in school, showing occasional flashes of brilliance and good behavior. His parents recognized in those episodes the first significant staple of his personality: he responded well to challenges, only then they were more like ultimatums. Trigg spent two years at the University of Dayton, where he majored, under his father’s direction, in computer science, though he rarely attended classes. It was hardly a wasted experience, where Trigg was concerned, though, because it was then that he experienced his first genuine taste of purpose, and it came in the form of touring with The Grateful Dead. To this day, it’s hard to avoid anything written or said about Trigg that doesn’t reference his great love affair with The Dead, so I’ll leave it at that, save for a couple of significant side notes that haven’t already been beaten to death: He’s seen the various formations of the band play in recent years, but he stopped touring, for the most part, with the death of lead singer, Jerry Garcia, in 1995. Touring was a period of great freedom, Trigg says, that, strangely, instilled in him a strong work ethic. He wasn’t a typical Deadhead. He preferred comfy hotels and dinners in nice restaurants to sleeping in tents and living off of parking lot grub. Work, through much of his early adulthood, was a means to this end. The death of Garcia, however, helped him understand that he couldn’t maintain this lifestyle forever. Gradually, he stopped going out every night after work and, more subtly, he started considering his future beyond the daily grind. Trigg Jr. found his son a job on Wall Street after he left college, which he used as a stepping stone to gain a more lucrative position with Salomon Brothers. But it was obvious both to himself and to those around him that it was an uncomfortable fit.
The firm, following a period of rapid growth, offered juicy buyouts that, Trigg says, were intended for its senior, on-the-verge-of-retirement members in an effort to quietly scale back. Trigg snapped it up without a second thought and returned home to his parents with the idea of entering culinary school. The details of Trigg’s epiphany are somewhat vague. He says he started cooking when he was living in New York and he needed a cheap alternative to dining out every night with dates. In the process, he started reading a lot of culinary books. He also points to his mother as a great inspiration. She often prepared meals for the family from scratch, but she says that she had no idea that Trigg was watching as closely as he apparently was.

Cream Puff War
Trigg spent a year working as an apprentice under the renowned French chef, Jean Pierre Tardy, at his Newtown restaurant, Jean Pierre’s, and then remained on staff basically as a volunteer for nearly another year. Tardy, who today conducts cooking classes in a studio kitchen a block away from the corner in Newtown Borough that his restaurant occupied for 17 years, remembers Trigg as the anxious guy in the kitchen. “He was always nervous when he worked next to me,” says Tardy, who then makes a slicing motion that indicates he cut his fingers often. In contrast, he says, when Trigg worked on the other side of the kitchen, he was calm and his plates were consistently well prepared (according to Tardy’s uncompromising standards). Working under Tardy should have been a nightmare for Trigg. He seems to have softened now, but Tardy’s reputation as a highly demanding, rigid chef was once as well known by diners in his restaurant as it was in commercial kitchens across Bucks County. Trigg recalls a night he entered Tardy’s kitchen with an ankle he severely sprained playing softball that afternoon. He showed up only because he felt Tardy needed to see the injury for himself to believe the excuse. But Tardy said they were too busy to lose him for the night. He disappeared for a moment and returned with a five-gallon bucket filled with ice and a bottle of tequila. Tardy, according to Trigg, then said, “ ‘You stay. You be okay. You stand right here and make salads and plate desserts.’ ” Trigg, to that point in his life, had a track record of rebelling against even the slightest hint of constraint. He left Wall Street, in part, because he couldn’t stand all of the screaming and scrutiny. And now here he was square in the middle of one of the most stressful environments he had ever known. Still, he kept coming back, night after night. And then he continued to long after he needed to. Tardy became the unlikeliest of mentors to Trigg. While Tardy dissected his every move and screamed at him in an almost-undecipherable French accent, Trigg took note, from the way he prepared dishes according to customers’ likes to his efficient utilization of the food inventory. Trigg entered Tardy’s kitchen with a faint hint of passion for cooking. By the time he left, he was beginning to grasp the business model of a successful restaurant. And when Trigg, a couple of years later, prepared to open The Ferry House, he came to Tardy with all of his questions. Tardy answered them all and then appeared at the restaurant shortly after its opening, Trigg says, to scrutinize the operation, from the temperature of the hot water running out of the bathroom faucets to the racks of lamb that should have been split between lunch and dinner. Twenty years removed, it’s clear that Trigg is the chef and restaurateur he is today because of Tardy. He’s loyal to his diners the way Tardy was. He demands much of his staff, but he also tends to them as though they are family, much as Tardy did with him. And he’s a tireless worker, who insists on maintaining some measure of direct control over every aspect of the operation, even as the reality grows well beyond that concept. Their connection remains casual. Both keep tabs on the other, though their lives intersect far more rarely than they once did, even just a few years ago. Illustrating, though, just how much respect the teacher has developed for the student, Tardy offered to buy The Ferry House, which Trigg moved to Princeton in 1998, but Trigg politely declined.

Bad Moon Rising
The excessively long closing should have been a strong enough warning that purplish clouds were gathering on the horizon. The session ran like four or five hours. In retrospect, it was a perfectly fitting ending to what was an overdrawn, at times dead-in-the-water process. The thing is, though, it was really only the beginning. A little over a year before, in January 2005, Trigg’s business partner, Barry Sussman, caught wind that the owners of The Peacock Inn were discreetly looking to sell. They inquired, made an offer, several actually, and were promptly dismissed. The Peacock was more archaic monument than thriving enterprise. But the Princeton restaurant and bed-and-breakfast held down a sentimental corner in Trigg’s heart. It was where he landed his first (paying) job as a chef. He worked as the sous chef there from 1989 until just before opening The Ferry House in 1992. It was in the Peacock’s kitchen that he developed his signature style, classic French cuisine infused with bold South American accents, and a bit of a following.
“I always got to run the kitchen on Sundays,” Trigg says. “That was like my little playground to sort of burn and learn.” The Peacock then was the epitome of fine dining, but it was starting to show its age. The building, according to Trigg, dates back to the 18th century, and by the time Trigg and Sussman made their bid, The Peacock had developed a reputation as a restaurant where diners go to die. Dinner, on average, was a minimum of a four-hour commitment. As the community sped up around it, The Peacock remained exactly the same. The week before Christmas 2005, Trigg, fighting his way out of the weeds in The Ferry House kitchen, received a call out of the blue from Michael Walker, who owned The Peacock with his wife. He said they decided to accept their offer, an offer that Trigg says was refused several months earlier. He called Sussman at the end of the dinner rush and broke the news to him. They decided then that they still wanted to do it. Walker, however, was inclined to make the deal less clear-cut. He wanted to hold on to The Peacock through June and take one more run at the alumni. In Princeton, life ebbs and flows according to the university’s schedule. And for business owners, graduation is akin to the Christmas season everywhere else. In the meantime, he asked that Trigg and Sussman not visit the inn or mention the possible sale publicly. So, in June 2006, they finally moved forward. Trigg headed straight for The Peacock after the marathon closing. The place was almost exactly as he remembered it. Almost literally. There was a general sense of decay that pervaded everything. He took a look at the reservations. The inn was booked that Friday for a rehearsal dinner and the family was staying there. Trigg honored it after an intense cleaning session and then closed The Peacock’s doors for what he planned at the time to be small, superficial changes to the first floor. More than three years later, The Peacock remains closed, though finally nearing completion after the inn hurtled through a basement-to-roof renovation. Every relatively insignificant change seemed to unmask a greater structural issue, which quickly became the overriding trend of the last three years. The ever-optimistic Trigg saw the downward spiral as an opportunity to seize the building’s potential once and for all. He hired architects, who designed an ambitious set of plans that would modernize the building, making it far more user friendly for staff and customers. The Peacock originally had 17 guest rooms, though only nine had bathrooms. The new floor plans created 16 rooms, each with its own plush bathroom. The wine cellar, which was previously tucked in an obscure corner in the labyrinth of a basement, on the opposite side of the inn from the restaurant, was repositioned to almost directly below the main dining room, reachable by two short flights of stairs. Trigg’s greatest advantage in undertaking this overhaul was knowing Princeton as well as he does. With The Ferry House relocating there almost 12 years ago, he’s one of the town’s longest tenured chefs, and he’s grown quite intimately in touch with its nuances over that time. This summer, he opened his second restaurant, BT Bistro, just outside of Princeton Borough, on US Route 1. Though there’s some crossover between the two menus, the bistro is very much its own entity, tailored specifically to its location, where it’s surrounded by franchise restaurants that compete for corporate travelers. The Peacock, which represents the third corner of what Trigg humbly considers his little triangle and some locals refer to as “The BT Empire,” will be geared for speed, first and foremost, Trigg says, whether its catering to locals dining in the restaurant or business travelers staying in the boutique hotel. Trigg’s philosophy is that it doesn’t matter how upscale the atmosphere, The Peacock is merely one stop on any given day or night in a long, intricate, fast-moving series of them. In other words, he’s aspiring to make it the antithesis of the former Peacock. Of course, his greatest disadvantage was, admittedly, serving as his own contractor when he knew very little about renovating. It was a move that undermined his efforts with one nightmare after another. “When there was a point you stood in the basement and you could see the roof, that was scary,” Trigg says. “I was walking through here one afternoon and a bat flew out. I was like, oh, my God. What else is living in here?” There was a section in the basement that was known as Peacock Alley. It was a small corridor with a low ceiling that, according to Trigg, was used as a sort of speakeasy during Prohibition. Trigg had the idea of turning it into a private dining room, which required digging out the floor in order to create a seven-foot ceiling. It became apparent almost immediately that there was no foundation. The building, along with the house next door, according to Trigg, was moved from the Princeton University campus in 1890 to its current location on Bayard Lane, where it was apparently deposited as is. There is three-plus years’ worth of that kind of day, which is how a budget spirals from $2 million to $5 million.

Tomorrow is a Long Time
There were turns, Trigg says, where he and Sussman lost almost all hope in reopening The Peacock. It was the opening of the bistro, which he also owns with Sussman, that resuscitated the project once and for all. Trigg was at the bistro “24/7” for six straight weeks, which meant he wasn’t drowning in the Peacock’s woes. By the time he returned, he was rejuvenated from the experience. If there’s a silver lining to a three-year renovation, even if it’s buried under several feet of saw dust and debris, it’s that the details don’t get glossed over. Trigg describes The Peacock as the purest reflection of himself of any of his three restaurants, from the star-like light fixtures that hang from the ceiling of the main dining room to the simplified, yet deeply comfortable guest rooms. Not only because of the extent of the investment he’s already made but because of what it spells for his future, the opening of The Peacock, which Trigg anticipates will come before the end of the year, at least for the hotel portion, will be life-changing. Long removed from the kitchen, save for Sundays, when he retreats there to escape the chaos in the rest of his life, The Peacock will pull Trigg even further into the business of running a restaurant, perhaps irretrievably so. A career forged outside of the kitchen is one that likely never occurred to him during those innocent early days of The Ferry House almost two decades ago, when all that really mattered was cooking, at least in his eyes. But the life of a professional chef is unrelenting, so it’s only natural that the chef himself eventually relent.
The Peacock firmly entrenches Trigg in the next significant phase of his culinary life. At the moment, it’s hard for him to see beyond the next six months. They’re going to be pivotal. He probably won’t leave The Peacock at all over that time. He needs it, he says, to run like a Swiss watch. For a man who struggles to take a day off each week, Trigg is facing the prospect, he says, half-jokingly, of “another year with no vacation.” Eventually, though, in a near future, he’d like to explore franchising the bistro and possibly teaching, which, in his mind, would bring him full circle. He’d be back in the kitchen, where he’s always felt most comfortable, cooking free of the stresses that are burying him alive now and inspiring a new generation, all of which was basically how life was for Trigg before he grew into a brand.

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