Roland G. Henin

by Susan Crowther

  That’s my 50 percent of the bargain: write these menus and practice the Mystery Basket, so when I show up to cook and demonstrate my skills in front of Chef, who has flown three thousand miles and has lost four hours of sleep due to the time change and has missed out on two fishing trips, I don’t go backward. So long as you’re making progress, you’re going in the right direction. But sometimes we weren’t moving in the direction fast enough. That’s the same with my staff. We talked about how you should do that project and yet, they chose to do the opposite. “Well, we were short staffed,” or “Well, I didn’t have the right product,” or, as Chef says, “Save zee excuses for the judges.”

  SUSAN: What is Chef passionate about?

  KEVIN: Everybody’s going to say food. I truly believe it’s every person or thing that he can touch. He’s passionate about a clean chef coat. He shines his fishing lures with a silver or copper polish, before he goes fishing. That’s why he catches the big fish! He’s passionate about his integrity. All a person has is their integrity … nothing more, nothing less. Without integrity, we’re nothing. And of course, Chef is passionate about food. Chef was strictly food—not payroll, not HR, not the babysitter, not the shrink. He was the chef. At the end of the day, he was the chef. He was responsible for food going to the guest. There was somebody who did the schedule and somebody to do the payroll. His job was to manage that kitchen and cook.

  You try to tell Chef, “Hey, I have a meeting to go to.”

  “That’s bullshit! That’s bullshit! That’s somebody else’s job! You need to cook. This is a food business, not working on a laptop!”

  “Yes, Chef.”

  I know he gets it, but he doesn’t want to get it, doesn’t care. There was one goal.

  When you look at the meetings, the scheduling, the PR, all that crap as he says, you don’t need it. A lot of the kids today get all locked up into that. They forget why they’re putting on that white coat. It’s not to go to the meeting, and it’s not to, Oh, I gotta do my hair. They don’t even wear kitchen shoes. They wear dress shoes! They walk around in their Monday-through-Friday and somebody does something and, oh Chef, I need you to take a picture here now. God forbid if they get in somewhere and need to cook. They need a person who cooks for them, now. I guess that’s the difference between “Then” and “Now.” I would have liked to have seen “Then.” I think “Then” was a good place, but it was probably twice as hard; everything you wanted to research, you truly had to research: go to a library; reach out to somebody; go work someplace for a few months, to learn about a menu item or a technique.

  SUSAN: How does Chef differ as a CMC coach, versus as a boss?

  KEVIN: He was never my boss, per se. He was a reference, somebody to keep you in check—that humble pie, so you didn’t get too big for your britches. We did parties all around the country: Lake Placid, Florida, and Buffalo. He can smell what you’re made of, and he pushes hard. Some people he will acknowledge and be cordial and professional, but he can tell they’re not in it for the long haul and are just looking for the better position or promotion. There’s a group of us who see that, because wow, he doesn’t bust anybody else’s chops. Or somebody will say, “Wow, he busts your chops hard!” Well, yeah. I’m worth it. Plus, I got thick skin, I’m not going to curl up into a ball and roll away in the fetal position. I’m a big boy. I can take it.

  We were meeting in my office here in Boston, and he looked at me and started raising his voice. “You should go back to Johnson & Wales and ask for your F’in money back! You got shortchanged! Stupid!”

  “Yes, Chef! I’ll write a letter today.”

  “They taught you nothing!”

  That’s the beauty of it. There’s no punches and nothing held back. He’s not going to sugarcoat it. “Why, why would you do this?”

  “I don’t know, Chef. I don’t know. I don’t have an answer.”

  “Well, that’s bullshit!”

  And there you go. You can hear him say this, correct?

  I got him in a good mood, in a meeting … everybody’s in a great mood. An article came out in the CIA about lobster bisque. I said to a couple of chefs, “I’m going to get Chef angry.”

  “Why are you going to do that? Why? Why?”

  “Chef, look at this article. I don’t think this is right.”

  He puts his glasses on and he’s reading it and he slams his fists on the thing. “They are stupid! I’m going to write to the dean! I’m going to write to CIA!”

  The article thickened lobster bisque with roux, and he got so mad! He looks at me afterward and goes, “Why would you do that to me?”

  “I don’t know, Chef. I thought it was payback.”

  He goes, “Ohh!”

  SUSAN: Describe your own mentoring style.

  KEVIN: I hate to say it. I’m the same way. Spending over ten years with somebody, I used to say that I was the product of the last chef I worked for, because I worked for so long with him, but I can honestly say now that the style has changed almost to mimic everything Chef Henin does. Like the patience level. You gotta do your part. I’m not going to just give you the answer … back to the thought process. Any mentoring differences are based upon how the world is today. Everything is go, go, go and technology-driven. Yes, it’s easy for me to pick up my iPhone and Google it. Technology has helped, but it’s also kind of hindered.

  SUSAN: I don’t mean to sound like an old codger, but it’s an entitled generation. They expect a lot of praise and everything spoon-fed. Google solves all their problems, so they don’t learn how to solve on their own.

  KEVIN: Yep. You have a conversation with somebody about something that either is incorrect or non-usable, and they get all upset. What do you mean? I showed up for work. You need to praise me. You need to give me more money. You need to give me a raise. I don’t need to praise you. You need to give me 100 percent. That’s what Chef has given me. One hundred percent.

  Andrew Friedman

  Food Writer, Author of Knives at Dawn: America’s Quest for Culinary Glory at the Bocuse d’Or, the World’s Most Prestigious Cooking Competition (Free Press, Simon & Schuster, 2009)

  Don’t let your sensibilities be offended.

  ANDREW: I first met Roland Henin when preparing to write Knives at Dawn, about the Bocuse d’Or Competition. Roland was coaching the US team. He had previously coached his colleague, Hartmut Handke, in 2003. Two thousand eight was the first year the USA effort was under the auspices of Daniel Boulud, Thomas Keller, and Jerome Bocuse.

  I went into the project with no prior experience of cooking competitions—none at all! I went to the team tryouts in Orlando before I sold my book project, gathering material for a book proposal. During tryouts, there were four competition kitchens set up, a facsimile of the real Bocuse competition in Lyon, France. Tryouts lasted two days. Teams were going through these long—five-plus hours—cooking routines.

  I met Roland the night before tryouts. At several points during the next day, Roland took my arm and walked me along these kitchens, pointing out things the judges should be noticing. This was invaluable, because a lot of the people involved in the US team—including Thomas Keller and Daniel Boulud—didn’t know much about cooking competitions. There were not a lot of people who could impart this information to me. We’d walk through the kitchens and he’d say: See how organized this person is, whereas this person is more chaotic, doing it on the fly. See how this person has a “Punch list” or schedule of their preparations on the wall, and this other one doesn’t. This person keeps cleaning as they go. See how these two people have this down to a routine, and these two people don’t. The first time he did this, I audiotaped him, taking it all in. With the legend of Thomas Keller, Roland is a figure that looms pretty large. Thomas will tell you that Roland was a catalyst in his transformation from an anonymous American cook in Rhode Island to one of the most important chefs we’ve ever had in the United States.

  Roland is huge [laughs]—I mean, he’s a very tall guy
with exaggerated features—huge hands, and this deep throaty French voice. All that could have been intimidating, but he was this incredibly nurturing guy with somebody he’d never met before. During those two days, I would go over to him and say, “Feel like washing the windows?” He’d go, “Well, you got five dollars?” A few times, he had Hartmut Handke join us. I believe the two of them are fishing buddies. Hartmut is basically what I describe as a “Competition Junkie.” I went to his house to interview him, and he literally had a trophy like a cup, filled with medals from dozens of competitions. Roland got Hartmut involved, and the two of them became my guardian angels for those two days in Florida.

  The French Laundry team won the Bocuse trials: Timothy Hollingsworth and his commis, Adina Guest. I traveled to Yountville four times, between October 2008 and January 2009, to observe training at what they call the Bocuse House, dedicated as a training home for the team. The regional notion was that the chef representing the US would take a three- to four-month sabbatical—leave their job to train. That ended up not being the reality; Chef Tim continued working throughout training. Roland made no secret of the fact that he was displeased: you could not be working full-time and preparing for this competition.

  Tim had figured out what he wanted to cook and put out his meat platter for the first time. Roland flew in for this demonstration, and the smile on his face was just … impressed and proud. The team ended up coming in sixth place. Henin believes that if the candidate had been training full-time, he would have come away with a medal. The food was good enough and his skills strong enough, but there just wasn’t enough time to deliver it. It bothered him, in terms of unrealized potential.

  I accompanied the team to France about ten days before the competition to get over jet lag and do practice runs. The funny thing between me and Roland is when we went to France. I didn’t know this when we all went over there, but it was his strong opinion that having a writer present in France was a distraction for the team. They didn’t need “mental interference,” seeing a person with a tape recorder and notebook out of the corner of their eye.

  At some point in the trip, it was like he turned off a switch. The team met each morning in the little breakfast room. There was a stretch of mornings where he wouldn’t acknowledge me at the table. Sometimes I would be the first down and he would be the second. He would just [laughs] get his food and sit at a different position at the table. Sometimes everyone would get their food and they’d sit down and say, “Good morning,” and he wouldn’t. If I contributed to the conversation, he would never pick up on it. It was as if I, literally, ceased to exist to him.

  “Chef, is there something I’ve done? Are you upset with me?”

  “Don’t let your sensibilities be offended.”

  He explained that the team should now be in a bubble. My point of view was that the Bocuse d’Or committee was in charge—not me or him. I had a book to write and there was no way around it. He understood that, but our priorities were different. Nothing else mattered to him but the mission, as the day grew closer.

  SUSAN: You could feel the tension in the book, without it being stated explicitly.

  ANDREW: Roland trained at a time when kitchens were boot camps: sink or swim. European apprenticeships were like medical school, normal to work six days a week, lunch and dinner, with a nap on the banquette in between meals. Things are different now, with a slightly more human view of the kitchen. For instance, there was a point in the book where, just before the Bocuse event, Chef Timothy decides to take a surfing vacation instead of having another round of training. I don’t know that it wasn’t the most useful thing for Tim to go surfing, yet he might have broken if he didn’t. Maybe he needed that break … I don’t know. I see both sides. But Roland was insistent.

  After the competition, all the team equipment had to be packed into a van to be stored at Daniel Boulud’s parents’ farm. Henin was so upset, I assume, by the results, that he did a lot of the loading by himself. I don’t know how old Roland was at the time, but he had to be well into his sixties. He got there before the team, and in like a fit, was loading the van—I mean, carrying big boxes out of the catering hall, into the van, and almost throwing them in there. Nobody was going near him. It was something to see! Also, he had a bit of a hip or knee injury from running. It was a very impressive physical and emotional display of raw emotion. No words or anything … the body language spoke for itself.

  The team went for a final dinner. It was probably stress about working on my project, plus being the night after the competition, but I got sick and couldn’t go and say my good-byes. I sent Roland an email from my hotel room thanking him for everything, for putting up with me, and saying that I’d see him again soon. Of course, now with the competition over, I got the loveliest email back, clearly from a different man than the one I had experienced in the last few days.

  Roland gave me time in person. He was being honored at the CIA–Greystone campus and he invited me. He gave this great speech about this cooking instructor and these four students who go out and party the night before a big test and come in and lie about having had a flat tire. The cooking instructor, in his wisdom, asks them the one question that proves the lie. First of all, it’s a great story about smart-ass kids being taught a lesson. It’s a distinct story about the kitchen and what you can (and cannot) get away with—a very Roland story. Here is a guy, way too big to be described as the Yoda of the Culinary World, but who is definitely one of the Mystical Elders.

  Funny thing is, he’s not known that way. Roland had been an instructor at the CIA during a very important time in the United States. People talk about his relationship with Thomas, but Roland had been an instructor in the late seventies and early eighties. A lot of now-famous people went through there at that time, chefs who remember him vividly! Not just Thomas Keller! There are a ton of people who are now in their mid-fifties to late sixties who went through the CIA when it was, by a mile, the place where aspiring young American cooks went if they could afford to go to cooking school. There are a handful of classic instructors that get talked about by people who went there—Sonnenschmidt was one of them, Eugene Bernard … and Roland Henin!

  A lot of people will tell you he was incredibly demanding, but they learned a lot. I interviewed a guy named Mike Colameco who has a show called Real Food on PBS. He told me that Henin would do things like: you’d be cooking something, and you’d go and get something, and he would turn your oven off. Why would he do that? To teach you to be ready for the unexpected. That’s the kind of thing some guy might do to you in a professional kitchen at that time, just out of competition. Henin knew that, and he’d do it to prepare you. Roland is one of these people who may not win the Who’s Who Award at the James Beard Competition and is not enshrined anywhere, but is one of those people from that time who had a profound influence through his being a CIA instructor. That is an underappreciated role. Everyone talks about the chefs they worked for in restaurants, early in their career. It was an incredibly important time in the Culinary Institute of America’s history, challenging the cliché of the French chef having no regard for America as a place where people knew how to cook or even having raw talent. Roland loves the United States, how open it is! In terms of culinary evolution, what has happened in this country in thirty years would take two hundred years in France.

  Paul Bocuse’s original utopian idea about the Bocuse d’Or was that representatives of different countries would come and cook food in the style of their country. Most people think that doesn’t work, unless you’re from Europe. If you come from Mexico, how are judges able to evaluate your food if they are not from Mexico? Roland is enthusiastic about food products perceived as “American” and believes they should be represented in the American platter. He always would bring up maple syrup; it was this great American ingredient. He knows more than I do, so I say this with all due respect, but my feeling is that would be something too sweet for a lot of the palates on the judging panel in France. There a
re people involved who would disagree with Roland on that point, but I thought it was interesting that, here was a guy from France who was so keen on being a “booster” for the American palate.

  Everyone knows that Thomas Keller’s kitchens are among the cleanest kitchens, even people who worked for Thomas back in the eighties in New York. You’ll ask, “What do you remember about Thomas Keller, when he was at Rakel?” One of the first things everyone will say is, “He was always cleaning.” When the Bocuse team practiced, they generated a lot of dishes. Adina would clean up and sometimes Timmy would do it, but, I gotta tell you … often, if the team was doing a practice or whatever, Roland would jump in and clean—get right in the sink and wash dishes. It was a touching gesture from someone who didn’t need to be doing that at all and could have stayed in the corner working.

  Right before the team flew to Lyon, Roland cooked them dinner at the Bocuse house. It was a beautiful thing, and they were all touched by that. When I describe his dissatisfaction, I don’t want to make it seem like that’s entirely the case. Just that he was up-front about the things he thought should have been different. It wasn’t by any means an adversarial relationship, and I hope I’m giving it the proper balance. He was on a mission, and I didn’t fit into the mission. Up until the point where I didn’t interfere with that, he was just about as gracious and supportive as anybody could be. But then, there was that little zone of time where I think he felt that my … presence … I don’t want to say my existence, but my presence was at odds with the mission. It was as simple as that. It’s like I said before, like they say in The Godfather: It was just business, it wasn’t personal.