Life is short, and you cross paths with some unique people. They don’t have to be your neighbor or best friend. These certain people leave a mark on you, and that’s what he’s done for me. I’m glad that we can express what he’s done on paper because he’s the kind of guy who doesn’t look for the spotlight and notoriety.
Henin did a lot more in those few weeks in school than he could imagine. When you’re young and you look up to guys like him, you don’t realize how much of an impact you have on people. They’re looking at you like you’re the Gods of Cuisine. The little things you do and say are taken with such magnified glances that you sometimes don’t realize the importance of your words or your actions.
Mike Colameco
Host / Producer Mike Colameco’s Real Food TV and Food Talk
This was the first guy that had ever, on purpose, sabotaged a recipe.
MIKE: I was in my early twenties, toward the end of my studies at the CIA. Back then, your last two units were the Sheraton Room and the Escoffier Room (E-Room). Both prepare you for the real world. The Sheraton Room was set up in Roth Hall. Half the term was working the front of the house, Russian Service—serving food off of your left arm from big trays, serving diners the best you could by using the back of a spoon and a fork [laughs] … picking up tourney potatoes and cuts of meat and putting them on a plate. Your customers were CIA students. The other half of the term was in the kitchen. The E-Room had the same rotation, but the clientele were the general public.
I graduated in January 1982, so would have been in the E-Room in December 1981. Roland was the Sheraton instructor. I was a slightly older student, having worked in kitchens for nine years before I went to the CIA. I started young, at thirteen, in Philly. By the time I got to school, I already had good solid industry experience, in terms of what you could do in those days. Because I had worked in kitchens, I recognized different things in the instructors.
Henin liked me, luckily, because if you got on his bad side early, it would be a long ten days. He was a quick study. You walked in and you were sized up. He was an imposing kind of figure, French, with a dry sense of humor. Big hands and a big schnozz (I have one too, so it’s one big nose to another). He was a big shot. There was no bullshit about him. You could tell that this was not going to be an easy ten days, in any way. If he didn’t like you, good luck.
Cooking schools are a concept, right? You learn the cooking trade in the field, so “cooking school” is kind of an oxymoron. You’re better served doing a long apprenticeship in kitchens. To that end, what Roland would do, and he was kind of famous for this, is, he’d mess with you. You’re working on your recipe and have to get it ready for lunch or dinner—whichever a.m. or p.m. shift you were on. You’d have your roast leg of lamb in the oven at 375, come back an hour and a half later, open the oven … and he had shut it off. [Laughs]
His pranks were on a daily basis. It was great because he gave you a sense of working in the real world! If you’ve got several things going at the same time, you better check on them every fifteen minutes [laughs], just in case. Did someone turn the oven off, or is the pilot light on? All those things happen in the trade. He’d sabotage stuff in the kitchen and explain to whomever was his victim that this is what happens. If you’re working on something, and you leave your mise en place, you’re playing around and you walk away and do something else and come back twenty minutes later, maybe it’s not going to be there. Maybe the pot washer took it. It was, basically, a reality cooking class in a school where there was no reality; it was all kind of a setup. This was the first guy that had ever, on purpose, sabotaged a recipe. He’d teach them a lesson that, Hey, when you’re out there in the real world, big boys and girls, this kind of thing can happen. When you get out there in a month, get ready. I had a lot of respect for him.
SUSAN: Too bad students had to wait until the E-Room to receive that valuable lesson, instead of all chefs doing that throughout the program.
MIKE: Yeah, well … it’s not the way culinary schools work. I am a graduate of the CIA, and I learned a lot when I was there. When people ask me about cooking schools, I tell them it’s not a bad idea, but a costly one. When I was a student, culinary schools weren’t that expensive; now they charge upwards of $50,000 for a degree. It’s crazy. I would say, find a good kitchen in the town where you live and even work for free for a couple of years. You’d be better served. Henin was great that way! He brought the real kitchen to the students. He was this salty French guy who clearly had a lot of industry experience and was trying to pass that on to the students. In terms of the CIA, it was more of a “hard knocks” fashion.
If you visit the CIA now, it looks different from the Culinary Institute when I was there. It looks like an Ivy League campus, with these beautiful brick and wood buildings, media centers and gymnasiums, and dormitories that could pass for million-dollar condos. When I was there, it was Roth Hall. Students lived upstairs, the library was on the second floor, and working classrooms were below. You either lived in Roth Hall or in one of the cinder block three-story East German dorms that were a little walk away from Roth Hall, down by the river. That was it; that was the whole campus. It was much more blue-collar looking than it is today.
The instructors then were almost exclusively retired, European-trained chefs—French, Swiss, German, Belgian, or northern Italian, plus a couple Asian chefs. They were all great at what they did, and you could get vastly different experiences depending on the instructor. Growing up in Philadelphia, other than Georges Perrier at Le Bec-Fin, there wasn’t much of a restaurant scene. At the CIA, suddenly it was like being in a treasure trove of knowledge. We were able to tap the brains of these guys who had an entire career in the industry, who started in their early teens and were now bringing thirty to forty years’ experience aboard. We had some world-class pastry chefs in the school at that time. There was this one Swiss guy, Chef Albert Kumin, who was still kicking a decade ago, making chocolates with his daughter. He was just amazing. This guy … we were doing eight-inch cake trays … he had those great big hands, reaching in and taking out these trays in a 375 oven. I’m thinking, Are you kidding me? He pulled sugar all the time and had these ginormous callouses. We had some of the best culinary talent in the country at the time, no debate.
I was obsessed with trying to get my money’s worth out of the CIA. If I felt there was a better instructor during a block, I would switch my a.m. and p.m. blocks, or I would take both a.m. and p.m. shifts. This was a long time ago, but yeah, they’d let you do that. It was different then.
After graduation, I got busy in my career. I was a chef at the Ritz-Carlton in 1987 and my girlfriend/now wife was the pastry chef at the Pierre. We were going to open a restaurant in New York City and had backers … then the stock market tanked—October 19, 1987, Black Monday—the stock market fell 22 percent in a single day. It was the single biggest loss of money in history. There was no “off” switch when the selling started … that meant our investors said no money. For weeks, all the chefs were like, Oh my God; every phone call is a cancellation. The market wiped it all out. Thomas Keller’s Rakel was less than a year old … everyone was struggling. Officially, the New York recession happened a few years later, but for restaurants, it happened that day.
We dusted ourselves off. Instead of building in New York, we’d build somewhere else. We traveled around and noticed that there were great restaurants outside of the city. I would not advise [laughs] anybody to do this. We ended up in Cape May, New Jersey, with a seasonal place. For six years, we ran it in the summer and came back to New York to work with friends in the winter. Then we sold the restaurant and had a few dollars because we owned the real estate. I did some food importing and odds and ends. Finally, the cooking show came about in 1999. Since then, I’ve been doing a mostly local PBS cooking show in New York City. I still do some radio for WOR. I went from being a chef to being in food media, once that became an actual viable thing to do. When we were in cooking school, media wasn’t
on anyone’s list of things you were going to do at any point in your career because it didn’t exist.
SUSAN: After graduation, did your relationship continue with Chef?
MIKE: I wish it had, but no, it didn’t. Once I got out of the CIA, I packed up whatever it was that I had—my cookbook collection, my knife kit—into my Ford Pinto, and I drove down to Manhattan. When you think about graduating in January, in retrospect, it’s not the best time to try to enter the New York job market. It’s one of the deadest times of the year. I put my shoulder to the task of navigating the world of Manhattan restaurants and building my résumé. I wanted to see if I could get into some of the best kitchens that were available in New York City. It wasn’t just all French or three-stars. I wanted to do volume, so ended up at Tavern on the Green for a few years as the night chef because you never know where you’re going to be in five years.
The old European guys were tough to work for, with the breaking down of barriers. I was lucky to have the guys who I had, coming up, who were generous with their experience. Jean-Jacques Rachou was a super-important guy in New York because he was the first French chef. He had three-star restaurants—La Côte Basque was one of the greatest in that era of the late seventies–early eighties, like Lutèce, like Le Carrousel … all of those. Jacques was like a Horatio Alger–type of story: Rachou was the first French chef to hire American line cooks full-time. All the other kitchens only had French staff front and back of house: Lutèce, La Grenouille, La Caravelle etc.
Rachou was an orphan, which, back then, was second-class citizenship. He lived like a slave with no schooling. When he first arrived in America, he could neither read nor write, in English or French. Rachou was completely uneducated; literally, he was illiterate. Despite this, he found his way into kitchens in France, worked his way up, and ended up at the top of his game in New York City. He was the first French chef in Manhattan, with a restaurant of note, who would hire American cooks, full-time. No one else would hire them. Charlie Palmer, Rick Moonen, and Frank Crispo—these were the guys graduating from the CIA around that time. If you came to New York in the late seventies and tried to get a job with André Soltner at Lutèce or any of the other restaurants, the answer was no. There wasn’t even a question. They would say it: We don’t hire Americans. You could come in and when our poissonier is away on vacation, you could work his fish station. When he comes back, you leave. There was a bias among that generation of French chefs. Jacques was the first guy who felt that these guys were as good as anybody else. I’m gonna give them a chance. They threw him out of the Vatel Club briefly because he was hiring Americans. It was kind of scandalous.
You don’t think of it these days. It seems like such a long time ago. There was … I don’t want to say “bias,” but there was a hiring practice … you could understand it, in a myopic way: these guys were trained in France; they were comfortable working with people who spoke the same language; they had the same cultural traditions and culinary reference points. If you say, I wanna make a Consommé Royale, or I want to do a Dover sole or a lamb this way, everybody was on the same page. The idea of American cooks was still pretty new on the upper levels—that the CIA and Johnson & Wales were producing graduates who were good cooks after they got out, or especially a few years out. It was hard to think back on a time when being American [laughs]—no, or being a white male, in any industry—was going to work against you. You couldn’t get a job as a CIA grad if you weren’t French, in those kitchens. Jacques was so important; if I were to list for you all the cooks that came through his kitchens in that era—the late seventies and early eighties—it’s a Who’s Who of what would become the first generation of American Chefs: Charlie Palmer, Rick Moonen, Henry Meer, Frank Crispo, Ali Barker, Waldy Malouf, Todd English, Stefan Kopf, Neil Murphy, and on and on and on.
The baton was being passed to us, from them. Now when I look back contextually, I think back … yeah, Thomas Keller … we all stand on the shoulders of these guys. That’s how it works; there’s no other way to put it. We learned cooking from them. We learned the restaurant business from them. By the 1990s, Americans were chefs in their own right. Then, by the aughts … David Bouley was probably the most famous guy for a long time, and I think Thomas Keller is probably one of the great—if not the greatest—spokesmen for what would become the Great American Classical Kitchen.
When filming out at the French Laundry in 2000, my cameraman pulled me aside after a day of filming and said, “So, what do you think?” I had eaten in most three-star restaurants in Europe.
“This is the first three-star Michelin restaurant I’ve ever seen in America. That’s what I think. He’s killing it. It’s perfect. He’s nailed it.”
Thomas and that generation of Americans were the first generation of Americans to take over kitchens and move the ball forward, but very much standing on the shoulders of mostly French chefs. As kids coming up, there was still that sense of rigor, discipline, integrity, and technique.
SUSAN: It’s interesting that he was a product of apprenticeship and classical European foundations. He’s perhaps also a spokesperson for learning in that traditional manner, compared to the culinary school path. I’ve seen that a lot, in people’s stories: the benefit to apprenticing. It seems to be a road less taken, nowadays … a lost or dying art.
MIKE: Yeah, it’s a shame and it shouldn’t be. I have a call-in culinary radio show, so I tend to answer the same types of questions: Why is my cheesecake cracking? Where do I go for dinner in the theater district? My rote answer about cooking is: If you’re interested in cooking, culinary school is an option, but a much better one would be to find the best restaurant you can talk your way into, work for free or minimum wage if you have to, and just keep your mouth shut … and learn, learn. The European models of starting young and not going to school, but doing apprenticeships, were more formalized. That’s the best way to learn this business, not spending a crapload.
When I was a chef in New York in the late eighties and nineties, kids were coming out of the CIA with their thermometers in their pockets and their neckerchiefs tied perfectly, expecting to be hired as sous-chefs. They had no résumés to speak of, and it was hard to explain to them. We had a lot of Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants before them who were amazing line cooks, who came to this country knowing nothing … people who’d work in restaurants and said, teach me. They are the Spanish contingents, now including Peruvians, Ecuadorians, Salvadorians, and now, Mexicans: the backbone of New York kitchens. They are phenomenally good cooks: disciplined, reliable, and hate to say it, but, dollars to doughnuts, they are ten times better than most of the CIA graduates, easily—humble and less entitled. For them, it’s a job. If you show them how to work fast and clean, they are great at producing a recipe consistently.
People who come out of cooking school have a false sense of their abilities. They think they’re worth something that they’re not. It’s just an illusion. Part of that comes from the culinary school. They give you that. They’re not gonna take your fifty grand and tell you the whole truth [laughs]. When we went to culinary school, there were just two: CIA and Johnson & Wales. Now, every city has its own cooking school. There are satellite programs, multiple campuses … it’s become a huge growth industry, and they can only sustain that by selling the myth that a) Cooking is fun to do for a career, and b) Come to my school. You’ll be good, when you graduate. Both of those things may be true, but it’s still a business.
SUSAN: Chef Henin is a French chef who persisted in the United States … spent his life mentoring American students. It’s complex. He speaks so highly about how quickly the US changes, and the creativity it allows. Changes that took a couple of years here would take two hundred years in France.
MIKE: That’s completely true. It’s our greatest asset as a country. Back in the eighties, we’d have a couple weeks off in the summer. We’d buy the cheapest plane tickets we could and go to Paris. We’d book tables to eat at these three-star restaurants becau
se that was the Gold Standard. What you were seeing in those kitchens, you were not seeing in America. There were a few reasons for it, not the least of which was ingredients! In New York City, in the mid-eighties, we were basically buying everything off Sysco trucks. Right? There were no farmers markets, no Farm-to-Table movement. There was no good bread. Butter was crap. We accepted that level of ingredients. In retrospect, it was junk.
To Roland’s point, once cooking became cool—once restaurants and going out to eat became the talk of the town, once it became fashionable—we ran with that ball. By the late nineties and the aughts, I would go to Paris and be bored silly. They hadn’t done anything new—nothing new since nouvelle cuisine. I’d think, Christ, I could eat better than this in New York any day of the week. And now look at the ingredients we have: the bread that’s available; the butter; the American-made cheese; the artisan ingredients. Yeah. Once we decide we’re in as a culture, we’re in. We just move at Grand Prix pace. It’s crazy. It’s the absolute truth.
SUSAN: And your legacy? The PBS show?
MIKE: One of the things these younger writers find useful with me is that sense of historical context—how it got to be this way. It’s easy to be smart and young in New York, just move to Brooklyn and think it’s always been like this. If you go back to the first generation of American chefs, the kitchen was such a small community. The restaurant scene in New York in the eighties was so tiny, compared to what it is today. I teach people … I add to the conversation.
SUSAN: Some of your favorite restaurants these days?
MIKE: They’re all over the place! The ingredients these kids have to play with and the dedication these kids have … I am a huge fan. A lot of guys in my generation, you’ll hear them bemoaning, back in the old days … I tell them, dude, you’re crazy. We were doing the best we could with what we had. If you picked any of those New York Times four-star restaurants in the era that I was in New York, if you could pick any of them, go back in time, and eat dinner there, you’d be lucky if that chef would get one or two stars today. That was all we had! It was the same menu, the Dover sole, the lamb chops, and some kind of beef done a certain way. Now people are just playing with superior ingredients.
Roland G. Henin: 50 Years of Mentoring Great American Chefs Page 8