The younger generation wants to go fast—not like how they did it in the old days. For certain things that you learn in this industry, it’s repetition that makes you successful—repeating and tweaking and making sure that you can do a dish for five people, and that dish is just rock star. Now, when you need to do it for five hundred, can you make that dish? That’s when you scratch your head, “How can we make this happen?” Some dishes can duplicate and some cannot. That’s where the challenge comes in, and that’s where the wisdom comes in.
SUSAN: What is your personal background?
LARRY: A Cuban-born native, came to the United States, and grew up in New Orleans. I’ve been in this business thirty-five years. Started in 1982 at eighteen years old, trying to help my mom pay for college, and honestly, I fell in love with it. I worked for a hotel in New Orleans. What a great time and place to grow up and be in the food industry, in New Orleans. I did my stint downtown and ended up at the apprenticeship program at the Intercontinental Hotel, a five-star, four-diamond hotel at the time. I encountered my first 100 percent French chef with his “very calm” temperament (which I say facetiously).
I always grew up with structure! My mother instilled this in me. In that hotel, I learned classical structure. Our cookbook was Escoffier. It was a dream. There was a pallet of Escoffier books, and Chef handed them out, saying, “This is your recipe book, and this is our code!” At that time, I was young, naïve, and wanted to learn, but I heard some of the other sous-chefs saying, “This is ridiculous! Who does this?” I worked with some phenomenal chefs, like Paul Bocuse. Charles Chavant from La Provence was also there, plus a lot of old Escoffier-style chefs who instilled in us respect and integrity of a brigade—no man is left behind. No one is too good to wash dishes, unload a pallet, or help their comrades. To this day, it’s one of my fonder moments. It’s difficult trying to teach that now, because the work ethic is totally different. Some guys still have it, so you can’t just make a broad stroke. You always look for that little gem … that gleam in someone’s eye, when you know that kid is gonna get it.
I went through convention hotels, country clubs, and eventually ended up at the Balsams. I’ve been with Delaware North for ten years; Balsams for three and a half years; NFL and Buffalo Bills for three years; and now I’m in St. Louis with MLB and the Cardinals for the past three years. I’ve always had a sound résumé, and I think that’s one of the things that Chef likes: This kid sticks around, no matter how rough it gets. That’s uncommon now, where people last in a company for two or three years.
The luxury we have with DN is that we’re so big and diverse that you can make an entire career in one “flat” or umbrella. Delaware has four major identities or segments: Gaming, Parks & Resorts, Sportservice, and Travel/Hospitality. Within those identities, there are multiple units, which allow an individual to get well-rounded with all these places. You could do ten or twelve years in sportservice and then do ten or twelve years in national parks. I’m an old believer that you should never leave a place prior to three years: the first year, you’re learning; the second year, you’re starting to give back and make an impact; the third year, you start to build your benchmark, so that you can progress to the next level and develop your next layer of culinary instincts. When we stop springing out of bed and can’t wait to get to work … then it’s time to move on. It hasn’t happened yet, so that’s good!
SUSAN: Utilization is something that comes up a lot …
LARRY: He’s always asking, “What would you do with that?” You tell him, and he’ll sit there and listen, but then he’ll offer another option. You sit there and go, “Wow. I’m an idiot.” I was working on a product for Practical, a poached pear. I peeled the pear and threw the peelings away into my food scraps, then put the pear into the liquid, so on and so forth. At the end of my full run for certification, he says, “Why would you not put the pear skins in the poaching liquid?” I said, “Chef, I thought it would turn the liquid bitter.” He says, “There you go, overthinking. Why don’t you just try it?” The next time I did it and the intensity of the poached pear flavor was like ten times … not that you were serving the skin, but the skin added more flavor. It was not bitter, but so divine. Simple! Plus, that’s one less item in your scrap pile that became food trim you cooked with. Same thing if you butcher chicken: you roast the whole thing; roast the chicken skin with the chicken fat to brush your chicken, versus olive oil. Use everything from that item; it’s all there, to fortify the stock, etc., without adding fifty-five ingredients.
SUSAN: What was his impact on your life?
LARRY: His dedication to the integrity of our business: if you call it a roast chicken, make sure it is a roast chicken. It may sound silly, but when you put something on the menu, make sure it is prepared that way. If you say “sauté,” make sure it is sautéed! Make sure there is caramelization on it and color. When my guys are putting menus together, they send them to me. I ask them to walk them through and will question, “Why are you thinking about this? What is your final outcome? You can’t skip certain processes. If you don’t have enough time to cook a velouté sauce, don’t call it a velouté!
Chef pushed me for certification. Our company standard is to be certified within three years. I had a hard time meeting that deadline, due to work and volunteering for company events, but he never let up. “It is your career, for you to benefit, personally. You have to make this happen. How can we support you? We won’t ask you to do events in those crunch time months before certification.” He helped me approach the GM to create a timeline they understood. He got them involved, so that they had ownership. We all reap the rewards and they get to say, “Our chef is certified!”
One of the things we did in Buffalo … it was brutal. Chef was on a mission. We went through a whole year of doing a tour around the company with the Jacobs family, with different parties, and so forth. I looked at my sous-chef as we were driving back and said, “You may want to let your wife know that you and I are going to be in bed together for the next ninety days, because we are going to get certified. We need to get this monkey off our backs.” Everyone supported it—the GM, Chef Henin, all the upper management. Chef says, “You guys keep thinking I’m the bad guy, but if you give me just ninety days, I can stay off your hit list, and yours will be the only unit in this company with three Certified Executive Chefs.”
Chef came in and mentored us. He treated our Practical as competition. “You guys are coming in as professional chefs. You’re not just going to pass. You are coming in as a brand—Delaware North—as your own integrity and your own name.” Chef suggested a competition package, including a personal history, menu, and seasonal concept, a grocery list and dietary needs. It listed all your cooking and cutting skills. It highlighted all the items and provided pictures, making sure the recipes were spot-on. We did not skimp on products. It was a spring menu, and we had morels, ramps, and fiddleheads. Finally, there was a section thanking the judges! That way, there was no question of, Did he do this or do that? We set the tone right away. That was the first initial contact with the proctors, when they asked if we had our menu. They remarked, “I guess we know who we have to watch.” They said that in a positive way.
After our Practical, a judge approached me and asked, “Who the hell taught you to do this competition stuff?”
“Chef Henin.”
“Please tell Chef Henin that it’s hard for the rest of the world to keep up with you guys, the way you represent. This was ridiculous food for a three-hour window!”
That was the peak of our day. Chef is right. If you fail on one little thing, everything else will carry you. Thanks to Chef, the monkey was off our backs. It was the best beer I ever had, that afternoon.
Scott Green
Executive Chef at Orchard Park Country Club
Is it good enough? Think again!
SCOTT: For the first twenty-two years of my life, I couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do and kinda failed out of the four-year school
. I had been doing this “cooking thing” all along, so I decided to go to culinary school at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. That’s where my career started to take off. I went to a four-star resort in Phoenix. Then 9/11 happened. I moved back to Detroit and ended up working for Delaware North. After six months, I was chosen to be the personal chef for the owner of company, Jeremy Jacobs Sr.
SUSAN: After six months, you became the personal chef to the owner of the company?
SCOTT: I had been cooking since I was sixteen, you know, the whole story … starting out as a dishwasher, then a pizza cook. I cooked during college—went to a four-year school for the big book of degrees, and it just didn’t fit. My girlfriend said, “Hey, you can cook. Why don’t you try that?” I went to the one-year school to get my bases down, but being in the business for several years helped. I went to the Wigwam in Phoenix—a giant place that had a bake shop, butcher shop, fine dining, casual dining, and a country club. I learned a lot there, and I worked my tail off, making [laughs] about $7.50 an hour. You could work a hundred hours a week, if you wanted.
Then 9/11 hit and it crushed the tourism business, which is a lot of what they did at the Wigwam—it’s a destination place. After I returned to Michigan, I saw an ad for a sous-chef at Comerica Park with Delaware North. I wasn’t a sous-chef, but the chef gave me the job. For six months, I ran my own restaurant. At that time, Jon Perrault was a corporate chef as well as Chef Roland. He ventured more into the aesthetic things—layouts, etc. He saw me and thought I would be a good guy for that personal chef position, so I went down to the Jacobses’ house and I tried out for three weeks. I was nervous, going into a billionaire’s house … well, he was not quite a billionaire; he was 890 million at the time. The next year, he was a billionaire.
SUSAN: [Laughs] No pressure.
SCOTT: Yeah. That setting was nerve-racking and I had my doubts. People were coming from all over the country to cook, also interviewing for the job. They selected me. At the time, I was seriously thinking about turning it down, but decided to take it and stuck with it for about five years and then carried on to a different part of the company.
During that time, they had this thing called a Chef Summit. I was young, maybe twenty-six, but Chef Roland wanted me to go out to the Napa Valley summit. I was nervous about meeting the guy: CMC … who is this? He’s French … has a funny-sounding name. Being unsure of myself, I flew into Sacramento. I had my luggage, walking out, and there’s Chef Roland with his giant minivan. He was the most gracious person I ever met. Being a guy of such a high stature with the company, and, basically in the world, he made me feel at home: “Heeey … I hear you are the great chef Scott who is working with Mr. Jacobs.” I was quite shocked, to tell you the truth. It was like meeting a movie star who was treating you like a normal guy. I’m going in like, there’s this mythical god of cooking … who is this guy? This mentor to Thomas Keller and Emeril Lagasse? He was still just one of us, a cook at heart. It made me feel like part of the team. It was like being in a locker room, with all the chefs talking and the camaraderie.
Chef Roland and I were part of the 2008 Delaware North Culinary Olympic team. He saw that even though I was young and green, I had the work ethic and the vision. We trained for ten months, and it was stressful. [Laughs] He’d fly us all into the Balsams Resort—fly us into Manchester actually, and then drive four hours to wherever the heck it is. We’re driving up in the van—me, Kevin Doherty, Ambarish Lulay, Rolf Baumann, and a couple guys working as commis. We’re driving and driving and Chef is giving us the precursor of what’s gonna be going on the menu. We got our templates ready to go for the week: our platters, the THEME, the teeeeeme, what the teeeeme’s gonna be … we heard about the theme a thousand times! We drive up to the Balsams in the middle of winter. There’s no one else around. This place, it’s like The Shining! The rooms are kind of scary.
We’re all new to the thing, doing cold platters. As accomplished as we were, we were novices walking into this. Chef Larry Johnson, the Balsams chef at the time, set us up in this butcher shop to work. This room is maybe ten feet by eighteen feet with a big butcher block in the middle that we all work out of, so Chef can see what we’re all doing at the same time. On the last day, we started at midnight and had the platters done by nine in the morning. Chef Roland comes down around 3:00 a.m. One of the commis is messing around with the gelatin and Chef rides him a little bit. The commis bumps Chef and spills his coffee. After the coffee was spilled, it was downhill for the rest of the day. Everybody got yelled at. He set the tone for what was needed in the next ten months.
He knew what buttons to push: some people need more coddling, while some people you just need to ride. He’d send out a picture of a platter and write: Is it good enough? Think again! (That picture is up in my office now.) When we made sturgeon mousseline, it was sturgeon—no substituting out another white fish. The judges may not know, but we knew we did the right thing, weren’t faking anything. You could see it: from the first platters we put up, to what we accomplished at the Culinary Olympics.
En Gelée. That was the biggest thing. He makes you do research first, then tells you a little bit how to do it. I made a mushroom and salmon en gelée. I know what I’m doing … do all my mise, get my gel set, and have it all together, first laying the mushrooms down, all in a line. I line my salmon, then more mushrooms, then the condiments, and then I start pouring the gelatin, pressing it down and putting it together. I wrap it up, let it cool and set. I start cutting it, but stop. “Chef! It didn’t come out right!”
He says, “Chef, you didn’t pay attention. You didn’t watch what you were doing. You didn’t follow the instructions, as I said.”
He makes me melt down the whole thing, pull it all apart, and separate each little tiny mushroom. I have like five different kinds of mushrooms in there. I pull it all apart, rinse off all the mushrooms, get them all re-seasoned, get the salmon out, pick all the gelatin off of that, and re-season the salmon. Then, he shows me how to build it. He gets a standard two-inch hotel pan. He gets the ice. He puts the bowl in the ice. He puts the plastic wrap in there, and then he starts building it, one by one. He puts more in there. He methodically puts everything in and says, “You have to do it like this.” Then he steps aside, and I do it. I’m putting mushrooms in, and salmon in, and gelatin in, and he says, “Do it faster! Do it faster!” I keep going and going and he says, “Oh! You’re a mess!” I have to break the thing down again. Then he shows me, straight up, how to do it. He does the whole thing, and then it makes sense. I now understand why you do things a certain way and in a certain order. We let it cool and set and then we slice it, and it is a beautiful terrine. I learned why he had me make it several times—so I would understand why he had to take the extra steps to get a beautiful finished product.
SUSAN: That seems like classic Henin.
SCOTT: Here’s another classic. We did a high-end gala for about 250 people at the Albright-Knox, an art museum north of Buffalo. I believe the exact event was called Panza, based on the art collection. We set up a tent in November … in Buffalo. We had no idea what the weather would be. I’ve worked in places with three inches of water on the floor and you’re plating up in fifty-degree weather.
These high-end galas tend to host a lot of vegans. Chef Roland takes on the challenge of the vegetarian meal. Duck and steak are the main meal options, and he’s got this vegetarian chop. All the meals were pre-ordered, but then everyone starts switching plates, and now everyone wants the vegetarian chop. Suddenly, he’s doing the most out of everybody.
There were fifty of these plates, and they looked exactly the same. He did it in small batches, over there in his little area with another person helping him. I went over to help him out, because he was getting very busy. The entire time, he’s in this zone, his cockpit. He’s sautéing the carrots, with shallots. Then he tosses in the green beans. He turns around and starts plating. Everything is going in the same order: he’s got the shallots and carrots down;
he’s got the green beans down; he’s got the veal chop down; he’s got the sauce down; he’s got the mashed potatoes down; he’s got the accoutrements down on the plate, and then BOOM! Then the next plate.
And to the next plate. And the next plate. And the next plate. Then he turns around and prepares more carrots. And more shallots. He cooks more green beans. Everything is in small amounts for five to ten orders, so everything is hot and fresh. I’m over there helping him, and then … I don’t know how old he is—no one knows how old he is!—he’s probably well in his sixties, and he’s boxing me out of the kitchen!
I’m like, “Chef, I’m trying to help you, here!”
He says, “Okay, do this, do that!” Then he’s yelling at me, “Hurry up! Speed it up! You’re too slow back there!”
He’s hitting me on the back, and I’m like, “Here you go, Chef! Here are some more!”
I’m cooking and cooking and going, and he keeps going, methodical, methodical, he just keeps going, and he’s putting these plates up, one after one after one after one, the exact same way. He has the same motions of how he puts the carrots, and how he puts the greens, and how the chop is placed, methodically every time—a machine in an assembly line.
I watched Chef when he was training chefs Percy and Kevin for the CMC test. I went out to Buffalo a few times to help out and be part of the critiques. Chef Henin would break down each piece of food on their plate:
Roland G. Henin: 50 Years of Mentoring Great American Chefs Page 24