The Making of a Chef

by Michael Ruhlman

  “Maybe I just don’t learn that well from your teaching style,” said John.

  I needed the chef to check my sauce, which I’d finally gotten blended and strained. He let some fall off a tasting spoon. “Nice consistency,” he said. “Perfect consistency.” He tasted it, nodded, winced. “Put about two tablespoons of molasses in it, and a little bit of salt, not much, and I think you’ll be fine.” And he was gone.

  Service came and the banquet was served; à la carte was slow and, as always, the tension that built through the morning was released during service. By the end of the day, Chef Turgeon and John were chatting leisurely about D.C., where both had worked.

  The kitchen was cleaned early that day and we gathered around the chef, who stood at the end of the service line next to the expediting microphone.

  “Today,” he said. “Better. It’s getting better, but it’s still not quite what I expect. Banquet was still not in sync. A la carte, again, details.” We had a few minutes to kill and the chef, musing, said, “You know, I tell students to hurry and they say, ‘I’m going as fast as I can.’ Well, no, you’re not. You will be amazed how fast you can do things. There is no limit to how fast you can go. You can never be good enough, you can never be fast enough. Remember that.”

  He asked each person, one by one, what they had learned today. Mimi learned about clabber cream, another type of soured cream. Geoff said, “When someone does something for you, double check it.”

  The chef smiled and said, “Ah, you realized that. Yeah, I see that all the time. Bill?”

  Bill said, “I learned how to do a really good vegetable stock.”

  The chef said, “I think mushroom stems and sweating is the key to good veg stock.” He liked to sweat the veg till they were nearly mush before adding them to the stock or water.

  Another learned about wiping down sauce containers, and the chef said, “I’ve worked in places where that was huge, always wiping down containers so no crud builds up, always putting stuff in the smallest possible container. John, how about you?”

  John was last in line. He said, “I learned not to share your feelings when you’re in a bad mood.”

  The chef nodded, chuckled, and said, “O.K., see you tomorrow.”

  Conversation was limited in the kitchen for the obvious reason that we had work to do, and I asked the chef if we could sit down one day after service. I knew very little about Daniel Turgeon, other than that he was thirty-three, born in Chicago. He drove a shiny red American sports car. He was smart and articulate about food, though here he talked more about mechanics and hustle. He had cooked with Madeleine Kamman at her school in California—“Great lady, great lady,” he said of the author and cook—and noted how surprised he was to find that “she had a cook’s mentality.” I’m tougher than you, I’m faster than you, I’m better than you. Turgeon himself secreted this mentality. And I knew that if you weren’t prepared for him, if your mise en place wasn’t ready or there was salt and scraps all over your station, he could be like bad weather coming down the line. One of his main themes, in the kitchen and in lecture, was how hard the life of a cook really was, and it was this I wanted to address first: why is he in this business if it’s so hard?

  He laughed an abrupt guttural he-huh!, smiled, and began talking with a lightness I had not seen in the kitchen.

  “Ya know, it’s funny. I remember when I started teaching Skill Development, after a couple weeks, in my head I was thinking, Day One, tell ’em, ‘Why are you doing this? What, are you crazy? Why are you getting into this business?!’”

  Turgeon couldn’t answer the question even for himself except to say that he’d always cooked. As a boy he wrecked the kitchen for a batch of botched sugar cookies, sugar all over the floor. His first job was busboy. And from that youthful vantage, the kitchen was the coolest place of all; he always wanted to get back there. And when he got back there all he wanted was “to move up the line, to be cooking on the hot line.” He knew in high school he was headed next to culinary school, and when he visited the CIA, he knew this was the place to be, he said. He graduated in 1985.

  Here is another facet of “a cook’s mentality.” After six years in the business, six-day, ninety-hour weeks, stressed, beaten down, and seriously considering getting out of the business, he was asked to become executive chef at a new hotel and restaurant on the Maryland shore, and he said sure. “It was crazy, but I enjoyed it,” he said.

  I turned the conversation toward cooking and learning to cook. As inevitably happened at this school when I brought this up, what we talked about was the basics.

  “Rose Ann was talking about that this morning,” he said. “She’s consulting on a property, and a lot of stuff’s out of a can and they just have no idea; she looks back at what she was taught here and said it’s just so important. How to properly cook a green vegetable. That’s what they hammer into you here. It’s really, really important. If you look at these master chefs—we used to talk about this in lecture—all they’ve really done is perfected, mastered those basic cooking techniques. And you just kind of progress from there, but that’s something you always lean on. And that’s what you’re always doing. They’ve mastered it, it’s what they always do, it becomes a habit—every time they cook a green bean it’s a perfectly cooked green bean.”

  “Are you a good cook?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I think everybody has a little bit of a lazy nature to ’em, everybody does. And I think the most successful cooks are those who are the least lazy. It’s an everyday struggle to be the best cook you can possibly be. That’s my main goal. I don’t care about being a great executive chef. I think it’s learning how to be a good cook and then teaching people to be a good cook. It’s something I’m always striving for, to be the best possible cook.”

  I said being a good cook was hard. He himself had hammered into us you can never be good enough, you can never be fast enough. Details fly out the window.

  “It’s funny, a situation happened today with the group leader,” he said. “I talked about it in class. About speed and things, you can never be fast enough in the kitchen; the older you get the faster you get, the more efficient you will work. It was funny he made a comment today, he was a little bit behind, he kinda blurted out by accident, ‘I’m movin’ as fast as I can!’”

  I laughed; we’d learned never to say this.

  “I went back to his station—it’s common sense—he was saucing something with a little teaspoon. I put a big spoon up and said, ‘I think you can be a little bit faster.’ He was in the weeds. He was starting to get mad at me. I was like, ‘Don’t get mad at me. You have this job to do here. Save that for later.’ And later he apologized.

  “Because there’s a lot of pressure, I think it’s a natural thing that’s probably been done to me, and I kind of do it to them. At the time, I say, ‘What’s goin on here?!’ And they’re in the weeds and you can see they start to raise their temperature a little bit; but I think it’s good to feel that pressure because eventually when they look back they’re gonna say, ‘Next time I’m just gonna keep a level head and go right through it, and then worry about it later.’”

  “That’s exactly what happened with John,” I said.

  “John too. I was thinking about John today. I’m like—” he laughed his guttural laugh—“‘Don’t get an attitude with me.’ And they always come back later, ‘Hey, I was wrong, sorry.’ But I know what that’s like. On the line, you’re on the line of battle, you’re on the front lines there. And it can get very stressful, and when, you know, you’re behind and things are starting to go wrong, you just start to get a little more irritated and it’s a lot of pressure. It’s like the first chef I worked for, he used to say it’s a battle. You against the clock, every day. Jeff Buben. He’d say that. You can’t let the clock win, you have to beat the clock every day.

  “I had a student a couple blocks ago; she was a nurse in an emergency room and I always used to say this is probably very close to wor
king in an emergency room except it’s not a life-or-death situation. Everything has to be done very efficiently, very quickly; you have to get it out quickly. You have to keep your head at all times. I think that’s the hardest thing. It’s time, it’s time, let’s go, everything has to be done as quickly as possible, and quality. That’s why in lecture I say try to find the best possible people you can work with, work with three, four, five of those chefs. You’re gonna pick up so many good things from each one, whether it be speed or efficiency or quality or sanitation. It’s just amazing what you can pick up.”

  The two most important chefs to Turgeon were the ones he worked for immediately after graduating. Jeffrey Buben and David Fye at the Nicholas Restaurant in the Mayflower Hotel set the course for his career.

  “Day One, I was like, OH MY—scared to death,” Turgeon said. “I was scared to death. I was scared to death for eight months. I really was. Buben had me in tears.” Turgeon suddenly appeared weary, simply recalling all this. “He kicked—worst feeling for a cook—he booted me off the line. ‘YOU’RE NOT GOOD ENOUGH!’ I was slow, I was slow, I wasn’t done, and I deserved it, I deserved it. I was like, ‘Did he fire me, did he not?’

  “The sous chef at that time was David Fye and he actually said, ‘Give him one more chance.’ And something clicked that day in me, and that was about eight months in. Something did click that day, where I came in that next day and I was hustling. I wanted to get to the point where he yelled at me a lot less. It was maybe once a week he’d say, ya know, ‘Hey what’s goin’ on here, what is this?!’ But he was always right; he never did it just to do it. Something wasn’t right. He always had a reason. And I needed that. Not everybody can deal with that, but at certain points everybody needs just a little push. So I wasn’t ready for that and not everybody can take that kind of atmosphere where somebody’s on ’em. I certainly saw a lot of cooks come in and out the door, a hundred at least, last a day, two days. But that’s where his expectations are and that’s how he went about getting to that point.

  “I know when I graduated from here,” Turgeon continued, “I was probably like these students here. I can’t remember, certainly I got B’s and A’s, but I don’t know if I was a good cook when I graduated from here. I don’t know. It took a while. It was probably three to five years before I started to say, I think I’m starting to become a good cook. Things happen in your head.”

  There it was again. I’d felt this—in a crude and introductory way—just as he’d said it, with the halting surprise of realizing, suddenly, you are a different person. “Things happen in your head.” Structures form. Pieces of information and experience join, crystallize into a pattern and lock into place. A whole system of gears is gradually ratcheted in and, suddenly, it engages. And there it stays, in the kitchen and out, no matter where you are. The experience is difficult to describe. Turgeon said it was like a sixth sense. Something clicked and you knew everything that was happening in the kitchen. Some people called it kitchen sense. It’s like something living that jumped inside you. A physical correlation might be this: you are carrying several heavy pieces of luggage through O’Hare Airport, walking as fast as you can to make a plane. You step onto an empty moving walkway—you are walking just as fast as you were, but, suddenly, space and time fly over you at double the rate and with ease.

  What is it about this work, I wanted to know, what kind of person does this—or rather, for what kind of mind and body is cooking the only option?

  “Some of the chefs I’ve worked for,” Turgeon said, “have had a deep passion for what they do. Some of them are workaholics. That’s all they want to do; they just want to be in the kitchen. Part of it is control, you’re in control. I don’t know how to explain it. You’re in control. It’s just a great feeling when all this stuff is going on around you and you’re kinda controlling it. It’s like a conductor to a symphony; when you pull it off nothing sounds better. Second, it’s just liking to eat. Loving to eat, having an appreciation for food. I love eating food probably more than anything, and to get that sometimes you have to cook it yourself. You can’t always afford to go out to eat. It’s art too.”

  “Is it?”

  “I think so. I think plating, presentation, is where the art part comes in. There’s art, there’s chemistry, there’s science, there’s a lot of little different facets of it.

  “I just think, the people I’ve worked with, there’s just a passion about food, they just love food. They love it. Part of it is wanting to make people happy. Certainly part for me is the physical nature. It sometimes feels like a workout and I like that. It’s a sense of achievement too. There’s just nothing like it when a service goes right, every plate, there’s just nothing like it. It’s probably like in baseball, pitching a shutout. That was it, that was the one. You’re always trying to achieve that, you’re always trying to get another no-hitter or another shutout. But then there are the negative things. It’s really demanding, you’re working all the time. You have to balance those things really well.”

  “So can you teach it?” I asked.

  “You can, you definitely can, yes. Eventually it’s like being able to pick out different complexities of wine, it’s about training your palate. And they can train their palates also, and eventually taste something so many times that if somebody makes it properly, wow, I see the difference each time, and, wow, that is really right on the money. Yeah, you can definitely teach this, no question about it.”

  I asked him how I’d done.

  “I thought you did well. I’ve kinda taken some of the pressure off. If you were on that station at night there would be one more item on there. Sometimes you guys had problems getting things done on time. I think you were probably a little bit nervous, first couple of days.

  “I think your best experience in there was when John was absent that day. You’re the man, you’re in charge, now you have to do it. I saw a difference the next day in you, you were much more efficient, you knew exactly what had to be done.

  “If you think what’s the speed that’s involved with that—you’re clearheaded at all times, and you’re movin’ so fast. I know, put me on the line, sometimes I get in the weeds—I know I’m in the weeds when I start doing three-sixties, start going around in circles! It’s just like, ‘Stop, I have to stop here.’ It happens to the best.”

  Just as knife skills and sauce work must be taught, how one behaves in the weeds is something that likewise can and should be taught. If you cook, somewhere down the road you’re going to be in the weeds; if you’re attempting to be a great cook, you’re going to be in the weeds a lot. Here was what Turgeon did when he was in the weeds.

  It was shortly before Saturday’s service. Chen, on sauté, looked at me during prep and made a shaky motion with his hand.

  “Nervous?” I asked. I was medium-dicing butternut squash. He nodded. “Why?” I asked.

  He said, “Nervous.”

  “Is language hard?” I asked. “During service, people talking too fast, things getting crazy?”

  “Yes, sometimes it is difficult.”

  Chen was behind on his prep; his mise en place was everywhere but en place and his station was a litter of kale and spinach scraps and shallot cores and burnt paper towel that he’d been using to light burners. It was easy for this to happen. When you were swamped, you could not rationalize spending time to clean up what was just going to become a mess again.

  But Chef Turgeon walked by and said, not for the first time, “Chen, you gotta keep your station clean.” Turgeon saw that Chen was frustrated and didn’t feel that he could take the time. Turgeon, knowing Chen had no time to spare, stopped to chat.

  “You know in the weeds, in the shits?” Turgeon asked Chen. Chen nodded. “When I was in the weeds, when I was really in the weeds, I’d stop. I’d say, ‘Gimme a second.’” Turgeon had looked up at an imaginary expediter and put his hand up like a batter asking the ump for time to step out of the box. Turgeon had an actor’s body language. He was
on stage; his movements were big, a caricature of what they were meant to portray. “Gimme a second,” he said, hand raised, head down toward his station. Then he reached below, pulled a blue Handi Wipe from the sanitation bucket, and again, slowly, exaggerating with large round shoulder motions, he wiped down Chen’s station, thoroughly and methodically, till it was a clean open field of stainless steel, saying, “And I’d wipe down my station.” Somehow he managed to convey service swirling around him, as he ignored it to methodically polish the stainless-steel station.

  His demo over, Turgeon tossed the wipe into the bucket, stood straight, and said to Chen, “’Cause when you’re in the weeds, this clutter starts to build up.” He put his palms on the station and then lifted them slowly to chest level. “And if they cut you open,” he said, “that’s what your brain would look like.”

  When I heard this I laughed. It was exactly right. I thought of Chen’s station, with all the scraps of food and burnt paper towel, littered with salt and pepper, spilled sauce hardened to crust—that is what your brain does look like when you’re in the weeds. Two things are happening in your brain during service. The first is what you are imagining—how long you’ll cook this piece of meat, how long you will cook this sauce down, what it will look like—how big the bubbles will be when it hits the right consistency, how low in the pan it will have reduced—when you’re ready to plate it; you’re thinking ahead to imagine each item that’s going on every plate in its finished form. The second thing is what your eyes are actually recording, the moment and sight at hand, each passing second. Service can become so intense that what your eyes see and what you are imagining—that is, what your eyes will see in a few moments—melt together into one. And when your station is a mess, scraps everywhere, dirty tasting spoons all over the place, burnt towel, scraps sticking to your shoes, this mixes with what is about to happen and all but literally gets into the food. And the sensation of this is that the mess is coating the insides of your brain, making it hard to think. When you clean your station, you clean your brain; you can work more efficiently in your head just as you can work faster at your station when it’s neat and organized, nothing in the way, nothing unnecessary in view.