The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  The grandchild of Irish immigrants who’d settled in Pittsburgh, Ryan is a classic American success story of the food business. His paternal grandparents had been so poor that his father, Lawrence Sr., born in 1916, was forced to leave home at thirteen and ride the rails toward California with his brother, looking for work during the Depression. After World War II—Lawrence was an army sergeant stationed in Oregon—he returned to Pittsburgh and worked in a brewery, fathering two daughters in addition to Tim, who was the eldest. The family was poor, but “we didn’t know it,” Ryan said.

  As a teenager, Ryan had vague notions of being a lawyer, but as the family had few resources, as his father had only a sixth-grade education, and as he didn’t know any lawyers other than the ones he saw on TV, law didn’t happen. His role model, instead, became Nino Sorci, a big charismatic chef-owner of the restaurant where Ryan had worked throughout his teens, and as far as the young Ryan could see, the richest man he knew personally. Moreover, Ryan loved the kitchen—“I was enchanted by the activity and the flames…. And even as a kid, I could work the line.” Sometime toward the end of high school, Ryan walked several blocks from his home to the Carnegie Library to see what was available in the way of a culinary education. The only thing going then was the CIA, and he knew exactly—“with total clarity,” Ryan recalls—what he was going to do. There was never a doubt.

  Ryan enrolled in the Culinary Institute in 1975 and graduated two years later. His father had died of bone cancer while Ryan was in school, so rather than travel in Europe, work in New York City or on a cruise ship, as he’d originally foreseen, he instead returned home and found work as a chef at a place an hour outside Pittsburgh, three bus rides away, at the highly regarded Ben Gross Restaurant, then later as the chef of La Normande, which became one of the finest restaurants in the area and whose owners periodically sent him to Europe.

  Metz, who was then an executive with Pittsburgh-based H. J. Heinz Company, dined at La Normande and got to know its young chef, encouraging him to participate in culinary competitions and occasionally judging his food. In 1982, not long after he was named president of the CIA, Metz—fresh from leading the United States to its first gold medal in hot foods at the Culinary Olympics—placed a call to the kitchen of La Normande in the middle of a busy service. A flabbergasted Ryan—he was just twenty-four—took the call. Metz wanted to know if Ryan would consider coming up to Hyde Park to open a new restaurant that would specialize in exploring American regional cuisine, one of the first in the country to make this its goal.

  At the time, if you were serious about cooking, nouvelle cuisine and all things French ruled. “I didn’t want to do chowder,” Ryan says now. But he came for a visit and was inspired by Metz and the challenge of having an impact on students. It was later to be remarked at the school that Ryan was Metz’s number one draft pick.

  After opening the American Bounty Restaurant, Ryan would excel with impressive speed at everything he did—he passed the Certified Master Chef exam at age twenty-six, the youngest ever to do this, became captain of the champion U.S. Culinary Olympic team, also the youngest to do this, and was the youngest president of the American Culinary Federation. In the midst of his day job and extracurricular cheffing, he earned a bachelor’s and an M.B.A. from the University of New Haven, then a Ph.D. in education from the University of Pennsylvania. Clearly, the guy was driven. He brought to every assignment the focus and tenacity of the chef. But the chef was now a doctor.

  This was consistent with what I knew about being an excellent chef. It was not something you could turn on and off. If you were truly a chef, that was your core; it defined who you were and directed your every decision. Chefness was not a hat you put on when you got in to work. Perhaps this is why he refused to let his kids, when they were toddlers, win at Candy Land. His wife, Lynne, thought this was ridiculous, but Ryan defended the practice. It was not that he played to win at everything he did no matter who the competition happened to be; it was, rather, that he wanted his kids to play to win, and when they did win, he wanted it to mean something. Also, he’d realized what he called the American Dream, a key facet of which was to be able to give your children more than you had as a child. But privilege, he wanted his kids to understand, did not mean you got things for free—you still had to earn everything. This meant that if you were one square away from King Kandy’s Castle and you drew Plumpy—back you went, three years old or not.

  He was a chef and a perfectionist. Lynne was a chef, too. A tall, attractive blonde from Alabama, she had been a nutritionist who didn’t take to hospital work and so enrolled in the CIA, graduating in 1987. Ryan was already in the administration by then, and their paths never crossed. She met him a few years later at a chef convention when she was the corporate chef for BlueCross BlueShield. They endured a year’s long-distance relationship, then married, fifteen years ago. Ryan refused to eat the first meal Lynne cooked for him when she finally moved up. Roast chicken. She hadn’t trussed the bird. Lynne couldn’t believe it: They were in the middle of upstate New York—where was she supposed to get butcher’s string? She was pissed. When she told me about the event, now fifteen years in the past, she was still pissed. Ryan remained unapologetic. “I believe in trussing a chicken,” he said, by way of explanation. And that was that.

  Ryan was now the man in charge of the place at which he’d spent all but five years of his adult life. He retained the chilliness I’d always sensed from my first meeting in 1995. This bothered me because I couldn’t see its source. It wasn’t as if the guy were an asshole or some blowhard corporate dude. Ryan was a nice guy who went out of his way to welcome me. I hadn’t graduated from the school, but he said he looked upon me as if I had. I got an appointment right away this time. And lunch. And all the time after I needed for further discussion. Nor did I feel as if he were hiding something, or not speaking frankly—he was unfailingly straightforward, and I usually agreed with what he said or at the very least understood his reasoning, which was clear and to the point. The guy knew food and cooking as well as or better than any chef I’d met, and he was smart and articulate.

  Here’s an e-mail, his response to my request for a follow-up interview by phone to answer a few outstanding questions, and it’s typical of his tone generally:

  Hi Michael,

  Happy New Year!

  It is always good to hear from you.

  All is well here at the CIA.

  I’ll ask Rona, to set up some time for us to talk.

  In the meantime, it would be helpful if you could e-mail me the questions that you’d like to cover.

  All the best,

  Tim

  And yet there was something that made him seem dangerous, as though you had to watch your step around him or he’d cut you—nothing personal. He played to win and never let that guard down. He was still a chef at his core—indeed, that chef core had likely made it possible for him to succeed outside the kitchen, in business, higher education, and administration. Anyone would have had to be ferocious to accomplish what he had by forty-three, his age when he replaced Metz. I’d seen this quality in great chefs and great surgeons. You had to be ruthless. Even when you played Candy Land or when your new wife served you a chicken that had not been trussed, you never let your guard down—ever. That was your standard, that was who you were. I wondered how much this had to do with how he grew up. Poor but not wanting for anything, he’d made his own way pretty much from age twelve. But his father, born into the Depression, was more or less forced from his family at that same age and spent his adult life as a poor laborer in a brewery. Perhaps part of Ryan’s ferocity was rooted in the anxiety of the immigrants’ shadow and a determination that harsh circumstances would never touch anyone in his family again—I don’t know. Nor did he—he would say only that he never saw anything he did as an accomplishment but, rather, as part of the process of reaching some bigger ultimate goal.

  We returned to the elegant, ornate boardroom at the top of the main stairway on
the second floor behind leaded-and beveled-glass doors. He gave me a PowerPoint slide show of the renovations about to begin, as well as some motivational and informational presentations the institute gives to faculty that underscores the changing nature of the workplace, everything from the new business environment to what does and what does not constitute sexual harassment. The conversation continued to swerve into the nature and meaning of chefs’ sudden celebrity. He’d had to stop himself from talking about it at lunch because I was trying to save it for a more considered time when I could concentrate and take notes. But it was impossible not to talk about it—chef celebrity seemed to precede all topics.

  Ultimately we sat down in his office at a round wood table, the very one where I’d grilled Mr. Metz and ended my obsessive quest eight years earlier for the proper color of roux for a classical brown sauce. It was a warm June day and the windows were open, the Hudson River visible in the distance.

  Ryan prefaced our conversation about celebrity with what he considered to be related to but separate from celebrity. What can we say defines greatness? What does it mean to be a “great” chef today?

  “You ask people ‘Who are the greatest artists?’” he said. “They say Picasso or whatever, and I ask, ‘Why do you say that? Because someone told you, just like they tell you Shakespeare is the greatest writer?’ Who is ‘they’? Critics and the like?”

  Ryan listed the four criteria that define greatness in any artist:

  They are excellent craftsmen.

  They are innovators—they do something that no one has done before.

  They are “on trend,” as he put it—their innovations are perceived to be of value; people buy their stuff; they aren’t tragic and misunderstood, appreciated for their innovations after they’re dead.

  They are influential—others begin to do what they started.

  By these criteria, the first chef in America to achieve greatness in this modern sense was Alice Waters, at her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, which opened in 1971. André Soltner was the well-known chef at his Lutèce, which opened in 1961. He was a superlative craftsman, chef, and restaurateur, but can we say he was great by Ryan’s modern definition? He was greatly admired, was a role model for young cooks, and was successful by any chef’s standards of the time; indeed, he remains an icon of the solitary chef working in his kitchen and practicing his craft (classic French cuisine) with monklike devotion and extraordinary stamina and longevity. He was not innovative, however, and thus he could not be said to be hugely influential, regardless of how revered he was and remains.

  But Waters didn’t really develop fame until much later, after the influence of her Chez Panisse chefs began to reverberate throughout California and the country. The first true celebrity chef—and I’m referring only to restaurant chefs, not the early TV cooks and chefs, Julia Child and Jacques Pépin, James Beard and Graham Kerr, who had long been on the scene by now—may have been Paul Prudhomme, who opened K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen in New Orleans in 1979. A talented chef, he brought the heavy seasonings of Cajun cuisine into the national consciousness, and his techniques—notably, blackened fish—were, for better or worse, widely imitated.

  Three years later, Wolfgang Puck opened Spago in West Hollywood, then fired up the steamroller and carried his California cuisine—American nouvelle gone rustic, but still created with classic French technique and served on fine china in a dramatic setting—across America, first with restaurants and innovations, such as the open kitchen in a fine-dining restaurant and Asian fusion cuisine, then with his pizza and fast food.

  After these three chefs, whose rise and monopoly span about a decade, comes a slew of groundbreakers, but few stand out to match these forerunners, chef-restaurateurs whose influence on the American dining scene remains apparent even today (less so with Prudhomme, though his spices helped pave the way for celebrity-chef products). Who followed? Larry Forgione, An American Place, 1983 (American regional cuisine). Charlie Trotter, who opened his eponymous Chicago restaurant in 1987 (big tasting menus, small portions), and also in Chicago that year, Rick Bayless, who debuted Frontera Grill (popularizing an authentic artisanal approach to an ethnic cuisine, in this case Mexican). Jean-Georges Vongerichten (innovative techniques and food in exciting rooms, Jojo and Vong) and Nobu Matsuhisa (fine-dining Japanese) in Manhattan. Thomas Keller in Yountville (numerous innovations in classic French technique, presentation, and conception).

  That would be my list of the Great American Chefs to date—a list that would be fun to argue with anyone because no doubt legions would be up in arms about his or her omission: How can you leave out Madeleine Kamman, Jeremiah Tower, Jonathan Waxman, Barry Wine? My response: They don’t hew to the four criteria. The shorter the list, the more meaningful it is.

  But the guy who really started things for this modern era of the chef as cultural star, the man Tim Ryan calls “the Elvis Presley of the culinary world,” the person who could be said to be the original great modern celebrity chef was French. Paul Bocuse.

  “There have been celebrity chefs for a long time—La Varenne, Carême, and Escoffier was undoubtedly a celebrity chef,” Ryan said, but it was the arrival of “Bocuse, starting in the seventies—that’s when things started to heat up.” Bocuse was really the first to play to the media and begin to elevate the chef’s standing toward what it is today.

  When Ryan was starting out, Bocuse was who everyone wanted to be. In America, the role model had been Soltner—the chef as monk. But that changed in the seventies. Young American chefs went to Europe and returned aspiring to be, Ryan said, “like Bocuse and his band”—the Troisgros brothers, Alain Chapel, François Bise, Louis Outhier, and Raymond Thuilier, all disciples of the legendary Fernand Point and La Pyramide.

  “And then we have the beginnings of the American food revolution in the eighties—folks become a lot more media savvy—media certainly gains traction and wants to write about chefs. They used to be called ‘star chefs’ back in the eighties. That’s when Wolfgang Puck started, and Larry Forgione and Jasper White, Todd English, Dean Fearing, Jeremiah Tower, and you can go through the list—many of them still big names today, or bigger names today.

  “Then comes television, and I think that notches it up, because you have twenty-four-hour cable television, and that makes a big difference.

  “But by and large I think it’s a good thing for the industry. The respect that chefs have as professionals is enhanced and higher than it ever has been before.”

  To support this claim he mentioned two names synonymous with American fortunes and high society who now attend the institute. Indeed, that becoming a cook was now acceptable in the American aristocracy said everything about what America thinks of its chefs.

  “This is a wonderful profession and opportunity,” Ryan said. “You can really do something great, and make a name for yourself, and maybe make another fortune if you already come from a fortune. It is socially not only acceptable but desirable.”

  But I wondered aloud at this. This fact is due to a romanticized version of the chef. How long will the scion of blue-blooded aristocracy last in his first kitchen where he does nothing but peel veg and turn artichokes. You don’t just open a restaurant after graduation and expect booming business and TV show offers. It takes years of hard, hot work before you have the clout to move into the upper echelons of the profession—for those who make it at all into the upper echelons.

  “Is this romanticized version of the chef harmful?” I asked Ryan.

  “The answer to every question legitimately is, it depends. It’s no different from wanting to be Tiger Woods and having an idealized version of that, or wanting to be Tom Cruise. Very few people end up making it to those rarefied levels. But part of being American is to be able to aspire to that. That any kid can be president, that may be a uniquely American perspective—I don’t know. But is that ability to dream, to aspire to do great things, good for society? I have to believe it is.”

  “Why are so many pe
ople interested, some would even say obsessed, with this work, with ‘The Chef’?” I asked.

  “It sounds trite,” Ryan answered, “but it’s one of those things that everybody in the world has in common—everybody eats, and everybody has to cook or go out or whatever.” In the fifties, the country had different priorities, he explained. We weren’t focused on food. But society began to change—America began to change. “Without a highway system, the food-service industry really doesn’t evolve in the way that it does—without a popularization of the automobile, you can’t forget about that and modern transportation. But people can relate to food, and think they have some experience with it and try it out. I can admire Ernie Els or Phil Mickelson or Tiger Woods just by watching them on TV even if I’m not a golfer. But if I go out there and try to do it, and see how hard it really is, your appreciation and respect is enhanced, and since everybody eats and the majority of people cook, when you see a truly great practitioner you can appreciate it in a different way.

  “I think we have some characters, too,” he continued. “Chefs have personalities, there’s no question about it. We tend not to be bland individuals. God bless all my friends in the accounting industry, but you tend not to want your accountant to be flamboyant and adventurous and risk-taking. But in an artist and in a chef those things are desirable. That’s part of who they are. These people have personalities and are entertaining and they have talent. They’re not just comedians or actors—they are practitioners of a craft.”