A couple of weeks ago I received an email from an owner of a famous restaurant near the civic center. To the left of it's header, "Emergency!" was a red exclamation mark. It seems that their pastry department had a first assistant walk-out/AWOL, the pastry chef had been given a bit of time off, and they needed someone to come in and relieve their weary working-every-day assistants.
I have been in a few days now and have a number of shifts this weekend and next week. What I have found there has been disappointing and sad and I feel moved to write a bit about it here.
What does Chef mean? People get out of their cushy culinary schools and are told by those establishments, (not all of them, thank god) that they are chefs. Coming back to craft, chef is a lifetime's work. One "apprentices" for years and years and then, maybe, develops some mastery in a few tiny areas.
For me a very basic way to separate chef and cook is management. A chef has a responsibility to those in their charge.
In Haddock's Knife's Edge thoughtful post he writes about keeping cooks, keeping them interested, and the tug of war we have with ourselves as managers when our support staff wants what we feel is unconscionable to give them:
"Now it seems I've got more Mayans wanting jobs than I know what to do with. Plus the hires have created some ripples in the existing crew. My most solid line cook is fearing he's going to lose hours and he also wants to do some prep shifts during the day. Although I speak rudimentary Spanish and he comprehends a good bit of English it's a little hard getting the overtime laws through to him. He's certainly willing to work for the same rate but it's not something I can legally do. What I can do and had planned to do is give him a raise."
And what is the responsibility of a chef? A good schedule? A menu that changes? Somewhere to work? A safe work environment? Good pay?
I take the responsibility of being a chef beyond these tight little stingy envelopes. Kitchens are hot, dangerous, competitive, loud, and masochist in the extreme. I teach because I want to intentionally give back to people what was, every so often, given to me. I teach in the workplace, among my friends & colleagues, at the farmer's market, basically every where I go. As Eric Ziebold once said, there are chefs who share, and chefs who don't. {Take a moment to reflect on this: when was the last time you saw in the press a chef or an owner naming anyone but themselves as a person who helped make them and their restaurant's name famous?} There are many chefs who want you to take the time to watch them closely. It has taken them centuries to learn what they know and they don't want to give it away so easily, or think you can "get it" so quickly. In a quiet way they are asking you to be patient. Then there are ones who are chefs by accident and they fear their staff will find them out so they hide behind overblown egos. There are so many kinds of chefs but there are a few private characteristics that we all share.
The restaurant kitchen is a place that tests every milligram of your essence. A perfectly balanced recipe of cockiness, humility, hubris and actual skill is needed. If you have no cockiness whatsoever you will be turned into mushy concasse. If you have too much you will be fired and/or humiliated in the most demoralized ways. I knew a meat cook who was videotaped by the sous chefs, and shown the performance only to be tortured with verbal and visual critique, then fired. It was no coincidence that this kitchen's movie was Reservoir Dogs.
A chef that cannot self critique is doomed. At The French Laundry my pastry chef, Stephen Durfee, made me grade each and every recipe I made. And at Gramercy Tavern I heard that Claudia Fleming made a practice of timing, on a stop watch, one of her assistants. I have used this method and it works.
An cook moves around going to different kitchens the way a graduate student picks the place where they will get that degree. We work for those who inspire us. We go where we will learn the most. About food, and ourselves.
A chef that does not teach, inspire, push, answer questions, and explain why is not a chef to me.
A chef is an overseer. Is the person the kitchen looks to to pull it all together. Who can direct a ship that feels like it's sinking. A leader, teacher, listener and barker. If you work for a chef who considers abuse as part of their management style you better be getting an incredible education out of it. The hours are too long, the conditions too rough and the pay too low to be in the kitchen for any other reason than your extreme {obsessive?} love of food. The delusional kind of love that you would lie on train tracks for.
I am saddened by the kitchen I am in because the pastry assistants are starving for information. They are nervous around me and don't believe in themselves because their chef has not given them enough. This pastry chef should count their lucky {expletive deleted} stars that they have assistants!! And a Coldelite ice cream maker! At my last job I worked in a restaurant with 120 seats and I was the only person in my department.
When I worked at Citizen Cake I had so many assistants all I did was think of new and interesting ways to keep them interested and learning. And the result was that I could create wildly creative and complicated tarts, cookies, candies and plated desserts, and have all this input on how to fix interesting problems. I created a book list, assigned mandatory reading from modern magazines, organized trips to farms and introduced them to farmer's markets, favorite farmers and food artisans. We had a lot of interns/externs from culinary schools all over the country and I made it my mission to fill in the blanks of their rote school educations. I called my assistants my children and I kept myself up to date on their external lives.
These are the responsibilities of a chef. Being a chef is not merely about cooking well. Can you delegate? Can you trust your people enough to take a day off? Two? Will they leave your charge better and more confident than when they came to you? Can you pass on the importance of humility? And by this I mean reverence for the craft, the repetition and the stamina of cooking, the food stuffs that don't get to the kitchen without hard labour, the gift of being able to feed people delicious, innovative and nourishing meals. When you cook for others you become an intimate part of their lives, if even for a few hours.
Being the chef du partie means that that station is your home. If you are the poissonier you intuit fishes, become proficient in how fish cooks, reacts, should be butchered, and you fall in love with the creature, create a guild and respect it in a way that makes you humble.
I am a student of the egg. I thank whomever created it and it never ceases to amaze and delight me. I love a smooth custard, a cake with perfect crumb, the magic of consomme, and a coddled egg in an egg cup garnished simply with sea salt and black pepper. I will study with butter, eggs, cream, flours, and sugar my whole life and hope to create a few delicacies worth remembering.
Learning about food and cooking is a continuous process. It's about developing, arguing about, stealing, rethinking and having opinions. Straight up, with no god damned ice opinions. It's reading, eating out, experimenting, taking notes, asking questions, using the same foods season after season, struggling, spending hours in the cookbook section of various bookstores, traveling, and inspiring others. Being a chef is a verb. As is love.
If you can't stand the heat get out of the fucking kitchen. Don't just stand there and pass on misinformation, misdirect those you're responsible for, abuse for no good reason, or use your ridiculously large ego to cower behind. I hold the belief that if your cooks are not well trained, it's your fault. A chef whose line cooks can't handle the kitchen without him/her is aweak and inferior chef.
In a short time I am vowing to make a difference in this kitchen. More than one assistant has nervously told me that though they really appreciate and want my tips and teaching, but they would have to resume doing things the way the pastry chef wants when that person returns. I have relayed all this to the chef de cuisine so that he knows what's going on, or not, in the department. And I have told him what I have found alarming.
In The French Laundry kitchen there were always little quotes and words pasted to the wall. To this day one my favorites remains:
"If you can't make a difference, who can?"
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