Roland G. Henin

by Susan Crowther

  He said, “What was on the knife?”

  “It was tomato! Obviously!”

  “You’re right; it’s tomato. Is the tomato supposed to be on the knife or on the tomato?”

  Probably on the tomato.

  You would have to figure it out on your own. Maybe I am more forgiving and [laughs] maybe give people more chances … but when you’re in the kitchen, being the chef in the kitchen, everybody should look to you, respect you, and know that you’re the hardest working guy in the kitchen. You can handle any job. I’ve washed dishes side-by-side with Roland. I’ve swept floors, scrubbed rusty pipes in the walk-in refrigerator. Just because you can cut a filet and cook it to temperature doesn’t mean you’re a chef. Leading by example is huge. When I do something, I’m trying to do it my best and better than yesterday.

  SUSAN: You mentioned your wife. Do you have children?

  WILLIAM: I have two girls, twelve and eight. I tell my younger daughter, “You met a famous chef one time. He was holding you in his arms, and you pooped all over him.”

  He was holding on to my daughter, saying, “Oh, she’s so cute!” This and that, and I heard this loud rumbling.

  “Uhh … Chef, I think you need to give her back to me. You won’t like what’s going to happen.”

  He holds her out like she’s a hot potato.

  Once, we had trouble. I was talking to him. “She’s not sleeping much, crying at night …”

  He says, “When I had my son, I used to open the bottom drawer of the dresser. We put the blankets in there, nice and soft. At 6:00 at night we put him in the drawer and close the drawer. At eight in the morning, when we want to get up, I open the drawer.”

  It was like, “Whaat?” [Laughs]

  He says, “You can’t let the kids run your life. You have to do what you need to do. They need to oblige.”

  It was one of those Roland parenting suggestions.

  I’ll sum his philosophy up with something he’d often say: You did well today. Pat yourself on the back, but don’t pat yourself too hard, because you probably could have done it a little better.

  Ambarish Lulay

  Department Chef, Hospitality and Tourism Management, Purdue University

  You do that task from start to finish, and you do it well, and you apply it to everything. I always want to do my best when he’s around—or even when he is not around. He is the VOICE IN MY HEAD, and he will be, forever.

  AMBARISH: We’re talking about Chef Henin … one of those all-pervasive topics, where you don’t know where to stop and you don’t know where to begin!

  I was a culinary student at Kendall College around 1999, cooking for a dozen people at the home of the dean of the college. A gentleman walks into the kitchen. I did not know who this person was. I was in that space where, I am a fearless student and know everything about everything.

  This gentleman walks up to me and asks, “Do you need any help? I can chop some parsley. I know how to chop parsley.”

  I thought, Oh my God, it’s one of those guests who want to know everything about the kitchen. I’m like, “No, I’m okay, thank you.”

  He had the meal, and everything was good. He gave me a card, which said Roland Henin. I put the card away.

  The next day, I am talking to a couple of my instructors: “This guy walks into my kitchen and he wants to chop parsley … it was strange. He gave me his card, and it said Roland Henin.”

  The instructors were both sitting down, and they both stood up.

  “Chef Henin was there?”

  “I guess. Do you know him?”

  The stories came out when he was an instructor at the CIA, so I realized that he was somebody special. I met him a couple more times. Chef told me to call him after I graduate if I would like to work for Delaware North; instead, I went to work in Europe. When I returned, I still had not called Chef. Then, an opportunity came—chef de cuisine at the Ahwahnee Hotel. I flew out there to do my Practical test. I didn’t realize Chef Henin would be watching over my shoulder for five hours as I cooked. By this time, I had learned enough about Chef to know that I was terrified.

  I meet Chef in the lobby at 7:00 a.m., and he wants to sit down for breakfast.

  “Oh, no, Chef. No breakfast.”

  “What, you don’t eat breakfast? How are you going to start a good day?”

  Little things like that were strange at the beginning: Chef Henin looks at our profession as a holistic thing. It is a profession that consumes you, if you do it right: How are you going to have a fruitful day in the kitchen if you don’t sit down for breakfast? His discipline translates into everything: what time he goes to bed; when he wakes up; all those little things. HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE YOUR LIFE? We haven’t even talked about organizing your cooking station or your mise en place. It’s about what kind of personal qualities it takes to be a decent quality chef. That’s when I started thinking about these things. When you’re a young cook, you are reckless. You work hard, put in fourteen, sixteen, eighteen hours a day, and you stay up late at night. You don’t think about these things. Chef is right there to remind you about all these things. So, in my formative years as a cook, he was already an influence.

  I managed to pass the Practical. Chef laid out a detailed review of the test, and there was an HR interview afterward. Me being me—you know, stupid—I said during that interview, “What is there left to interview? I have just completed a cooking test with Chef Henin! If you look at those notes, it will tell you everything about me, and what I can cook, and what I cannot do.” We had a little encounter there; this was obviously not the right thing to say in an interview, but not many people understand him unless they are in the field or they work with him.

  SUSAN: How did he influence you?

  AMBARISH: The basics are the basics. Fundamentals don’t change. Before you start a project, have your prep list done. Before you encounter your day, have a priority list. During that period, I worked on traveling DN projects. Chef would fly down for the Bracebridge Dinners—eight traditional Christmas Dinners hosted by Ahwahnee. They are a four-hour theater performance accompanied by a nine-course meal. Chef was always responsible for the fish course. I would make certain that Chef had his commis, his setup ready and recipes in order, because the first thing he does when he comes in is test the recipe.

  Let’s say we are making lobster terrine. By this time, I knew the format. No, I should rephrase that: by this time, I did not know the format. Chef comes in, and I pull out the recipe.

  “Here is the recipe we are thinking of making.”

  He makes a couple tweaks, and he says, “Okay. We got to make a test.”

  “Oh. Can’t we just make the terrine?”

  “No. If you’re going to go ahead and make eighty lobster terrines, shouldn’t you test one first?”

  Thank God for this. We test one. We fix the mistakes. We make another one. By the third terrine, Chef approves. We sit down for a few hours and create an elaborate prep schedule for the next few days. We will make eighty terrines: lobster, poached gently, split open, and cleaned; filled with a mousse of lobster roe, wrapped in spinach; roe mousse went into the middle of a scallop mousse studded with lobster claws; the whole terrine was set in a mold lined with thin strips of Nantes carrots from a local farm in Madera, California. It was amazing. We multiplied the recipe, tracked the production schedule, and went through the whole process. Three people worked eight hours a day for six days just making sheets of spinach leafs: stemming the spinach leaf; blanching the spinach leaf in perfectly boiling water; shocking it in ice water; dabbing all of the liquid out of the leaf; laying it down flat, on a twelve-leaf by twelve-leaf square, so we can perfectly wrap the lobster in it, all of the leaves going the same way. When the terrine was done, it was close to perfect.

  Until then, you could have asked me what “perfect” means, and I would have given you some cocky answer. It’s one of those elusive things, but when I saw it happen, I was able to identify it. Working with Chef, you brea
k everything down into smaller, manageable units, you do each one of those units perfectly, and you are going to get an end result …

  When Chef came down for the holidays, we would slice the tenderloin of beef, a traditional main course. In feeding four hundred people, four lines would put up one hundred plates each. Again, everything perfectly organized, because we have done this dinner for years, and we have a system. Chef adored the system and was so pleased to come down and work with us. It was a pretty large event! It consumed about thirty days’ worth of our lives and also mixed in holidays including Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. It was one big stretch, and we loved it, to say the least. We’re all suckers for punishment, aren’t we? That’s why we meet people like Chef Henin, because, we are suckers for punishment.

  We were invited to cook at the James Beard House, in New York City: the executive chef from the Ahwahnee, Chef Roland, our pastry chef, and me. We did a California menu—heirloom tomatoes and things like that. This was late fall and we had wonderful produce available to us, so we had it all shipped out. We prepped our food the day before at a catering company. This kitchen was full of people—being New York City, it was elbow to elbow … but nonetheless, we were prepping. Chef was over there in the corner. He wasn’t too excited about the quality of the lettuce greens we had now, after shipping. He proceeded to shock those lettuce greens in ice water and go through each one—de-stem each one and make sure they were perfect for this party of 110 people. He spent quite a bit of time doing that!

  We were in the other corner of the kitchen, prepping constantly. In California, we have the Diestel Turkey Ranch. We made turkey roulades for our main course—organic turkey breast, pounded and stuffed with a turkey sausage with dried fruits and nuts. I went by the textbook! We were cooking at the Beard House, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I prepared the roulades in California, wrapped in Saran Wrap and tied in butcher’s twine. The butcher’s twine is tied at about an inch and a half apart. They were cooked sous vide. We would finish them off last-minute with whole butter on the grill to a nice, golden-brown color on the outside and then slice them.

  Our day started at the farmers market and then by 7:00 a.m. we were in the kitchen, spending the entire day prepping and making sure that everything was organized, racked up, and ready to go. Seven thirty in the evening comes around. Chef is getting antsy, because he wants to go to dinner. He’s picky about sitting down and eating when you have long days—again, that breakfast thing. He wants everybody to stop prep at a decent time, sit down, and eat a proper meal, always with a salad. There should always be a salad in there. But, when you’re in the zone, just hammering away at a list, that’s the last thing on your mind.

  I had just pulled out those turkey roulades. He looks at them and says, “These are not tied tight enough.”

  I’m looking at the clock. It’s a good fourteen hours into the day. “Okay! I’m going to re-tie them.”

  He says, “What? You’re going to re-tie them now?”

  I found myself saying, “Yeah. Absolutely. Tomorrow is our dinner. These roulades are not right. I’m going to re-tie them, right now.”

  He stood there, and he watched me for the next hour and a half as I re-tied those twenty roulades and got them as tight as they needed to be. I removed all the twine from before and got new twine on there, an inch apart (or half an inch apart … I can’t remember now), but they were re-tied and they were tight. This time. As I look back on this now, I think, there are a lot of times when there is no compromise. If you want to do something right, it doesn’t matter what time of the day it is or how many people are coming to dinner. If you’re going to do it right, you’re going to do it right, no matter what. At any cost. You got to do the best you can at that point in time. These lessons are right there around the corner, but sometimes we hide behind our work and choose not to notice them. After ninety minutes, he says to me, “You could have saved on twine. The way you were tying it is inefficient. If you had to tie more, you would have wasted a lot of twine.” I was cutting the twine to the desired size and proceeding to tie it in a sort of basket. But he waited until I was done.

  Yes, I learned … that was my second chapter of working with Chef. We had a wonderful time at that dinner. The next day, we were working in the James Beard Kitchen, a wonderful place. Chef is poaching eggs, which is, again, a treat to watch. He’s got his poaching station all set. We brought in farm-fresh eggs from California, with beautiful marigold-colored yolks that were absolutely delicious. The eggs are all cracked into thirty bowls, as he’s going to poach for 110 people. We had a commis who would poach the eggs, but Chef was excited to poach them. We set up the station: eggs cracked in bowls and a pot of water, eight to eleven inches deep, with vinegar.

  “How much vinegar?”

  “Until the water smells like vinegar.”

  These are things you learn in school, maybe, but to put them into action each time you do something … that is what’s important, no matter how small the task. His poaching water is the perfect temperature, and his ice bath, and then, all set? The station is ready to go? Yes, Chef!

  He starts poaching those eggs, one at a time. “Where are the shears?” Shears! There are little wisps of egg whites that come off those eggs. He wants to trim those so that all the edges are round and matched perfectly. You can just visualize him standing there, poaching the eggs and trimming the albumen so that they all look perfectly oval. Then, he lays them on a towel. These are things that make him who he is. He is the product of all these little things, done perfectly. That’s his philosophy, and that’s what he lives by. The quote that comes to mind is by Fernand Point: “Cooking is an accumulation of details done to perfection.”

  SUSAN: Did you have dinner after you tied the roulades?

  AMBARISH: We did have dinner! I believe we did have plans to eat at Momofuku that ended up being closed for a private event. We ended up eating a quick dinner at a corner bistro in Tribeca, and then afterward went to Bar Boulud to try some pâté and terrine. It was definitely a wonderful night, no doubt, but I was not leaving that kitchen without re-tying those roulades.

  SUSAN: It says something that he stayed there with you.

  AMBARISH: Uh-huh! I’m sure it was some kind of test. There always is a little bit of a test in there, isn’t there. What are you going to say? How are you going to respond? All he expects is the correct response. After working with him this long, I thought the right thing to do would be to stay behind and re-tie those roulades. It was something perfectly under my control that I could fix. There was no other way, but it wasn’t always that easy. You learn to have a good set of eyes, where you can see your own mistakes. You can self-critique and you correct. He always said, if you can see things in a critical manner, then you’re going to start to fix those mistakes. He allows for mistakes, but if you’re making fundamental mistakes for the level at which you are, it is unacceptable.

  Conversations didn’t come about easily. Working with Chef, if he received the respect he deserved—if you were the person who would put your head down and do your job—then you have the privilege to have conversations. If I am working with Chef, I am not talking. My nose is to the cutting board. My eyes and ears are open and my mouth is shut, so I can understand direction clearly, whether it’s verbal or nonverbal. [Laughs]

  Chef being in the kitchen makes it a better place. I always want to do my best—the way it should be done, the way I was trained. I don’t want to take a shortcut when he’s around, or even when he is not around. He will always, always be the VOICE IN MY HEAD, because we need that. We need that internal check. We get lazy sometimes, and there is no substitute for good hard work. When it comes to doing something well, there is no compromise. You see Chef wrap a pan in plastic wrap and label it, and you go, “Wow!” It’s such a simple task to take a pan of food, wrap it in plastic wrap, label it, and put it away. You do that task from start to finish, and you do it really, really well. You take that formula, and you appl
y it to everything. Chef is the voice in my head, and he will be, forever.

  Colin Moody

  Executive Chef, Monterey Peninsula Country Club, Pebble Beach, California

  Nice to meet you. Don’t fuck up.

  COLIN: In summer 2000, I started as a sous-chef at Asilomar Conference Grounds. In my first week, Chef Bill Bennett said, “We’re going to a Rice Counsel Conference at Greystone. Master Chef Roland Henin is going to be there.” I said, “What’s a Master Chef?” I get off the bus that took us to the CIA and see him. Roland Henin is a pretty intimidating figure. I’m tall. He’s taller. Chef Bennett introduces us. Chef Henin extends his hand and says, “Nice to meet you. Don’t fuck up.”

  I had no idea what it took to be an executive chef. Chef Henin put together a proper sequence for a chef to become a leader. He had a path for each of us. He had a hundred different chefs under him … I don’t know how he kept track of all this. He led us through ProChef training at the CIA, which took up to a year to prepare for. You have five Practical exams and a bunch of written tests … a real butt-kicker. He had us over-train. When we went in there, we were ready to do twice as much cooking as needed. They actually had us back off with what we were putting together.

  What was truly telling about how Roland trained us for this is, we had another group who was sportservice, and they were also doing this training for five days. They were trained by a corporate chef. Roland Henin was on the parks and resorts side. I think 60 percent of them failed. Only one out of the nine of us failed. His training, while rough, was effective.

  One thing I enjoyed about Chef Henin was that, for his age—and around this time, he was in his fifties, if not sixties—he’d throw down twelve hours right next to all these young kids, like it was nobody’s business, just tear it up. I mean, he was relentless. He was nearing the end of his career when I dealt with him. We were doing an event for the general manager’s conference. I had two guests chefs come in, and Roland Henin, of course. By the third day, these guys were just exhausted. They’d always come in late. Henin’s favorite thing to say was, “Good afternoon.” Even if it’s seven in the morning and you show up two minutes after him, it’s Good afternoon.