HE landed at Oceana as chef de cuisine just two weeks before Rick Moonen left and, two months later, took the helm.
“I’m gonna rock this place,” Cornelius Gallagher said then. It was a bold pledge from a gangly, freckle-faced Bronx kid who had never run his own Manhattan kitchen.
A year later, he’s earned Post restaurant critic Steve Cuozzo’s first four-star rating in four years. (The last was Danube, in 1999.)
“I could have every meal for a month at Oceana and not get bored,” Cuozzo writes on Page 51. He isn’t alone: The foodie grapevine has been buzzing about this new boy wonder, who seems to lack the Viking stove-size ego that comes with the turf.
“There are two kinds of chefs,” Gallagher tells The Post, “the ultra-talented and the ones who work really hard. I’m the second kind.
“I lie in bed every single night till 3:30 or 4 a.m. with dishes going through my head. Sometimes I have to take a sleeping pill to fall asleep.”
No wonder he’s woken up so many jaded palates.
New York has a tendency to treat its hot young chefs like rock stars, who comport themselves accordingly. But the boyish 31-year-old Gallagher is a family man – with an office plastered with pictures of his 2½-year-old son, Jake, and a lunch personally packed by his wife and “best friend,” Melissa.
He started cooking at 12, when his mother was hospitalized and he leafed through “Joy of Cooking” to prepare meals for himself and his younger brothers and sisters.
After a few disasters – like croissants that came out “black and nasty” – he started getting the hang of it. More important, he says, “I knew what I wanted to do. A lot of my friends didn’t. I knew I loved to cook.”
From vocational school, he went to the Culinary Institute of America, then immediately started cooking around – almost promiscuously. There were stints in Spain and France, and at Bouley, Daniel, Lespinasse and Peacock Alley, under Laurent Gras.
Gallagher learned from them all.
But let others luxuriate in his loup de mer en croute or pastrami-stuffed skate: Gallagher brown-bags it.
“My wife’s a better cook than I am,” he says, showing the lunch – turkey and American cheese on white bread – she’d packed him that day.
“I come home, she’s got chicken cacciatore or roast chicken waiting for me … I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
THE INSIDE DISH
Favorite food: Turkey sandwiches with white American cheese
Dream date: Picnic on a black sand beach in Hawaii with the wife
When not cooking: He practices Brazilian ju-jit-su
Chef he admires most: Daniel Boulud
Most hated food: pattypan squash
Most hated trend: Fusion for the sake of shock value
Favorite dish at Oceana: Japanese diver scallops with spiced shellfish Normand
Favorite dish elsewhere: Bistro burger at Corner Bistro
Most painful kitchen moment: Splattering hot duck grease on his foot in France (he lost the skin on three-quarters of the foot)
Favorite band: Staind