He said, “Minced,” then paused. “Ya know, why don’t you get me a piece of ginger, a peeled carrot, and a scallion at your station, and I’ll show everyone how I want them done.” The first day, he answers a lot of questions and demos a lot of the basics they’ll be using each day.
“Hey, folks, come on down here so I can show you something real quick,” he called to the class when the ginger, carrot, and scallion were ready at the station. But he scanned the long steel table, lined with food and cutting boards, and said, “Where are your tasting spoons? How can you cook without tasting?”
“We’re that good,” a student in front of him said.
“I’m gonna call you on that one,” Pardus returned. “That’s the kind of statement that’s gonna come back and bite you on the ass. I’m the only one allowed to be cocky here.” He grinned, then moved on to peeling ginger: “Instead of using a knife or a peeler, use a spoon. It gives you a better yield and you can also dig into the crevices. When you mince it, don’t cut it into random chunks”—he makes a frenetic chopping motion—“and talk about what you did over the weekend. You bruise it. I want a nice, clean, dry mince.”
Next he demoed a scallion—long cuts on the bias, noting that there are all kinds of biases you can use on a scallion, but he wanted, he said, “nice, long, pretty, thin, feathery pieces…. I’m holding my knife like they taught me in Skills. Don’t worry about raging speed. Do it right.”
And he demoed a carrot. Rather than squaring it off, removing the rounded edges, he sliced it on a bias into thin sheets, then fanned the sheets like a deck of cards on the board and rocked his knife across the sheets to create a quick julienne, uniform in width but of differing lengths. “No waste, a lot faster,” he said. “Are these good enough for a consommé? Probably not. Are they good enough for a stir-fry? Absolutely.”
And on we went through to service, three and a half hours that zip by. This is another part of the life and spirit of the kitchen—the nature of time feels different here. Time goes by really fast in a kitchen, but not in the sense of your not being aware of it, an effect often described by artists and craftsmen when they become deeply engaged in their work. It’s the opposite. You’re intensely aware of time—service is at 6:00, after all, and you’ve got to know where you stand relative to that. But because time moves at a rate that’s different from normal clock time, you simply have to learn to sense that those nuts you put in the oven or those beets roasting in foil ought to be done by now.
One result of this unique time dynamic is that it’s easy to spend twelve hours in a kitchen and have it feel like a normal day at work. Are you tired? Yes, but not that tired—it’s not like time spent sitting at a desk or taking call in your hospital’s ICU for twelve hours or a shift in the mailroom. There’s something about the combination of working with food—the nature of the craft of cooking, its physical and mental demands—and the irrevocable deadline of service that changes one’s sense of time. The relentless daily service is critical to the dynamic. It keeps you engaged in the time you might otherwise tend to forget about altogether, as a painter or woodworker does. You can’t be heedless if the deadline of daily service looms—when you will either be prepared (and have a good night and your soul is nourished) or you will not be prepared (and you get your ass kicked and your soul is bruised).
I thought about this squishy time business because I’d spent that morning, starting before seven, in the Caterina kitchen, the school’s showcase restaurant serving the public, watching another class study balsamic vinegars, then prepare for service. By the time I got out of Pardus’s class, after dinner, cleanup, lecture, and a quiz, it was after nine and getting dark. And I felt great, tired as if from a good workout, not beat. This was a beneficial aspect of the kitchen. But also it led some chefs to work too hard—those chefs who wouldn’t leave the kitchen feeling good, because if you felt good it meant you could still do more work, and so they invariably worked past that point of feeling good, always trying to do more, because they were chefs and that’s how they lived. A fourteen-to sixteen-hour day is fine, but if it’s all you do, seven days a week, it’s gonna run you down and crush you eventually. You had to know your limits; you had to find the right balance of work to nonwork time.
Theo Roe’s Skill Development I ran simultaneously with Pardus’s class, and I’d make periodic dashes from one to the other for numerous reasons. I was curious about how Skills had changed, because it had been so important to me, was the place where I learned what I needed to know in order to learn the rest. Roe, moreover, was a brand-new teacher, and this was his very first class—all new instructors begin by teaching Skills, as is appropriate, I suppose. Roe, I discovered, had been a sous-chef under Pardus when Pardus was running the kitchen of Mustards, in the Napa Valley, Cindy Pawlcyn’s seminal bistro, then followed Pardus to Sonoma when Pardus took over the Swiss Hotel. And, finally, I wanted to know the students who were currently entering Skills at the CIA. This was perhaps the most surprising of all.
I don’t think what I found was unusual, but it felt dramatic. Before Roe’s class, I’d attended a meeting of incoming students, about ninety or so, and afterward met by chance an accountant, a sales and marketing professional, and an attorney—two women, one man—each in his or her forties or early fifties, entering culinary school, what some people still considered a trade school, Dr. Ryan’s views notwithstanding. From there I headed to Roe’s class. His students, having arrived early, lingered outside under and around a gazebo. I met a personal injury lawyer and a New York City landlord, a cop from Wichita, and a Boston social worker, each in the early to mid-forties. Dan, a Chinese American still in his twenties, had grown up in the restaurant owned by his dad in Brooklyn, then had been on Wall Street for five years but wanted to return, he said, to the work he felt he ought to be doing—restaurant work. A UCLA graduate who’d worked in L.A. entertainment and also the dotcom world before it burst was among them, along with Guy Anderson, thirty-six, who’d left his job as a director of communications for West Virginia University. And there was also a fifty-three-year-old orthopedic surgeon named Phil Farris, from southern Louisiana. He’d been working in hospitals since age fourteen, but when two close friends died of heart attacks, he took it as a warning to seize the day and decided to follow his passion for food. He was such a foodie, he said, he felt like a Jew wandering the desert until he arrived here, and realized, “I’ve found my people!”
He’d enrolled hoping to one day open a restaurant in Belize, where he owns some land, but then discovered, he said, “now I don’t know, there’s so many opportunities.”
On their first day, after a thorough tour of the kitchen, the first order of business was to begin stocks, and it was helpful to have an orthopedic surgeon such as Phil in class. Chef Roe discussed various types of bones and how they affected the final stock—young bones have less flavor but more gelatin for body; older bones have more flavor but less gelatin; joints are loaded with gelatin; meat still on the bones is loaded with flavor. Roe lifted a large joint from a tub of beef bones, and Phil commented as if they were rounding on a patient and lecturing his interns.
“Anytime a bone meets a bone there’s going to be a lot of articulated cartilage,” he said, the class huddled around a pot on the stove. Roe held up the bone as Phil pointed. “This is the femur, and you’ll see at the distal end—the far end of the femur—here you’ve got your articulated cartilage. And that’s the meniscus,” he said, apparently delighted to see the connective tissue, the fibrocartilage, he’d so often repaired in aging and sports-damaged knees. Good gelatin means good body in your stock—ask your purveyor for extra articulated cartilage.
There was, indeed, an extraordinary range of students here. Far more eclectic than when Chef Roe, class of 1994, had been here. Theodore Roe, thirty-eight, from State College, smack in the middle of Pennsylvania, was a big, solid chef, six-two at least, blue eyes, brown hair, and an aw-shucks easiness in his conversation, whose early ambition to
be a ski bum hastened his fall into cooking (he’d worked in kitchens throughout high school). He did his CIA externship at Mustards and there met Pardus.
I found Roe down in his cubicle—chef-instructors have desks on the top floor of the main building and typically share space with another instructor—with his Pro Chef, the CIA textbook, open to “Egg Cookery” and studying his computer terminal. I’m a fan of eggs, and we discussed the subject and agreed that much finesse was required for superlative eggs. Eggs lead Theo immediately into a personal testament to the importance of excellent egg technique.
One of his first jobs was as a breakfast cook at a Marriott in Denver. It’s pretty hard to get much lower in the cooking hierarchy, but he’d cooked thousands of eggs there. Theo comes right out and says, “I’m not hip enough to live in New York”—a quality I can relate to—but because of the thousands of eggs, he moved into a regular line cook’s position, thirty hours a week, at a very hip joint on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, above his station in every way.
“I worked at Café Luxembourg,” he told me, “part time, while I was a student here at the college—the administration likes to refer to the Culinary as a college these days, and I guess it makes me feel important. A friend set me up with a tryout for their brunch service. Because of my breakfast cooking experience at the Marriott, I was able to jump right on the hot line. First, the Marriott taught me how to properly cook eggs, which believe it or not, is a skill all to itself. Another good thing about being a breakfast cook was it not only taught me how to read tickets and expedite, but it also forced me to be clean and organized. Chefs hate disorganized slobs.”
If you are a cook, there is something to be learned everywhere you go, even if you are a Marriott breakfast cook.
It intrigued me, also, that this former breakfast cook was now in charge of training tomorrow’s chefs. Roe had obviously come a long way. How did the CIA—the leader in American culinary education—hire chefs? What did they believe a chef must know in order to qualify as a teacher of tomorrow’s chefs, how good did they have to be, and how did the school evaluate a prospective chef’s knowledge and skill and taste?
As it turned out, I found, they hired chefs not unlike the way a restaurateur hires a new chef for his or her establishment. Prospective chefs fly in and try out, cooking for Tim Ryan and Henry Woods, associate dean for faculty development, and up to six others, answering questions about their food to test their knowledge. If they pass, they are asked to give a lecture and demo to a class, on, say, egg cookery, or making polenta.
But just as the student body had evolved, so had the incoming chef-instructor.
“Our ideas of what it takes to be a successful chef-instructor have changed,” said Woods, the man in charge of the hiring process, a 1978 graduate of the school. “It’s a more complex world. Being a real good cook, fifteen, twenty years ago—that was OK. But it isn’t anymore.” For instance, they used to hire a pastry chef for their baking and pastry curriculum. They now have categories of chefs for this program: artisan bakers, production bakers, and pastry chefs—everywhere, the chef world was specializing. Of the three hundred or so applications Woods sees each year, the candidates most likely to be hired are those who have been referred by current chef-instructors. The least successful candidates, he said, are CIA graduates who apply on their own, thinking that the school is the same place they graduated from.
When an applicant looks good on paper—eight to ten years in the industry, good cover letter, good résumé, in midcareer growth rather than burned-out-and-looking-for-a-nine-to-five-with-weekends-and-holidaysoff job—Woods invites the chef for a tryout. The first thing a prospective instructor must do is cook a four-course meal for eight people. “The price of admission,” Woods says. “They have to demonstrate they have the fundamental skills.” If they don’t, sayonara.
Thus, on Mondays, when the Escoffier restaurant is closed, one or two prospects will try out in that kitchen, which has a built-in, big semi-circular viewing window. The chefs have four and a half hours to prepare and present their courses: a consommé, a salad, a fish course, and a meat course.
Consommé takes some craftsmanship and knowledge. Can they make a perfectly clear beef soup—date-on-a-dime-at-the-bottom-of-a-gallon clear—one that doesn’t taste solely of the garnish they put in it but has a rich, full-bodied beef flavor? Salad: They’ve been able to go to the CIA’s formidable storeroom in order to pick ingredients that satisfy them, and the CIA staff will evaluate how complex the salad is. Did the chef simply use mesclun greens, or did he or she choose a variety of ingredients, perhaps roast some vegetables, perhaps toast or candy some nuts? How was their vinaigrette—simple or complex—and was the acidity right? The chef is presented with a fish and a meat, and must devise a dish for each on the spot. Does the chef know what the fish is, does he or she fabricate it well, serve the right portion size? And is it seasoned and cooked properly? Does the chef make a fumet from the bones or decide on an easier, nonstock-based sauce? And then the meat: a similar set of evaluations and expectations from the judges.
Having sent out the last course, would-be instructors then leave the kitchen to sit before the panel—usually several are Certified Master Chefs—to be grilled about the food they’ve just cooked and served. Do they speak well about it, do they have clear explanations for how and why they handled the food as they did, why they paired this meat with that garnish? Sometimes, Woods said, the panel will like the food but sense no passion or energy from the chef, qualities a chef-instructor must have. Other times, the food will be borderline, but the chef wows them with a passion for food and cooking, or with exceptional articulation of a subject, and may be hired on the basis of this.
If they pass the chef practical, they are then invited to teach a class. If they succeed here, they will be given an offer. If they accept, they’ll be trained in teaching skills for six weeks before they begin their first Day 1, the maiden voyage in Skill Development. Which is where Theo Roe is now, a bit slow to react, a bit plodding and unsure, but not lacking confidence in his knowledge and technique, simply finding his teaching legs.
For his chef practical, Roe did a Beef Consommé Royale (“Royale” signifies a plain custard garnish, a form of egg cookery, notice; one whole egg and three yolks per cup of cream, according to Escoffier #496, chilled, then diced); a salad of organic lettuces, pickled globe beets, spiced walnuts, Chatham goat cheese, and a Dijon vinaigrette. He was given striped bass for his fish and a couple of chickens for his meat. He poached the sea bass and served it with a citrus butter and an herb salad. He broke down the chickens, roasting the bones for a natural jus; he made a forcemeat with the dark meat and piped that into slits he made in the breasts, which he partially sautéed first, to render fat out of the skin, then finished in a low oven to ensure they would cook all the way through without drying out. He served the chicken sausage–stuffed breasts with herbed spaetzle.
“My cooking tryout was intimidating,” he recalled. “But I guess they liked it.”
The chef tryouts all have an assistant for help, if they need it, to peel shallots, chop mirepoix, locate equipment, and the like. Frank Jerbi is the Escoffier kitchen Fellow—a recent graduate who assists the chef, a six-month paid position. Frank thus works for the chef tryouts. He can gauge the quality of the chef by how much the chef leans on him. The more work they ask him to do, the worse they tend to be. One chef, for instance, had to ask Frank if he thought he had enough egg whites for the consommé. “I don’t think that’s gonna do it, man,” Frank told him. The guy didn’t pass, Frank’s advice notwithstanding. Frank was Roe’s assistant and said Roe was “cool,” hardly asked for any help at all.
Pardus did his tryout at the winery kitchen of Markham Vineyards, in St. Helena, in the Napa Valley. He threw up in the parking lot beforehand, but he felt better once he got cooking. He, like Roe, did a Consommé Royale and pan-roasted chicken. He garnished his salad with roasted tomatoes and a goat cheese crouton. The most i
nteresting part of his tryout, though, was receiving the odd small fish they gave him—smooth, shiny skin, looked like pompano only really small. He finally decided they must be pompano and was right. They were too small for eight portions, he said. The proctor agreed and got him some tiger shrimp, and he made a forcemeat with these. (Forcemeat is a display of craft the judges love to see.) Pardus seasoned his with citrus zest. He made a stock with the fish bones as a sauce base. He thought it was a good dish, tasted great. But, before the panel, when Tim Ryan asked how he dealt with the texture of the shrimp farce, Pardus immediately realized his error: He should have pushed it through a tamis, a drum sieve, so that it would be completely smooth on the palate. Thinking fast, he said he’d seasoned the shrimp with citrus zest before pureeing them and didn’t want to tamis out the flavor. Ryan surely spotted this as the BS that it was—but he probably didn’t care; what would have been important to Ryan was whether Pardus knew in the first place to tamis the farce for a smooth, clean texture, and he did.
I would imagine it’s a nerve-racking experience, even if you’re doing something you do all the time, like breaking down chickens and cooking fish. But cooking techniques are not what usually brought a candidate down, but rather bad decisions—thought mistakes. “You’d be stunned by how many people try something they’ve never done before,” said Woods, naming the biggest cause of failure in the tryouts.
Frank Jerbi is twenty, young for the management position he holds, the sous-chef of this restaurant kitchen. He has brown eyes and straight brown hair, and his pallid complexion shows off deep circles beneath his eyes, the mark of overtime and weekend jobs. I admired the confidence with which he both instructed students and with which he cooked. He said the chef tryout was easy—he could pass it no problem, and from a purely cooking standpoint, I didn’t doubt him. My first day in the kitchen of the Escoffier Room, the school’s oldest restaurant, one devoted to classic French cuisine, he made the consommé. “I’ve been making consommé twice a week for a year,” he said. “I love it.”
The Reach of a Chef Page 9