Toward a Better Life

by Peter Morton Coan

  The second time I went home because my father was going to die soon, so I saw him before he died. My older brother Joe is still alive. He's ninety. He's in Florida now.

  The third time I went when my younger brother Frankie was sick, and you know what happened? In a few days I was going to come back to America; he said to me, “Are you counting your days to go back?” [Serious look, quiet voice.] He was counting his days to die! [Chokedup.] I was going to the airport, and I said to him, “I'm going to leave now—I'm going to Vienna to the airport,” and then Frankie, he just closed his eyes and he died. [He cries.] Just like that. He was seventy-six. The same morning when I was leaving he died. The same morning! He just closed his eyes. Like that.

  We were very close. I was his big brother. We grew up together in our village. My parents came from America and brought him back home. So he was born in America but raised in Austria with me. I didn't see him too much because when I came here he stayed in our village. But we were always writing and everything.

  I tried, but I could not change my papers at the last minute to stay for the funeral. I had to come back because my time was up on the visa. I said goodbye to him, but I never got to bury him. [He cries hard.] I wanted to stay, but I could not change my papers. [Long pause; then he gathers himself.] But at least I saw him before he closed his eyes.

  With a suitcase in each hand, he immigrated to this country in 1959, having been the personal chef of General Charles de Gaulle at the “French White House,” and holds the distinction of having turned down a similar position at the Kennedy White House when being “the chef” was at the bottom of the social scale. After two days in America, he found work at New York's famed Le Pavillon restaurant and spent ten years at the Howard Johnson Company. In 1974, he was injured in a car accident and doctors said he would likely not live, much less walk again. Jacques beat the odds and went on to become an internationally recognized French chef, television culinary pioneer, and author of more than thirty cookbooks who, along with close friend and legend Julia Child, paved the way for the success now enjoyed by so many of today's television and celebrity chefs. The recipient of numerous awards, he is among an elite group that has received the Chevalier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and the Chevalier de L'Ordre du Merite Agricole, two of the highest honors bestowed by the French government. A master teacher, he has imparted his extraordinary knowledge and experience to students for more than two decades at Boston University and the French Culinary Institute in New York, where he is dean of special programs. A devoted husband and father, he has been married for more than forty years to his lovely wife, Gloria, whom he met when he was a ski instructor and she was his student. “I recently celebrated over fifty years in America,” he said. “I came here and loved it, and I never wanted to leave.”

  I was born in Bourg-en-Bresse, a small town about forty miles northeast of Lyon in France in an area very well known for the chicken, the chicken of Bresse, considered the best chicken in France: blue leg, white plumage and the red cock—so the red, white, and blue colors of the French flag.

  I was practically born into the restaurant business. My father was a cabinetmaker by trade, but my mother opened her own restaurant, though she was never professionally trained, and my aunt had a restaurant, a second cousin had a restaurant, another aunt had a restaurant. I'm the first male to go into that business in the family, but often in America people think of the chef in French cuisine as purely male. Now it's true that in the Michelin Guide, most of the twenty-one or twenty-two three-star restaurants in France are [led by] male [chefs], but there are like 138,000 restaurants in France. So most of it is still cooked by women, believe me!

  I grew up during World War II. At that time we didn't have any television, we barely had radio, there were no magazines—so we had kind of blinders on. As a result, you do what your parents do. So for me it was either being a cabinetmaker like my father or getting into the restaurant business like my mother, and I was excited about the restaurant business. All the excitement, the people, the noise, I loved it, so I went into that business. I never would have thought in my head I could become a doctor or a lawyer or one of those things; you didn't really stray from your family's business, or go outside the character domain of your family, and so you had kind of blinders at the time. Life was much easier than it is for young people now because, in a way, life was decided for you.

  My mom had a very simple type of family restaurant. I remember my brother and I, before going to school in the morning, around seven thirty, we'd go to the market, which was a mile long beside a river. The market opened at three o'clock in the morning and finished at eleven o'clock in the morning. So my older brother and I, we'd go with my mother with a big bag, and my mother would walk to the market and buy on the way back, trying to get a better price—“Your case of cauliflower won't be good tomorrow. I'll buy it from you for half price”—and that's what she did because every day she had to go to the market and do that. I remember in 1959 at the restaurant it cost one dollar for the price of a meal, or five francs, and that included three or four choices for first course, then main course, a choice of vegetable, a choice of dessert. So you take a dish of each of those to create a menu, you had a carafe of wine with it, you have the bread, you have the service, tax included. One dollar, you know!

  So to be able to do it for that, you didn't waste anything at all. Everything was used. And that kind of approach is reflected in my own cooking. I am very miserly in the kitchen, maybe because of that. Certainly we were used to saving money. We waste so much food here [in America], you know? When I go to a restaurant, I first go to the garbage to see what it is, and I'm amazed!

  As I say, I grew up during the war. I remember my father disappearing to go into the Resistance. One time the Germans came to our house, and he jumped through the window and disappeared for like two or three years. He would appear occasionally and bring us food, sardines or something, because he had a wife and three kids.

  We lived near the bridge of Lyon, the big bridge next to the railroad station—so it was an official point, a targeted area, and the bombardment started with the Italians throwing a bomb on the station there, and it blew out part of our house. Well, my father was gone in the Resistance. My mother was working in the restaurant with my grandmother. Fortunately we were all in the garden that day, so no one was touched, and we stayed with a cousin while the house was repaired. Remember, there was no telephone at that time, so my father would reappear, and all of a sudden he had come back to the house and we were not there, so he tried looking for us at some cousins' house.

  We got blown up three times. The second time it was the Americans, who blew out the railroad as well as the same side of the house the Germans blew out, but we were not in the house either. The third bombing was when the Germans left France at the end of ‘45—they blew out the Bridge of Lyon, which blew out part of the house—so three times we were blown up, but three times we were not there, so we were lucky. But my father—it's probably why he had a heart condition—came back three times to find part of his house demolished. [He laughs.] Certainly I remember the Americans as well, running after the American tank, which was my first experience with chocolate and chewing gum which got thrown out of the tank by the GIs. I had had chocolate before the war, but I was too small to remember it.

  For primary school education, you had to go to school until age fourteen to pass, and I was in that class when I was twelve, so I was way ahead in class and my brother was too. My brother became an engineer.

  For me, I asked for a dispensation and took all of the exams when I was barely thirteen and went into apprenticeship as a chef because this is what I wanted to do. It's not because I couldn't study in school. I was doing quite well. But I knew from the beginning this was what I wanted to do.

  At that time, my mother had a restaurant where she lived, in a suburb about seven, eight miles south of Lyon, and I left home when I was thirteen and returned to Bourg-en-Bresse, where I was born,
and went into apprenticeship at Le Grand Hotel de l'Europe, which was considered the best hotel there. The chef there had actually gone to school with my mother, so she knew him, and so he took me in as an apprentice. There were four apprentices, and it was a three-year apprenticeship where you work seven days a week with no days off. You start at seven or eight o'clock in the morning and work until about ten at night, and at the end of the month you had four days off, so if there were four weeks in a month, I could take my clothes, my chef jacket, hat, pants, my apron, my towel, the sheet off my bed, everything back to my mother for her to wash and then bring them back. I would go back and forth to Lyon once a month.

  When I finished my apprenticeship, I went to work for the season, a summer job, at L'Hotel d'Albion, a lakeside spa town in the Alps. It was a big hotel where you worked four months of the season, seven days a week, no stop because this is the season. I came back to work in Lyon at a restaurant for a couple of weeks before going to Bellegarde, which is a town close to Geneva, a small town where I became the executive chef for the winter at L'Hotel Restaurant de la Paix, which was something, considering I was not quite seventeen. In truth, though, except for the dishwasher, I was alone in the kitchen. The son-in-law of the owner who was the “real” chef spent most of his time in the nearby ski resort of Chamonix, plus the winter was pretty slow in sleepy Bellegarde, so the owner of the hotel took me on as the chef. I was there for about five or six months during the winter, returned to Lyon to work for awhile at a local landmark restaurant, and then I went to Paris. I was seventeen.

  I had never been to Paris, but I told my mother I had a job which I didn't have, so I took the train. When I got there, I went to La Société des Cuisiniers de Paris, meaning “Society of the Chefs of Paris,” sort of like an employment center for chefs, and you can go there in the morning and you give your name to become a member. Then you're classified as second or first company, or chef de partie [also known as a “station chef” or “line cook”], or whatever your position, your age, where you've worked, and then they get you a job for the day. You work a job maybe three days, four days—sometimes a month or more—so there was always a job. In the morning, for example, you have a restaurant, a brasserie, and the chef doesn't come, or something happened, the restaurant calls La Société. I don't know why a place like this does not exist in New York, which has something like eighteen thousand restaurants, because it would be very useful.

  So I worked in a lot of restaurants before working at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée on the Champs-Élysées. I pretty much worked there the longest time of any place that I worked. I worked at the Plaza Athénée for over six years. I usually worked on my day off, and very often during vacation time I went to La Société again to make extra money, so I probably worked in over two hundred restaurants in Paris on my days off.

  In 1956, I was called into military duty. Usually they sent you to the army or sometimes to the air force, less so the navy, except for cooks—La Société had an arrangement with the navy to provide them cooks. In France, if you work on a destroyer, for example, you will have a petty officer to go with you to the market. You will have only so much money per day, so they want a professional who knows how to budget, buy, and it's not like the whole navy eats the same thing—they eat whatever the chef cooks that day, maybe something special like lobster for Christmas or the fourteenth of July [Bastille Day], so you really have to save your money. I was sent in the navy to boot camp in southwest France, and it was during the Algerian War, and then I went to do marine training. I was in good shape, so I was sent for military training, and I was supposed to go to Algeria in the marines, but I could not be sent at that point because my brother was there at the same time, so I ended up not going.

  I was sent back to Paris to the admiral's mess in the center of Paris because I had worked at the Plaza Athénée [and] Maxim's. Then I had a friend from Lyon who I met there, and he was the chef of the secretary-treasurer, but he had never worked in Paris, and he said, “I would appreciate it if you would come and help,” because he was making dinner for the secretary of state and other people, and he said, “I'm not really that good in classical cuisine,” and I said, “Fine.” I had a room in town, so I was kind of free. And I started doing dinners for them at the Treasury, and then my friend was released from the army, so they asked me to stay on. The government was going through many rapid changes at the time. The prime minister then had all the power in France. The president of the republic was like the Queen of England—he didn't have any power before General Charles de Gaulle changed the constitution from the Fourth to the Fifth Republic, so with all the changes I ended up as “First Chef” of the prime minster at L'Hôtel Matignon, which was, and still is, the residence of the French prime minster. Then the government changed again, and it was at that time that de Gaulle came back to power, so I was there and stayed on with de Gaulle.

  I admired him. To start with, de Gaulle was like six foot five. He was thin and tall, and he was practically blind, so he'd always look at you this way [sideways], so he appeared even more important, even though he couldn't see anything. [He chuckles.] His wife was very small. During the time I was with de Gaulle, I served heads of state like [President Dwight] Eisenhower, [President Josip Broz] Tito, [Prime Minister Harold] MacMillan, so as the chef it was a great experience. But it was a totally different world then than it is now because at that time the chef would be in a hole somewhere. You would never be called to get kudos or complimented or applauded or whatever. That did not exist, period. Never once. They didn't even know who was in the kitchen!

  I saw General de Gaulle twice a week to do the menu for the week and especially for the Sunday meal after church when they held a dinner—the children, grandchildren, and so forth—but at that time, the president just went through the kitchen, said hello, and that's about it. You never had any kudos or compliments or anything like this. There was no publicity of any kind, so certainly that was one of the reasons that I didn't go to the White House later on: because I had no inkling of the possibility of publicity and the promotional value of this because it didn't exist. A cook by definition at that time was in a black hole somewhere, and that was it. I was used to being invisible…. You work with a young chef [now] and they want to find their dish; they want to create and find what they want to say. When I was in the kitchen, the idea was to work in a great house like the Plaza Athénée or Maxim's in Paris and to try to do it exactly the way it was always done in that house. So that the lobster soufflé, for example, at the Plaza Athénée—which was pretty famous—well, any one of the sixty cooks in the kitchen could have done it and not known the one who had done it. So the idea was to identify yourself with that, rather than now [when] it's the opposite; to detach yourself from that and be different or peculiar or whatever, which is another training altogether. [He laughs at the irony.]

  By 1959, I wanted to come to America. Everyone wanted to come to America! And at that time there was more of a difference than there is now. I figured I would go, work for a couple of years, learn the language, and come back. I wasn't married. I could literally do whatever I wanted, and although my mother would have liked me to work in her restaurant and stay in France, I also had a friend at the Plaza Athénée who knew a pastry chef who worked in Chicago somewhere that led me to someone named Ernest Lutringhauser, a guy from Alsace with a restaurant in New York called La Toque Blanche, or “The White Hat.” He came on vacation every year to Paris, so I corresponded with him, and we met and he said, “Yes, absolutely, I can sponsor you if you want to work in the States.” At that time it was pretty easy because according to the law in the United States there was a quota. They accepted only so many immigrants from different countries every year, and the quota for France was never filled, as opposed to, say, Italy, where almost a third of the population immigrated in the 1930s and there was a huge waiting list going back eight, ten years before you could come to the United States with an immigrant visa, but France? No.

  I w
ent to see someone in the de Gaulle cabinet who said, “Go see Mr. Wood at the American Embassy. I'm going to give him a call and give him this letter.” Well, Mr. Wood happened to be the vice consul at the American consulate.

  I had my green card in three months! It was the spring of 1959. I waited, I think it was ten days after the six-month limit that I had to leave because I wasn't ready to leave that fast!

  I came on a student boat. Actually, my parents took me to Le Havre and I took the Ascania, which was an old converted luxury boat that was bringing home something like twelve hundred American students who were studying in Russia and all over Europe. It took thirteen days to come to Quebec, and everyone was singing and playing guitar late into the night, and it was the end of the fifties….

  From Quebec, I took the train to Montreal, and from Montreal, I took the train to Grand Central Station in New York. I arrived with my two suitcases [laughs] and went straight to that man who had sponsored me. He put me up at a YMCA for two weeks until I found a room. In the meantime, he introduced me around. With the background I had, there was no problem finding a job. I came here on the tenth of September 1959, and a couple of days later I was working at Le Pavillon, which was the best restaurant in the country at the time, and a week later I was enrolled at Columbia University.

  I went to Columbia to learn English for foreign students. I took an entrance examination, and I did fairly well, considering that I had been studying in Paris for like six months at a private school before I came here, and considering that I had no ear at that point. I couldn't understand anything people were saying. So I ended up in an intermediate class for English, and then I went on to another class and then another class for about two years until I got to what they call “English for Freshmen.”