Without spending too much time on my 2008 Bocuse experience, I was a disaster. It did not go well. Do I look fondly on the experience? Yes, in some ways, but there was a lot of unfinished business. I didn’t truly “get it” until I failed miserably and reflected on the experience.
In 2009, I reapplied to the competition and was selected again. Armed with a better understanding of what could be accomplished in that little kitchen and with the given equipment, I set out to do things at a higher level. When Chef Henin made himself available to observe a practice session, I was absolutely welcoming to the idea. It was no different, even though my food was at a higher place; his reaction to it was the same low-level miserableness. Is it good enough? I was armed with a few answers this time, but that sent him into a frenzy. I spent a lot of time over the last two years researching platters and presentations of previous high-level practitioners of Bocuse d’Or, in Lyon. When I brought this up, he did not even want to hear it. Angrily, he would say “Why do you want to do what has already been done?” Oh my! How deeply true was that? Where does he get this wisdom? And why don’t I have a shred of it, after twelve years working with this man? That interaction set me up to achieve the Best Meat Presentation for the Bocuse d’Or USA competition. I was inches away from the podium, but also proud of this prize. It showed that I was finally “getting it” … a little.
Over the course of the next two years, I continued to pursue competition efforts in the ACF arena. There was talk about a formal Delaware North nomination to support pursuit of the Certified Master Chef exam. I knew I would be supported if I showed interest; I just wondered if I could succeed. This exam is nothing short of unachievable to almost 90 percent of those who take it. The formal agreement came in 2011 and my three-year roller-coaster ride on the Roland G. Henin Express began. This journey was full of surprises, tears of both joy and frustration, more perplexity, laughs, quiet despair, sleepless nights, happy esprit de corps moments, and respectful soul-jabbing.
Chef Henin always signs the annual Christmas card, “In Good Cooking.” There is nothing more important than that statement as it relates to my friend, colleague, and mentor. I would not be who I am today without some of the influences he has bestowed upon me.
William Bennett
Executive Chef, Corral de Tierra Country Club
We worked long hours into the night, just goofy-tired. I couldn’t get enough of it, and thought, If this is what professional cooking is, I want more of it! After working with him that day, I would go anywhere he told me to go to do anything he told me to do.
WILLIAM: I took a job with Delaware North in 1998 at a conference center, my first job as an executive chef. I got a call from the GM, who said the company wanted to send me to New York for an important dinner. Their corporate chef was going to be there, a well-known French-trained chef. I said, “Wow, that’d be kind of fun.” I was excited; this was my first experience where a company “flew me out there”—paid for my flight, meals, and everything. I would help do a dinner for about 450 people in Niagara Falls, at another kitchen that DN operated.
I had never met Roland or had experience with a chef of that level. That weekend was the hardest, most high-pressure cooking that I had ever done up to that point … and [laughs] probably even since. It was the only time in my life, cooking in the kitchen, when I was so nervous and stressed and freaked out that I was just holding back the vomit. I thought I was going to throw up for a good half an hour.
Chef was super intense. We spent three days preparing for the event. All the problems that could happen when you’re doing an event in a new place where you’ve never been, with people you’ve never worked with, happened: people didn’t show up; ingredients didn’t show up; there were all kinds of issues, from lack of facilities to equipment, and he battled through every one of them. The night of the dinner, we had more people not show up. It was a huge event, with fireworks and a huge tent overlooking the Falls, and a separate tent for dessert. Two kitchens were attached to the main tent.
The night of the event, staff didn’t show up, and we didn’t have enough chefs. He came to me. “You’re going to be in charge of one kitchen, and I’m going to be in charge of the other. Come with me, right now. I’ll tell you what I want and how it goes.” He put me in charge of one kitchen that plated up around 250 of the meals; simultaneously, he would be on the other side of the tent, plating up on his side. It was the most exhilarating thing for me to have the guy pick me out of the four to five other chefs who were there and to have responsibility. From that day on, working with him in that capacity, he invigorated me toward being more of a professional chef and challenging myself.
That night was frantic. The beef Wellington in the oven wasn’t done yet at the time of service. He had to decide on whether to serve the salad now that he was planning to serve after the beef. He ran through the kitchen with the towels flying and saying, “Salad salad salad now! Serve the salad now!” Just running through and everyone was looking up, like, Who the hell is that guy?
We switched gears and had to change the whole thing around. My stomach was turning, I was sweating and shaking, and I was thinking, How am I going to get this done? This guy is crazy! He put so much pressure on me and I had just met him four days ago! It pushed me to my absolute limits—showed me what I am capable of and what it takes to do those kinds of things. From then on, after working with him that day, I would go anywhere he told me to go, do anything he told me to do; I was like … probably one of his best soldiers, to be honest. I still feel that way. If I ever have an opportunity to work with him again, I’d drop what I’m doing.
Some guys were put off by his intensity. The closer you got to him, the more intense it was. They were like, I better keep my distance, or else he’s going to make me do things that I won’t be able to do, or, I don’t want to do that much work. We were working about seventeen hours a day. I loved it. I would have worked nineteen or twenty or twenty-four. And he was there with us the entire time. He didn’t say, “Here’s a list—do it, get it done, and I’ll see you in the morning.” He was the last guy to leave the kitchen. He was the first guy there in the morning. To watch a guy in his sixties work full-tilt over twelve or fourteen hours a day … he could do twice as much work as me, and I’m half his age! Everything he did was spot-on. If this sixty-something guy can stay on his feet and work to this level, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t be able to. People would complain and I’d say, “Your feet are tired? Look at that guy. He’s twice your age. I’m sure his feet hurt. His back is tired and his knees hurt, and he’s not going to stop or slow down. Or complain.” I thought that was the best thing ever. I guess it showed in my enthusiasm, my respect for him, and my work. He saw that in me that, of all the people there.
I think back and wonder, Why didn’t we just bring in more people? Why didn’t we buy a different product? It’s that uncompromising commitment to doing it the right way … at literally all costs: you don’t sleep; you don’t eat regular meals; you don’t get a phone call. You are there for the one single full purpose, and that was different. The seriousness of it was different for me. I liked that single-mindedness—you’re going to get the right product, no matter what. You’re going to handle it the way it needs to be handled, no matter what. If it takes one hour or ten, it is what it is. That’s what you’re here for. He was real clear about that. Some people didn’t want to put in the effort and commitment to work up to that level.
SUSAN: How do you think the night went, then?
WILLIAM: We served a French-style meal: an appetizer course, then the meat course. After the meat, it’s traditional to eat your roughage—your greens to wash everything down—and then move on to the dessert. He planned to serve beef Wellington, followed by the salad course, with these delicate little greens all stuffed in these little Parmesan baskets that [laughs] you had to make, one-by-one. And the meat, with a propane oven, outdoors, didn’t cook as fast as it should have. In a dining room with four hundred–
plus people waiting, it was going to take another fifteen minutes to finish the beef, and then it should rest and everything. So even though the menu was on the table saying, “beef first and then salad,” he switched it around, in order to make sure that the beef was properly cooked, to assure the quality of the food. This required putting the hot plates away, getting the other plates out, and resetting the entire thing for service—ten minutes of frantic running around. With the available staff we had to plate up that night, he kept two-thirds of them and threw the derelicts at me. He put me to the test, seeing if I could get it done. I thought, Why does he have, like, twelve people, and I have seven? He would run through—and I mean, literally run through this massive tented dining room. He would run through the kitchen, saying, “LIKE THIS! LIKE THIS! LIKE THIS!!” Not screaming in a bad way, but vocal and loud. He kept coming through there, while I was watching the plates and checking on everything. He’s running through, barking these orders out, and I’m saying, “Yes, Chef. I got this. I got that.”
There were some culinary students there from NFCI. Chef and I are yelling to each other, back and forth, and this girl—she didn’t look real serious about anything in life—turns to me, and says, “Who is that asshole?”
I said, “Hey, hey, hey! He’s in charge! He’s a Certified Master Chef! Watch your mouth. You gotta show some respect, here.”
She says, “I don’t care who he is; he’s an asshole!”
“Well … you’re going to have to learn how to deal with these people, if you’re going to want to be a decent chef, someday.”
SUSAN: I guess that’s why I’m interviewing you, instead of her.
WILLIAM: From then on, whenever there was a DN event that required attention, like if they were looking to gain another contract, he would set up these elaborate meals over the course of a few days. It was like a big long meeting with the DN people. He would fly out there and invite this team, and I was lucky enough to be one of them. You go out there, cook with him, and execute these meals. We’d show up someplace where we’d never been before, go in and assess the kitchen. We did a lot of cleaning, scrubbing, and organizing. He refused to work anywhere that was dirty, messy, and unsanitary, so we spent half of the first day cleaning and scrubbing: the floors and walls; inside the refrigerator; the prepping tables; behind the tables; the shelf underneath the tables we were working on. We cleaned everything that we were going to come in contact with—completely scrubbed and sanitized and straightened up. That’s how we started.
After a couple of these trips, you learned the procedure and how he liked things. We would get flown into wherever—Florida or Ohio or New York. We’d land and connect, get the menu going, and get the stuff in the kitchen. We were like a military operation. We’d walk in and these cooks would be there. They didn’t know who we were, and we didn’t know who they were, and we’d say, “Hey, I need you to come over here, clean this and clean that,” and they’d say, “Who the hell are you? You’re not my boss!” We would basically command the kitchen and the crew. You’re working with this guy who is a world-class level chef, and you show up at a place with guys making food who didn’t know culinary operations—a bunch of stoners on their summer job at Jones Beach. In twenty-four hours, you’d try to turn them into something acceptable to a Certified Master Chef.
SUSAN: What impressions stand out?
WILLIAM: He loves the camaraderie of the kitchen. At the Asilomar Conference Grounds, these older Portuguese cooks had been there for about forty years. These guys never had much professional training, but they’d been cooking their entire lives … they had these cooking instincts. Roland became friendly with them and absolutely loved this one guy, Eddie da Silva, the chef of the kitchen for many years. When things got computerized, Eddie couldn’t do the things they needed, so they hired me as the chef to come up in this new company while Eddie “the rock” stayed on. He had the history and knew all the visitor’s preferences.
I wasn’t sure how Roland would handle those guys … he’d come in and they’d be a little sloppy and he’d jump all over them. Instead, he immediately recognized how special they were. He’d call and ask, “How’s Eddie? How’s Roberto? How are my buddies down there?” Maybe because he was French and they were Portuguese … they were working in another country. They talked a lot about the food that they grew up with and their kitchen experiences. He couldn’t get enough of hanging out with those two Portuguese guys. It was another side of him: he could be so demanding, but then super friendly.
He is such a humble guy! It’s funny … that first weekend, he mentioned Thomas Keller. I was trying to be up on the food world. Thomas Keller had opened a restaurant in Napa Valley that was getting attention. People called him the best chef in the United States and here this Roland guy I just met tells me, “Oh, I gave Thomas his first job and was a mentor to him.” I was like, “Yeah, right. Sure you did.” [Laughs] I thought it was a joke. Thomas is the best chef in the United States! What are you talking about? You gave him a job, like he was a summer cook? What?
Then my wife and I go to this bookstore in Berkeley. The French Laundry Cookbook just came out, and I bought it. I asked my wife if she would drive home so I could look through it. I am flipping through the book, and in a beginning section, there is this whole paragraph where he is comparing Roland to Zeus. I read through it and jumped up out of my seat. “Holy crap! He keeps talking about Roland! I just worked with him two weeks ago! Look at this!” I turned to the index, and under “Henin” there are multiple pages. It kind of hit me at that point, like, Wow. He really did do all these things with Thomas Keller. Look at all these other things he’s done for all these other people.
He never hangs his hat on that stuff, never puts it out there: Oh, look at me. I’m a big chef. He never talks like that. Especially now, where everybody wants to get their face in front of the camera, his work speaks louder than the publicity. Years from now, when he’s not around, people will look back on him and say he was more than he ever let on … it’s that business of being humble and not just trying to get all that attention. I handle myself the same way. If one day I am the best cook in the world, I’m not going to put it on a billboard and I’m not going to have people address me that way. He’s a one-in-a-million kind of guy, but he’ll never tell you that.
When he told me about Thomas Keller and I didn’t believe it, he just shrugged it off. Then when I saw the book a couple weeks later, I realized he’s a lot more than he’ll let on. Nowadays, all chefs want is all the attention. It’s annoying. I treat it the same way, when his name comes up.
“Oh, I worked for Roland for a while.”
“Oh, geez! How was that?”
“It was the best time of my life. It was the best cooking I ever did.”
I had those four years with him, and it’s more than most people are ever going to get to be around the guy. It meant a lot to me, but I’m not going to toot my own horn about it.
He can be kind of gruff when you meet him. If you don’t play ball and do things correctly, you’re gonna get the horns. One time, he flew a bunch of us out to an event. There was this new DN chef, and Henin liked to take the new people to these things. They fly us all out there and put us up in these hotels, feeding us and everything. The first day on the job, this guy unrolls his knife roll, takes his stone out and starts sharpening his knives. Roland’s looking at him, and I could tell, Oh boy. Here we go. He went up and asks the guy, “What the hell are you doing?”
The chef thought he was going to impress Roland. “Oh, I always like to keep my knives sharp. I want to make sure they’re nice and sharp for today.”
Henin just lit the guy up. “Do you think I flew you all the way across country so that you can stand here and sharpen your knives?! That’s something you should have done, before you got here! You’re not prepared! Put that away!”
The new chef says, “Chef, my knives aren’t sharp.” The guy was arguing with him a little bit, and they went at it. When that’s
going on, you just keep your head down … [Laughs]
This was a treat to be able to come out here and work with all these people. You should be better prepared than that. When you see that happening, you make sure everything you’re doing is right and everything is in the right spot. You don’t want to be the next guy on the chopping block. So everybody went back to their respective jobs, and about two months later, he was just gone. I imagine they had more than that one run-in.
SUSAN: Compare your mentoring style to Chef Henin’s.
WILLIAM: I don’t operate the same as Roland, in the kitchen. I’m a little bit mellower as a person, probably a little more patient with people. Let’s say I peeled a tomato. He would come over and say, “This isn’t a peeled tomato.”
I’d say, “What are you talking about? There’s no peel on them.”
He’s like, “No no no …” And he’d scrape the peels, themselves! He’d scrape the back of the peels off with his knife, and he’d show me this little bit of red on the edge of his knife and he’d ask, “What is that?”
“What is what?”
“What’s that, on the knife?”
“It looks like tomato.”
He’d say, “There you go. Exactly.” And, he just walked away.
I thought, What is the guy telling me? I don’t understand this.
Roland G. Henin: 50 Years of Mentoring Great American Chefs Page 21