“No, no, the spinach, you need to clean it, you need to wash it. You need to make sure the stems are gone from it. There’s a stem here. You got a little bit of rust on this piece of lettuce that needs to be taken care of. You can’t have those mistakes. This sauce, here, you can see the beurre blanc has a slight little break in it. You can’t have that for a CMC test. You can’t have these kinds of mistakes! Your THEME! Your THEME! What’s your THEME for this menu? This doesn’t match with the THEME that you’re doing. This plate here, out of the five courses, is an outlier for the rest of the things you are doing.”
He’d break you down like that, right down to the carrots on the plate … and help you understand, this is what’s wrong and this is how you make it right.
When he was a young chef in France, he went to watch a team event. There were fifteen teams in this kitchen and he watched all of them. One team was working hard. They were running here and there and they looked busy, like they were doing all this work, and getting all this stuff accomplished. Then, he saw this other team, in the corner. It looked like they weren’t doing much. They were standing in one place. They didn’t move around a lot. There wasn’t a lot of motion. He looked at it. He thought about it. The team that “wasn’t doing much” was actually more productive. They were organized down to what steps they were going to take, which commis was doing what, and what they were going to need. They had their mise en place arranged with all their pots and pans, so they weren’t running all over the kitchen during cooking. It showed in the final stage, and don’t quote me on this, but I think the team that was the most controlled won, while the team that was all frantic, their platter wasn’t up to snuff. That was a lesson to him as he was growing up: make sure you are organized. I took that to heart. When I do a competition, I don’t want to be moving around. I’ll work right there, do the turning and twisting, and that’s it—no moving around in the kitchen like an idiot. I see that in the workplace, too: first plate vs. final plate is completely different. You do more, more, you practice … you practice a dozen times before competition. Chefs who are more organized stand right there, not running around. They work, do the project, BOOM. Do the next project. I am amazed what I am able to accomplish in an hour’s time.
I had a sous-chef who wanted to take the CSC exam. I said, “Chef Roland is coming into town next month. Here are the things you need to learn. Chef will come and take a look at what you do. You have a month to practice.”
And he’s all, “Oh, yeah. I’ll get it done … I’ll fluff it.”
I’m saying to him, “You can’t fluff it. It’s gotta be right. You’ve got to know what you need to do.”
Next month, Chef comes for a three-hour practice run. Chef is watching this sous-chef, not saying a word. I didn’t get any precursor from Chef from what this sous had been doing, what his training was or how far he’d come along. Chef is writing his notes. He’s got one page … now he’s got two pages … and I’m thinking, Oh, boy. This is going to be rough.
The sous finishes, he’s plating his food …
I don’t think Chef even looked at his food. Chef could tell, from the moment he started, that this guy wasn’t prepared. The guy was young, maybe twenty-five. You can’t fool Chef; he knows. He tears into the kid with the biggest rant I’ve ever seen Chef on, in my entire life. It didn’t stop for like twenty minutes: how unprepared, how unskilled, and how embarrassing this was. I thought the kid was gonna cry.
The kid needed to understand what it takes to be a chef in order to do these Practicals and get these certifications. He rode the kid … “You need to get this written out, you need to get your head clear, you need to get more mentally involved with this, and be more prepared, in order to be a professional.” Chef knew that the guy needed to be berated, and it helped him, immensely.
The guy said, “Chef, you’re right. I’ve got to spend more time on this, focus on that …”
Anyway, the guy took his CSC exam and passed with flying colors. Not a problem, because he understood what it would take.
“I was trying to fluff it. I sandbagged it. I thought I knew more than I knew.”
Chef was like, “Nope. You don’t know anything.”
I was ready to go crawl in a hole, because this poor kid … I mean, whoa. But Chef always knows what buttons to push, and in the end, he’s right.
Everything Chef does ends up being a life lesson. The way you put your pants on: how would it be more efficient to get ready in the morning? Packing for the Culinary Olympics was [Laughs] … “Oh, no. You have to do it like zees. We take zees out of zees. We put that here. You wrap zees three times.” Packing for the Culinary Olympics was a day-long process. We’d ask, “Chef, shouldn’t we plan on bringing more? What if we make mistakes?”
“Don’t make mistakes!”
SUSAN: Anything else to add?
SCOTT: Roland Henin is not going to let people change his mind on how he thinks things should be. He sticks to his guns on what he believes in. He makes recommendations, and a lot of the times, you see that the recommendations aren’t followed. And you go, “Well, why didn’t we listen to Chef? Why didn’t these things happen?” In the end, you find out that he’s always right. He would say, “This guy is no good for the company, he’s gonna create problems for you, later down the road.” You’d see the guy promoted and then the problem would happen down the road, and the guy would get fired.
He pushed education, with DN: “We gotta develop these chefs. We gotta build up the talent.” Working in a corporate setting, people are always looking for ways to cut costs, but you’ve got to spend money to build and retain the business. Everything Chef ever said to me … in the end, he was always right, no matter how wrong I thought he was. [Laughs] I don’t know how, but he always is.
Jon Wilson
Executive Chef, Ralph Wilson Stadium
He acts like a normal guy. He doesn’t push it in your face. Someone once said to him, “You made Thomas Keller famous?” And he replied, “No. Thomas made me famous.”
JON: I started with DN in 2002, at the First Niagara Center, home of the Buffalo Sabres. When you saw Chef walk into your kitchen, standing up tall, you’d scatter like cockroaches. When I first met him, he asked me if I knew what the “M” meant in CMC. I said, “I don’t know, Chef.” And he said, “Mean.” Then, in 2008, they sent an Olympic team over to Germany. That’s where I got to see the other side of Chef. He brought Chef Rosendale out, and Chef Handke came out to compete. The stuff you learned in one month preparing for the Olympics was like two years of doing it in the business—the research, the practice, everything.
The company invests a decent amount of money in us, professionally. We have a budget each year for professional development, and we go to Chef and say, “This is what we want to do, and this is how we want to go about it.” I tell ya, he’s right ten times out of ten. It gets a little frustrating at times … but if he tells you you’re ready, you’re ready. He won’t send you unprepared.
When I was preparing for my certification for executive chef (CEC), he came in and helped me practice. Some people would talk to you, like “This is terrible. This is what you need to do.” He was different. He’d tell you, “This sucks, and here’s why.” If you blow him off, you can chalk it up … but if you listen to his critique, he’s a tremendous help. I just did a Cold Foods competition. I’m going for my ProChef II. Chef Henin says, “Your garde-manger is pretty shaky. You’re going to have to do a couple competitions.” I wanted to try a Cold Food, figured I’d get a medal and prove to Chef that I could do it. I sent him a photo of the platter and within an hour he emailed back. He must’ve written for about two hours, tearing the platter apart! At the end he says, “That’s enough for today. I’ll call you, tomorrow.”
I’m in Buffalo, he’s in Seattle … he kicks my ass from three thousand miles away! He’ll say, “Send me all your work.” Then he’ll call me and say, “Are you ready to talk? Yes?” And we go, page by page. He says, “You k
now what you gotta do, all right? We’ll talk, tomorrow.” When somebody at that level is so interested, you want to try that much harder!
Whenever doing a Practical, you utilize the usable waste and separate it from the non-usable waste. The proctors come through and look at it. After one of my practice sessions, Chef came through and said, “Look at you. You have all this usable vegetable, all this usable fish, all this usable stock. Why don’t you put it on the damn stove? Instead of just sautéing with butter, you could deglaze with the stock and have less waste than you’re telling me you have. Use the damn waste!” It was one of those lightbulb moments where you say to yourself, Why didn’t I think of that before? A lot of times when you’re going through the process, he comes back and says, “You could have done this so much easier than you’ve done it.” He waits until you’ve done it before he says anything. That way, you learn.
SUSAN: Why do you think he had me call you?
JON: I think he sees that I’m sincere. I’m not just chasing the money or the titles. I’m a Certified Executive Chef, and I’m a sous-chef, and I’m going to stay in Buffalo. You see a lot of guys with DN that say, “I wanna do this, and I wanna do that.” They talk big, but they don’t spend the weekends and the nights and the holidays practicing and researching and traveling. I think, once he sees that level of commitment … I mean, if you just show up for one practice, yeah yeah yeah. He acts like a normal guy. He doesn’t throw it in your face. Someone once said to him, “You made Thomas Keller famous?” And he replied, “No. Thomas made me famous.”
SUSAN: What other stories come to mind?
JON: I have three. First one was earlier this year, when I was competing in Madison. Chef said, “Send me your menu.” I was making applesauce, and he said, “Put the type of applesauce you’re doing [on the menu].”
I said, “Chef, I’m doing Red Delicious apples.”
He said, “I’m sure the apples in Buffalo are delicious. But, what type of friggin’ apples are you using?”
“Chef, I’m using Red Delicious.”
He said, “Oh, okay.” Then, he went right to the next line, like nothing ever happened.
After I competed, he called me. I was in the competitor’s lounge, and he followed up, like he always does.
“Well, how’d you do?”
Because I was in the lounge, I whispered. “Let me take the call out in the hallway.”
He said, “What are you, sleeping?”
“Well, no, Chef. I’ve spent thirty-six hours competing, and I can’t really talk.” I said I hadn’t read the critique yet.
“Well, call me as soon as you get your critique.”
So I read the critique and called him back, and he says, “What do you think about your critique?”
“What do you think I thought about it?”
And he says, “What did you expect them to give you, roses?”
Henin always asks for five bucks, whenever he answers a question. If you’re looking at something, and he doesn’t tell you, he’ll say, “You want me to tell you, you owe me five bucks.” Once, I wrote him a letter, and I thanked him for his help, and I put five dollars in an envelope. I put it in his briefcase, before he went on the plane, and I drove him to the airport. I didn’t hear from him … didn’t hear from him. The next time he was in town, I said, “Hey Chef, did you find an envelope in your briefcase?” He looks at me stone cold. He says, “Did you think five bucks was enough?”
Last year, he called on January 13, which happens to be my wife’s birthday. He asked, “Do you want to go to dinner?”
I called my wife and said, “Hey, Chef’s in town.” She’s met him a couple times. She knows him.
She says, “Yeah, go ahead. Bring me something home from the restaurant.”
We were eating and afterward, I went to order and the kitchen was closed. Chef asks, “What, are you hungry? I didn’t feed you enough?”
I said, “Chef, it’s my wife’s birthday. I have to bring her home something and now the kitchen’s closed.
He went off, “Your wife will not be pleased. Don’t think you’re getting anything from me tonight.”
SUSAN: Anything else you’d like to add?
JON: It’s funny … because Chef always swears, but then, when you hear it in his accent, it doesn’t sound so bad.
Chris Gould
Chef-Owner, Central Provisions
I went through the practice feeling pretty good. Then I read through the notes and I thought, Wow! I was terrible! The stuff he said to me brought me to tears, but he was only doing it because he wanted me to win.
CHRIS: I met Chef when I was about nineteen, just before graduation from the apprenticeship program at the Balsams. Delaware North had just taken over management there. The Balsams was heavily into competitions. I had stayed late, working intensely on some competition stuff, and he walked into the kitchen. I didn’t know who he was. I was young at the time and didn’t know anything about Delaware North or the management side of it.
He came in and—he is obviously a big presence—I was fairly terrified. We talked about what I was working on. In the next couple months, I got to know him a little bit. I’d see him when he was around the restaurant. Then, I entered into a competition—the ACF Junior Chef of the Year or the Culinarian of the Year—and he coached me. I had won the regional competition in Columbus, Ohio, and trained for national competition in San Antonio, Texas. He coached me one-on-one and taught me a lot about timing, proper French technique, etc. We spent months training. Not many people got one-on-one time with him.
SUSAN: Why do you think you got that time with him?
CHRIS: Before I met him, I was working on my own accord. After everyone would leave the restaurant, I worked on my own time, practicing for competition. I think now, me being a chef in my own right, if I saw someone doing that, I would spend the time with them. That would motivate me to put all my effort into somebody, if they’re putting all their effort into it.
Once, during a competition practice, he wrote me a note that I have saved. It was our last practice before the nationals, before he had to travel west for a few weeks. I was meeting him in San Antonio for the ACF convention. For our last practice, we did a full run, like it was the actual competition. He sat there and took notes the entire time on stuff I did right and stuff I did wrong. I went through the practice feeling pretty good. Then I read through the notes and thought, Wow! I was terrible! He had three full pages of notes, mostly stuff that I needed to work on. Afterward, he went through the whole list of every single thing, for ninety minutes. He just beat me up over it, beat it into my head. If I did it like that, I would never win. This was the stuff I needed to work on in the next couple weeks, so that when I met him and did the competition, I would win. So, I practiced and practiced and practiced all that he had written down. I did a full run by myself. I went out to San Antonio and won the competition. The stuff he had said to me brought me to tears, but he was only doing it because he wanted me to win! For example, in properly poaching my Dover sole, I didn’t add the cartouche over it. Little things like that made the difference between doing it properly or not. He says, “If you practice all of this stuff, and you do all of this stuff right, you will win.” I did, and I did!
In recipes, I would write vinegar as “vin.” He’d say, “Vin is wine! You don’t abbreviate vinegar as vin!” To this day, I don’t abbreviate vinegar. There are so many things he taught me that I instill in my cooks: basic cleanliness and mise en place. He was huge on station setup, making sure it was neat, clean, and organized, at all times. When I worked with him for that year preparing for competition, it was all about timing and organization: when you do this; when you do that; how long it should take; and proper techniques like properly boning a chicken or poaching a Dover sole.
SUSAN: What got you to the Balsams?
CHRIS: I started washing dishes in high school, as a summer job. Part of the job was making salads and stuff like that. I enjoyed that part, but did
n’t like washing dishes. At the end of summer, the chef asked me if I could come back the next summer, and I told him only if I could be on the line, because I wanted to cook. He said okay. The next summer, I worked on the sauté line, not knowing how to cook at all … but the chef trained me. I enjoyed it and excelled at it. I did that for two summers. When I was figuring out where to go to college, I wanted to continue cooking, so I applied to Johnson & Wales, CIA, and all these places. My chef was a graduate from the Balsams and said I should check it out. I went up there, applied, got in, and was there three days after I graduated high school. The apprenticeship lasts three and a half years, so I was there from 2002 to 2005. I met Chef Henin in 2004.
SUSAN: How did he affect your own mentoring?
CHRIS: He is passionate and unrelenting, but also fair. He holds people accountable for what they do. He won’t go after people and yell at them for no reason; it is always to make them better. It was not just a personality, like, I’m a chef and I’m gonna yell at people, ’cause that’s what I do. The reason he’s spending the time teaching or even yelling is because he wants to have the best out of that person.
I take that into my philosophy. I only hire cooks who have that drive. A lot of cooks these days grew up on the Food Network. They think being a chef is glamorous, where the opposite is true: it’s a lot a lot a lot of hard work, persistence, and training. Chef personified that. He would be there after work at 2:00 a.m., working on kitchen training. It wasn’t in his job description to do that, but he wanted to help me get better. I do that, too. Even if you’re hard on somebody, if they sense why, then they’ll do anything that you ask them to do. They might not understand exactly why they’re doing it, but they understand that what you’re doing is going to make them better in the long run. That’s the biggest life lesson from Chef Henin. If they don’t understand that you’re doing it to benefit them, then they are going to resent you for it and they are not going to want to do it. But then, you also need to find that right person who wants to work that hard. In that way, the mentor and the mentee kind of find each other.
Roland G. Henin Page 25