Now that’s intimidation. And yes—chefs do yell sometimes!
On the other hand, a number of students told me they didn’t think the school was hard enough. Carrie Whealy, a twenty-two-year-old from Iowa, was among them. “I expected it to be really hard core,” she told me. “I’ve been a little disappointed.” She also said, interestingly, that she’d arrived at the school planning to be a chef, but now, almost two years later, recently back from her externship at Chez Panisse and with graduation six months off, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Perhaps go into writing, she confessed.
I was also spending time in Chef Pardus’s class. I had dinner with him and several of his students—after service and before cleaning the kitchen and lecture—and I voiced what I’d heard from some students, that it wasn’t as hard as they’d expected. They agreed unanimously. The chefs were great they said, but they didn’t push you.
I was sorry to hear that. I didn’t want to think that chefs here were going soft on students. Being hard and pushing me was the making of me, and I wasn’t even a student. Not giving me the opportunity to take the easy way out was something that didn’t just help me while I was at the school, it could be applied to everything I did. In a lot of ways, learning to cook saved my life. So to think that the school was filtering out what had been the most valuable part of it to me, personally, and doing so because it had allowed our culture of complaining to weave itself into the fabric of the school, was especially disheartening. Some chefs even wondered aloud if it wasn’t the result of the school’s pandering to consumers, trying to get and keep their business.
Nonsense, said Ryan. (Uncharacteristically, and with annoyance, he used a stronger word when I pressed the issue.) It’s not a kinder, gentler kitchen, he said, and they aren’t pandering to any consumer or competing for students’ bucks. (They are competing for the very best students, Ryan said. The CIA accepts about 80 percent of its applicants, though the school notes many of the 20 percent are not accepted because the applicant doesn’t complete the process, often because of the school’s requirement for previous work in the industry.) But if by kinder and gentler, what was meant was more professional—that would be true, he said. If it meant that when someone was dressed down for not being prepared, it was their performance that was criticized, and that the student was not personally belittled, then that was true, he hoped.
“This institution as far as I know and throughout our history has never been about anything but continuing to raise the standards for our industry, for the profession, and for the individuals who are here,” he said.
Yes, there were issues of how best to teach the work of the chef as the profession changed. More and more, the school looked toward how best to teach the individual rather than institute a blanket approach to instruction.
“There are two thousand three hundred students here and probably twenty-three hundred approaches to take,” Ryan explained. “Does that require faculty members to be smarter? Yeah. Does it require them to work harder? You bet—and what’s wrong with that? So I don’t see any of these things being mutually exclusive, and I don’t see them as being anything but a natural evolution.”
Some of the faculty had noted the changing nature of their work and the continual struggle to be rigorous without being intimidating, an especially tricky tightrope given the extraordinary diversity of the student body—from sensitive high school graduates to knuckleheaded cooks to forty-one-year-old former mortgage bankers.
“I don’t think people are confused, Michael,” Ryan said, doing his best to temper my annoying persistence on the issue. “I think that people are struggling in accepting their personal responsibility, whether here or elsewhere. It’s hard to accept responsibility. It’s easier to walk by a piece of paper that’s on the ground and pretend that you don’t see it than to stop and to pick it up. It’s easier to fool yourself into saying, ‘Oh, somebody’s going to come down on me or a parent might call me, therefore I can’t push these students,’ and that’s not the case. Do we have to be more sophisticated about it? Yeah, absolutely we do, that’s the way the world works. We’re not cooking the way we were a decade ago, either.”
That was a good point. It did come back to cooking in the end, and I liked how cooking metaphors were always quick at hand.
One of the chefs who had taken the new teaching environment most deeply to heart was my chef, Chef Pardus. He had a reputation for being a hard-ass. He had pushed me and challenged me, but he never intimidated me. I was bigger than him and this helped, since he could kick my ass on the line. Also, we were both in our thirties at the time—I wasn’t an impressionable youth easily intimidated. He was unfailingly challenging, articulate, passionate, and really smart in his approach to food. But a lot of students now complained about how hard he was. They either liked him or hated him (the surest indication that something powerful is going on—you couldn’t have a tepid response). True to form, he wanted to be the best teacher he could possibly be, and so he struggled mightily with softening his style without lowering expectations of student performance or diminishing his own passion. And he had an ongoing dialogue with the assistant dean, Chef Felder, a longtime veteran and spiritual torchbearer of Chez Panisse, who was another chef I had no end of respect for.
“I agree that tempering emotions is a necessity, you’re correct in that and I will continue to struggle with it,” Pardus wrote in an e-mail to Felder while I was there.
I’m having trouble separating the training of professional cooks in cooking fundamentals from holding them accountable for organization and forward thinking. If I nurture them every step of the way through the braising process, compensating for a lack of organization so that they don’t become “intimidated” and shut out the fundamental cooking technique—am I succeeding?
On the other hand, if they are very well organized and have planned well because they are afraid of the negative repercussions of unpreparedness, but they undercook the braise and it’s tough—have I failed?
I would rather have both a well-planned and successful dish. Unfortunately, many of our students come to class with the attitude that “showing up is everything.”
I can work on my motivational skills, but fearing the wrath of the Chef is a time-tested tool for getting young cooks to follow directions.
“The perpetuation of the belief that ‘fearing the wrath of the Chef is a time-tested tool for getting young cooks to follow directions,’” Felder wrote back,
disturbs me in the deepest part of my soul. Yes, fear is a motivator no doubt, but I come from the belief that one lights the fire of passion in a young person to be the best they can be through positive interactions and by setting very high standards for them to attain.
I equate this belief with how I cook as a chef. I cook from the understanding of what the item needs. What will make that vegetable taste the best that it can taste. I don’t try to “master” the item. I look at the essential character traits of the vegetable and match my cooking technique and combination of flavors with those traits. In my core, for me, I know that that is the best way in dealing with people.
Certainly in raising children, we know that setting parameters and guidelines of what is acceptable and not acceptable is of paramount importance. How I work with Emma is very different from how I work with Genevieve [referring to her young daughters]. Like a new potato versus a strawberry, they each need something different while I still adhere to my commitment of raising children who have a strong sense of love, kindness, respect, and responsibility.
I so would like to change the belief that one needs fear to achieve the highest standard. What does fear do to an individual? What is “mastery” without love and passion? How do we nurture intrinsic motivation rather than extrinsic? Fear is so extrinsic to me. It comes from the outside. The only tool that fear gives is a perpetuation of fear itself.
Sharing knowledge, role modeling, the concept of the “more you give, the more that will come back to you,” breaking br
ead and engaging in thoughtful conversation, committing to our belief in each other’s greater good, holding each other accountable, giving each other a break, seeing clearly, creating a space for dialogue, for mistakes, are principles that are so near to me and so much how I want to live, the idea that “fear” works is terrifying to me. The energy of fear rattles my bones.
…I was up a lot of the night thinking of how long it takes to understand a person and how lucky I am that I have people like you who aren’t afraid of exposing yourself and digging deep into our similarities and differences. I appreciate your time on this topic.
She signed it, “Respectfully, Eve,” and the conversation continued long after I left the school. Felder was right and Pardus was right; Felder expressed a utopian ideal, and Pardus described the reality as he experienced it daily in the kitchen with a score of new, very different students every fifteenth class day.
Felder’s idea, echoed by Ryan, about cooking to the item, to the potato and the strawberry, is apt and what makes teaching today so much more complex and difficult than it used to be (and probably so much more effective). Truth is, the cooking world is filled with knuckleheads. It’s filled with humanity of every stripe. For a knucklehead, a group I include myself in, yelling works. Fear is a splendid motivator. Turgeon learned this way, too. Why did he start to hustle so hard at his first job after the CIA, at Vidalia under Jeffrey Buben, what made him excel? “I wanted the chef to stop yelling at me so much,” he said, grinning at the memory.
But there are a lot of people out there who don’t respond to chefs who, as one phrased it, “discuss with volume.” Mary the mortgage banker surely doesn’t need some hard-ass screaming in her ear to clean her goddam station. Nor the thoughtful Carrie, who was moving from the hope of cooking to the intent to write about it. How does an instructor pitch his or her teaching to students with such diverse goals in the same class? The only way I know of is smaller, more specialized classes, but until that happened, Pardus and Turgeon, both CIA grads, both cooks and chefs who learned by getting their asses kicked and by working really, really hard, would continue to grapple.
“Hard to believe,” Pardus wrote to me toward the end of the summer when I asked about the issue, “but I’ve become an anachronism. I’m looking at it as a challenge. If I can soften my delivery without diluting the intensity, I will become the teacher I want to be: one who is tough and rigorous but engaging. Alienating students is not in the long term best interest of my career.”
I wrote back to Pardus, telling him he reminded me of Cool Hand Luke after he’d dug that dirt out of Boss’s hole for the last time—“I got mah mind right, Boss!” Pardus said he was afraid I’d say something like that.
After I’d finished in garde manger, and saw Turgeon in the hall, I asked him if he remembered to hug his students today. He grunted, shook his head, and looked away.
I’m sure I was annoying to them, and they knew they were taking a risk before their colleagues, if not the CIA president and his administration, just by talking to me, and for that I was truly grateful, but I couldn’t help it. I loved this school and all these chefs. They were really passionate about what they did, and what they did was to teach people how to work with food and everything that followed from that—which, as far as I was concerned, meant pretty much everything.
And as far as the students went, there were good ones and bad ones, diligent ones committed to extracting as much information from this place as possible and others who preferred to let the information wash over them. In my observation, the students who complained said more about themselves than about the school or this or that instructor—they defined themselves as people who put blame elsewhere rather than take responsibility for their actions. The harder they argued their point, the deeper they entrenched themselves. Those students who said that the school wasn’t tough enough, that the instructors didn’t push hard enough—they were the ones you wanted on your team.
CHAPTER 4
Waiting for Bibimbap
“I want to welcome you. I’m Michael Pardus, your instructor in K-1 for Asian cuisines.”
This was the pre–Day 1 meeting in which the chef set the ground rules for the next block or course of study and did his best to ensure that all were prepared and ready to roll the moment the block began.
With the curriculum revamp in 2001, not only had the name of the class been changed to more accurately reflect the cuisine (it used to be “Oriental” cuisine), it had been lengthened from one half block—seven days, followed by seven days of charcuterie, to a full block. The eighteen students now seated around a long table in the Continuing Education Center’s dining room were currently finishing up their three-week block in American regional cooking, a course that also had been expanded from a half block (split with fish cookery) to a whole one. This made a huge difference. Pardus noted that in his class, for instance, instead of spending a scant one day each on Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam, they spent two. India and China got three days. This was enough for a brief overview of these styles, and importantly, the students got to prepare their menus at least twice rather than once. So, if your Thai papaya salad and green pork curry were lame, you had a chance to figure out why and try to fix it the next day. Previously the food with which most students were least familiar went by in a blur. Cuisines of Asia still remained a sprint, but there was now time for the class to develop a routine—they were still mastering basic restaurant service in addition to the food itself, rules of sanitation, station setup, and the order-fire-pickup that began at 6:00 sharp.
“I don’t care who gets the food as long as it gets there. I don’t care who cleans the floor as long as it’s clean and half of you aren’t in the courtyard smoking,” he says, running through the rules of his kitchen after handing out tracking schedules, who’s on which station on which days, what each station is responsible for, and a sheet spelling out exactly what he means by being prepared. “I know at five-thirty if the sous-chef has done a good job…. I really emphasize how you organize yourselves. Come to class fully armed with all the information you can bring to show you are prepared. You have daily assignments. I do not collect homework. This is so you cannot do a Google search of key terms and cut and paste.”
Key terms included materials and methods—such as paneer and katsuobushi on days for the cuisines of India and Japan, respectively—about eight to ten a day.
“You do this, you don’t understand your menu or a recipe, or anything, you ask me at three-fifteen, you’ll get a gentle, patient person. Never hesitate to ask me. What’s a severe bias cut—hell, what’s a bias cut? What’s it mean ‘medium-low wok’—what’s medium low for a wok? You come and ask me that at five-thirty, I’m going to tell you to go take a walk around the block, because you aren’t prepared.
“I have a reputation for having a really hard edge. But I’m very passionate about what I do and when people don’t join me in my passions,” he says, and his lips curl into a tight grin, “I get a little cranky…. I’m really into it.” Pardus has traveled in Japan, Thailand, has connections in Singapore—they speak English there, he tells the class, so it’s not an intimidating place to extern, if they want that, he can help them line up work—and he has begun this year to organize a culinary tour of Vietnam. This is his fourth course during the ten years he’s been at the school. “It’s been my best so far,” he tells them. My final days back at the CIA would be the first four days of his course, cuisines of China and Korea. The menu included Hot and Sour Soup, Smoked Bean Curd and Celery Salad, Lacquered Pork Ribs, Crispy Tangerine Chicken, Moo Shu Vegetables, and Shanghai-Style Fish with Bok Choy and Fried Rice. Pardus’s kitchen, like Turgeon’s, was on the basement level of the main building and so had no windows and was long and narrow. Its dry-storage cage contained unfamiliar items, such as nam prik pao (a Thai chili paste), various fish sauces, noodles made from mung bean starch. There was a bank of ranges, but there was also a tall box used for steam-roasting and smoking pork ribs and
pork shoulder butt and Peking duck; a tandoor oven; and three traditional restaurant woks with about 135,000 BTUs beneath them (a normal range produces about 20,000)—lift a wok off its base, the dozens of jets of flame below looked like rocket-engine output. Cooking in one of these numbers was an education—the kind of experience you can get only by doing it. The wok got so hot, you couldn’t let your food sit still in it; you had to keep your food dancing above the surface continuously or you’d burn it. Above these woks were wall spigots for cleaning them with a big wood-handled brush, then tipping the water out into a trough that channeled it to a drain behind the stove.
It felt good to be back in class. You arrived and got straight to work—no lecture or preamble from the chef, no dithering while others got their shit together. In K-1 we gathered product and began making our dishes, developed by Pardus, Shirley Cheng, and their colleagues in Asian. At first, Pardus said he felt a little intimidated and unsure—how authoritative could a white boy from Connecticut be on Asian cuisines? Eventually, after a lot of study and travel, he thought he might have an advantage over Shirley Cheng, from Chengdu, China, or Prem Kumar, from Kerala, on the southern coast of India. They cover seven regions of the Eastern world, and while Cheng or Kumar would no doubt bring an authoritative depth to their native regions, they also had their own biases. Pardus hoped he’d bring both knowledge and balance to every region.
Early on the first day, a student approached Chef Pardus with a chunk of ginger she’d just peeled. “Do you want this grated or minced?” she asked.
The Reach of a Chef Page 8