Roland G. Henin

by Susan Crowther

  Roland was a floor judge. He kept coming by and looking in my garbage can. I’d sneak up behind him and pretend that I was gonna nudge him into that garbage can.

  He said, “What are you doing, Chef Dan?”

  “Listen, Roland, I’m not putting anything in there. You think I’m crazy?” I said, “Go get a job as a garbage man. That’s not where the food is, it’s up here on the table.”

  “Now, you need to be respectful, Chef.”

  “I love you, Roland. You’re not going to find nothing in there.”

  SUSAN: You sound more like his colleague than his mentee. You’ve earned that status.

  DAN: I enjoy spending time with Roland. He’s a fisherman. He didn’t go to our last Master Chefs’ meeting because he wanted to go salmon fishing. It was the peak of the season and I just love that he did that. I’m a hunter, and I’ve made my own long bows and arrows. I have to have my freedom. Roland and I connect in that way. We spent so many years in kitchens, on quarter tile floor, wet slippery knives, and crazy people, right? Around people, kids, and students who should be doing anything else except cooking … we did that for fifty years. It’s good to get your feet in the dirt, on the earth, or in a boat, and just breathe the air. He earned it.

  I cherish anything I can get from earth. I took a doe last week, a nice fat doe. I still have three more tags actually, so I’m still deer hunting, but we eat mostly wild deer, turkey, and wild boar. We forage our own mushrooms and dry ’em. Go crazy on asparagus. In the spring, harvest ramps and wild garlic. We have chickens, so we’ve always got eggs, and if I could do it over again, I probably would be a homesteader-type farmer. But then I never would have learned to cook well from all the wonderful people who shared ideas with me.

  SUSAN: Where did you receive your culinary training?

  DAN: I always wanted to be a student at the institute, but couldn’t afford it. I started cooking. I started working in restaurants when I was thirteen, as a busboy and a dishwasher. Watching the short-order cooks amazed me, so I got in there, and one thing led to another. I was cooking when I was fourteen—flipping six-egg pans and throwing down for the bar crowd on Saturdays at two in the morning. I would feed two hundred people by myself. It was cool. I just love the dance, if you will, of line work. And there were waitresses! Where else would I want to be, right?

  The people who knew the restaurant owner were chefs around town, running the Polish Center Club and other clubs. They came in to help open this restaurant. They’d take me on the weekends, and I’d learn how to cook prime rib for five hundred people: how to season ’em and start ’em upside down; how to check them with a metal skewer; and how far that fat cap is gonna shrink from bones when they’re done. Then another chef would take me on Saturday mornings. I would make spaghetti sauce—six hundred to eight hundred gallons, in these huge kettles for Bella Mia Spaghetti Sauce, Lipari Foods. Then, I got the opportunity to work for Milos Cihelka, who was in the first group of Master Chefs; he tested with Metz in that group. One week before I was married, I left a good-paying job to work for him at the London Chop House, as a saucier. That restaurant was happening, back then! We had all dried meats and aging boxes. We made our own vinegars in huge wine barrels. It was a neat place and my first taste of fine cooking.

  Then I went to the Detroit Athletic Club as chef de cuisine. The chef there was a Scottish fella who was a con artist. Six months later, they promoted him to executive chef, and I wasn’t ready for that. I was just a kid, so I moved into the chef’s office. There was one old book, with a pink-brown cover, I think. It was the smaller version of Escoffier. I skimmed through the book briefly and took it home that night and looked at it. This guy writes about cooking like a warrior poet! This book makes me crazy! If I want to make something, I got to go from one end of the book to the other.

  I decided I’d make everything in that book, since the Athletic Club had several venues: a formal dining room; the grill room; the lady’s dining room, with all Ming china; a men’s grill room; and a bowling alley. We had all the athletic squash courts and the foodservice up there, too. I had a place for a club sandwich, chicken liver pâté, oxtail consommé … whatever I wanted to make in that book, I had a place to put it. It took about twelve years, and I made almost everything.

  In 1988, I took my Master Chef Certification. I was all streetwise and self-studied. I got to write curriculum for your school with Tim Rodgers, and gosh, Ron DeSantis. I worked on creating butchery and charcuterie videos. I had always wanted to go to school there and ended up helping them with curriculum as well as writing curriculum for other colleges! I learned ass-backward.

  Roland does have a sense of humor and a good heart. If he sees someone cooking who is serious, yet they’re stumbling—they’re lighting themselves on fire—he’ll help them. If he thinks they’re sincere, he reaches out. He did that with me when I was young. I learned to do that with others.

  The hero of the story here is Roland. He shares ideas. He has affected many elements of cooking in America today. Everyone who knows him thinks the world of him. He’s a good guy. He’s fun to be with. He’s a great chef. I’m lucky to have known him and worked with him a little.

  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

  Steve Giunta, CMC

  Culinary Director, Cargill Inc.

  The fact that we won had nothing to do with our culinary talent and had everything to do with his leadership.

  I was fortunate to have met Chef Henin early on in my career. I decided to go to the CIA right out of high school. Luckily for me, I was an a.m. student. Chef Henin taught the p.m., so I didn’t have him as an instructor right off the bat. Legend quickly grew at the CIA where he taught Fish Kitchen, and that’s where I first met him. He ran his p.m. class differently than the a.m. instructor … a bit like a boot camp. He speaks fast, has a French accent, and—pardon the expression—he’s hell on wheels in the kitchen. He quickly had this bravado about him that he was not going to put up with mediocrity, and he wanted all the students to know that.

  I continued my career at the CIA at the American Bounty restaurant as a part-time waiter. I befriended Tim Ryan, the American Bounty chef. I graduated and was offered a fellowship position, which is kind of a junior chef, reporting to Tim Ryan. Fellowships have a bit of an elevated status. We’re still looked down upon because we’re not full-fledged chefs, but we were half a step above the students, so that was a good place to be—in the limbo of where you don’t have the pressure of a chef but are better than a student.

  Roland Henin was the young brusque French chef at the Escoffier French restaurant, and Tim was a young brash American chef. He and Chef Henin became fast friends. They would spend time together on the weekend nights, and I, being a student groupie, would hang around them trying to gain culinary tidbits. It was awesome to see the interaction between chefs Henin and Ryan because they had both worked in France. They had so much common ground and appreciation for classic French cooking, so at twenty years old, I got introduced into real cooking by two real chefs.

  Shortly after that, Chef Ryan became part of the 1984 Culinary Olympic Team in Frankfurt, Germany. One of the events leading up to the Olympics was this “Dinner of the Century,” held at the Palmer House Hotel in Chicago. Chef Henin assisted, coaching the younger apprentices and sous-chefs. Being Tim Ryan’s assistant chef, I flew to Chicago and participated. We were serving about three hundred people. Chef Ryan had the fish course, and part of that dish was a caviar beurre blanc. Something went amiss with the beurre blanc, and it separated. Chef Ryan yelled over at me to start dicing eighteen pounds of butter, so that we could make more beurre blanc, but Chef Henin dove into the range, literally swooped down, and with a few strokes, fixed the situation and repaired the sauce. I don’t know what he did, but I heard him and Chef Ryan laughing and clapping each other on the back, so I took that as a sign to stop dicing butter.

  A year later, I was part of the CIA Alumni Team that competed in a Junior Culinary Comp
etition, an apprentice competition held in George Brown College in Toronto, Canada. I was working for Bradley Ogden in San Francisco. Chef Henin was the mentor/coach and asked if I wanted to try out. I flew to New York, put a platter and a hot dish together, and was chosen along with four other young chefs to be part of the team. They held practices at the Hyde Park facility, but I was busy out in California, so wasn’t able to make these. Remember, this is before email, smartphones, and all that stuff. Just through conversations on the phone, I was given a turkey platter to put together and help with the lamb main course we were going to serve as part of the hot food competition.

  We arrive in Toronto. There were five of us … and it was supposed to be a four-person team. I’m doing the math in my head. Okay … five young chefs are here, and four people are allowed on each team … something’s not right.

  I went to Chef Henin and asked, “Chef, do we have an extra chef?”

  He looks at me, and says, “Yeah. You.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  I had asked for vacation time and spent my own money flying to Toronto and realized that I was the apprentice to this apprenticeship competition. I said to Chef, “I don’t know what happened, or how we got off the target here, but I want to be one of the four teammate members here. I don’t want to be the commis to the commis.”

  Chef goes and talks to the group, comes back and says, “Well, you’re the Team Captain now.”

  I went from not being on the team and being the pot washer to Team Captain. I don’t know what happened. The downside to Chef Henin is that he’s not always the greatest, most clear communicator. Right? He takes a lot of input, but he does things his way. This was a great example of him just trying to do the right thing and not hurt anybody’s feelings. He’s got a big heart, but in the middle of all this, he said yes to everything and wound up with a five-person team. The four were from New York, and I could see a kind of out-of-sight, out-of-mind thing where he might have forgotten about me. But when I approached him, I think he realized—I had many conversations about this with Tim Ryan, after this competition—I think Chef realized: Oh, this is Tim’s guy. Tim is now the president of the CIA. At some point, Chef Henin realized, I cannot make this guy fly all this way and not give him a spot on the team.

  It gets better. We’re in the middle of this competition. I had not done any practices with the team, so I didn’t know the system they had put into place for the cold food—what platters they were using, etc.—so I’m just doing what I normally do with my experience on the Culinary Olympic Team and put together a turkey platter. I’m standing there, ready: everything glazed in aspic; all my tourneyed vegetables cooked, glazed, and beautiful; all the garnishes and the dough pieces. I’m ready to lay out my platter. Chef Henin looks around and doesn’t see any other food ready or any other junior chefs there, so he starts screaming. It’s just his way of showing love, but he’s upset that the “new guy who just got promoted” is ready, while nobody else was. He asked me to put my food back in the cooler and go help the others. Now I’ve become the bad guy. I get to be the intermediary, going around saying, “Hey. You guys are running late. You have to get our food ready.” Chef Henin is losing it. As he was judging other teams, and since he was our mentor/coach, he was not allowed to physically do anything. He was not allowed to pick up a knife. I’ve never seen someone so uncomfortable with their hands tied behind their back. He couldn’t help the young chefs get their food ready, and he was like a caged animal. We put our cold platters out, and the next day, we did our hot food competition.

  If you looked at the hour it took to get our cold platters together, you might have said, “This team will finish dead last.” We were just running around like crazy. The story I tell is, it’s like the football-catch game with the ball that vibrates … all the players stand on the field, and the ball kind of vibrates, and they move around in different circles, and they look like they’re lost? That was us.

  At some point, Chef took a deep breath. He went from purple to a light-red in the face, and then he brought us together. To be able to cook as well as he does, but also to problem-solve at such a high level was amazing. He quickly realized who was in trouble and who wasn’t, and he paired the weak and strong together. Without his leadership, we wouldn’t have gotten the food out at all. The fact that we won had nothing to do with our culinary talent and had everything to do with his leadership. The way he got us—through fear, mainly—but how he got us together at crunch time…. We won the 1985 international competition.

  Chef Ryan was a newly-found culinary team member and Chef Henin was an up-and-coming chef at the CIA. Tim had spent his time in French roots, but is now trying to be an American Chef. So, Chef Ryan was making a seafood sausage, with pike as a forcemeat. Chef Henin asked him if he was interested in using a panada in the forcemeat, for the sausage. We soaked some bread and milk and added it to the pike as we ground it up. You forget about the roots of French cooking when trying to make something that sounds “American.” But, the minute we added the panada into the mixture, it was elevated.

  I’ll never forget Chef Henin making pike quenelles, a ground pike mousseline forcemeat mixed with pâte à choux. The ratio is important: 2/3 mousseline and 1/3 pâte à choux, shaped into these large quenelles, poached, and then coated in Sauce Americaine. It was a dish in the Escoffier Room. I probably would have poached the quenelle and served it with the sauce separately, but true with Chef Henin’s style, coating the quenelle with the lobster sauce gave it a depth of flavor and silkiness that it hadn’t had before. I went on to work with Georges Perrier at Le Bec-Fin, and we made that exact same dish the exact same way. It was not only eye-opening when Chef Henin showed me, but it was confirmed by another French master.

  The finishing technique with braise is an example of the elevated cooking needed to happen at the Master Chef’s exam. Young chefs learn to braise: take a piece of beef; make sure it’s dry; season it; brown it in a clear fat; and build flavors from there. Use wine, stock, and a thickened stock like a sauce espagnole, and then braise it. The liquid should come halfway up the product. You cook it covered in a moderate oven until it’s fork-tender. That’s all well and good. You create something beautiful.

  But Chef Henin taught me how to finish that—unlike anything I had ever seen up to that point. He would take the braised meat and put it on a rack, like a baking sheet tray, put it in a moderate oven, and baste it once or twice with the braising liquid, while the sauce is finishing. What happens is, the seared crust was brought back. You would get this deep, rich, brown crust on the meat, glazing it dry in an oven like that. After watching him, I studied that section in Escoffier’s Le Guide Culinaire and the same reference was there. Chef Henin learned that growing up: you take it 90 percent of the way there, braising it the way we’re taught, but the final 10 percent makes all the difference in the world. To taste a braise that’s been glazed like that, in the oven on a rack … it’s unbelievably magnified beef flavor. It creates great food from good food.

  Chefs Henin and Ryan would talk about three-star Michelin restaurants in France and the differences in those kinds of restaurants: their attention to detail and level of service. Wait staff were journeymen. It was their career and passion to serve food at the highest level. I noticed that the underlying theme of these discussions was a little frustration that the students weren’t willing to understand the dedication it took to be part of a three-star Michelin restaurant. Tim Ryan talked about climbing a ladder and putting your chin over the next rung. He says you’ll never understand that viewpoint unless you’ve seen—you’ve struggled to climb and see from a different vantage point—what excellence is all about. Chef Tim was fortunate to get that and it meant so much to him, because he no longer had a ceiling for his view of excellence. It was never unattainable, but higher than he would have anticipated before seeing it—the absolute preciseness of à la minute cooking—cooking things perfectly, precisely together, and serving them immediately. Everyone harmoniz
ed around serving something of perfection at the optimum time. Chef Henin confirmed this: that sense of urgency was compromised, over and over again, as our business grew bigger and has more people working in it. The ideal of a three-star restaurant meant the world to both of them.

  Chef recently wrote me a four-page letter in this incredible French script, almost like calligraphy. Who writes a four-page letter anymore? I’m gonna buy him a tablet or something that he can type on (but he probably won’t use it). The four-page letter is about preparation for the CMC exam. He goes back to the basics. What he sees in young chefs is that they don’t spend enough time developing a plan, making sure that the plan works, and then executing it within the timeframe. That’s the way he runs his organization. That’s the way he mentors people, and that’s the way he conducts his life: you start from the beginning; you make sure that you master the fundamentals, and you can build on top of that. Don’t go too far too fast. The fundamentals are so important that you can’t go anywhere without them. He honors excellent technique, which is the soul of French cooking.

  Raimund Hofmeister, CMC

  University Director, School of Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management, Stratford University

  We don’t like to talk about this in our business, but there is sensitivity in those kinds of people. You go deep, fine-tuning into every fiber of your body and connect with the food. You connect with the environment. It was one of the most spectacular things I have seen.

  RAIMUND: I was born and raised in Germany and apprenticed in Baden-Baden, which is near the French border. I graduated at the top of my class and spent a lot of time in the Alsace region and went to some nice places in Switzerland. I spent a couple years in South Africa, joined Westin hotels in Johannesburg in 1972, and then moved with Westin Hotels to the US, in Kansas City. Opened up the Beach Plaza Hotel, the Detroit Renaissance Center, and then moved to Hawaii. From there, went to Tulsa, Oklahoma to open the Williams Plaza. I got the flagship of the company, the Century Plaza Hotel, and became executive chef there, in 1979. That was a rather incredible milestone in my career: I was twenty-nine years old and got this big monster hotel. The Century Plaza became the headquarters for Ronald Reagan away from home, hosting all the events and functions for the president, officially and unofficially. I tried out for US Culinary team and became a member in 1982, and then went for my CMC in 1986.