Roland G. Henin

by Susan Crowther

  It was in about 1982, in my assignment to the US Culinary team with Ian Bender, where Roland and I first connected. Not that we recognized each other on a personal basis, but it started a relationship during my CMC exam in Hyde Park, New York, where he was the judge for the classical part of the test. I think this was the first time we made a lasting impression on each other, with the famous Wiener schnitzel episode.

  During the exam in the International category, I got a rather complicated Italian menu, while my counterpart got a Wiener schnitzel. I was kind of laughing, because I didn’t see the comparison of the challenge. The chef who got the Wiener schnitzel was pooling sweat, in a panic.

  I asked him, “What’s the problem?” I’ve done thousands of Wiener schnitzels in my apprenticeship and all through my career and never thought it was a challenge.

  He said, “You don’t know what I’ve gotten myself into. It’s the worst I could imagine.”

  I watched him make the Wiener schnitzel. It was a wonderful Wiener schnitzel … and he just barely made it. He squeaked by with 3/10 of a point, and I thought to myself, My God, what’s going on here?

  On the final day of my exam, in the general basket, where you pick your assignment … guess what? I got the Wiener schnitzel! So, I was now in desperation … the last day counts as 50 percent of your grade. After several days of cruel examination, everything you have accomplished is still in jeopardy. You do stupid things when you are desperate and tired. I looked at the Wiener schnitzel and thought, He did a wonderful Wiener schnitzel. I don’t know why he got such a low score. What can I do?

  I scored the breading, marking it. It’s something you just don’t do, but I did it. Of course, as I fried it in the pan, it came out kind of bubbly, nice … but the breading kind of broke, because I cut into it. As it went in to the judges, they didn’t come out of the room. That wasn’t a good sign. I’m pacing up and down and I saw all this nightmarish news … Chef Hofmeister didn’t make the CMC exam, this and that. I was in a suicidal mood there. The doors open and somebody screams out of the room, “HofmeistEHR! Come in!”

  I got in there, and I still see it in my head, just like yesterday. There’s this big table. And there’s this one mean chef in the middle who has my Wiener schnitzel on his fork. He kind of threw it down on the table. The breading just … went everywhere.

  He looked at me and he said, “What do you call this? A Wiener schnitzel?!”

  I mean, my world’s just finished, at that moment. I said, “Is this it?”

  It was Bruno Ellmer. He looked at all the Master Chefs behind him. He kind of, in a dominant way, influenced the other chefs.

  “What do you think? This qualifies as absolutely nothing!”

  He went down the line, one by one, to ask them what they thought. The first four judges were absolutely negative; they agreed with him.

  Then they come to Roland Henin.

  And Roland … I just love him. He looks at Bruno, and deep down, I’m still convinced that somehow, Roland must have gone through a similar kind of a torture, and this is his chance to get even. He just looks at Bruno Ellmer and he says, “I don’t know what you have with this Wiener schnitzel. To me, it looks perfectly fine.”

  It was kind of the icebreaker! After that, yes, I slipped by. I just barely made it—of course, not with Bruno who was concerned, but with the rest of the other Master Chefs.

  Later on, I was so mad, and that night it was Mystery Basket for ten people, and Roland kind of was scouting around, watching every move I made. I was so upset, and I just cooked my heart out. Put him in the ground, you know, this is not sitting well, so he came to me and said, “Raimund, you mustn’t be angry. Small potato. Wiener schnitzel is not a culinary thunderstorm.” He looked at me and he says, “Your classic examination was one of the best, and that is all that counts.” I had one of the highest scores in the classical French cuisine, and that laid the foundation of our relationship. I have the utmost respect that he stood up for me, and he knew there was more in my life than cooking a Wiener schnitzel, or maybe messing up on a Wiener schnitzel. Ever since then, I would never let anything bad happen to Mr. Roland Henin. [Laughs]

  After I passed the exam, of course I don’t have to tell you how drunk I got, but it was quite an ordeal. My friends picked me up, and we had the celebration at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center. Ever since then, Roland and I have had a great relationship. After winning the Culinary Olympics and during the world championship in 1986, I had the task to put the first original ACF Culinary team together. We asked Roland if he wanted to come in as the team captain for the ACF Western Regional culinary team, which he then accepted. Those were two wonderful years. We developed an incredible concept.

  I received my CMC in April 1986, and we put the team together a few months later. We went to the Culinary Olympics with the Western Regional team in 1988, and we did the America’s Cup in Chicago, which we won. It was a good endorsement to compete in Frankfurt, because the establishment didn’t want to have regional teams. We were self-funded and not officially endorsed by the ACF. We ran against the establishment, but were instrumental. You don’t have to win in order to leave your lasting impression. In those two years, we forced the ACF to think differently and allow regional teams, allowing more people to participate in the various aspects of Culinary Olympics. We don’t interfere with the national team, but we compete in different categories for different honors. We actually supplied national team members out of that team for the next four years. Our long-range fighting against the odds was pretty good.

  SUSAN: Being allowed to compete in this way sounds pioneering—it hadn’t been done before?

  RAIMUND: Not on such a large scale independent organization. We covered the entire ACF Western Region. We went out there and scouted for the chefs to get on the team. It was a rough two years. We worked extremely hard. It’s nice to have a budget and sponsors; we didn’t have that, so we started from scratch. We got a few donations and made chapter presentations to get a little money. At the end, we had a wonderful setup, a nicely put-together machine. We went to Frankfurt with almost thirty people. I love every minute of the memory of that, especially the finish. Roland never forgives me for what I did that day, but that’s what friends are for. [Laughs]

  We were competing all through, and of course, when you finish with all that, you’re pretty tired, so we decided on the last day that we were gonna go and have dinner. We went to a nice restaurant in our hotel, we were having a good time, and Roland fell asleep. He was so exhausted. He sat at the table with his eyes open, just snoring away. Everybody made his own little token comment. Let’s set him up here. We tell the maître d’ that we’re going to go outside, and when we’re outside, he should wake him up and give him the bill. He didn’t know what to think. I said, Be insistent. Force the issue. Threaten to call the police or something. And sure enough, we were all outside, and we look in the great windows of the restaurant, watching the whole scene. The maître d’ woke him up. Roland became confused and then disturbed to find he was all by himself in that restaurant. The maître d’, of course, speaks German, and Roland doesn’t. If you could have seen that, it would have been a classic comic. He was so confused. He argued back and forth, and finally, finally, the maître d’ let him go, and Roland stormed out the restaurant. We were maybe a few steps down and were all outside cheering at him. He was so mad. He didn’t speak with us for two whole days. [Laughs]

  SUSAN: I thought he let things slide, like a duck with water rolling off his back … we don’t have to talk about the “table dance” …

  RAIMUND: [Laughs] No no no. I mean, really, what are the rumors about that?

  SUSAN: Just a line in an email I caught …

  RAIMUND: After a few drinks anything is possible.

  SUSAN: We’ll get off the table and back into the kitchen. I thought of you both as equal mentors to other people, but did you have some kind of mentoring relationship with him? Did you work with him in kitche
ns or just in competitions?

  RAIMUND: We worked those two years in training sessions, and we’d meet in Practical exams and other food competitions. We have not worked one-on-one in the same kitchen. He had one of the most spectacular food displays in Frankfurt, in the 1988 Olympics. He did get a gold medal. What he did there was borderline perfection. When you develop those kind of things, practice session after practice session, you get in contact with the man’s inner commitment. 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. If he had been representing the US national team, the notoriety would have come so much bigger and stronger for what he did. If he had been part of any national team, it would have been a sensational display.

  I always hate to say better than me, but … yes, he was definitely better than me, in that competition. I can say, “Well, I was team manager, I had a million things to do, I couldn’t really concentrate.” Those are only excuses. He just was better. I thought it was the most downplayed display, and I never have seen such an in-depth commitment from anybody on one single expression—to bring out the Pacific Northwest: the barnacles; the unique seafood; the unique plates of color combinations and compositions. He’s a fisherman, and all of that reflected into that display. He must have spent I don’t know how much time to research what is unique to the region. I had seen him, week after week, working on the same thing, little by little, picking the ingredients, making sure they’re all perfect, cooked together perfect. Your respect for a man grows when you see those kinds of things. The outcome was spectacular. I fell in love with it. I couldn’t see enough of what he did, and the whole team benefited from that corner display. People were constantly marching around that section of the table, looking at it. We all felt spectacular. When you think back in history, when those things happen, you don’t connect all the dots. You have to grow up in life and go through a certain period to know it better than you knew it at that time.

  SUSAN: Yes, we live in strange, polarized times … more people are connecting with food locally, while globally, mono-cropped food is becoming horrifyingly industrialized.

  RAIMUND: Food—is it safe or is it not safe? Here we are. We talk about organically grown foods and this and that, but this is what people like me and Roland grew up with. You have a whole different connection. There’s so much talk about genetically engineered foods and what a bad future we all have. All this happens because we let it happen. As long as we let it happen, a disaster somewhere down the road is going to come.

  When I ask a student, Describe to me how an asparagus is grown? They have no clue. If they would see an asparagus field, they wouldn’t even recognize that they grow the asparagus there, okay? I mean, you have CMC exams, and half of the chefs never recognize an artichoke! Yeah, it’s a challenge to anyone, because who wants to grow fresh artichokes? Who wants to do some of the more complicated stuff? When you see it, it’s shocking.

  Roland and I have a similar thought about this: if you get a beef tenderloin on your certification exam, it assures that you’ve passed. You can’t screw it up. It’s tender. It doesn’t take rocket science. But give them something they have to work on, use skills of slow cooking—simmering, braising, etc., what good cooking is all about—and watch what happens. That is what is missing, and that is what he knows. A lot of what makes Roland Henin so great and powerful in this trade is his connection with food: the way the food is grown, the way the food is appreciated.

  His weak habit, I tease him of it, could nearly be German … he’s so organized and particular in everything he does. I refer to him as one of the last dinosaurs because of the level he is. There are not many chefs out there who still have this, this old precious value. It just does not exist anymore. We have conversations while watching Master Chef exams. We’ve done a lot of judging together and this and that, and the conversations always boil down to the basic principles of good work ethics, the work procedures, and the professional pride of people. If I would have been a student and had him as my teacher, I would be lucky.

  Roland has been most criticized about his style in critiquing. You have to take it at face value. Whatever he says is true. Sometimes when you speak different languages, things come out in a different meaning. What weighs heavy in one language isn’t always heavy in the other language. His critiques are always, always right on the button. I love to listen to it … very often, I couldn’t say it any better. He put a lot of effort in for young chefs to help them develop properly, to give the advice. These days, it’s not always taken the way it should be, because people don’t give the time anymore for proper development. They think it has to be overnight and that doesn’t happen in our business. Unfortunately, the whole trade suffers.

  If I ever want to bring up an example to my students, I bring up Roland. I say, “You have to connect with food. If you want to become an exceptional chef, all the fibers in your body have to connect with it. Everything you touch. Everything you do. The way you pick it, the way you’re looking at food, the way you display your food. You have to nurse it, babysit the steps of preparation. You just have to be in love with it.” Roland Henin can do that. I have seen it.

  What he is even better at is the everyday application of his trade. I can tell you what I think, how lucky the people are who work with him on an everyday basis. It has to rub off. People, if they are around him for a while, exact his style, his mannerisms, all aspects, they learn hard to treasure it. When I talk to people who have the privilege of working with him, they think the same way as I do. He’s one of the best out there, and there’s no question in my mind about that.

  Ron DeSantis, CMC

  Director of Culinary Excellence, Yale University and State University of New York Empire State College; Chef Consultant, Cancer Nutrition Consortium

  Those forty minutes helped me for the rest of my career.

  RON: I learned to cook in the United States Marine Corps. I was chef of the quarter Marine Corps Recruit Depot, San Diego. I won many awards and had emeritus promotions. Our dining hall in Okinawa, Japan, was the best dining facility for small category West Pacific. I was the chief cook there. After there, I went to school at the CIA. After graduation, there was one country in Europe that was working visas. The CIA faculty thought you had to go to Europe to be a good chef, so I went to Germany for five years and then got a job as a CIA faculty member. In a short period of time, I ended up in the Escoffier Restaurant, their four-star restaurant that, a couple of years before me, was the domain of Chef Roland Henin. He left the CIA about a year before I got there. I had heard of Roland Henin, but hadn’t met him. So, I was working in the E-Room, as we affectionately called it, and the Certified Master Chef exam was under way. The exam coordinator, Chef Noble Masi, approached me and said he’d like me to be an expert judge in Classical Cuisine. I had no idea what this guy was talking about in terms of the exam and hadn’t been back in the United States long enough to get information about it, but of course I was young and full of myself, and I figured, Yeah, let me do this thing.

  I walked in, and they put me down in this judges’ room next to Master Chef Byron Bardy.

  “What’s going on?”

  “You’ll be fine. Just enjoy the food, eat it, and give your feedback.”

  So, I did. Thankfully, I was asked my opinion about classical preparations, which is what I was teaching.

  Somewhere along the line, my evaluation caught the attention of Chef Henin. The tasting was over, and we had to evaluate the station of the chefs to see how they had left it and their leftovers. Henin came over and said, “Chef, you’re coming with me.” Naturally, I jumped up and entered the kitchen with him. I was pretty sure about attention of detail and prided myself about that, but in that period of forty minutes, we went through these different stations. He demonstrated to me what was valid, what thi
ngs they shouldn’t have done, why things were leftover, what things should have been used, product utilization or lack thereof. It was an unbelievable learning experience. Those forty minutes helped me for the rest of my career. That was my first time meeting Roland.

  SUSAN: You were in Germany for five years?

  RON: I was in Germany from 1981 to 1986. I was only going for one year, but I met this girl, and it took me four more years to convince her to move to America. For most of my final years, I lived in Bamberg, Germany, in Northern Bavaria. Bamberg was founded in 973. It’s an old city, and, actually, to digress for one moment, Bamberg was the center of the Roman Catholic Religion. The Vatican moved to Bamberg, because Pope Clement II wanted to have his papal office there. The cathedral in Bamberg is where the Roman Catholic Church resided during his reign, and he is the only pope buried outside of Rome. How’s that for some trivia origin history?

  Roland and I wanted to know the traditions leading up to this thing, because they were more important than the raw ingredients. For example, during my Master Chef test, I drew a mussel dish to prepare, probably some Belgian dish. Having traveled to Germany and the Belgian border, I knew that when you serve mussels in Europe, you always take one clean mussel shell after they were steamed, because invariably there’s one empty shell, and you slide it to the edge of the bowl. The whole shell clips on to the edge of the bowl, as it’s still hinged. You use that one shell as tweezers to extract mussel meat from inside the other shells. I know these things, because I lived there for five years and made a point of experiencing and understanding these traditions and what these things meant. When I went for my CMC test, the judges put it on my critique, saying it was a nonfunctional garnish. I said, “That’s good, because it’s not a garnish; this is a function of this dish. This is the mussel shell you use to eat all the other mussel meat.” I saw three pencils flip around to eraser, erase numbers, and put fresh numbers down. Had I not known these origins, then I wouldn’t have been able to have that conversation.