I have since come to learn that things are not so simple. At the same time, it is indisputable that the modern restaurant is a French invention; the “software”—that is, the way a restaurant is organized—is likewise French. And nowhere else have chefs taken a national cuisine and refined it so much and as variedly as have the French. As I mentioned earlier, part of the explanation is that France in the latter part of the eighteenth century was the first country to develop true restaurants: establishments that offered a varied bill of fare, set prices, and the ability to order à la carte. As restaurants advanced, a culture evolved with them. Cuisine held a rank alongside theater and the other arts. The result was a public that would pay the price for the best food and challenge their chefs to new heights of creativity.
The French took dining, a part of daily life, raised it to an art, embedded it in high culture, and thereby attracted the economic resources necessary to develop a more refined and expert interpretation of food than anywhere else in the world. In much the same way, French haute couture took another part of daily life and developed it. A dress embroidered with pearls and trimmed with fur is, in some sense, not unlike a saddle of veal studded with truffles, stuffed with porcini and chestnuts, and glazed with ruby port. It is expensive. It is refined. But it would never happen were it not for a public that appreciated and would pay for it. Cultures make choices for their definitive statements. The Italians lavished everything on developing their opera and the Russians their ballet. The French chose haute cuisine and haute couture. Today these two hautes have gone global yet have kept their French sensibility.
Even in France, however, chefs have learned to include North African and Indochinese culinary traditions (maybe the only good result of colonialism). When Alain Senderens made his reputation in the 1970s as one of the most innovative chefs in the nouvelle cuisine movement, he had a young Cambodian in the kitchen, Sottha Khun (my good friend and former executive chef at Le Cirque), who could tell him if the new Asian flavors he was trying rang true. I do not know where Senderens got his inspiration for combining lobster and vanilla bean, but it certainly came from outside the canon of Parisian cuisine. It was one of the defining recipes of nouvelle cuisine, and I suspect it emerged from the fact that with all the international influences included in his food, he was open to the strangest yet most delicate combinations.
When I started out, the Lyonnais regarded themselves as residents of the self-titled world’s food capital. Even if you didn’t agree with them, you could see why they thought so. If you drew a ring around Lyon a hundred miles from the center, Place Bellecour, you would probably have encircled more Michelin stars than anywhere else in the world, including Paris. So the grand tour of the world’s cuisines was not such a big thing with us.
Still, after a short while in the business, I yearned to see something new, anything. When I was sixteen, I told Nandron that I wanted to take a summer vacation. Like a true French chef, he replied, “You do not need a vacation, for God’s sake; you are sixteen years old! I’ll get you a job at my friend’s auberge in the Pays Basque.”
So I left my home region for the first time and worked for three months at a restaurant in the most remote corner of southwestern France (in the Hotel Etchola in the little village of Ascain). Same country, but what a revelation! The trout just about jumped into your bucket from the mountain streams of the Pyrénées. There were the heavenly Ossau Iraty cheeses made from sheep’s milk that grazed on sweet mountain grasses! And the Jambon de Bayonne, wild mushrooms, and invigorating Espelette peppers were all new and exciting to me. I immediately learned the importance to a young chef of being open to other cuisines. Hybrid vigor is the term used in agriculture to describe how the offspring of two genetic strains is often more robust than either parent; the same is true in cooking.
If I were your age, I would think about a trip to France, Spain, Italy, or Scandinavia—those countries offer the richest and most innovative European cuisines, in my opinion. Eat everywhere you can. Go to the markets, the wineries, the food shops. If you can find a position, then by all means get a stage (internship) or cook’s job for six months.
Pay attention to your family’s traditions as well. My real point is that coming at things through the focus of culinary tradition allows you to create with confidence.
Apart from Europe and its culinary offspring in the States, India and Mexico both offer varied regional cuisines, tremendous refinement, and novel (to a European palate) ways of combining flavors and textures. China, too, has a rich culinary tradition, and even though it would be hard to claim that I think of myself as a young chef at this point, I learned from opening and operating restaurants there. Its imperial cuisine did for the indigenous cuisine what French gastronomy did for our home cuisines. In contrast, Singapore, although a young city, offers an Asian food culture ranging from the street to the refined table.
Peru has wonderful cuisine. I love its ceviches, and with the large influence of Japanese culture, it has wonderful sushi as well. You could not think of a better place to learn about raw fish and marinades than Peru, or to draw on Incan influences and the ingredients of the Andes the way Virgilio Martínez and Gastón Acurio have. Argentina has a reputation for the best meat in the world, and in our Netflix Chef’s Table era there are would-be Francis Mallmanns cooking with wood fires all around the globe.
The cuisines of the Middle East are as rich as any, with a sophisticated use of aromatic spices. Chefs such as Yotam Ottolenghi and Michael Solomonov have done much to bring this influence into modern restaurant kitchens. A trip to Israel will take you to an exciting scene of culinary innovation. Then, of course, there is Vietnamese food, for which we French chefs have a special fondness. Before the word fusion had anything to do with food, French chefs were marrying their techniques with the ingredients and recipes of this ancient and elegant cuisine. The result was multicultural and refined.
Any place in Indochina—Thailand, Laos, Burma—will offer you a great cooking tradition with more exotic-looking fruits and vegetables and more varied seafood than you would have thought possible. And the region is so sensual, with its spices, flowers, temples, and tropical air.
Take six months to two years. Travel the world, work with chefs everywhere you can, eat every kind of food. And then get ready for the rude awakening when you return home and begin a job at a top restaurant. It could be with Michael Anthony’s Gramercy Tavern, Barbara Lynch’s Menton, or Paul Kahan’s Blackbird. Nobody is going to care all that much that you have been to Italy or Singapore or Shanghai because their main concern is only how well you can cook their food. They’ll look at your résumé, check your references, and look you in the eye, and if you are lucky they will hire you. When that happens, your immediate task in life is no longer to dream about foreign cuisines and faraway temples. What matters now is the clatter and heat of a real kitchen and a chef who wants it his or her way.
So nourish your culinary soul with a world tour when you have the chance, and continue to nourish it with Sunday trips to restaurants or trying out new cookbooks. Frankly, you may not have the time or pocketbook to travel and take jobs here and there, but you can still let your imagination roam. This will give you greater perspective as a chef and will somehow seep into your ideas and techniques.
Fantasy world versus real world: this is the dichotomy customers make when they choose your restaurant for a night. And it is what keeps us all going in the kitchen when the orders back up, tempers flare, waiters mix up their tables, soufflés fall… you name it.
Soak up all you can now; then it is time to start building your career.
DESIRE, DRIVE, AND FOCUS
I HAD A young chef come to me one day who had been doing a great job at garde manger. He wanted to move onto the line as a cook, which is pretty true to form for any aspiring chef. So we moved him to poissonier (the fish station), and right away you could see his lack of experience, speed, and productivity. We had to watch over him, to use the French phrase, comm
e le lait sur le feu (like milk on the fire). In other words, we would have to watch him very carefully to make sure he did not suddenly upset the entire service by overcooking, oversalting, charring, forgetting an ingredient, lack of coordination, or making other errors that can ruin a recipe so quickly.
Don’t be in a hurry to move up the restaurant ladder. There is a lot to absorb at every station. Moving you before you are ready does no favor to you or the rest of the kitchen brigade. You will always be playing catch-up, and they will always be waiting on you. It’s really much better for everyone, yourself included, to become as expert as you can at every step of the way. It takes time, but once you move up, unless you really screw up, you are not going to have the opportunity to go back and fill in the gaps in your skills.
Although something may look easy, often the subtleties of everything you do in the kitchen require long practice and careful observation. Mastering the simple technique of controlling heat on the stovetop will take time. As many restaurants do, we have a series of metal rings that cover each burner: by moving the pot closer to or further from that heat epicenter, you can get temperatures over 800°F or as low as a lazy simmer. Young cooks will get the hang of it, but they have to observe everything by watching their chefs. If they have the talent and are driven, the day will come in the not too distant future when they can master the heat.
Just be prepared for the chef to throw you a curve. They all do. When I had maybe a year under my belt at my first job, my boss, after a week of hunting in Alsace, arrived in his Citroën DS 21 (the French Cadillac) and opened the trunk, which was full of game: pheasants, hares, partridges, woodcocks. All were going on the menu for that night, and I had to get them ready for service. Two other guys and I spent the whole afternoon plucking birds, dressing them, and learning six new recipes to create a wild-game feast. I had cooked game that my family and I had shot, but now, in a serious restaurant, new combinations of ingredients were coming at me from every direction. We had pheasant terrine, partridge chartreuse, woodcock flambé à l’Armagnac with croutons spread with crushed woodcock giblets and butter. And lièvre à la royale—boneless wild hare stuffed with foie gras truffles and ground pork, braised till spoon tender in a concentrated red wine, blood, and hare stock. So much to learn and do so fast. I had to run like crazy to stay up with the service and not make any mistakes.
Of course, these kinds of surprises are not the rule. Most restaurant work is endless repetition of simple techniques. Let me give you an idea of the day you can look forward to at one of my restaurants or David Chang’s or Marcus Samuelsson’s—it doesn’t matter whose, because the work is the same. Let’s say you are at my restaurant, DANIEL. We are not open for lunch there, so if you are a cook, you will come at noon and may stay until late at night.
Sometime in the next ten hours, you can count on me or the sous chef or whoever is above you to get on your case pretty hard. Get used to it. You have to worry when your chef is not constantly on your case. No one would waste their time if they didn’t think you had something going for you. That’s probably small consolation when you’re getting chewed out for overcooking a halibut, but in all honesty that’s about as close as you’ll ever get to winning a medal in many kitchens. In a kitchen, praise is the absence of criticism.
Through the course of the day you’ll have a couple of breaks and a meal or two, but between one o’clock and five thirty you are getting prepared, doing your mise en place. If you have talent, discipline, speed, and focus, you will get through this quickly. If you are new on the station, you may have good habits and focus, but there is no way that you can work at the same pace as an experienced chef. In that event, you will need to improve fast with a smart game plan because it will take time to get up to speed. We will give you the drill of what you have to do and how you should do it—how to shell a pea very quickly, how to debone a squab rapidly, how to mince shallots into microdice—but then your level of skill and your preplanning take over.
I had one prep cook, Chepe, who could go through three cases of peas by the time a young cook had done a few pounds. I do not expect the young cook to be as quick as Chepe. I cannot even describe how he did it. It is one of those things experts do in a blur of hands and a pile of pods. But a smart young cook, when given the job, would watch Chepe for a while, then put his or her observations to work.
Skill and planning ahead take practice. Every skill takes practice, including the skill of knowing how much you have to do. Though you may have the technical aspects of mise en place down, if you have not figured out how much is required, you will either waste time or mess up the smooth flow of service by doing too much or too little prep. Wasted motion in the kitchen has a time cost, often as disruptive as insufficient preparation. By looking at the reservations, the number of portions available, the semipredictable habits of the clientele, you should know exactly what you need to do to be ready.
Doing all these things correctly in the midst of the many demands of a first-rate kitchen requires aggressiveness, concentration, and, most of all, stamina. Your job is to work rapidly with precision and consistency.
In prep or service we do not have time to slow down, so the only way to get up to speed is to invest your free time in honing your skill, spending time with the men and women who are the best at each particular task. Then, as you concentrate and practice, it gets easier and you can relax. This is not to say that the work gets easier, but the pressure lifts as you become more accomplished and organized, planning your day according to what you need to get done and the level of your ability—always remembering that in addition to the one task you are trying to master, there are five or six others that you will be called upon to finish at the same time!
I remember in Vergé’s kitchen having to prep mousseron mushrooms and baby artichokes on the same morning. Both were included in popular items on the menu, so there were mountains of them. The baby artichokes required force, speed, and an adept knife hand to peel away the tough outer layers. It was a mean job. The tiny cap mushrooms, though, required more delicacy and a lighter touch to trim the stem. Two different skills, neither of them ones you naturally possess just by picking up a knife. I can still hear Vergé’s direction to his troops, which comprised his entire employee-motivation scheme: Plus vite, encore plus vite. Faster, and then even faster. But I was doing it as fast as I could.
The bottom line is the only way you will advance in this profession is if you invest your own time over and above your time on the clock. If you are driven to be a chef, this will not be an issue. I suppose the same is true for orchestra conductors, race car drivers, surgeons, and ballerinas. Every profession that draws ambitious dreamers demands time. It will come naturally to you because your interest and your desire will constantly propel you to the kitchen. And when you are done with your current task, you will be peppering the sous chef on the next station with questions. You can’t help it. It is in your blood. It does not make the time commitment easier or leave you any less tired at the end of the day, but people who are driven by something—or better yet, drawn irresistibly to a goal—do not count being tired as a bad thing.
When the day comes that you have mastered one station, your chef will move you to another. Hopefully, it will not come as a complete novelty, because you have been interested in and observant of the rest of the kitchen. Still, when you have to take on the next job, you will start all over again, knowing next to nothing and not even doing that particularly well. But if you put in the time and have the desire, you will learn and we will teach you.
You must look inside yourself and find desire, because if you have it then you will make the time sacrifices and endure the criticism. Although I will never deny that it is hard work to become a chef, the clatter of the kitchen, the intense aromas, the mix of languages, the precision teamwork of the kitchen brigade when the service is really rocking… all these things make me feel alive and charged in a way that nothing else can. So yes, you work until you are bone tired, but t
here is nothing else you would rather do. Is that any different from a tennis player who wants to make it to Wimbledon or a guitarist whose ambition is to play Madison Square Garden?
One more requirement—you need youth. Notice these are letters to a young chef, not a new chef. In other words, if you were forty years old I would not be writing this to you, because the demands of the job and the competition in the restaurant world require stamina and energy—two qualities that you have when you are younger but that lessen as you grow older. This is as true of chefs as it is of basketball players or Olympic swimmers. Youth is one of your few advantages; put it to good use. It is best to start young in this career, though as I write this advice, I remember that Chef Thuilier in Provence, whose famous volcanic temper I described earlier, was a successful insurance broker in Paris until, at age fifty, he moved down south and opened Les Baux de Provence. But he is the exception. Since he lived into his late eighties, he had as long a run as a top chef (Michelin three-star) as anyone in the business.
But back to you, my young friend. Every newcomer I have ever known who went on to become an accomplished chef kept a diary of techniques and recipes and a small collection of “holy books.” I still have my tattered copy of Gringoire and Saulnier’s Le répertoire de la cuisine, which was my version of CliffsNotes for cooks, full of the basics of recipes and definitions of terms. If the chef asked me to cut something paysanne style, instead of scratching my head and wondering how on earth a peasant would cut things, I looked it up in Le répertoire and found that it means large, rustic pieces.
Going back to your original sources and inspirations is something you will do throughout your career. You’d be surprised how much “old stuff” remains true. As a chef you join countless generations of chefs—both at home and in the restaurant kitchen. You are the transmitter of millennia of food culture, and people come to you with an emotional expectation as well as a culinary one. Your customers trust you to make their celebration as special as the feelings that go with it. That trust makes you realize fully that being a chef is indeed a high calling.
Letters to a Young Chef Page 7