We drank beer, I ordered a basket of fries because I hadn’t eaten dinner, and Pardus explained how and why he came to be where he was. There is no typical chain of events that leads an ordinary human to become a chef, but Pardus’s path and personality contained elements similar to many chefs’.
Michael Pardus was born in Wilimantic, Connecticut, in 1957 to an elementary-school teacher and an employee of the local telephone company, and he grew up in Storrs, Connecticut. Most chefs I had met had some sort of formative kitchen experiences with a woman in the family. In Pardus’s case, it was his father’s mother. Pardus described her as the sort of woman who would bake 140 dozen cookies at Christmastime. “She knew exactly how many there were,” he said. She taught him about the care of food. His grandfather, who had cut the grass flanking highways for a living, tended a beautiful garden, and from him Pardus learned the pleasures of fresh produce.
Pardus grew up to be a rebellious teenager not atypical in the mid 1970s. “I looked like Ted Nugent when I was fifteen,” he said, referring to the rock musician who would leap about on top of giant speakers during performances, brown frizzy hair trailing like a banner behind him. He took a job as a dishwasher at an old-age home to support his skiing habit and found that he got along in kitchens.
Michael Pardus hated high school and avoided it whenever possible. During his junior year he took courses at a branch of the University of Connecticut and managed to accrue enough credits to satisfy his high school’s graduation requirements. Thus, on the day when his fellow classmates were beginning their senior year of high school, Pardus filled his backpack, actually watched his school bus pass by, then said, “Hey, Mom. I’m going to Boston. I’ll see ya later.”
He hitchhiked there, he told me, found a nineteen-dollar-per-week room with a hot plate and a kettle-washer job at Massachusetts General Hospital. He still felt an affinity for kitchens. “It wasn’t that I had a love of food,” he said. “I had a love of chaos.” He was soon joined in Boston by his girlfriend and another friend. “It was a gas,” he said, but eventually their lives turned rather dissolute and “weird” and as he moved into his twenties, it dawned on him that washing steam kettles was not satisfactory long-term employment. He knew about the Culinary Institute of America, found out how much it cost, and asked his parents for tuition money. His father, who had already paid for a year at Boston University that his son didn’t show up for, said no. But, his father continued, he could have his room back if he wanted; this would allow him to save money. So Pardus returned home and worked till he could apply to cooking school. When the CIA had no openings, he began a small campaign to get in.
“I badgered them,” Pardus recalled. “Every week I’d call them up and say, ‘This is Michael Pardus. Do you have any openings?’ It got so they expected my call. ‘No, Michael, we don’t have any openings yet.’” Late in the summer of 1979, when he had just turned twenty-two, the Culinary called to say they had an opening if he could get to Hyde Park in late October. Pardus sold everything he owned, including his stamp collection, and moved to Hyde Park. It became a new home.
“It was the first time in my life where I found a whole lot of people like me,” he said. “They were brothers and sisters. We’d get up and talk about food. We’d go to class and study food. We’d eat lunch together and talk about food. At night, we’d drink beer and talk about food.”
And yet it wasn’t the food he was hooked on. He learned what the chefs taught at the Culinary in the early eighties, classical French cuisine (he never butchered a fish here, never used a fresh herb, he said), wondering to himself, Why would people eat this? “But I followed the party line,” he said. Pardus admitted that he was still the sort of person who thought Long John Silver’s was a fancy restaurant.
He did his externship at a resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, which among other things offered a gigantic buffet every Saturday that served a thousand people at twenty-five dollars a head. When the cook in charge of the buffet quit, Pardus, in the middle of his cooking-school career, took over. “I’m a sucker for responsibility,” he told me.
Here he learned organization. He had one job: feed one thousand people each Saturday. He would roast forty or fifty prime ribs, forty or fifty pork loins, clean and cook thousands of shrimp. “American continental crap,” he said. “Food was still not the thing. It was a vehicle for being organized.” He loved being organized. His prep list ran pages. Other people wouldn’t and couldn’t do what he did. And each week, when it was over, Saturday night, it was time to unwind. Or as Pardus put it, “Fifth of gin, fall asleep in some bathtub with a waitress.”
He returned to the CIA and graduated in 1981, taking a job as a line cook in New Orleans at the Royal Sonesta Hotel on Bourbon Street. He moved quickly to garde manger. It was here that he filled an eight-foot-long ice canoe with ten thousand shrimp and blew out his sciatic nerve.
When Vicky graduated from the Culinary, they married. “You can’t do much in New Orleans without a drink in your hand,” they agreed. “Maybe we should think about somewhere else.” Eventually, that place was Dallas, where Vicky had landed a job at the Four Seasons. She helped her husband find work at a new country club called Las Colinas Sports Club (“same old American continental crap,” Pardus said). She arrived in Dallas first and began work; he followed a few days later, arriving at the hotel where Vicky had been put up while searching for a place to live.
That first night, they decided to order room service. Room service was a turning point in his culinary career.
“That first meal blew me away,” he said. “It was room service from the grand dining room. I realized, ‘This is food.’ It was incredible.” Genuine nouvelle by a good French chef. Not bullshit nouvelle, he said, but the real thing. He had no idea food could be like this. It was the early eighties when nouvelle was nouvelle, and good, and Pardus was twenty-four years old. “This was really cool stuff. I knew how to make a mousse. It never occurred to me to make a mousse with lobster and wrap it in a cabbage leaf and steam it and serve it with basil sauce and a beurre blanc. Basically you’ve got lobster and butter, which is a classical combination, and playing around with it.” He and Vicky sat on the bed staring at the plates, picking apart the food, examining it, scrutinizing it, verbally dismantling it, and putting it back together again. “It was beautiful,” Pardus told me, “and I said to myself, ‘Hey. I know how to make all these components. I never knew they could be put together this way.’ It never occurred to me that you could do this.”
With that meal, his education began.
He bought books, scrutinized photographs, read recipes, and thought, What can I do? He began experimenting on his own. “The wheels were turning and turning and turning,” he told me. He still put out country-club food, but every now and then the chef would give him some leeway to make the kind of food he and Vicky talked about late at night after work. She’d return from the Four Seasons, her hands cramped and knotted from cutting bas-relief roses out of potatoes, and tell her husband what the chef there was doing. Now, instead of putting out the standard smoked salmon for the Sunday buffet at the sports club, he’d do a salmon mousseline roulade filled with spinach and chunks of lobster, sliced and served warm with a light beurre blanc.
But he knew this wasn’t enough. He needed a teacher. He asked associates who was doing the most interesting work in the city. He was told of a Frenchman named Roland Passot who was opening his own restaurant. Pardus went to Passot and asked for a job. Passot said he couldn’t pay anyone, forget it.
Pardus said, “I’ll work for free.”
“When can you work?”
“I work from two till ten; other than that, I’m free,” Pardus said.
“Can you come in at seven A.M.?”
“Yes,” Pardus said.
“How many days a week?”
“How many do you need?”
“Four.”
Pardus said, “Fine.”
Pardus worked for ten mouths for free for Pas
sot. Passot had worked in some of the great kitchens of France and under great chefs and what Pardus remembered most, the first thing he said he learned from Passot, was how to make a good brown stock. He had made brown stock at the CIA but the way he had been taught had been in a classroom situation, not cooking it long enough and then not reducing it to the proper flavor and consistency. Passot’s brown stock—cooked long and then reduced to a tasty brothlike liquid—now here was something he could use. Passot and his partner spoke French all day, but Pardus asked enough questions to learn how a true French chef worked, and how the classical methods at the CIA could be put to use beyond what he’d learned in school.
The second turning point came after his next job; he and Vicky had moved to California and he began cooking at Miramonte Restaurant in St. Helena under a man named Udo. Udo himself had worked under Bocuse and Michel Guérard and it was here that Pardus came into his own as a chef. He began a daily journal of the specials they created at Miramonte (“Quail stuffed with foie gras,” one entry read, for instance, “poached in quail stock served cold with grapes and pickled cherry, clarified jellied poaching liquid”); his descriptions were often accompanied by a diagram of how the dish was plated, where the pickled cherry was placed, where the aspic was spooned. He still had this notebook, jammed with food entries, and he still referred back to it as a reference. In 1985, Udo closed the restaurant to take his staff on a tour of France provided they paid their own airfare; the last entry in Pardus’s notebook records the revelatory twelve-course meal he had in Paris at Jamin by Joël Robuchon, the cook through whom God spoke.
The journal, containing hundreds of entries, ends here as if, after that meal, he concluded one phase of his education and career and began a new one.
You Understand What I Am Saying?
“Al dente vegetables don’t fly here at the CIA, I’ll tell you right now,” Chef Pardus said to start his demo on Day Fifteen, the beginning of Culinary Skill Development Two.
We’d had the customary three-day weekend, typically scheduled after the end of each block unless a holiday fell in the middle of the block. I’d only completed one fourteen-day block, but so much had been packed into those days that I was glad for a Monday off. Furthermore, we were heading into vegetable cookery, far from the intriguing intricacies of the consommé and sauce Robert. We began Skills Two with glazed carrots, creamed corn, and Mexican-style corn. As if to heap further insult upon us, Pardus had added a quart of béchamel to each person’s production for the day.
It wasn’t business as usual. Pardus had called out new table assignments. I had been moved to Table Three, the back of the room. No more listening in on Pardus’s evaluations of veloutés. I grabbed a spot near the stove, which would save traveling time. The new dynamics seemed to set instantly. Adam had taken a spot nearest the stove also and would work beside me. Eun-Jung had tried to sneak into my spot by the stove when I’d gone off to get a cutting board, but I muscled her out upon my return. She would work across from Adam, having least direct access to the stove of any of us. I reasoned that because much of our production required group efforts (clarifying butter, say, or reducing stocks), I would be of more use near the stove than Eun-Jung, whose linguistic challenges continued; in fact, she seemed to understand less and less as we went on, though this may simply have been that she no longer tried to hide her difficulties. But the real reason I stayed where I was—to be perfectly honest—was that I was looking out for Number One. I admit it. I was in the game here and saw no reason to be kicking into the wind if I didn’t have to.
Across from me was Leonard Mormondo, a stocky youngster from Queens. Len was a workhorse, rarely spoke, and had large blue eyes and downturned features that gave him a perpetually sullen look. He had worked a year and a half each in a restaurant (front of the house), a bakery, and a butcher shop. I could see him as a butcher, hefting a side of veal to the board and dismantling it, effortlessly, into saleable components. Something about his demeanor, his silence, the efficiency of his short, compact frame echoed honesty and work ethic. When a smile reversed his dour aspect, as would happen only occasionally, it was because he was genuinely pleased.
Adam, of course, would be the angry leader, if only by default (Eun-Jung followed by necessity, Leonard by disposition, I by profession).
“I know that people are looking for al dente where you’ve worked and where I’ve worked,” Pardus continued, standing before his customary burner. He had begun three weeks of doubles, which meant he was now repeating the demo he’d performed seven hours earlier in K-2. “However. There are an equal number of people who are looking for cooked vegetables.” Not mush, he said, but a good bite with no discernible crunch, bright color, and fresh flavor. Temperature control was critical, he said. Uniformity of cuts was critical. Jumping the veg in your pan was critical—learn now, don’t fry it. Vegetables here are to be cooked and not overcooked. “It’s a lot easier to learn how to do that up front,” he said, “and then if you go someplace where they want al dente vegetables, you back off a little, rather than say, ‘Oh, yeah, well I just cook my vegetables al dente.’ That’s a lame excuse that a lot of people use for undercooked vegetables. ‘Oh they’re supposed to be that way, they’re al dente.’ Yeah, right.” Pardus paused and scanned our faces. “They’re salad! Raw vegetables are salad.”
Occasionally an unusual man would appear in our $330,000 classroom to observe. He would exchange a few words with Chef Pardus, and when we looked up from our board he would be gone. We first saw him as Chef Pardus demoed American Bounty vegetable soup. He, too, was dressed in chef’s attire. The green nameplate pinned above the pocket of his jacket read “Uwe Hestnar.” He was tall, graying, and solidly built. A forceful figure. He wandered the kitchen as Pardus sautéed leeks and onion and carrot. He stopped by the steam kettles, dipped a bowl into the veal stock, let the stock fall from the bowl back into the kettle, and regarded the bowl thoughtfully. Then he disappeared.
Chef Hestnar had been at the Culinary for more than twenty years and was now a team leader, the name the Culinary gave to its managers. Eight team leaders managed 120 faculty. Hestnar presided over a team of twenty chef-instructors running the formative kitchens: Skills, Intro, American Regional, Fish Kitchen, Oriental, and Charcuterie. Chef-instructors agree to a three-year probationary period when they begin at the Culinary. During this time they can be sacked with no questions asked, no reasons given. Part of Hestnar’s job was to evaluate each instructor regularly during this period. When a Skills instructor complained to him that all the consommés were coming out cloudy, he dropped in and saw (to his silent amazement) that every single consommé was at a vigorous boil; he methodically passed each burner, reducing the boil to a simmer. He sat in the back of the classroom after dinner as Pardus lectured on cream soups, and Pardus, while he didn’t alter his style or his lecture, realized that he was going out on a limb in answering a question from Ben, that he might improve on the onion soup by adding a drop or two of sherry vinegar. Hestnar would depart without a word.
On Day Sixteen, Skills Two—represented on my prep card as glace de volaille, SMEP, bread crumbs, spinach, peas, green beans almondine, broccoli hollandaise—Hestnar appeared as I was readying my peas and spinach. Chef Pardus preferred at this point that we bring up the veg items two at a time. The peas were sautéed with blanched pearl onions in a little beef stock, beurre manié swirled in at the end to thicken the stock. The spinach, a ubiquitous item at the Culinary, was to be sautéed in clarified butter with shallots and seasoned with salt, pepper, and, curiously, a dash of nutmeg, which added an apt and intriguing flavor to the greens. I put them both on a warm plate and approached Chef Pardus’s desk. He and Chef Hestnar had been talking but stopped when I arrived.
I stayed one step back, but Hestnar ushered me forward with a sweep of his hand. Pardus lifted a small forkful of peas, then praised the sauce. He tasted an onion. “These are just a bit crunchy,” he said. With Hestnar there, I didn’t want to argue. To my
surprise, and I was suddenly not so comfortable or sure of myself, Hestnar drew a fork from the container and tasted some peas and an onion. I’d been, I realized only then, more cavalier than I’d wished; I cursed myself for not tasting the peas and onions again for seasoning and doneness. If it was perfect, it would have been luck. I hadn’t put 100 percent into the damned peas; had I known Hestnar would taste, I would have.
“Crunchy?” I asked him.
Hestnar was from Hamburg, Germany, and still had an accent thick as molasses. “He’s the chef,” he said, not looking at me. He had thin eyes and a thin wide mouth and square features. He didn’t smile.
I nodded, feeling rebuked. I was not to talk to him.
Pardus tasted my spinach. “Good cooking time, excellent flavor,” he said. I knew this. I’d done the spinach perfectly, mainly because I loved spinach cooked this way. Hestnar lifted another fork and tasted my spinach. He said nothing.
When Hestnar was gone Pardus reminded me about Hestnar’s he’s-the-chef remark and said, “I could have told you those onions were asparagus and he would have said the same thing.” Pardus also told me that Hestnar had been favorably impressed by my vegetable cookery, and somehow this made vegetable cookery seem more worthwhile at that moment. Pardus was happy, too, because it made him look good, particularly since I wasn’t even a real cook but rather a more lowly life-form.
The next time I saw Hestnar happened to be in K-2 downstairs, a long, gloomy Skills kitchen where Pardus taught A.M. Skills, the class normally presided over by Chef Le Roux, who had been a cook in various capacities at Manhattan’s Le Pavillon, Le Cynge, and La Côte Basque. I’d asked Pardus if I could hang out, observe a different Skills class, watch what happened unencumbered by the need to crank out the daily mise en place. Also I wanted a sense of what doubles were like. I enjoyed sitting back and watching. I could talk with Pardus here. Like my class, this one had five women; Pardus stood staring down the narrow kitchen, and said softly to me, “A lot of them”—male students—“still think it’s a boys’ club. I can take them into the field and introduce them to some women who will cook them into the dirt. It’s a matter of stamina and skill, not upper body mass.”
The Making of a Chef Page 11