The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  The garde manger class concluded with what’s called a Grand Buffet, an event that sounds straight out of the age of Carême and takes up four of the class’s fourteen days, three in preparation, and one day for setup and service. It’s a big deal. Large serving tables beneath vast tablecloths are assembled in the center of the dining hall (a former chapel that retains its stained-glass Bible scenes) and special serving platters are brought in. All of it has to be trucked from the basement level, where the garde manger kitchens are, to the main floor. Baking and pastry classes, held in a different building, bring in all their buffet concoctions, from baguettes to pretzels, plated desserts to petits fours on mirrors. And half the school is invited to have lunch here on this day, the day of the Grand Buffet, or several hours later, their dinner, prepared by the P.M. garde manger students.

  Turgeon has divided the class into six teams working three stations, each station serving a particular style of cuisine. Almost needless to say, there is a classic French station—France is where so much of the garde manger discipline originates. So Turgeon will oversee the slicing, presentation, and serving of dishes one expects to see at a Grand Buffet—roulade of foie gras and magret (the breast of the Moulard duck, raised for its foie gras—it’s almost as rich as a thick strip steak) with a fruit compote and sliced toasted brioche; a salmon pâté en croute; a smoked chicken liver terrine.

  For the Italian station, he’s included a pork loin stuffed with sausage, which will be served with a Caesar salad and eggplant “croutons.” He calls out “Demo!” and the class huddles around station six as he demonstrates rolling the loin, butterflied and pounded flat, around the sausage and tying it. It will be browned, then roasted. “Watch the sear on the pork,” he tells the group, noting pork’s low-fat content. “The industry has raised these pigs to be chickens—they oughta have feathers.” Next he moves on to the table preparing the favas for the three-bean salad, served with the tuna confit. He peels a raw fava—it’s kind of a pain, he says, but it makes a difference. This was new—I’d peeled thousands of favas for his American Bounty succotash, and I always cooked them, shocked them, then peeled them. When they’ve been cooked, they pop right out of the skin; raw, it’s like peeling an egg. When I noted the change, Turgeon informs me, every now and then with the old method, a batch would turn brown; this way, they never turn brown. Then on to the tuna, which he wants cut very small. “Portion size is really critical,” he says. “You don’t want a lot of big stuff on the plate. Get in touch with your feminine side, don’t be afraid of it. Think of this as Barbie food.” Then he barreled forward, on to the foie gras roulade.

  I felt lucky he’d put me with the group in charge of something a little less familiar and more exciting: the Southwestern station. This was what the school meant by embracing the more practical demands of today. There would be a terrine, of course, but on this station it would be a chile-chicken terrine—dark meat ground with fat and seasoned with shallot, jalapeño, garlic, and oregano. Its interior garnish (things left whole and folded into the meat-loaf mixture that make the pâté visually and texturally dynamic) included roasted poblanos in addition to ham and chicken breast. The team making it must research and devise a suitable accompaniment—it would be some sort of chunky salsa.

  Turgeon had a bent toward this kind of food, with its vivid flavors. In Bounty the steak that came off my station got a dry rub of ancho and cayenne powders, cumin, mustard, paprika, salt, pepper, sugar, and dried oregano before being grilled, and was served with a barbecue sauce—with a base of roasted tomatoes and veal stock—that included more dried and ground peppers, coriander, molasses, honey, and was at the end spiked with cilantro and bourbon. Now, for his Grand Buffet menu he did an ancho-rubbed skirt steak, which would be served as a tortilla with lime-cilantro sour cream, roasted red pepper and achiote salsa, and a chipotle pico de gallo. That’s delicious just to think about, just as delicious sounding even if you didn’t know what all that stuff meant, and you’d have to be a really bad cook to screw something like that up.

  He did a sweet corn–and–shrimp soup, a chowderlike concoction seasoned with jalapeño, cumin, coriander, and lime. There were pork empanadas and barbecued lamb tamales (which used a barbecue sauce similar to the one I’d made in Bounty; mercifully, this one included no brown sauce about which I had become bitter and resentful while working there) and wild mushroom–and–cheese quesadillas. Even the salads were exciting, especially the one featuring fingerling potatoes, chorizo, and roasted poblanos.

  This was American regional cuisine from the Southwest, a breath away from Mexican cuisine. But it was also, now, amazingly, the stuff of a classically influenced Grand Buffet.

  Turgeon would stride past the tables during setup in the main hall, looking serious as a Doberman. Directly behind these students, the other A.M. class set up its stations. Casting a glance at the instructor of this class, John Kowalski, CIA class of 1977, Turgeon, ever straight-faced and deadly serious, said, “Hey, those recipes you got out of Martha Stewart Living are looking pretty good.”

  Kowalski, busy with setup, grimaced but failed to come up with a return thrust. There’s a healthy competition among instructors here, especially when their food is on display side by side.

  Turgeon estimated this was about his fiftieth Grand Buffet—nothing compared with the four hundred or so Chef James Heywood did during his many years as a garde manger instructor, but it felt impressive nonetheless. For his students, every thirteenth day of every block went like this: 7:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M., gather mise en place, post To Do sheets, glaze, slice, dress, and finish all food. From 9:00 to 9:20, take equipment upstairs. By 10:00 A.M., finalize mise en place, change jacket (this is public cheffing, after all—gotta look clean), and organize stations. From 10:00 to 10:30, take food upstairs. At 10:30, Turgeon would demo each “interactive” station (those stations slicing meat to order or heating and finishing soup). At 11:00, roughly 350 students filed in and had their pick of French, Southwestern, and Italian foods, or, on the other side, Kowalski’s class’s stations, American regional from the South and from the Hudson Valley, and a station devoted to fish. In an hour their work and three days of preparation was done, time to break down, clean up, scrub the kitchen, and set out stools for the day’s evaluation and a Day 13 quiz. (Turgeon, who was doing doubles this week, would repeat each step exactly seven hours later with the P.M. class.) Tomorrow would be the students’ last class before leaving for an externship, paid work in the field, for at least four months.

  My very first day there, Turgeon called to me: “Hey, Michael, c’mere.” He wanted me to see an e-mail that related directly to something we’d been talking about.

  When I’d been there earlier in the spring, I began asking most chefs I spoke with how the place was changing. There were various responses, of course, but a single issue was almost unanimously common: the students had begun to complain. Not about anything specific; they were just generally more quick to voice discontent—about homework assignments, grades, workloads, stress factors, how difficult this or that instructor was being. If they didn’t complain to their instructor, then they complained to the dean in charge of that instructor’s team, and if not to the dean, then to their parents, who then called the school.

  When I asked Ryan about this, he said, yes, both students and parents complained with increasing frequency. He said he hoped he wouldn’t be like that when his kids were in school, but then shrugged as if to say, How can you know? Indeed, perhaps it was a change in the culture at large, related to parents’ deepening involvement in their kids’ lives as well as to a culture increasingly attuned to diversity in the workplace.

  Whatever the reason, for the chef-instructors at a culinary school, the effects of this complaining may be more pronounced than they are for instructors in other types of schools. It seemed to undo a primary dynamic of the kitchen—the chef as omnipotent authority. Eve Felder, CIA class of 1988, who’d been my garde manger instructor, was now the assistant d
ean in charge of curriculum and instruction. She suggested the change in the dynamic may have begun in 1989, when the school first gave students teacher-evaluation sheets, officially called “Feedback Forms,” to fill out at the end of each block. This was a revolutionary idea (and not a very pleasant one) to a chef who had been pretty much allowed to do what he wanted in his own kitchen. “My staff gets to evaluate me? Grade me?” Furthermore, everywhere in the industry, in every kind of kitchen, complaining wasn’t done—you just didn’t do it. This was a fundamental part of kitchen culture. Why? I don’t know. Perhaps kitchen work is so damn hard that if you had any complaining gene in you at all you just got deselected out quickly. You let one complainer into a place this hard and hot and miserable, and pretty soon you’ll be overrun by whiners. Or maybe it was simpler than that: Complaining in a kitchen just doesn’t make any sense. It would be like walking through the Sahara and complaining about how hot it is. Obvious and irrelevant.

  My favorite complaining story in a kitchen comes from Thomas Keller during his Rakel days: It had been a killer service and a long week, and one of his beat, sweaty line cooks couldn’t wait to start breaking down his station to begin the work of cleaning the kitchen so he could go home. Then, at 10:55, five minutes before the kitchen closed, a server entered the kitchen announcing a late walk-in—“Order in!”—and slapped a ticket on the line cook’s shelf. The line cook groaned. Keller fired the guy on the spot. The incredulous line cook said he was sorry. Keller told him to go home. The line cook couldn’t believe it—said he was sorry. Keller told him to get out, told him if you don’t like to cook, I don’t want you in my kitchen. Keller meant it. And that was that.

  You didn’t complain in a kitchen—you quit.

  Another Keller-related complaining story: Keller was evidently fairly demanding of all his cooks, and often what he asked didn’t make sense to the one doing the work. He had one such prep cook picking basil. The prep cook had a pile of leaves in front of him and had thrown all the stems in the garbage. Keller, who was experimenting with infused oils—it was earlier in his career; he’d never use stems now, but at the time he was trying it—told the prep cook to get all those stems out of the garbage. This apparently was the last straw. The prep cook grabbed for the nearest knife and began chasing Keller around the kitchen. The guy had snapped. This is a more conventional form of complaining in the kitchen.

  It all goes back to the fact that a professional kitchen is a place unto itself, a place where you can’t lie. To allow people to complain opens up the doors to self-deception, laziness, and a lack of accountability. The work is hard; no one’s forcing you to be here. If you don’t like it, leave. If it’s too hard, if you can’t do it, we’ll find someone who can—nothing personal—but service starts at 5:30 and there’s a lot to do.

  Certainly there has been behavior in revered kitchens on the part of the chef that would be considered criminal in the corporate world. It’s hard to imagine the boss at your software company or ad agency jabbing your ass with a carving fork to get you to work faster, actually drawing blood—it wouldn’t fly. But it happens in kitchens—a good thing houndstooth check hides spots. Thrown knives, sauté pans whipping past your ear—it happens.

  But it’s a different world today. You could get sued. The world of the restaurant has gotten complicated. In 1997 a hostess at the four-star restaurant Lespinasse in Manhattan, led by Gray Kunz, sued the maî tre d’ for sexual harassment. Her actions, being a form of complaining by one of his staff, prompted Kunz to fire her. But hundreds of workers at the St. Regis Hotel, which housed the restaurant, protested the woman’s dismissal, disrupting work and forcing guests to carry their own bags. The hotel rehired the hostess the following day. The issue grew so volatile that Chef Kunz left the kitchen for three weeks, till people cooled off. A half year later, he was gone (he said it had nothing to do with the event, that he wanted to open his own place—something that wouldn’t happen for six years). Could that same Keller line cook file a wrongful-dismissal suit today? Maybe. Four-star kitchens have become haltingly respectable. In Keller’s kitchens, everyone addresses everyone—from the lowest culinary school extern to Keller himself—as “Chef,” a term of respect. There’s no yelling and no throwing of utensils, and it’s been years since anyone’s chased Keller around the kitchen with a knife. Indeed, in the fall of 2004, the French Laundry fired a sous-chef for what was described by numerous sources as grossly unprofessional behavior involving physical and verbal aggression and intimidation.

  The CIA, of course, happened to be training those people who would go out into the new professional kitchen and other segments of the industry. It believed the standard of professionalism was not relative to one’s surroundings—standards applied to the corporate boardroom and skills kitchen in equal measure. But it was the power of the students to complain, combined with the changing nature of the workplace, the country’s increasing ethnic diversity, and the growing sensitivity generally to discrimination and harassment, that was causing some Sturm und Drang among the teaching staff. What was acceptable behavior on the part of the chef-instructor and what was not seemed to be changing. Screaming was once considered an effective tool for getting something done in a kitchen—that didn’t fly anymore, and no one had a problem with it, but did that mean you couldn’t express anger? If you could, how much and in what form? If you wanted a kid to be accountable for his work, to be prepared for the day’s lesson, say, come to class with a To Do list or having memorized key techniques and terms in cheese making, and he didn’t, you could get mad at him, but nowadays, that kid could complain that your getting mad was intimidating. And, now, intimidation is not allowed.

  Turgeon later described the effect of this on chef-instructors to me this way, a small example from a uniformly respected and admired teacher who, though considered tough, generates very few complaints: “When I was in Bounty, I didn’t think twice about saying ‘fuck,’” he told me. “But one day in here, I got really upset at a group that was under-performing. I turned and walked toward the sink and said ‘fuck.’ This was a Friday and I went home and worried about it all weekend. Am I gonna get in trouble for that? Maybe the group thought I was yelling at them. Or maybe one of the kids is really sensitive and is gonna report me.” Turgeon has had a student begin to cry in front of him. They’re a different bunch these days. Many chefs say the student body has gotten younger, though during the past few years the average age of a student has dropped from twenty-four to only twenty-three. In Turgeon’s class, the oldest student was twenty-three—except for one career-changer, a forty-one-year-old woman named Mary, who’d left mortgage banking to pursue her culinary ambitions. (That’s a serious career change, but it seemed kind of a no-brainer to me. Mortgage banking or working in kitchens…hmm, let’s see. Mary wasn’t sure what she’d do with her culinary education but thought she was headed toward catering.) And another profound change: Most of these students didn’t even want to be chefs. It used to be that sixteen out of the eighteen students would want to be chefs. “Now,” Turgeon said, “it’s half.”

  All things considered, the timing of the student e-mail was apropos as far as my addressing this issue at the school and underscored its pervasiveness. The e-mail, by a student named Emily Annas, had been disseminated unsigned to the entire faculty by Jerry Fischetti, the associate professor who teaches Introduction to Interpersonal Communication. It had been written in response to a class assignment and was less dramatic itself than the response it elicited from the faculty.

  “In my IIPC class,” Fischetti wrote, “one assignment is to answer the following question: Comment on the statement, ‘When emotions are involved, the emotions become the message.’” The student agreed with the statement and his response followed:

  On the opposite end of the spectrum, a person who is upset, angry, or hostile is going to send that message and that message only. In the culinary industry, it was a common practice for chefs to teach by methods of fear and intimidation, n
ot by compassion or patience. Some chefs teaching at the CIA, to this day, still practice those methods of teaching, and the effect on the student is discouraging. A student who is yelled at by an angry, upset chef only hears the negative aspects and not the lesson the chef is supposedly trying to teach. Hostile chefs create a lack of interest in the student, a desire to stop listening, to emotionally shut down and close their mind to learning new things—the exact opposite of what the chef-instructor is supposedly trying to achieve.

  Turgeon immediately dispatched an off-the-cuff response, one that every chef who’d come to the warm world of the CIA from the dark and stormy world of restaurants appreciated, many of whom wrote similar responses:

  Jerry, could you keep a record of this statement and send it back to this student after they have been in the industry for 5 to 10 years and let’s see how their thoughts on this subject have changed. When the reality hits…your dishwasher just called out; your saucier just gave notice; the next months you foresee having just one day off; you currently are putting in about 80 hours a week; you just had to fire the front-of-the-house manager because they are stealing wine from the cellar; you need a new dishwashing machine because the old one is on its last legs; your business has been down the last couple of weeks because of high gas prices, and it’s absolutely crucial that the local newspaper’s review of you is a good one; and so on!