Roland G. Henin

by Susan Crowther

  SUSAN: It’s not my intention to spin it any other way, although I am biased, in his favor. I was one of those CIA people in the eighties who worked with him for only one month, yet he left an impression that’s lasted a lifetime.

  ANDREW: He is indelible! I got lucky; I got this great shot of the team in the window right after they put their platters out: Tim, Adina, and Roland. I framed it and sent it with a thank-you note to the key people who helped me with that project. I heard from, maybe, two or three of those people. One of the notes I got was from Roland: This is really well done and thoughtful of you. That meant a lot to me, because he wouldn’t have said that [laughs] if he didn’t mean it. I didn’t dwell on the disagreements that were happening, although did mention that the sabbatical didn’t happen. Roland sent a note, saying he appreciated that I had been honest, didn’t brush anything under the rug. That meant a lot to me, too. He’s an uncompromising guy. The upshot to that is if you screw up, you’re gonna hear it, and if you do well and he approves, he’s not blowing hot air. His positive feedback meant a lot to me. I’m sure I would have heard, otherwise.

  The Director: The Art Institute of Seattle

  Hard asses make good training.

  —Dave Megeins, CMC

  In the mid-eighties, Roland Henin was wooed away from the CIA. For several years, he worked in culinary research and development for major Oregon corporations. Living in the western US offered another perspective in this new world that prompted the inception of the 1988 ACF Western Regional Culinary Team. Soon, Chef was enticed once again, this time to found a culinary program at the Art Institute of Seattle (AIS). An opportunity to create his own program, in a land surrounded by ocean and Pacific salmon? Henin grabbed it.

  Chef spent over three years at Art Institute of Seattle, until political values clashed. Goals of the college shifted from product-driven to profit-driven models. Henin had to battle over basic pedagogy such as practicing actual cooking skills to develop one’s craft versus simply watching videos, suggested as being a sufficient teaching method for preparation in the industry. Henin’s integrity won, again. He left AIS in early 1996 and entered the next phase of his career, which sustained him until retirement.

  Dan Thiessen

  Executive Director at Wine Country Culinary Institute

  It’s nice to be back in my neck of the woods. I’m back to who I was meant to be.

  DAN: It was 1995 … I was the sous-chef at the Coeur d’Alene Resort. There was an ACF Mystery Basket Competition in Spokane. I had never competed before. At the time, I was twenty-two years old and just returned from Europe after graduating from the CIA, in 1992. I worked in Switzerland for three years, in Zurich, and then Interlaken. This was my first competition, and Chef Henin was the Kitchen judge. [We laugh] I got raked over the coals on Henin’s critique. He busted my chops for not making cracklings with the duck skin. I didn’t know who he was or what was going on.

  The next day, Rod Jessick, my executive chef, called me into his office. When Chef hired me, he would only let me work there for one year and then expected me to move on to other opportunities: “We’re going to learn as much as we can from each other, and then, you need to be somewhere bigger than Coeur d’Alene.” Anyway, he called me into his office and reminded me of that conversation. This was a month away from the end of the year and he says, “I just got a phone call from your next employer.” Roland had called Rod to ask about me. He was looking for an instructor for his new team at the Art Institute of Seattle. One of the things he viewed from the kitchen critique, after beating me up, was that for a twenty-two-year-old, I had a good command of fundamentals, the things schools don’t teach people anymore. That was beaten in my head at the CIA and, of course, for three years in Switzerland.

  All I had was Rod saying, “You’ve got a Certified Master Chef saying he wants you to go work for him. You better go work for him.” So, that was the deal. I went and interviewed with Roland and said it would be a great opportunity to be part of. I got to be there from the ground floor: building lesson plans around the curriculum and teaching knife skills on the third floor of the school, before there was even a kitchen built. It was a tremendous opportunity, so I jumped at it. At the age of twenty-three, I moved to Seattle and was the first full-time instructor on Roland Henin’s team to open up the school. That’s how Roland and I met.

  Chef became a mentor in my life. From the beginning, I was kind of like his little protégé. He wanted me to get into more competitions, and I also coached our competition team for the students. He encouraged me to try out for the Culinary Olympics and arranged it so that I went and worked with Chef Franz Popperl for a week. He and Franz had been on a team together. Chef Franz was a master of cold food and could get me to a point where Roland could finish my training. I hadn’t had a lot of cold food experience at the time. I was a hot food guy. So, I went and spent a week with Franz and went on, gaining a ton of experience.

  Henin has this incredible ability to have a frank almost blown-up conversation and then get over it and move on. In my experience, the European chef will push until the American shows their backbone. They will push and run over you until you give up or you finally make adjustments, so you don’t get run over anymore. We developed a positive friendship, both fiery and supportive. He used to love coming into the kitchen and giving his critiques. Most times, they could be pretty brutal. There is a time and place for these critiques, and we would have a lot of conversations about that. When we focused on the students, we could speak our own personalities and get through it versus attacking each other. In this way, we were able to work well together.

  Roland excelled at goal-setting: listing the steps you need to do, to get what you want to achieve, envisioning yourself ten years from now and what you wanted that to be. You had to backtrack and build forward, so the steps you take today were in the right direction of the goal where you wanted to go. Of course, there are sidetracks—life happens—but you don’t just all of a sudden create success; it takes practice and discipline and critiques.

  When I sat down and said, “Okay, here’s where I want to be in ten to twenty years,” I found that I was halfway to not matching up with where I wanted to be. Some people chose the competition path under his tutelage. If that’s what they truly want to do, then all the power to them. It’s just not the path I chose. It was time to change my trajectory. He did not like that, at first. He saw me as a protégé, but once he got over it, we were able to move on. And, now he wants to go hunting with me. I’m afraid of him shooting me. [Laughs]

  When I said to him, “You don’t have what I want,” he started screaming and yelling and told me to get out of his office. Three days later, we’re having coffee, talking about what we’re gonna do next. The deal is, you bet he will chew your tail off, but on the flip side, he will joke about it later, might rip you a little bit: “Has the scar tissue healed yet?”

  When I worked for him, I went straight from being a sous-chef to his instructor, never had my own kitchen or team, so I left the Art Institute to become chef at the Space Needle. I worked positions in Seattle and owned a restaurant in Bellevue before moving out to Walla Walla in 2011. I grew up about ninety minutes east of here. This was an opportunity to get out of the Seattle rat race, get back home and start a family. I own the ranch where I was raised, and we’re buying a small farm. It’s nice to be back in my neck of the woods. I’m back to who I was meant to be.

  I was raised on a cattle ranch. We raised about three hundred mother cows. I always worked on the ranch and on my uncle’s farm—they farmed about 15,000 acres across the border, into Idaho. My parents used to visit this restaurant about once a month, 3-Mile Inn, three miles up the river. In the eighties, it was basically the only game in town. We became friends with the restaurant owner, Skip. One night, Skip, being a smart-ass, said “You know, if Peewee over here ever wants a real job, he can come on over and work for me.”

  “Will I get paid?”

  He says, “W
ell, of course I gotta pay you!”

  “Perfect. I’ll start next week.”

  On the ranch, your payment for chores is called “room and board.” So, I started working at the restaurant when I was fifteen, washing dishes, busing tables, and cooking omelets for Sunday brunch. By senior year, I was the lead line cook, doing a little bit of everything, working fifty hours a week, while going to school. I’d get out of school at about 3:00 in the afternoon, drive up to the restaurant, and work until eleven at night. I’d work Sunday brunch, too. I was working my tail off.

  I was fortunate as an only child. My dad said, “Listen. We know you like this culinary thing, and we want to support whatever you want to do.” They knew I wanted to be a veterinarian and also go to culinary school. He said, “You’ve worked in a restaurant. You know what that’s like. Why don’t you spend a week with our vet, work on-call with him, and see what you think?” So, I did. After a week of being a veterinarian, I said, “All right, dad, I’m going to culinary school.”

  There were thirty kids in my senior class. Small town. My dad told me, “Listen. If you don’t leave now, you’ll never leave, but you can always come back. You’re getting luggage for your graduation, and I expect you to use it!” I graduated from high school in 1990, got on an airplane for the first time in my life, flew to New York, and went to the CIA … bit of culture shock, to say the least. I graduated from CIA in April of ’92, and on June 15, I landed in Switzerland.

  The first guy I worked for (Skip) said to my dad, “If Danny’s serious about this chef deal, he needs to go to chef’s school at the CIA, and then he needs to go to Europe.” I spent the last two months at the CIA in the Resource Center looking for jobs in Europe. At the time, Euro Disney was opening up. I interviewed with them and they offered me a job, but they could not guarantee me where I would be working. They were only filling requisitions. The guy said, “You’re not going to know where you will work until you get there.”

  “So, what’s to say I’m not gonna work at a hot dog stand at the front gate?”

  “Nothing. We’re sending over a number of people that they need. They decide on where you go.”

  I thought, Okay, that is not what I want to do.

  Literally the next day, I was in the Resource Center, and this Switzerland job popped up. I sent them my résumé and two days later, got a response. That’s what started the deal. The first practicum visa was for a year and a half, and then I had a nine-month visa. That was my tenure over there.

  When I met Henin, I had a lot of youthful confidence and ego, but I had some chops in me, too. Coming straight from that European kitchen for three years was like putting gasoline on the bonfire. Over there, I don’t wanna say that it’s better, but there’s a different intensity than with American chefs. This was back in the early nineties. America had some chefs who could compete at that level, but were not compared to the Europeans. There were a few of them, I think … I don’t want to tick anybody off, but we were definitely not on a level playing field with Europe.

  In the early nineties, the Artisan-Slow movement was nonexistent in the United States. Over in Europe, it’s how they live. Most Americans don’t grow up in that culture; unfortunately, if we’re ever going to learn it, we’ve got to work with somebody who will teach it to us. As culinarians, it seeps into us. Those of us who were raised on a farm or ranch have the great fortune of being raised around agriculture, but there are not a lot of chefs who come from a farming background. Usually it’s the other way around; chefs start understanding where their food comes from and then get into farming.

  A few years back, we were discussing the Bocuse d’Or. His perspective: “It’s funny. Americans always wanna beat the French. They ask for my opinion, and I tell them, ‘You gotta be American.’ Don’t go with the focus of beating the French; you’ve got to represent your own food. You’ve got to have conviction around what is the definition of American cuisine: do the research; have conviction; and cook from your own soul.”

  SUSAN: What life lessons persist?

  DAN: Your greatest learning opportunities are from bad experiences—not only from your own mistakes, but also seeing mistakes of other people. Henin may not deliver the message in the way you want to hear it … but what he’s saying is absolute truth. There are times I didn’t like that, but those were opportunities for me to learn the message he was conveying and also challenge my reaction to how he was conveying it. We don’t want the truth, but we need it, you know?

  I learned respect for the themes! During critiques, he’d repeat, “There’s no team! You have no team in your menu!”

  The poor kids were like, “Team? We are a team!”

  We’re like, “No, he’s saying theme. He just can’t say the, “th.” You have a team, but you don’t have a theme in your menu.”

  No matter how long he’s lived in America, he’ll never give up his French accent.

  Henin’s got that habit where he goes to shake your hand and feels for those callouses. He wants to know: Are you a real chef, or are you a kitchen chef? He still does that! Whenever I see him, he’s like, All right; let me see your hands … how much time you been spending at the desk?

  Maybe it’s so important to him, because he gave up so much for his craft. That’s the downfall of Roland Henin, and it’s one of the things I considered, when working toward the Certified Master Chef title. One of the most difficult things—one of the most painful things—I’ve ever said to the guy was, “Chef, you don’t have what I want. You’re a Certified Master Chef, but you’ve sacrificed everything in your life for that!” He’s one of the greatest CMCs out there and probably that ever will be, as far as what he’s been able to accomplish in his career, but that comes at a cost. Now he’s retiring and winding down. He wants to fish and have someone there fishing next to him. He’s got Joni (his wife), all his friends and colleagues.

  For a long time, he was “Old School French.” About the only time he’s not Old School French is … ah … never. The man fishes Old School French: he’s got his lures lined up with the water temperature and the ideal fishing conditions and numbers on the boat for where you put your fishing pole. He’s got mise en place in his fishing boat. It drives me nuts. He’s just like that all the time, and … there are times where that’s good and times where you gotta be able to kick back and relax. And, he can relax today. I don’t think he could have years ago, but he can relax today. Finally.

  SUSAN: What’s your relationship with Chef these days?

  DAN: We touch base all the time. He wants me to take him hunting, for bird, deer, and elk. He’s probably one of the oldest men in history to go through the hunter-safety education course. Two years ago, he got his hunting license. He’s going to start coming over about once a month, because he wants to see this part of the country. I want to get him around the students here. At the school, we have a Hot Food Team for the Junior ACF Culinary Competition. I’d love to have him come over, offer some critiques, and do some judging. If I can get Henin to critique my Culinary Team, heck yeah I’m gonna jump on that opportunity.

  SUSAN: Here you are, back in competitions … full circle?

  DAN: One of the best ways to learn real-live cooking is through competition, so I need to provide the opportunity for my students to compete. Where else are you going to get the critique of all these judges and the type of practice and the one-on-one workings with the coaches? In a classroom, you’re one of twenty. In a team, you’re one of five, with three to four instructors giving you their opinions. As you look at ratios and immersion, there’s no better way!

  In competition, you see all these teams trying to do their rendition of a classical dish … you can’t cook it ten different ways, but you can see it cooked from other people ten different ways. What better way to learn than by seeing all the other interpretations? It teaches about discipline and mise en place and to be able to be critiqued—to be critiqued is a skill set—to be able to take that and come back for more! That’s a tre
mendous way to learn.

  See, here’s the deal … my students know that, just because it was not my path, doesn’t mean I don’t try to provide that opportunity for others. I can’t pick who’s going to be successful, who’s going to be the rock star in the kitchen. I have to provide the opportunity for everybody to blossom into that, if that’s what they want to do. Just because I don’t want to compete anymore, doesn’t mean that none of my students do. That’s the beauty of our business; it’s not cookie-cutter. Everybody has the right to express their deal. Even though the Culinary Arts is an individualistic art, it takes a team to do everything.

  John Fisher

  Chef Instructor, Renton Technical College, Retired

  In this business, you can’t let outside interference make your judgments. It’s not about going to work from nine to five. You’ve got to live, breathe, and eat your profession.

  JOHN: I got interested in cooking as a young person, around ten years old, from my aunt, a great cook from Old Country in Italy. She got it from her mother. I learned a lot about Italian food, a lot of great recipes. She taught things you wouldn’t learn from an Italian chef. I always wanted to be a chef.

  I met Roland Henin around 1992, through competitions. We went to Salish Lodge for a tryout. He was emphatic about the classics and made sure things were carried out in a proper manner of execution: butchery first, with the rest falling into place within the timeline. The final critique was somewhat comical about certain items, like placement of food and styles. Chef gave me a lot of grief over how I was dressed! I dressed appropriately, as far as my hat, starched top chef coat, etc. I had on gray slacks. They were starched and creased, looking good, but he didn’t like that too much.