NEW YORK – Julia Child may have brought fancy French food to the masses with her massively popular public television show, but David Bouley brought it to the table of the famed restaurant in New York City with his sauces made of vegetables and herbs.

Bouley, who died Feb. 12 at age 70 from a heart attack, was famed for his encyclopedic knowledge of nutrition and ideas how to improve health and save lives through restaurants and it kept a cavalcade of customers coming.

In a look at his life for The New York Times, Pete Wells described a man wh “hurtled along breathlessly in ever-widening circles of references and allusions,” who could pour out a stream of ideas, beliefs, theories and histories.

But it was in the kitchen where his genius came out and ranked his restaurant among the best in the United States and third in New York City, where the competition is fast and hotter than pan seared Ahi tuna.

“Mr. Bouley could set a dozen flavors spinning at once and never lose control of a dish. I eventually came to think that his ideas weren’t jumbled at all; only the words were. When Mr. Bouley expressed himself through food, I had no doubt that he was on to something,’’ said Wells.

Bouley started at Montrachet and later at the first Bouley, on Duane Street in TriBeCa, and, “It was often the idea that fruits, herbs and vegetables could do a lot more than most chefs were asking them to do,” said the review.

He was a pioneer who brought the innovations of French nouvelle cuisine into American food and without the butter and cream dishes usually associated with many French dishes and recipes.

He then started preparing his specialties without sugar or wheat flour and somehow, magically, still made a meal of creaminess without cream and rich sauces that had almost no fat.

He made French food, not normally associated with health – that’s the Mediterranean Diet and Greek foods – healthy and was obsessed with nutrition and diet and said no one would have indigestion later or bored with his meals.

Bouley – the restaurant – had two incarnations, from 1987-1996 at one location and reopening from 2008-17 at another and opened a bakery featuring bread.

“For a time it had the most exciting bread cart in town, and maybe in the whole country. The buckwheat-walnut and coconut fiber-pistachio loaves amazed me, and not just because they contained no gluten,” said Wells.

Bouley also was fascinated with Japanese cooking and techniques and created two other restaurants, Brushstroke, a subtle experiment in East-West fusion that didn’t seem like fusion, and its offshoot, Ichimura, which introduced many New Yorkers to the deeper flavors of Edomae sushi, said the feature.

He was burning with ideas too and preferred staying in the TriBeCa neighborhood where he was a fixture. In 2017, he set up a place that included a cooking school, bakery and a test kitchen that could be used as an event space

and what turned out to be his last restaurant, Bouley at Home. It closed for good in the early months of the pandemic.

His cooking grew more and more intent on assembling “the most nutrient-dense menus … for unbreakable health,” as the Bouley at Home website put it but the piece said when you started to eat, “You would have believed that each dish had been devised by somebody who never spent a minute thinking about anything except how to fill each serving with a few more ounces of pleasure.”