Roland G. Henin

by Susan Crowther

  The second-year apprentices cleaned pheasant. We were in the basement and in came this one woman. She takes the pheasant out of the apprentice’s hand and hits him left and right over his face with it. The guts came out all over behind his neck. One of the owners of the hotel had a daughter who was a little bit younger and always came down in the kitchen to flirt with us. This apprentice was stupid. There was a cinema next to the hotel and it was free for us to go, when we asked permission. Well, he was caught smooching with this daughter, in the cinema. Oh boy, oh boy. He got fired.

  SUSAN: You and Chef Henin must go way back.

  FRANZ: I’ve known Roland since 1987. He joined an ACF chapter, and he had this idea to start a regional team. Competitions were never a big part of my work, but he reminded me of why we do them. I was teaching for the Culinary Institute in Portland. I always thought teachers should compete! It helps educate the students. It shows the craft and gives a good name to the school. I asked the school for a plane ticket for support, but also had to fund-raise for competitions.

  Roland inspired me to rise up to the whole thing, and I did pretty well. The first time we competed together on the regional team, in 1988, in Frankfurt, Germany, was a disaster. Our task was to bring not too many suitcases, to lower the costs. I had everything down to one package. I had one apprentice with me. Roland Henin came to the airport, looked at my luggage, and said, “You are not my friend anymore! You could have offered to take some of my luggage!”

  I said, “You never asked! You never called me!”

  “You should have called, as a courtesy.”

  He went off on me, to the point where I am standing there, and I say to him, “You know what, Roland? Just shut up! And, go F yourself!”

  Whenever we would compete, it always came to this point where I had to tell him to go “F” himself. It was amazing. He just flew off the handle like a real, good old European chef. He demanded from you, loyalty. He demanded from you, respect. We had our ups and downs, but it was okay. Roland said it was good to travel to the competition location, before you compete on teams. If you’re flying to another town, it’s a different experience. I already experienced that in Los Angeles and other places and had one experience behind me, so I knew how to pack, etc.

  Roland’s last competition was in 1988, in Chicago. The display was beautiful! He had a whole table set up with his Thanksgiving theme. The table was made by carpenter and it was heavy as hell. We had another guy who filled up a container. You couldn’t send it by plane, so we had to pick it up by freight. He had a big toolbox—like the kind people have on their pickup trucks? He put all his food in there, and then he put in his aspic. The whole thing weighed about four hundred pounds.

  In Germany, we got to the hotel, and they didn’t have a kitchen for us; we had to prepare in a corridor. There were two guys on the loading dock prepping. I had to work near the elevator. It was pretty bad. Everything went so smoothly getting to Germany, I thought, Something’s got to go wrong. We enter the exhibit hall and there are no tables for us! Chef Raimund put the application in three days before it was due. The person who was supposed to submit the application for him didn’t, so we are now scrambling. Chef Raimund was having a slight heart attack over the situation. He was so mad that he jumped up on the tables! It was quite a scene. Roland Henin kept his cool, with a toothpick in his mouth. He said, “It’s not my problem.” He always walks around with a toothpick in his mouth. It helps him to think.

  My stuff was critiqued by Ferdinand Metz. I came up with the cold display, with an exhibit of rabbit. I don’t know if you ever heard, but I got this nickname in the United States as “Rabbit Man.” My work pleased him; he criticized me the least of all.

  Roland Henin will always be my mentor, my barking little Quasimodo. Lots of people have a hard time with criticism and start to crumble. There’s absolutely no backbone on lots of people I meet. You try to get them to compete and they say, “Why should I do it? It’s too hard. What I get for it? Nothing.” It’s pretty bad. The craftsmanship is absolutely misunderstood.

  There are too many kitchen shows. Everybody thinks they’ll become the TV version of Master Chef or food critic. They have absolutely no idea what we’re talking about. It’s more about entertainment than the ritual of eating … molecular gastronomy and all that—not for nourishing, not for necessity. Twenty-four courses? You need more chefs in the kitchen than customers.

  SUSAN: What pisses off Chef Henin?

  FRANZ: When someone tries to question him! [Laughs] You can see him like getting red in his face and he just gives it to you. He usually starts out, “You know what? You are coming here, wasting my time!” He sees that they haven’t done the research.

  Once in a competition, he came out of the kitchen with a blown-up food handler’s glove pulled over his head. [Laughs] He had his five fingers right on the top, like a chicken. He’ll lighten the mood when people are too tense, but he’s a serious guy. Roland Henin coached the German Master Chef, a big guy, Hartmut Handke, for the Bocuse d’Or competition. When you have Chef Henin coaching you, and he thinks that you could win it, you will. I mean, Henin is down to every little step, every little move in the kitchen. He will question you, and he will be in your face: Why are you doing it this way? Every detail. Why are you turning left, you should turn right! That’s what he is; that’s the brilliance of the guy. He sees everything: every wrong stupid movement that you make because you’re nervous, or you’re off, or not well prepared, or whatever.

  Recently, I had a nightmare. I was in this perfect, nice chef’s outfit. I’m walking through the kitchen, and I said to myself, “Oh, man, there’s no food here. I don’t have any food.” There was no time to prepare anything, and here comes Roland Henin. He says, “Where is the food?” I just walked out. I had to say to myself, “Wake up! Bad dream!” You can’t blame Henin for your nightmares, when you’re unprepared or lazy. Oy yoy yoy.

  Keith Keogh

  Owner/President, Total Food Network, Orlando

  Me just dogging him and persisting and not letting him say no.

  KEITH: I met Chef Henin in April 1988. We were competing at the Culinary Show in Chicago on the main floor. I competed with the Disney team, and he competed as an individual. We didn’t know each other and got into a conversation behind the table about how he executed his platter. What stood out in that conversation was his ability to teach and his focus on detail: why things were cut and presented in a certain way and his philosophy about it.

  For instance, on his plates, he executed a loin of rabbit. He described the slicing technique: if you slice a loin straight up and down versus at an angle on a plate, it changes dramatically. Presentation is completely different on a bias and diagonal slant. We compared ours to his, and you could see a difference. Imagine if I take a stereo and put on any kind of music and turn up the treble all the way, and then I take it all the way to the bass. It’s the same exact music, but the sound would be completely different. We had tremendous debates about these fine tweaks.

  We spent the first four years of our relationship debating the nuances of cooking—ingredients of a stock, or roasting vs. baking. People would be astonished how much time we spent on this … from how to use a knife to how to stand! Of all the people that came to compete, no one else would debate me but him. In preparing for the 1992 Culinary Olympics, Roland was one of the first people I called for his thought process, going through plates, platters … his ability to bring everything back to the fundamentals. He would never ever let something go by, which was, actually, a big part of the team success.

  How do you make a chicken stock flavorful, in a four-hour period, in this particular kitchen? We ended up grinding the bones by running them through a Hobbs food grinder, making the raft, and then cooking the bones and raft all at once. How much do we have to add? Do we add gelatin? What do we have to do to get the texture in the stocks in that short period of time? A lot of that was Roland. What do we have to do to make sure that the bâ
tonnet are correct every time? This is what they judge in Europe; that’s the norm. In America, we’re just a little bit more “creative,” giving things classical names, but not executing them the same way. When you get to an international competition and don’t execute in precisely the way they are asking, you don’t succeed. We were fortunate in the World Cup and several other first-place finishes, and a lot of it was attributed to Henin stressing the fundamentals. In the end, that’s what separates the teams: Everybody is working under the same time limits, right? So, who executes it right?

  In Europe, they have a grinder where you can take the chickens and run them coarsely through it. It would grind the bones, chop them through and squeeze them. So, when we made our stock, it would extract everything at once, and we got that great flavor. We ended up putting a little touch of gelatin in it, because we didn’t get the texture in that short period of time, but we did get the flavor, while other teams were bringing (soup) base. The judges come around looking at your stuff, and they’re impressed when you execute fundamentals like that.

  SUSAN: They used chicken base?

  KEITH: Yeah. They weren’t successful. Different people approached that time constraint differently. We approached it and executed it from the fundamentals, and I think that’s why we were successful. Again, it’s the details. He executed a loin of rabbit and we spent a lot of time talking about it. Take the slicing … the bias fits in a little better and each slice locks in, together. It’s the nuance of the same protein, same idea, but thinking through that dish to its last possible degree. Once you bring it to center where everything is balanced, once you get it right, it’s perfect. That’s where Roland helped us, in between that treble and bass. You’re messing with your radio, it sounds a little better, and you mess a little more until it comes in, perfectly.

  Roland’s got a sense of humor, once you learn to recognize it. Once we were at a practice session with the ’92 team. Each team presented their platters in the middle of a large amphitheater-like room. Everyone got to hear the feedback; it was a learning process. One kid who tried … he just didn’t have his platters together. Roland looked at the plate and then he put his finger down his throat, like he was gonna throw up. The whole audience was quiet at first, but then exploded in laughter, including the kid. It released a lot of tension.

  In 1991, when I took over as president of ACF, I asked him to take over the certification process because of his attention to detail and precision. When Chef Henin was chairman of the search committee, he’d redline grammatical mistakes in a chef’s application and ask for them to be corrected. The ACF had never experienced that before, but he wouldn’t allow misspellings on an application. It was hard for people to handle, and he took a lot of heat. Henin would never back down. He had a standard in his mind, and he stuck to his guns. Despite all their complaining, these same ones who got their certification considered it a banner of knowledge and approval.

  Henin brought the ACF standards out. In the eighties, chefs weren’t a big deal. Sure, there were people like Paul Prudhomme, but the schools and everything didn’t come along until later. Henin upheld ideals and integrity. He demanded the cooking or practicum, in certification. Until then, certification only required you to fill out paperwork and send in the application. There was a written exam with two hundred questions: describe how to peel a carrot, but there was no show me a hollandaise.

  At Delaware North, he brought in certification, doing internal classes and educational seminars. They had their summit events and internal competitions from different regions. I judged them a couple times in Buffalo. The way he handled those people … they worshipped him. You don’t see a brigade of chefs look up to a corporate chef. Usually, it’s here comes the corporate chef, telling me what to do. He had a whole different level of respect than most corporate chefs I’ve worked with. It was amazing.

  SUSAN: What attracted him to you?

  KEITH: Me just dogging him and persisting and not letting him say no. I was on him until he said yes about the certification and until he said yes about the team, and let me tell you, it wasn’t the first time I asked him. In any case, he did it. I think he just dealt with me to get me off his back, most of the time. [Laughs]

  When we competed in Europe, somebody needed to get ingredients for the hot food competition. Roland and a couple of our apprentices would go, driving all night to Belgium to get stuff, because we wanted it fresh off the market. There was such a level of trust. Think of twenty people, representing five teams, who had worked four years to be in Europe—Luxembourg or Germany. All these teams get to represent their country and had to trust somebody to get the food that they were going to put on their platters and in somebody’s mouth: that was Roland. If the market didn’t have something, he’d figure out how to get it. He’d go to a charcuterie shop or somewhere to get the right meat, if they didn’t have it at the open market. We knew that when he came back, we’d have everything we needed. Sometimes he didn’t always have great friends with purveyors at the market, because he demanded such a high level. He wouldn’t just take what they’d give him; he’d send it back. We’re not going to take that. This is the way I want it. But, those clashes are what made him so effective and helped the team out so much.

  A lot of people don’t remember that during those four years, we won two competitions and we lost two competitions. We won the two competitions by less than .15 of a point. I’m talking all-around championships—the World Cup and the Escoffier Cup in England. Then we lost them the same way in Basel, Switzerland. When you’re dealing with that kind of detailed measurement of success, an overcooked rabbit or fish with just a little bit of an off flavor or a potato that’s too soft translates to .15 of a point, overall—the difference between winning and losing.

  Roland would leave Luxembourg around ten at night and be back by five or six in the morning. The market would open at 3:00 a.m., and he’d be there, ready with their list. If something got misused or didn’t come out right during practice and needed to be done again in the afternoon, Roland would get in the car and find us something in Luxembourg or Germany, in Berlin or Frankfurt. He’d find a charcuterie shop and get us a shank. Instead of our concentrating on how we were going to replace it, it was, Okay, they’re going to take care of us. Move on to the next thing and we’ll finish it up when they get back.

  Competition took incredible stamina, and that’s why I retired. It’s a young man’s game. My feet told me after ’96, no more. You get two hours sleep. We had a coach who said, “If you can’t sleep for more than four hours, you’ve got to sleep for less than two.” If you slept three or four hours, you felt worse. There were nights when everybody got two hours of sleep or less. Everybody was totally committed.

  I will tell you one more story and if it doesn’t make the book, I want you to make sure he gets it. When I was president, we had a Northwest Regional Conference in Salem, Oregon. Roland always talks about fishing. I used to fish competitively way back in the eighties here in Orlando for bass, right? It’s a different kind of fishing. Roland got himself a new boat and wanted to take me out, so sure enough, we went. Roland rowed and instructed. “This is the way we fish. You sit in the boat. You cast this spinner way downstream, and just let it float downstream.” That is totally opposite of what bass fishing is, where you just drop little artificial bait off rocks or drop them off weeds. After about an hour, we didn’t catch anything. I said, “I’m not going to do it that way. Here, let me just hit along the shore as we go down.” I caught a thirteen pounder, one ounce Steelhead trout … got it in the newspaper, there! He told me he would never take me fishing again! [Laughs]

  SUSAN: And have you?

  KEITH: No, I’ve never been fishing with him again. [Laughs] First and last time! We brought that salmon back and cooked it. I was working at Disney at the time where we had team meetings. I brought everybody in who knew Roland, and I showed them. It was a thirteen-pounder, so we fileted it, did a little brine on it, and then stuck it in t
he oven, Florida-style—lemon, just a touch of horseradish, salt and pepper—and baked it. We cut it up and ate it. It was so good … there were about eight of us and we each got a little bit. Roland always told us how to fish and always had stories, and we harassed him about that, forever.

  I’m so glad you’re doing this. He’s a handful, but he’s a great person.

  SUSAN: He sounds like a four-year-old boy you’re dropping off at daycare. [We laugh]

  Kevin L. Ryan

  CEO/Executive Director, International Corporate Chefs Association

  He would take all of his toiletry items. They’d be set up on the bathroom counter from shortest to tallest.

  KEVIN: I first met Roland through the US Culinary Olympic team. I got to see him as a leader helping younger team members with all the different techniques that he knew, and people he knew. They all looked up to him. The wealth of knowledge he had … especially in traditional cuisines! When you compete in an international arena, you have to know a lot of everything around the globe when it comes to cuisine. That’s the one thing Roland had—that kind of knowledge. He had competed on the stage as well, so he knew exactly what to do: what judges would be looking for; how you couldn’t cut corners; how to have everything down to perfection.

  Speaking of perfection … here’s one, about the NRA show in Chicago in 1992. We always had to share rooms because it conserves money. Everyone roomed around with different people and decided who they liked and who they wanted to room with—basically, who they could tolerate. After everyone bounced around a few times, nobody wanted to room with Roland. He’s so eccentric. He would take all of his toiletry items, any tubes, etc. They would have certain heights, and they’d be set up on the bathroom counter from shortest to tallest. Any tubes and things that were laid down, the same thing: shortest to tallest. It had to be exactly to perfection. I don’t have an issue with that, because I call myself a recovering perfectionist. It was no big deal for me, and we got along well. We had hit the road now for a few years, and we traveled all over. We went to China together, on the road, for twelve straight days and come back to Hong Kong. Guys are running into McDonald’s to eat and he and I are going out to a fine dining restaurant to eat sushi.