Those were the important things that I learned. Making a veal stock, or roasting a bird, or fluting a mushroom, or things like that that were technical, yeah, those were influential, but not in comparison to understanding the relationships, understanding the teamwork, understanding the consistency, the hospitality, the general dedication and commitment that you needed to have to achieve greatness in a restaurant. It comes down to finding those exquisite ingredients. Going to a farmers market is a wonderful thing, don’t get me wrong. There are great ingredients at the farmers markets, and it certainly opens a door to a group of specific gardeners who are able to deliver these great ingredients, but it has to go much further than that. It has to be much deeper … to those individuals who are bringing all the ingredients to your restaurant.
Take a rare or luxury ingredient, like caviar. You have to be able to work with a producer, continually evolve the quality of the product through continuous work with one another. You don’t just say, “I want to pay X amount of dollars for the caviar.” It’s not about negotiation of money. It’s about the ingredients and the quality. If you reach for the quality you want, you have to be willing to pay for it. Price should not be something that enters into a conversation with our suppliers. If we’re going to have meaningful relationships with our suppliers that help benefit them, we can’t have negotiations on price.
And caviar is a luxury ingredient, compared with butter, which is a common ingredient. Still, you want to have the best butter that you can possibly get. Diane St. Clair produces some of our butter, in Vermont. She makes a small amount, and we buy all of our butter for the French Laundry and Per Se—about 90 percent of her product. I don’t know how much her butter costs. It’s not the point, right? She’s a small farmer. She has eight cows. This is her livelihood. I have to be able to support her by agreeing to pay whatever she needs to charge me, so that she can have the lifestyle that she needs. It’s certainly not a luxurious lifestyle—she is a farmer, and she needs to exist. If she has to raise the price of her butter to send her son to college, then I’m not going to negotiate on that. Why would I? Negotiating on a person’s life shouldn’t become part of a conversation when you’re trying to support someone who’s bringing you the best product that you’ve ever tasted.
SUSAN: Reminds me of Roland Henin’s philosophy of mentoring—at what lengths he’ll go to when he is “crafting the best chefs” in the industry.
THOMAS: Roland was that model figure. He was the person I wanted to be. He was articulate, he was intelligent, and he was thoughtful. He possessed all the qualities of a person that I hoped to possess. Roland helped me, not only in my cooking, which was critical, but helped me in my path to becoming this chef and being able to accomplish specific goals. He would spend time with me, not only in the kitchen, but also just hanging out, conveying the importance of commitment and dedication to what we were doing. He helped me understand that the food that we cook, where it came from, was critical to our success. René Macary and his wife Paulette, owners of La Rive, in the Catskills, said, “Plant a garden … try it. You have some broccoli … might as well put it in the garden. Don’t let the deer get it. [Laughs] But, plant a garden.”
Now, Roland and I are out of that mentor-mentee relationship. He’s still a prominent figure in my life. Is he helping me understand the path that I’ve taken? No, because he doesn’t understand that path. In that generation, it wasn’t something that they did—what we do today. Modern chefs, as opposed to the modern chefs of his time, were two dynamically different individuals. So he has become a very close friend, not someone who is mentoring me on what my goals are or how to achieve them.
SUSAN: I was thinking about the shadow side of mentoring—how lessons can come in negative forms …
THOMAS: Well, the best lessons come in negative forms. [We laugh]
SUSAN: Have mentors been integral with blessing you, in this way?
THOMAS: I’m doing a good job in failing, myself. [Laughs] I don’t need other people to make me fail. Failure is a very important part—the most important part—of our ability to excel. You have to realize your failure and understand that you have to modify your behavior in order to be successful. If you cut your finger, you better be doing something different next time to not cut your finger—change your behavior. [Laughs] That’s something pretty black-and-white. If you think about that in a bigger way, you start to understand what it is that made you fail. And it’s not one thing; it’s always a number of things.
SUSAN: What are some of your values?
THOMAS: Modesty is very important. We need to maintain that sense of humility. Trust is crucial: teaching someone something and then trusting them to do it. If you don’t trust somebody, then you’ve lost the ability to do other things yourself—to search for your own continuous goals. Collaboration is critical: to be able to enhance an idea through conversation with others, to be able to champion that idea—not through your ego, but through theirs. It’s your idea, not mine. Give it up. Give that success away and celebrate it with somebody else. Consistency: we need to be consistent with who we are and what we are and what we do. If you can’t be consistent, then you’re a one-hit wonder. Impact: to be able to impact people. To be able to give something to somebody that makes a difference.
SUSAN: What are some delicious things that happen in the job?
THOMAS: There are so many of them. The biggest one we need to realize is the success of the moment and being able to celebrate that success: doing a beautiful dish; collaboratively and collectively coming up with a new composition; just realizing the moment when someone does a really nice job, and you’re part of the reason they do that job. Those little moments of success are probably the most gratifying: to see a young person do something that you’ve helped them achieve. Those moments are priceless.
SUSAN: Are you doing what you want to be doing, in life?
THOMAS: I’m not sure. That’s a good question. Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not. As chefs, we have a real, innate problem. We lack the backbone to say no. Or, we lack the training to say no, maybe is a better way to say it. We certainly have the ability and the backbone to instill our will, so maybe it’s just the training. From the time you walk into the kitchen, at a young age, you are consistently reinforced with the idea of a “Yes.” You never say no to chefs. When somebody asks you to do something, you want to give that person what they want. Sometimes it confuses us at specific levels or specific times in our profession, where opportunities abound. We can’t give the world the opportunity to realize what is the most important to us … because we want to say yes to everyone. And then you end up having to say no to the things that are most important to you.
SUSAN: Would you reshape something in the next ten years?
THOMAS: I’m not sure about that, either. There is a level of seduction that infiltrates the process in choices. As chefs, we’re not used to so many opportunities, such as working in television, writing books, and other high-profile branding exposure. My generation is the first to be exposed to this, so what we do is critical for the next generation. You see some of my colleagues doing things that may or may not be in the best interest or the best examples for the next generation.
The idea of good food is something that is not trendy. The Slow Food movement is here to stay. We want to eat more dynamically and have different experiences with food—more than we used to. We still find ourselves being comforted by foods that we grew up with, but at the same time, we’re growing foods that we’ve never experienced before.
SUSAN: What are your hobbies?
THOMAS: I golf. And I’m learning how to fly.
SUSAN: Fly, like, a plane? Get out. Don’t you have to accrue, like, a lot of hours?
THOMAS: Yes. It’s not so much the hours, but the skills. [Laughs] They say a person’s able to do something within a certain amount of hours based on the average of students in the past, but it’s only an average. It’s how you would determine to do anything … like with childr
en on their bicycles with training wheels or swimming with floaties. They’re there to protect you until you can swim or ride the bike independently. Even when you feel you’re ready, your parents probably keep those floaties or training wheels on for another couple weeks, just to make sure. Right? It’s kind of the same thing about flying. I’m not sure if I’m ready yet. I’m sure he’ll take them off some day, even though I think I’m not ready. And he’ll say, “Now you can land the plane.” I can do everything else, but land. [We laugh] That’s what I’m learning now.
SUSAN: Yeah, that’s cumbersome.
THOMAS: Yes. The more you do it, the more comfortable you are with it. It doesn’t seem to be a lot of things happening at once. You have more time to do the things you need to do to land the airplane than you thought you had when you first got in the airplane. The first time you watch your instructor land a plane, it’s like, How did you do all that?
SUSAN: Have you ever fished with Chef Henin?
THOMAS: I have, but it’s been ages. I need to get back to that. It’s one of those things he continues to encourage me to do, and I continue to fail. You get consumed with other things and other people’s desires of what you should be doing. That’s what a chef’s life is. I just need to learn how to say no. I’ve known that for a long time. There are a thousand wires in me that are all connected to the “yes.” I don’t want to be in a place where my glass is full and I can’t fit anything else in it. And that’s the reason we say no. I want my glass to be half-empty—doing the things I want to be doing for my career, but also for myself, which is golf and flying.
SUSAN: So it’s not that full right now … your glass?
THOMAS: No. My glass is full. I’m half-empty. It’s a good thing. The alternative sucks. [We laugh] There will always also be your personal and your family life, too, that infringes on your professional life—doesn’t infringe, but sometimes has to … interface with it in a very comfortable way. The older you get, your siblings, your parents, they start to age and become sick. All of a sudden, you’re faced with an idea that you never thought about before: I have to take care of my older brother. I have to take care of my father. That’s a significant life-changing experience that might happen. And everything else goes by the wayside because you have no choice. It’s not a planned process. Everything else I do is planned. Even though it is a lot, I’m still part of a plan. Someone getting sick—or yourself getting sick—is not part of the plan.
SUSAN: Talk about the mentoring organization, Ment’or.
THOMAS: Chef Bocuse asked us to form a collective organization supporting the US team in the Bocuse d’Or competition. He felt that America has never done as well as it could have, and part of that was because of a lack of awareness and support. He asked me to be the president of the US team and, as I pointed out earlier, you always say, “Yes.” I mean, I don’t think anybody has ever said no to Paul Bocuse.
Over the years, it has evolved from just supporting the US team to also establishing a foundation called Ment’or that basically has four initiatives: one, of course, was Team USA; the second initiative was to have a young chef competition to help identify future candidates for the Team USA; the third was our grant program. We gave close to a million dollars in the past four years; our last initiative will be our Chef’s Congress. The first one will be held in November [2017].
SUSAN: What does the Chef’s Congress entail?
THOMAS: It’s a collective—a collection of chefs with significant exposure and opportunity, helping to change the path of our profession to be more cohesive and collaborative. We are very fragmented at this moment; my goal is to bring it together in the same way that the medical profession controls what they do, basically. When the Harvard Medical School publishes a paper about cancer, people listen. It’s the same way with the law professors. We don’t have a collective group that has the best intentions of our profession in mind, who are able to define policy and change the way people think about us.
The media seems to control our profession. If the media says that’s good, it’s good; if the media says they’re bad, they’re bad. If the media says this is the best thing, everybody jumps on it. The media claimed “Farm-to-Table,” and everybody wanted it. The media claims, whatever it is, molecular gastronomy, and everybody runs to that. The media has us by the nose and it leads us around at their own whim and for their own benefit. Regulations are put on restaurants by our lawmakers, and sometimes are very unfair or not thorough or not thought out in the way that they should be. They’re not fabricated for our kinds of restaurants; they’re only based on the least common denominator. I don’t want to say anything bad about McDonald’s, but we’re not all McDonald’s.
SUSAN: Could this organization help in a lobbying capacity? For instance, raw cheese comes to mind.
THOMAS: We hope to.
SUSAN: Is the ultimate goal of mentoring eclipsing?
THOMAS: André Soltner, Jean-Jacques Rachou, Jacques Pic, Michel Richard, Georges Perrier … these are some of the great chefs of the last generation. Each one of them will admit that they cannot do what I do. I’m sitting here with these icons, these role models … and I can’t fathom that they would say this. To me, they are extraordinary men with skills that I could only hope to aspire to when I was a young cook. To have them say that makes me feel awkward, but at the same time, it’s true. They didn’t have what I have. They gave me everything they had, but then, resources for me became more abundant, more refined. They didn’t have food processors when they were young cooks. They didn’t have immersion circulators. They didn’t have the facilities that we have, the sauté pans we have.
It’s like a baseball player, or football or soccer player, from three generations ago. I mean, I’m a golfer. Thirty years ago, golfers were hitting with Persimmon wood. Today, they have drivers that are made of composite metals 460 centimeters in diameter, and they’re hitting a ball 380 yards. Arnold Palmer, when he started, would hit a ball 300 yards with the drivers he had. They struggle with making the fairways long enough now to accommodate these guys, with all the equipment, knowledge, and training. I was at a training center this morning and worked with a guy who was doing all this stuff with me: rotation, spinal stretching, and all kinds of things. Golfers of two generations ago didn’t do any of that. They were heavy guys who smoked cigarettes and drank beer and went out and golfed. Right? So that’s the point. These guys are the reason I’m here and they will always hold the utmost respect and admiration for me. As awkward as I feel when they say that, I have to agree with them because … walk into my kitchen.
SUSAN: Right. And you want to be one of those chefs in the future, sitting there with someone you once mentored, saying the same thing …
THOMAS: Yes. And I say now that the chefs in my restaurant are better than I am. They’re all extraordinary, in the end. I mean, am I a great chef? Yeah. I truly believe that. I believe I have the skills, the knowledge, and the determination. I have the fortitude and commitment for everything it takes. I didn’t have the training they have. I didn’t have the tools they have. I didn’t have the kitchens they have. I didn’t have Thomas Keller giving me all the things I give them, to be able to do their jobs the way they do it. It’s a generational thing.
We need to be accepting of that fact. It’s a hard thing for chefs to do, because egos, in so many ways, are such a big part of a chef’s life for the bigger purpose of our profession. It’s not about us. If we’re not positively impacting the standards of our profession, then we’re not doing a good job. If it’s only about me or my restaurant, then it’s just irresponsible.
SUSAN: I’m just curious, Chef, did you ever get your flying license?
THOMAS: I did. Then I stopped flying. I realized I needed to work on it more, and I didn’t have the time, so I’d much rather play golf. If I hit a bad shot, I don’t hurt anybody … at least I have a smaller chance of hurting somebody, whereas if I’m flying an airplane and make a mistake, there are a lot of problems. [We laug
h]
SUSAN: But you did actually land a plane, by yourself?
THOMAS: Yes, I did.
Steve Mengel
Chef Administrator, The Greenbrier
He’s the encyclopedia on cooking, and I wanted to read it.
STEVE: In the winter of 1976, I was an apprentice working at the Everglades Club. My first year, I prepped and made soups with another lead chef. I didn’t work with Roland directly until my second season, when I worked with him one-on-one in the evenings for dinner service. I was the garde-manger chef, and he was sous-chef. The first time I met him, I thought, Oh my God, he is arrogant, all-mighty, and confident. He was very difficult for a beginner. We think we know it all when we’re younger, full of spunk. Roland was quite regimented. He was always in uniform at work. He expected and demanded a high standard, period.
But Roland had what I wanted to learn. He would teach you techniques and ways of doing things. You weren’t just going to stand there and not figure out how to do it; he was going to make you do it right. He is the encyclopedia on cooking, and I wanted to read it.
SUSAN: What did he see in you?
STEVE: I don’t know! He respected me. I think we were equal in some respects. He saw someone to have fun with, who wanted to be part of his life. It wasn’t like: I’m your boss at work and then want nothing to do with you outside of the kitchen. Roland was not that much older than me, but he was sort of a father figure, at least when we were in the kitchen. Outside the kitchen, we were buddies. He didn’t try to tell me how to live life—he wanted to share it with me. But in the kitchen, he told me what to do and I did it.
Roland G. Henin: 50 Years of Mentoring Great American Chefs Page 5