Letters to a Young Chef
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So, with the global nature of modern French kitchens, a chef’s education is not as straight a path as the one I took when I left my first job at Nandron after two years and drove sixty miles north to Georges Blanc. A young chef today can make part of the world tour that I mentioned earlier simply by working in the right kitchens in the wide range of cuisines available in most cosmopolitan areas.
After you spend enough years going from kitchen to kitchen, it is time to put down some roots in one place and move up through the ranks. This is when you will take the steps that will make you a true chef. Although you may arrive with a beautiful résumé from some famous restaurants and think you are pretty hot stuff, take my word for it, you are not. Even if you are, it does not mean that much to your chef. He or she is interested only in what is needed in the kitchen, and your goal is to be an asset to their team—not a judge of their place.
Building your ego is not part of the game. This may be hard to swallow after having worked so hard for so long, but there is only room for one ego in a kitchen when the crush of service is on. Do not take it personally. Respect the chef and always give more than expected. Become a key part of the team. This will deepen your technique, your knowledge, and your relationships. It is a critical chapter in your development as a chef. This is when you move from being someone who can cook very well to one who instinctively does it right every time. Your goal must be perfection.
I’m always amazed by the humble artistry of a pizza chef, spinning the dough, tossing it in the air, stretching it into a neat circle. Always perfect. I love it. I wish I knew how to do that. Yet I also know that to be in the same league I would have to spend at least a year at it. It is the same in a restaurant kitchen. You cannot be master of anything unless you work at it for a good long while and really understand it. It has to become second nature to you, and that’s why it’s good to take time to master every station in a kitchen.
I remember chefs at the restaurants where I apprenticed who had been doing the same thing for ten years and were perfect at it. For any number of reasons, this career path is no longer very common. Perhaps it is the always-online, 24/7, accelerated pace of our lives, the ambition to be famous right away, or the rapidly changing trends in food—whatever the reason, we all work in a charged atmosphere of speed, high expectations, and high ambitions. No one puts in all the time that apprentices once did. You will feel tremendous pressure to move forward as your peers advance. To develop skills the old, slow way is not always practical; still, we can expect perfection in some things and a high degree of competence in others.
I used to give the example of André Soltner, the legendary chef and owner of Lutèce, who—in lieu of reading a résumé—would ask prospective young cooks to make an omelet. Today, I often ask for a simple soup or even an interesting salad with a perfectly balanced vinaigrette. Like the omelet, the whole process takes mere minutes and comprises several critical steps, and in observing them you can instantly assess the level of skill and confidence of any candidate.
You may never be called upon to make an omelet in a fine-dining restaurant, but you will need to strive for the same high level of precision in every aspect of your craft. Spending six months to a year at each station in a restaurant seems just about enough if you practice, keep improving, and keep challenging yourself to make it perfect. The more you look at cooking, the more you realize it is always an unfinished education. There is truly no limit to how much you can learn, especially today, with a global chef community.
Mine is not the only path you can take. Cooking schools produce thousands of graduates each year, but it’s important to remember that they’ve never had to present the bill to a customer or be challenged by food critics for what they made in class, so while many of them have learned a lot, not every one of them will be able to handle the pressures of running a business. Many go to work at hotels, clubs, cruise ships, resorts—all good opportunities—but in a restaurant, the pressures to maintain excellence are higher. I mean, every chef with a reputation must be a great cook first, then be very well organized, have good management skills, understand marketing, have good taste, and know how to control costs. These are skills that you need in a gastronomic restaurant or casual bistro alike. By absorbing everything, you can learn the business. Or you can opt to work in someone’s restaurant for the long haul. Becoming a sous chef to a great chef is an honorable achievement. There is the quiet satisfaction of doing the job of a sous well, and being the most supportive behind-the-scenes chef has its rewards. It can be a fulfilling life.
If you are an entrepreneur, however, there is no limit to how far you can go with your ambition. It takes sacrifice. It will require an understanding that you will work very long hours and not have much of a personal life, but if it is your passion, as it is mine, you do not have much of a choice. You are going to have to do it, so you might as well aim to do it right.
Of course, there are only so many top restaurants that even great cities such as New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles can support. Does this mean that you have to make it there? Not anymore. You can be a chef in a smaller city, in such places as Cincinnati or Louisville or Philadelphia, or even in the countryside. Look at Gavin Kaysen in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Gavin was a loyal asset in my restaurants who, as an alumnus, became a friend. Now he’s a partner to me in many endeavors, but especially in the foundation Ment’or, which provides grants to train future generations of chefs (www.mentorbkb.org). This is the evolution of chefs in America today: just like Gavin, through dedication and mentorship, younger chefs are able to partner with others and meet the growing demands of a local clientele for better cuisine in small cities. Gavin is helping to expand a culinary identity in Minneapolis. And most important, his cuisine is delicious and soulful, and his restaurant offers warm and knowledgeable service in a cool and cozy atmosphere. America craves those kinds of restaurants, so the opportunities are there. The choice is yours, but the competition is fierce, and you need to know your clientele. The hardest challenge for millennial chefs is to earn loyalty from millennial customers as they search for the latest trends. Being trendy is fantastic, but you need to stay the course. Being successful means outlasting the trend: staying current while maintaining a certain respect for the past; regarding the future in terms of evolution, not revolution.
MENTORS
YOU WILL NOT take the same path that I took, but nonetheless you will proceed from one job to the next as you develop your career. Where do you start? At this stage of the game, no doubt you have some friends who have gone on to good kitchens, or one of your teachers in culinary school noted your raw talent, or maybe you have some family connections. Whatever the case, if you have been studying to be a chef for a few years, you probably know somebody somewhere. My advice is to try them first. It is a big world out there, but it’s a small community of chefs; your goal in starting out is to get your foot in the door with a good one. Not one of the great ones necessarily, but someone who knows how to cook very well and, just as important, knows how to run a kitchen that maintains a reputation year in and year out. Be careful of the trendy place where the scene is more important than the food. Look for a place where you can feel genuine soul—in the chef, in the staff, and in the experience they offer.
That first place where you work is an important step for you, because once you are connected within the chef family, your second job will be a whole lot easier to find than the first. At some point you will be able to go to your chef and say that you want to move on, and if you have done a good job and there is no room to advance in his or her kitchen, you can pretty much count on them picking up the phone and making a call for you. Nandron was only too happy to call Georges Blanc for me when that day came. Or maybe the sous chef for whom you worked has moved on and you call him, or maybe a friend of his sends out a call for help. Like most businesses, especially at the top, the restaurant business is one of connections, and you make connections quite obviously by meeting and working with the ri
ght people.
What I am talking about here is what people in every walk of life call building your résumé combined with serious networking. I have never hired anybody on the basis of a résumé alone. Ideally they come with a very strong recommendation from their last chef.
So lesson number one: always leave on a good note. If you sign on with somebody whom you look to as a mentor, it is important to make the commitment to stay for two years or so, largely because in the beginning, I promise, you will not be up to speed in the kitchen. By that I mean your skills, knowledge, and palate are still very much works-in-progress. Simply by taking you on, any chef is making an investment in you. You need to stay long enough to pay back that investment—so hopping from one place to the next is the surest way to burn bridges. And in the small world of good restaurants, one burnt bridge can often damage your career. One of the best ways to pay respect to your chef is to find your replacement; as a young cook, you will know many other young cooks. Any chef will remember this gesture. Doing the job well, always being prepared, accepting every task as a challenge, and signing off with integrity are the best things you can do for your résumé and career.
Of course, you may not know anybody at the top, but if you have any connection at all, use it. Take the time to search for an introduction to a good kitchen. Usually people are ready to take a chance on someone young and full of enthusiasm. You might not get paid very much for it. You might have to start at the bottom. In the past, most fine-dining restaurants would offer a low-paying position as a stagiaire, or paid intern. It was a great way to prove yourself and learn while having less responsibility than the full-waged cooks. Many people have done stages with me, and like me, most chefs believed an intern’s compensation is learning from the organization and making important contacts. Today, these programs are still common in Europe. They remain less common in the United States, and they are no less important for young cooks.
I can guarantee that cooking today is much more fun, honorable, and rewarding for everyone in the business than when I started. I was barely a teenager when I started at Nandron. It was a very good restaurant (two stars), and I was at the bottom of the heap. I learned how to peel every vegetable, filet every fish, and pluck every game bird in the Lyon markets. I got my knife skills together. I learned the importance of MEP—mise en place—the term for the art of creating your recipe in “kit” form, that is, broken down into preproduced elements so that you are ready before the crush of service, at which point all you have to do is cook, finish, and assemble it, rapidly.
As low man on the team, my job was to go to the market in Lyon first thing in the morning to pick up supplies. Guess who else was there? The legendary chefs of Lyon and its environs who were in the vanguard of new French cooking: the Troisgros brothers, Paul Bocuse, Georges Blanc, and Alain Chapel. For a chef, being in Lyon in those days was like being a musician in Liverpool when the Beatles were getting together. These were the guys who were changing the food world. They were at the market early to make sure they got the very best ingredients before anybody else had a chance to buy them. There were beautiful vegetables from the farms of the Rhône and wild herbs and cheeses from the mountains of eastern France and glistening fish fresh from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic.
Working long hours—which every young chef had to do—and then getting up super early to be at the market is tough: definitely not the most sought-after job. But taking on the tough jobs—from scouring pots and cleaning vegetables to showing up before dawn rubbing the sleep from your eyes—is the mark of someone who will pay their dues to learn everything about the job of being a chef. Early mornings in the market had their rewards: I had the chance to rub elbows with the greats. This does not mean that I was able or even tried to get a job with them, but I got to see how great chefs act and think and handle ingredients, and that was invaluable. Once the trip to the market was done, I would sit down at one of the local bouchons and have a bowl of tripe with them. They would open a bottle of Beaujolais (but I stuck with lemonade). The stories, the pungent rough language, the camaraderie made me feel on top of the world. Of course, they would rag me pretty hard in the way that old pros like to tease a young kid. But I ate it up. I was just so happy to be in their company.
After three years of apprenticeship at Nandron, I figured I had learned about all I was going to learn. Nandron understood that, and I was off to my next mentor: Georges Blanc. It was a good fit for me, because like me, Blanc came from a family that had a tradition of serving what was known as the grandmother cuisine of the area. He was interested in refining this traditional food into haute cuisine and shooting for three Michelin stars. His family-style cuisine had become world famous at his mother’s auberge, La Mère Blanc, a wonderful two-star restaurant near the old wine route between Burgundy and Lyon. But Blanc elevated that country food to an art. Something as simple as Blanc’s frog’s legs, which you could get anywhere, were the best frog’s legs you could ever hope to have: perfectly crisp, seasoned, moist, and finely balanced between the full aromas of garlic, shallots, and the herbal accents of parsley and chervil.
As I look at the modern dining landscape and see first the advent of comfort food and then the reinvention of that food on contemporary American menus, I recognize a process that I first experienced working with Georges Blanc. My strong advice to you, which I learned from a three-star Michelin chef, is “Remember your grandmother’s food!” That is shorthand for saying remember the foods that connect you to your region, your family, and your culture, and celebrate your heritage. If I had to pick one dish that seemed to conjure up this idea for Blanc, it would be crêpes vonnassiennes: crispy, moist pancakes made from a batter incorporating mashed potatoes—and soft with a buttery perfume. The recipe actually came from his grandmother, who used leftover mashed potatoes for the batter. I’m sure he grew up making and eating them, and he still serves them today. It is like Proust and his madeleine: once you start thinking of a favorite dish from your childhood, it summons up a whole world. When you are a chef, you are going to want to honor your past by transforming food memories into offerings that belong in a great restaurant, so that they are new and current yet fundamentally classic.
When you work with a great chef, your job is not to be creative but rather to interpret the creativity of the chef for whom you are working. The chef has an idea for a dish that comes from a deep understanding of cooking and ingredients. If you can help interpret his ideas, his inspiration, and his techniques consistently, you will enrich your foundation as a chef.
For example, I used to work with Blanc to develop new dishes. When he had an idea for a new dish he would explain the concept and basics to me, and I would make a test and do the mise en place. He would taste and approve it, or, if not, would guide me as to how to make it better. This was true whether the dish was as simple as a sorbet or as inspired and complex as a poularde de bresse stuffed with crayfish, chicken liver, foie gras, porcini, and truffle. During the experimentation phase of any dish, there is constant communication between the chef and the cook, who work together to gradually bring the dish into harmony with the chef’s vision. Getting it right was a tremendous satisfaction. It’s the same process today with my team of chefs and their sous chefs.
Blanc and Nandron were chefs in the Burgundian and Lyonnais traditions: founded on broad flavors as seductive as Burgundy wine (which was used in many of the recipes). Blanc was an innovator, but his tastes always had an authentic link to the classically pungent flavors of the region. My next mentor was Roger Vergé at Le Moulin de Mougins on the French Riviera. In the same way that my job with Blanc resulted from a phone call from Nandron, another phone call, this time from Blanc, landed me with Vergé. The year was 1974.
Vergé was from Allier, near the center of France. He had traveled the world and finally settled in the south of France, where he embraced the sunny, light cuisine of Provence—as bright as a Van Gogh sunflower. His was probably the most fashionable and stylish restaurant i
n the world during the mid-1970s. It was a Mecca for the next generation of talented young chefs. Alain Ducasse worked there before he went on to Michelin superstardom. David Bouley, Hubert Keller, Jacques Chibois, Francis Mallmann, Emeril Lagasse, and George Mendes all worked there too, and went on to great success in their own restaurant ventures. As they did for me, the years spent learning from Vergé served those chefs well.
Le Moulin de Mougins was my first three-star restaurant (Blanc was still a two when I was there) and a whole new level of the game. Working in a stable of such thoroughbreds made each of us better. We learned the same lesson that you could learn at any great restaurant with the same ambition: although everything is based on the skill and reputation of the chef at the top, cooking is a team sport.
In the beginning, when you are cooking another person’s cuisine, it is discipline, not your creativity, that is the most important quality. Expressing what the chef wants and doing so with his or her team requires it. This is not to say that your ultimate goal is to be a clone of your mentor. Just as there was only one Roger Vergé, there is only one you. The young chef who strives to learn everything a mentor can teach will be more ready someday to express his or her own creativity when the time comes. I have seen this happen time and again with young chefs who made the transition to master in their own right. For example, Corey Lee, whose San Francisco restaurant Benu has earned three Michelin stars, perfected and refined the cuisine of the French Laundry during his years with Thomas Keller. Once he struck out on his own, his marriage of French technique, California ingredients, affinity for Cantonese cuisine, and Korean background made his inspired food unique and personal. It’s clear he learned many things from his years with Keller but at the same time was developing his own style.