The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  What were “chefs”? What had become of them? Even one of their best had realized he was out of balance, wasn’t sure anymore who he was or what he was supposed to be doing. It was a brand-new role. There were signs of what the new American chef was becoming, or might become, in Puck, Lagasse, Vongerichten, Keller, and even chefs lesser known outside their markets, such as Joachim Splichal, of the Patina and Pinot restaurants, who in a decade created a series of successful establishments and sold this business to a big company for a boatload of cash. But there was no known long-term model.

  For better or for worse, chefs were stepping out of their monk’s robes, slipping off their clogs, and donning pairs of hand-stitched John Lobb loafers. They were moving into the realm of commercial branding. America loves the notion of the chef as artist, the creative genius working magic in his or her kitchen. That same chef, however, is considerably less compelling when he or she becomes a commercial for raisins or espresso or pots and pans. So what will happen to our perception of the chef? The chef is in transition. The chef is looking for his shoes. But with the phenomenal popularity of this once blue-collar labor and the potential dollars to be generated by it—whether in pots and pans, salsa, baby food, spice rubs and sauces, or in television shows, books, and rollout restaurants—chef branding, with its product lines, multiple name-recognized restaurants, and entertainment venues, has lured the chef out of the kitchen.

  The esteem accorded well-known chefs had another effect outside the industry: The new recognition ignored the dues paid, glossing over the work that got them there, of how hard and how long they struggled, the ongoing grinding toil of the devoted and talented chefs in the early phase of their careers. Which is why we now get perplexed articles in the Wall Street Journal headlined “Reality Bites: Would-Be Chefs Vie for Stardom,” an article noting a 40 percent increase in enrollment in culinary programs to 53,000 students over the past four years, attending “in the hopes of becoming the next Emeril, Mario Batali or Bobby Flay,” and the resulting disgruntlement when that doesn’t happen or even come close. The story not only lays bare the typical career circumstances of a recent graduate—with eighty-hour workweeks and a salary in the low five figures—but interviews culinary school graduates surprised and miffed at eighty-hour weeks and a salary in the low five figures.

  They’re mad because this is a part of the industry they didn’t see when they signed on—it simply isn’t much on view. They see Batali and Flay and Lagasse doing shows, having their faces and names on books, entertaining bestseller-worthy crowds at their signings and demos, and opening fleets of hot, A-list restaurants. They see Thomas Keller, the apotheosis of the American Chef, in magazines and on network television, but not the labor of his four hundred employees, the staff that allows Keller to be who he is and to remain there. They don’t see Emeril Lagasse’s twelve-hundred-plus workers or the legions who drive Wolfgang Puck’s empire.

  Those chefs are the models of the future. But where had the artist gone, the figure the American restaurant-going public most adored? What did it mean to be a chef? What happened to chefs cooking? Had the profession spun out of control? Had we, the audience? What was going on here? Had we built it up too high, being a chef? Are we in danger of burning out on chefs, of suddenly turning on them, shouting that they have no clothes on, and dumping them in favor of the latest pop idol or sports giant?

  Perhaps, on the other hand, our chef-mania, our grossly out-of-touch understanding of the work, is a good thing, a way for America to at last get a grip on its own relationship with food. Since the end of World War II, this country has been out of sync with the natural order of sustenance and nourishment, embracing processed foods, revering canned goods, “instant” breakfasts, and frozen dinners, then elevating fast food to a way of life with such force that its impact has become global, then simultaneously abhorring animal fat for health and dietary reasons, while still becoming the fattest community on earth, then turning around to proselytize on diets composed entirely of salt-rich protein and animal fat, and banishing bread of all things—the staff of life was now the evildoer, and just when bakers in this country had figured out how to make it well. We completely upended the food pyramid we’d always accepted as undeniable and good common sense. Ours is a country that for years held out a silver cross at eggs. Eggs are bad for you! Eggs! The most natural food on earth, a symbol of life and fertility, a compact package of proteins, fats, and carbohydrates whose versatility in the kitchen, pleasure at the table, and economy at the store is unmatched by any other food. We learned to hate the egg! Do you need any further proof that something is seriously wrong with this country that teaches people to avoid eggs? Only when they became a good strategy for slimming down did we reverse ourselves on the egg quandary.

  But in addition to inept thinking about the egg, we’ve also managed to debase our eggs on a massive scale, to contaminate them so that they may actually make you sick if you don’t cook them till they’re hard, and downright dangerous for the very young and the very old. We’ve done the same to our animals, too, by pumping them full of chemicals and feeding them crap they wouldn’t naturally choose in generations of evolution. Our major commercial hog producers are breeding the fat out of hogs to try to please the knuckleheaded consumer, who doesn’t know anymore what’s good for him or not—how could he? he’s been taught to fear the egg!—degrading a once-fine animal beyond recognition, and yet we think nothing of supersizing our french fries and burgers and Cokes. We’re breeding chickens without feathers. Most people scarcely know anymore what their food looks like when it’s alive. They get grossed out at a proper pig roast. They wouldn’t know what to do if they saw an asparagus growing wild—you can’t eat that, it’s gotta come in a bundle with a rubber band around it. If food doesn’t come in a package or a box or wrapped in plastic, we aren’t comfortable with it, don’t trust it. It might hurt us. Gotta be processed. Gotta have an expiration date. It’s sometimes hard to remember that what comes out of our boxes and packages first comes out of the earth.

  Chefs, thanks to their celebrity, now have the clout and the passion, as well as the knowledge, to point us back to the things that matter—to sustainable farming, to raising animals naturally in fresh air, rather than inside cement barracks pumped full of antibiotics. We’re slowly, too slowly, recognizing the scary results of chemical-laced livestock in overcrowded spaces—not merely inferior beef and tasteless chicken, or unpleasant bacteria such as Salmonella and Listeria, but also the evolution of truly deadly bacteria such as E. coli O157:H7.

  Alice Waters, of Chez Panisse, began working with farmers thirty years ago and asked us all to understand better where our food comes from because it matters. This former schoolteacher had the authority to do this because she ran a popular restaurant. A generation later, chefs are a powerful force in the way we raise hogs, cattle, and chicken because Americans are spending their dollars at these chefs’ restaurants and buying their cookbooks—capitalism at its best—and reading about their beliefs and philosophies, in addition to trying to actually cook their food, and believing what these chefs believe. Which is, as Keller has said, “If I have a better product, I can be a better chef than you.” Or to put it in more sweeping but no less accurate terms for the rest of us: We better take care of the earth or we’re gonna have shitty food, and having shitty food is no fun.

  For all chefs’ potential in society, though, much of the country has gone a little batty over them, according chefs a power and an intelligence few of them actually possess. This is a country, after all, that barely distinguishes an Olive Garden from an Olives, or an Outback Steakhouse from a Jean-Georges steak house; or even recognizes that all steak houses are a kind of fast-food restaurant dealing in heat-and-serve protein, no matter how fancy the side dishes. Nevertheless, what chefs do individually and collectively is important and potentially powerful, everything from running excellent restaurants to supporting good farmers and growers to raising money for countless causes. They’ve been e
specially productive, more so perhaps than any other industry in the world of commerce.

  One of the biggest organizations, the antihunger, antipoverty nonprofit Share Our Strength, for instance, marshals chefs to help raise about $20 million a year, according to its founder and executive director, Bill Shore. Shore guesses that nationally, the totals that chefs raise for charities are closer to $100 million annually.

  In this profession that has undergone rapid advancement and enjoyed a sudden elevation in esteem, the role of the chef has become increasingly specialized. For these reasons and the seemingly endless range of potential work, chefs often don’t understand their role anymore or who they should be as a chef. I’d set out again to explore the nature of this work and the ways it was changing, both for the chefs, in all their varying capacities and the decisions they face in this new food world, and for the people for whom they do the work—us, the cooking-struck, chef-adoring, restaurant-crazy consumers.

  CHAPTER 3

  Shadow Urge

  On the other hand, it could be me—maybe I needed to understand the work better, to get to the source of my own enduring fascination with it. Maybe it’s just me who’s chef-struck. Maybe I’ve had my head in ovens too long. Or maybe not long enough—maybe I’m not fully baked and that’s why I keep returning to the brutal-elegant contradiction of the restaurant kitchen and the work of the professional cook.

  I had first entered the mysterious world of the chef and the professional kitchen via the gauntlet of a “Skills” kitchen at the Culinary Institute of America, run by Chef Michael Pardus. I was thirty-two. I’d been a hobby cook since fourth grade when, an only child bored after school, I decided to bake a pie. I’d just seen Julia Child do it on TV. She’d made an apple pie seem easy and fun. It was the middle of a Cleveland winter, 1973, and I don’t think we had a fresh fruit in the house, but I located a can of pears in syrup back in a cupboard and so moved forward with my canned-pear pie. (I’d love to know a ballpark figure of how many people Julia inspired. I’m sure we’d circle the globe if we all lay down head to foot. Not even counting the people she inspired who went on to do their own teaching and inspiring, surely an exponential figure.)

  The pie itself was not worth eating as I recall (serious crust problems owing to the soaked fruit), but I’d loved making it, and so would continue cooking, just as I would writing, which I had also begun to do at this same age. The writing was no more worth reading than the pie was worth eating, but I’d liked the process of writing as much as I’d enjoyed the process of cooking, enough to keep on doing both. I’ve always suspected that for me, the act of cooking and the act of writing are linked, that the desire to cook and the compulsion to write arise out of the same spot in my unconscious, as two different manifestations of the same innate urge.

  In my case, the food got better before the writing did. Cooking was a lot easier than writing, no question. Cooking, moreover, had a distinct advantage over writing. Cooking mistakes could usually be eaten. Written mistakes had to be thrown out, and most everything I wrote early on and for a harrowingly long time was a mistake. Nevertheless, providence saw to it that despite at first possessing more culinary than literary acumen, I would earn my living by writing rather than by cooking, with the single and instructive exception of a four-month stint as a clock-punching grill cook. (I acquitted myself acceptably on the line—ever the B student—no great shakes, but not a travesty either, at least dependable during a Saturday-night crunch.)

  My last full-time white-collar job ended in 1993. I’d been an editor and a writer at a local magazine in Cleveland and had, rather cleverly, I thought, invented a monthly column that would not only serve the magazine but feed what was by then my incessant hunger for information about food and cooking. I would call up a chef, invite myself into his or her kitchen, and get a private lesson. The chef would get a picture and a profile in a magazine. I was more or less indiscriminate about where I went—chefs weren’t particularly well known, even by the time I’d quit to write my first book about an all-boys high school. But I’d been struck when reporting those columns by one thing especially: at least half the chefs I’d interviewed and worked with had gone to the Culinary Institute of America, in Hyde Park, New York. I’d never heard of it till I’d started my column, but enough chefs had named it as the place where they’d gotten their initial training that it made an impression on me. Having finished my first book in the summer of 1995 and needing a subject for the second, I figured I’d simply expand my erstwhile magazine column to book scale. With an arrogance unique to journalists, I wrote to the CIA’s president, Ferdinand Metz, and invited myself in to write a book about young chefs and learning to cook at this, the first and most prominent cooking school in the country. When I didn’t hear back, I phoned. Metz’s assistant informed me that my letter had been passed on to the school’s executive vice president, Tim Ryan. It was July and I was ready to go. I called Ryan’s office. When I reached Ryan’s assistant, I was told that Mr. Ryan did have my letter and that he could meet with me in the middle of October.

  October? That was three months away. My clock’s ticking—I had to do things like rent our house, find an affordable dwelling up there, five hundred miles away, and I had cashed the advance check.

  When I described my urgency, the assistant assured me this was really his first availability. I would have to wait patiently, learning what I could in the meantime.

  October at last rolled around, and I trekked out to Hyde Park with my wife and infant daughter. I met Ryan in his office on the third floor of Roth Hall, the CIA’s main building, a classic brick structure that was once a Jesuit seminary. Ryan was straightforward and plainspoken, though he maintained a corporate coldness that intimidated me. Friendly to a degree, open and honest, yes; warm and fuzzy, no. After a meeting, a tour of the school, and lunch at American Bounty, the institute’s restaurant showplace, Ryan said he was “favorably inclined” about my idea, but he’d have to think about it. Then he left. I was encouraged to have some dessert.

  Ryan “thought about it” for three more months before acting on his initial inclination. I’d honestly thought they’d leap at the opportunity to host me. In truth, they were wary of letting a stranger into their school. For all they knew, I was just some schmo trying to scam a free education. It’s a point that could be better argued now than at the time, because then a culinary education is not what I wanted, but in the end it’s what I got. Changed my life, in fact.

  I’d hatched this plot to write about learning to cook at the CIA at an auspicious moment in the cultural life of the chef. Indeed, I was amazed no one had already done what I was about to do, and I knew there wasn’t a moment to lose. The same week I’d written to the school with my nifty idea, I’d been alerted to a segment on the Today show in which a couple were being interviewed about their new book called Becoming a Chef, a kind of survey of the profession up to that time. The husband-wife team Andrew Dornenburg and Karen Page, he a chef and she a Harvard-educated businesswoman, had interviewed scores of chefs and put together a potpourri of chef lore, restaurant history, profession pontifications, recountable memories, and how-to advice that cumulatively painted a portrait of the chef in America at the exact moment of launch into the stratosphere of celebrity. One of the book’s strongest features was its documenting the new restaurants and chefs beginning to change the way America ate—naming not only such landmarks as Lutèce and Spago and Charlie Trotter’s but regional restaurants as well, Norman’s in Miami, Mustards Grill in the Napa Valley, and Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe. The authors also placed these chefs and restaurants in a broader historical context of the new American food scene. The book was published as a sporty trade paperback, and its content and design were so popular that Becoming a Chef spawned several more books by the authors (and a few less-worthy imitations). The authors have made a mini-industry out of their work and continue to document the scene, most recently with a more traditional cookbook, The New American Chef, exploring internati
onal influences on our country’s already dynamic food scene.

  Becoming a Chef is the best of their books, perhaps because it was the first to provide a truly broad, comprehensive, balanced view of the life and work of the professional chef in the words of the chefs, all of it organized and written by a chef. Dornenburg and Page had correctly sensed that America had an incipient interest in the work of the professional chef and were really the first to start feeding what has proved to be an astonishingly voracious and still-unsated appetite for information about food and cooking and the men and women who do it for money—the real information, not the stylized fluff available in food magazines, which had been the only material available for decades.

  I sensed it, too, but could do little other than tap my fingers while waiting, waiting for Mr. Ryan’s favorable inclination to take effect.

  At last it did. I entered K-8—a large rectangular teaching kitchen in the heart of this old elegant seminary on the verdant banks of the Hudson River—looking to seventeen fellow enrollees and one chef-instructor like something resembling a culinary student. My intent had been no more complex than to get in with my notebooks, get out with a story and maybe a few cooking tips, write a book, and move on to the next subject. How was I to know that learning to make a veal stock would change my life, that sauce Robert (ro-BAIR, one of the oldest derivative sauces, veal demi spiked with mustard) could be as mind altering to me as several tabs of Timothy Leary’s finest, that the true measure of a man was not determined by slaying the dragon and capturing the Holy Grail but, rather, by the proper cooking of a green bean. Yea, verily! The meaning of life could be found in an onion, and the battle of a busy restaurant service could deliver you to an altered state of being—equal parts grace and shame—in fact, to a kind of parallel existence without any relativity regarding the speed of light, for me a new universe. I would become a cook. I liked this place and I wanted to stay.