The Reach of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  This is Keller’s colleague and contemporary with whom he can, through food and cooking, teach this country how to think about food, which of course is only a step or two away from teaching people how to think about life, which of course is the territory of the artist.

  Some chefs argue with me for saying that chefs are craftsmen and not artists. Every chef is not an artist, but those chefs like Keller and Rodgers and Masa and Grant and Melissa, who try to tell us, through the example of their food, how we might live, they truly are the artists—artists who happen to be chefs.

  But Keller himself said he was not even cooking, that he wasn’t a chef anymore in the old conception of it. What is “the chef” then? What kind of shoes does the chef wear today? What does a chef do? And have we lost something forever because of it?

  The chef today is running a company, now composed of many separate businesses. The chef isn’t in the kitchen, he’s in the office. He wears a business jacket, not a chef’s coat. He puts on a chef’s coat for photo shoots and gives interviews to the press that he hopes will be good for his businesses. He meets with or conference-calls the general managers and chefs de cuisine of his various restaurants. Soon these chefs won’t cook either, if they advance. Pretty soon, they’ve got on a business jacket. The chef puts on a Brooks Brothers no-iron shirt and a pair of casual slacks and moves into retail. The chef licenses his name to manufacturers, and he visits the factory in France or California to observe the quality of the product and meet with the company’s directors. He puts on a hard hat to view the new restaurant under construction. Flying home he reviews the proofs of the manuscript for the next book, which has been created by another faction of his team.

  “The chef is the one who’s setting the standard,” Keller says. “The chef expresses a vision. The chef motivates people. The chef gives his staff the tools they need to excel. Is that being a CEO? Definitely.”

  This fact, the fact that the chef is a CEO, changes the whole restaurant culture, forces the people working in it to reevaluate their skills and their ambitions, a reevaluation that begins now all the way back in cooking school, where so many young culinarians begin their careers. The changing nature of the work of a chef is shaping the schools that are shaping the kids. And the best of them will open restaurants like Primo and Alinea, they’ll move into food corporations and hospitality institutions and raise the standards there. Some of them will find their way onto television and perhaps have the most influence of any of their colleagues because of the vast numbers of people they can reach through this medium, provided they remember food television is about personality and entertainment and only incidentally about food.

  The chef is now a powerful force, and with that power the chef can start businesses, develop products, and change people’s minds. Is this a good thing? If the business is a good one, it is; if the product is good, yes. But only if.

  Within all this complexity—chefs traveling around the globe, everywhere but in their own restaurants it sometimes seems—all this product development, entertainment, rollouts, buyouts, licensing, and merchandising, where is the romance of professional cooking? The chef in his kitchen, the romantic life of the chef. Was it a lie, a kind of consumer-generated fantasy that made it more fun to eat out and made more respectable the slog of kitchen work? The best in the country scarcely cooked anymore as a direct result of their success at cooking. If it was inevitable that the best in this field ultimately selected themselves out, was the American restaurant in danger of a kind of reverse Darwinism? A thriving of the least fit? Somehow that doesn’t seem outlandish in this crazy food-neurotic country, driven by agribusiness that eliminates the variety of our crops and debases our livestock. But is it true?

  No, because Melissa is in the kitchen this very moment, and so is Grant, and Masa’s restaurant can’t open if he’s not in his kitchen. Polcyn and Pardus and Turgeon are teaching scores of the next generation—they’re in their whites and holding a student’s chef’s knife to begin a demo, and if that knife isn’t sharp as a straight razor, I hope they keep that knife till the student learns that his or her knives are sacred. They are the tools of the trade—and it is a trade, a proud one when it’s properly practiced, and also a trade that can become an art only if the cook chooses to stay in the kitchen. The kitchen is where the complexity of the professional cooking world is not muddled by business-school jargon and greedy ambition and ego. The product is good or it is not, it’s cooked right or it’s not, it’s delicious or it is not. The end makes it clear.

  When this whole chef world gets too complicated, when all this talk of branding is too much, and the head spins with notions of rollouts and management contracts and licensing deals and charitable foundations and television opportunities and Vegas, there’s always this: the kitchen. We’ve all got to eat. A kitchen is a good place to be, almost always the best place in the house, whether that house is a home or a restaurant. A place where you can’t lie to yourself. Go to the kitchen. Wipe down your counter till it shines. Set out a heavy cutting board. Steel a paring knife and a chef’s knife. Gather your shallots, your parsley, your tomatoes, and the rest of your mise en place, and stand in one place and cook for a long time. That’s the greatest thing about a kitchen—it’s guaranteed always to be there, will always be only and exactly what it is. That’s where the greatness begins. And it will be there for you when you come back in from the complex world that it opened up for you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I’d like to thank all the chefs who participated in this book. They were unfailingly generous with their time, their knowledge, and their kitchens.

  I’d also like to thank, as ever, my agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, and my editor, Ray Roberts. I’m grateful also to production editor Bruce Giffords at Viking. The copy editor of this book, John Jusino, deserves special thanks for saving me from innumerable embarrassments regarding name spellings and dangling clauses. Two magazines, Gourmet and Golf Connoisseur, gave me assignments (and travel and expense money) to pursue information that is included in this book, material I’d have been unable to get otherwise.

  Last, I’d like to thank my family for allowing me so much time away—and for being so fine when I got home.

  * Trotter would back out of the deal in the fall of 2005. By the end of the year the space remained unspoken for.

  * Pictures of these dishes, the menu, and the restaurant can be seen on the Web site of the eGullet Society for Culinary Arts & Letters (egullet.org), in a forum devoted to discussion of the restaurant: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showtopic=66997&st=0.