by Cat Cora
I needed a part-time job to pay expenses and help with my student loans, and landed one in the Tavern at the Beekman Arms. The inn bills itself as the oldest continuously operated hotel in the nation. The adjacent restaurant continued the colonial theme, with overhead beams and an open fireplace, and served butternut squash soup, braised short ribs, and Atlantic salmon. The place was owned by renowned chef Larry Forgione, one of the founders of the New American Cuisine movement, which was exploding across the culinary landscape. My boss was an executive chef named Melissa Kelly. She was my kind of woman, enthusiastic and creative, a cheerful perfectionist. I’d never worked for a woman before, and we got on like a house on fire.
Since Hannah and I returned from Europe and I landed my job at Amerigo, she enjoyed hearing about my culinary antics and became interested in how the front of the house worked. She thought she might like to try her hand at restaurant management one day, and when there was an opening for a waitress at the Beekman, I suggested she apply, and they hired her immediately. You’d be hard-pressed to find a female student who hasn’t spent a stint waitressing, and for this reason we tend to think it’s a job pretty much anyone can do. Anyone can do it well enough to keep from being fired, but to excel at service you need to be mentally organized, quick on your feet, and unflappable, and Hannah possessed all of these skills. We made enough money to pay the bills and also tour around the Hudson Valley on our few days off. We were happy.
In the summer between your first and second years at the Culinary you’re required to do an externship, the idea being that nothing furthers a culinary education more than a few months in a real-world restaurant kitchen. My ambition was on fire after the success of my first year, and I wanted to extern in Manhattan. New York was the culinary capital of the world and no other place would do.
I landed a spot with Anne Rosenzweig, who was all about giving female chefs a shot. She was chef-owner of the celebrated Arcadia, one of the hottest restaurants on the Upper East Side. She was one of the first to champion so-called American cuisine, which she served with a cheeky twist. I just loved it. Her club sandwich was a lobster club made with roasted vegetables, bacon, and lemon mayonnaise, and was big enough for two people to split. Her Caesar salad was made not with ho-hum romaine, but with then-exotic arugula. She served corn cakes topped with crème fraîche and rack of lamb drizzled with pomegranate juice. What impressed me most was her flair for plating a dish, her feeling for colors, shapes, and textures. Many years later, when I competed on Iron Chef and I would smoke the competition with my creative plating skills, I remembered Anne.
Working in her tiny kitchen felt like joining the cast of a movie. I worked under Linda, the daytime sous chef, a hard-ass straight out of some New Jersey industrial town whose accent was so strong I could hardly understand her. The other sous chef was a Moroccan man named Medhi, the hardest worker I’d ever seen. He was a devout Muslim and fasted on the required holidays, working the grill all day long, the sweat pouring off him, but never taking even a sip of water until sundown. I was constantly worried that I’d have to call 911 when he passed out from dehydration, hamburger spatula in hand.
Hannah stayed in Rhinebeck. She wasn’t keen on living in Manhattan, and who could blame her? The plan was for me to live in the city during the week and come home on the weekends. I found a position as a live-in cook for an older couple who worked as journalists. I had my own quarters in a doorman building on Park Avenue. I thought I was set, living the life in New York, New York.
For the first few weeks of my externship my hosts were out of the country, covering some big story somewhere or other, and I had the run of the house. I missed Hannah. I may as well confess it now: I’m a spoiled titty baby. I don’t like being away from home, away from my partner, sleeping in a strange bed with the always-weird sheets—why are the sheets of others, no matter the thread count or expense, always unsatisfactory?—and the not-quite-right pillows. Sleeping alone. I didn’t like it then and I don’t like it now, although I’ve had to adapt.
But in 1994, I still struggled with being out there alone in the world. I was determined to suck it up. How could I be a bad-ass, world-class chef if I couldn’t be away from home? I was like the grown-up version of the third-grader who begs to be picked up from the slumber party because the thought of not sleeping in her own bed is terrifying.
I was able to keep it together until the journalist couple came home. I realize my room and board was predicated on my being their cook, but in less than a week, in addition to having me make breakfast, lunch, dinner, and any number of random snacks, they were also leaving their dirty laundry in a basket in front of my door.
That was it. I quit on the spot and moved back to Rhinebeck, joining the ranks of suburban commuters, taking the train five days a week into the city from Poughkeepsie. I wound up enjoying myself. I had to be at the restaurant at 8:30 a.m., so I had to catch the six o’clock train. I’d grab a coffee and the newspaper, and have that hour and a half to myself to relax and collect my thoughts for the day. Once I arrived I’d hop onto the subway and be at Arcadia in a matter of minutes. At the end of the day, on the way home, I would head back to Grand Central, grab a cold Heineken and the New York Post, and sit back to enjoy the quiet time on the train. Even though I thought it was compulsory to do your externship in the city, I found a sweet rhythm in the life of a commuter, and I remember it as a happy time.
That fall, Nancy, one of the six women in our class at the Culinary, was awarded a “scholarship” to spend a day with Julia Child at her home in Cambridge. Coincidentally, Nancy was Melissa Kelly’s aunt, and was a little older than the rest of us, perhaps in her late forties. She was medium height, athletic, and lively, with a thatch of salt-and-pepper hair, maternal in a “you go, girl!” sort of way.
The day with Julia included lunch and the chance to watch her film an episode of her PBS series, Cooking with Master Chefs. Julia was always ahead of the curve, and this show, where Julia traveled around the country cooking with top chefs from every region (in the companion cookbook, Julia interpreted the recipes on the show for the home cook), could have sprung from the Food Network brain trust just last week.
Nancy was allowed to bring a guest, and after class one day, as I was putting away my knives, she came up to me, told me about her prize, and said, “I can’t think of anyone else who would appreciate an afternoon with Julia more than you.”
I practically keeled over with joy. I hugged her so hard she claimed she saw stars.
Chicago chef Rick Bayless was Julia’s guest on the show that day. They filmed in Julia’s kitchen on Irving Street in Cambridge, with its extra-high counters, the only concession she’d made when she remodeled. Otherwise, it didn’t look a whole lot different from my mother’s kitchen on Swan Lake Drive, with its double oven and nothing-special refrigerator. Despite her wealth, Julia never wanted anything special—read “professional”—in her kitchen, because she never wanted to alienate her devoted audience of regular home cooks.
I’d never watched anything filmed before. Julia, in her hot pink blouse and purple scarf, was an old pro, asking Rick Bayless pertinent questions and effortlessly leading him on to the next step. Rick had a lot of brown hair and schoolboy glasses. When we sat down to lunch at Julia’s kitchen table, covered with a practical wax-coated tablecloth, I suddenly felt shy. She was just as she had been at the book signing—interested, engaged, twinkly eyed—but I was sure she wouldn’t remember me. How many thousands of people did she meet in a year?
“I’m sure you don’t remember me, but I met you at a book signing in Natchez. Mississippi. I was the girl from Jackson who asked you about becoming a chef. You said go to the CIA, it’s the Harvard of cooking schools, and that’s what I did. I’m graduating in a few weeks.”
“Oh, of course, that’s splendid!” said Julia, seeming to mean it.
Did she remember, or was she just being polite? I prefer to think that she’d seen something in me, and it made me feel good
knowing I hadn’t let her down.
In early 1995 I graduated from the Culinary Institute with honors, at the top of my class. Twelve years later, I would be invited back to give a commencement speech.
ten
January 18, 1995
Dear Mademoiselle Cora:
We regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you a position with us at this time. As has been our policy since our doors opened seventy years ago, we do not allow women into our kitchen. Nevertheless, we wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors.
Sincerely,
Monsieur X
It was the eighth rejection I’d received in as many days. I’d painstakingly composed a letter describing my accomplishments and goals, assembled clippings from the Culinary Institute newspaper highlighting my achievements, collected glowing recommendations from my most exacting instructors, and mailed my application to ten of France’s top three-star restaurants.
Every graduate at the Culinary who aspired to be an executive chef in a good restaurant was encouraged to do a stage (the French pronunciation has a soft a and rhymes with collage), an unpaid internship in a French kitchen. The French invented restaurants, and before the advent of the modern cooking school, young aspiring chefs learned their trade through the ancient tradition of apprenticeship. In modern times, it gives a cook the chance to hone his—and most of the time it is a he—skills out there in the real fine-dining world, where every dish that leaves the kitchen is expected to be perfect.
My first choice was Paul Bocuse’s L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges in Lyon. He turned me down with such speed I doubt he even opened the envelope. I also tried Frédy Girardet, a Swiss chef whose self-named three-star restaurant near Lausanne is one of the best in the world; pretty much everyone who can make a decent roux considers Girardet to be one of the greatest chefs of the twentieth century. He, too, said non, merci. No women allowed in his kitchen, either, and no apologies for the blatant sexist attitude. That’s just the way it was.
I turned twenty-eight in April of that year and was getting powerfully cranky in the face of all these roadblocks. What if every French chef I’d approached said no? I could apply for internships in Italy, Spain, or Germany, but it wasn’t the same. In the mid-nineties, it was France or don’t waste your time and money.
Then my luck changed. One day I received two acceptances in the mail—one from Georges Blanc, who owned the restaurant that carried his name, in Vonnas, and the other from Roger Vergé in Mougins. After years of grilling, sautéing, chopping, mincing, grinding; of working, networking, hoping, and dreaming, it was finally happening. I said yes to both, without giving a single thought to how exactly I was going to afford it.
Aside from a single meal a day, my stages at Georges Blanc and at Roger Vergé’s restaurant, Le Moulin de Mougins, would be on my own dime. Even if I succeeded in deluding myself that I could work hard and live on one meal a day, I’d still have to contend with the matters of lodging, airfare to France, train fare from Vonnas to Moulins, and all the incidentals I would need during the six months I would be abroad. In all my grand dreaming, I had a habit of forgetting about basics like shampoo, toothpaste, money for laundry, and the occasional beer I might want to grab at the end of a long day.
I borrowed a little money from my parents, and my grandmom insisted on pulling some out of her savings. I took extra shifts at work, did some catering on the side. I drew up a budget so tight I already felt dizzy with hunger. Still, I could make it work. Six weeks after I’d received my acceptance letter and two weeks after I graduated from the Culinary, in March 1995, I was on a plane to France.
I flew to Lyon and was met at the airport by Achille and Stavri, old Greek friends of Taki and Maria, my godparents. They were a modern European couple who lived separately during the week. Achille was quiet, a gynecologist with a practice in the city, and he stayed in their apartment in Lyon. Stavri was a professor and intellectual who preferred the country, and stayed in their beautiful stone farmhouse in the hills of San Belle, a small village not far from Lyon. She was small and feisty, with an easy laugh. They were opposites who enjoyed one another’s company, but also had, I’d heard, “arrangements.”
I struggled to stay awake as they drove, filling me in on the details of their farmhouse’s restoration, the challenges of finding a good stonemason, and the rest I’ve forgotten, because I may have lost the battle and fallen asleep. The next morning they drove me to the village of Vonnas, an hour north, toward the Swiss border.
We drove through Vonnas proper on our way to my accommodations. Vonnas is Georges Blanc land. In the early nineties he bought the village bakery and grocery store. Then in a move straight out of Monopoly, he purchased seventeen of the ancient houses surrounding his restaurant, creating a village gourmand of shops, cafes, and hostelries. The little village was romantic and pristine, the style uniformly Alpine. I was beginning to feel the same stirrings of panic and homesickness I’d experienced during my first stint at the Culinary, but the quaint beauty calmed me. I could live here for three months, couldn’t I?
Except I wasn’t going to be living in the cozy, charming, well-lit center of Vonnas. Achille continued through the village and up a steep hill into a neighborhood that was as dreary as the village gourmand was charming.
My new home was a squat, three-story concrete building that looked like some kind of asylum for the criminally insane. I thought maybe it was just me, jet-lagged, anxious, nervous, but then I saw Achille and Stavri exchange worried looks. Giving me a sidelong glance, Achille saw my face, the downturned corners of my mouth, and leapt out of the car, hustled my suitcase out of the trunk of the Peugeot, and assured me that this place would grow on me in a few weeks’ time.
They helped me carry my luggage to the second floor. I wasn’t surprised to see that my cell was similar to that found in a white-collar prison (at least according to Law & Order). We said our good-byes, and my last connection to home and my old life hopped into their blue Peugeot and drove back down the hill.
After I unpacked my suitcase I decided I would feel better if I had something to eat. The thought cheered me up just a bit. I was here because of my love of food, and food would help me appreciate being here. With a new sense of purpose I trudged back down the hill to the village in the drizzle. But it was Sunday, and I’d forgotten, if I ever knew, that in most European towns and villages, shops are closed on Sunday. Everything in Vonnas was closed. By the time I’d circled the village in search of something, anything to eat, I was soaked to the bone, my teeth chattering.
My resolve was fragile. I came upon a phone booth. Inside it was warmer and smelled only slightly of BO and urine. I used my calling card to call home. My mom answered on the first ring, as if she’d been expecting me. The sound of her voice reminded me just how far away from home I was.
“I think I may have made a mistake,” I cried.
“Don’t worry, honey,” she said. “You did not make a mistake. You just need to settle in.”
“How do you know?” I pleaded.
“Because it’s your dream,” she said.
As much as I could see myself repacking my suitcase, paying all the money I’d so carefully saved to a taxi driver to take me back to Lyon, where I would buy a ticket for the next flight home to Jackson, I couldn’t imagine telling Georges Blanc I was wussing out. However terrible I felt in this moment, I’d come too far. And I felt angry at myself for not being made of sterner stuff.
By the time I hiked back up the hill it was dark. My stomach squawked with hunger, but I put on three layers of clothes to stay warm, then climbed into bed. All night long I heard talking, moaning, and the occasional scream coming from the floor above me. Later I would learn that the top floor served as the village’s residential psychiatric treatment facility, a polite way of saying Vonnas’s mental institution. Not far from what I’d guessed.
Things did look better in the morning. On my first day in the kitchen of a world-renowned Michelin three-s
tar restaurant, excitement overrode my nerves. It had been a day since I’d eaten and my head was pounding for lack of coffee. I set off on the twenty-minute walk down the hill, along the slick cobblestone streets that lead to restaurant Georges Blanc, arriving a little before 7:00 a.m.
I’d imagined that cooks would just be arriving, sleepy-eyed and beginning their prep, but the kitchen was in full swing, with pots clanging, cooks issuing orders to the commis, the junior chefs, in French. A quick glance around the kitchen confirmed what I’d suspected: that even though Georges Blanc had accepted me, he ran an almost exclusively male kitchen. That morning I saw no women at work, but later I would meet Greta, whose buzz cut and big shoulders gave her a bad-ass military mien, and Kimiko, one of a team of highly trained Japanese chefs there to learn nouvelle cuisine.
The introductions were short and in French. I spoke only what I’d learned at the Culinary. It was alarmingly obvious that I was going to have to get up to speed tout de suite. For now, I relied on the international language of cooking—pointing, nodding, and eyebrow waggling. When no one barked or threw anything, I assumed I got it right.
The pastry chef, Marco, who worked directly under Georges Blanc, permitted me to grab a croissant and café crème before reporting to the chef garde manger, the chef in charge of cold dishes—appetizers, salads, pâtés, terrines.
He assigned me to asparagus peeling. No problem. At the Culinary I’d developed a serious affection for the vegetable and knew I could do the best peeling job in the history of Georges Blanc. I took up my position at a long counter beside a commis who seemed no older than twelve. He looked like a child dressed up as a chef for Halloween, in his baggy checked pants, white jacket, and white pleated toque that was half as tall as he was.