ATTITUDE AND TEAMWORK
NOT EVERYTHING IN the career of a chef fits into tidy pigeonholes. In this letter I would like to offer you a grab bag of qualities, essential but disparate, that I have observed in young cooks who went on to become top-flight chefs in their own right. It all starts with self-management and good attitude.
Some cooks are meticulous in classifying recipes, keeping track of all the details in the kitchen that contribute to a dish. I have found that such cooks can often be successful and manage well. I remember from my early days that the chefs who did this were the ones who went on to bigger things. We would get together after work or on days off to compare notes from our diaries and exchange recipes. Remember, back then, well before the digital age of online recipes and cooking shows, our mentors (Vergé, Chapel, Haeberlin, and so on) did not have their own cookbooks. Often during our afternoon breaks we would trade recipes the way kids trade baseball cards: “Hey, I’ll give you three Bocuses for two Vergé and a Girardet.” You would never get this exchange at the top level—one great chef to another—so this is how valuable “chef DNA” would get mixed, and the result would be ideas for new dishes that were in a sense the offsprings of the top chefs of the day.
If you have a deep interest in recipes, it often follows that you understand how to begin to organize the details of a recipe. These are tremendously revealing qualities, because only through understanding the details and organization of a recipe can you achieve consistency, the hallmark of a good kitchen. If I do a terrine of foie gras and there are fifteen cooks and assistants in the kitchen, I look for the person who asks me detailed and insightful questions about the recipe. He or she really wants to understand. The others? They do their jobs. They may do them well, maybe better than the one who asked the question, but still I think the inquiring chef is the one who, once he or she understands a recipe, will be consistent. Remember that word, underline it, put it on your mirror to look at every day.
People may visit your restaurant once because it sounds interesting. They may visit it a second time because they had a very good meal the first time, but they will only keep coming back if the food and service are consistent. The goal of the chef, whatever the level of cuisine, is consistency. Consistency in preparation, technique, taste, and presentation—all must come together to meet or exceed the expectations of the guest. The only acceptable departure from the norm is to do it even better than the last time. This way, people will return to your table just as they might reread Madame Bovary or return for a second or third viewing of The Godfather: each re-experience reveals new pleasures.
Because you are consistent, your patrons may trust you to try something completely new. If you like the braised shortribs we serve at Café Boulud and you’ve always loved the sea bass, then you will probably give me the benefit of the doubt when I present Skate Wing Stuffed with Chanterelles Duxelles with Sauce Bordelaise.
I always look carefully at how a young chef self-manages in the one area where he has some latitude: his production and mise en place. Say we give you a bunch of leeks to julienne. You are only going to julienne the white parts. The young chef who will improve thinks ahead and asks, “What am I going to do with the greens?” They might be delicious for the staff meal. Or maybe you remember reading about Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s lamb saddle dusted with black trumpet mushroom powder and a green leek purée, and you suggest something in that spirit. If you think like this you have an understanding that in haute cuisine we create a lot of waste, but there is always some way to use almost everything if you think about it long enough. Today, aiming to create no waste is so important that Dan Barber did a pop-up in London called wastED where he served a zero-waste menu.
One of the most memorable dishes I ever made grew out of this natural instinct to use everything and discard nothing, or almost nothing. It was back at the old DANIEL, before we moved from 76th to 65th Street in New York. Emeril Lagasse and the late Charlie Trotter, along with a half dozen friends, came for lunch. Now, one thing you need to know about chefs: we like to cook for each other, and we like to raise the bar with something that is really “out there.” I had done a suckling-pig special two days earlier, so I had three heads sitting in the fridge ready to be given to one of the prep cooks to take home for pozole soup.
Then it occurred to me, why not give these superstar chefs something really primal, like a nice pig’s head? I took a large copper sauté pan and meticulously lined it with apple-smoked bacon. Then I put the heads back to back and surrounded them with rustically cut apples, celery root, carrots, onions, lots of endive, rosemary, garlic, fresh cracked pepper, and salt. I pressed the vegetables tight against the pigs’ heads then covered the whole thing with slices of bacon so that in effect you had a turban of bacon.
I roasted it for two and a half hours until the bacon was golden and crisp. When we presented the finished dish at the table, we cracked open the bacon crust, and the aroma erupted to fill the room with a smoky, unctuous perfume.
I believe Emeril’s exact words were, “Yeah, man!”
Then we brought the heads back to the kitchen—the meat of the head was falling off the bone—and cracked the skull to eat the brains. We gave everybody at Emeril and Charlie’s table a piece of ear, snout, jaw, some apple, endive, and the smoky-fatty jus from the bacon. This is how to make a chef happy when you feed him. Do not give him caviar; give him a pig’s head. Needless to say, I do not have much call for bacon-wrapped suckling pig’s head. In fact, that was the only time I ever made it. It was an unforgettable, spontaneous moment that I have yet to re-create, but this is the kind of thing chefs do for one another: pure whim, going with your gut, and having fun.
Which gets me back to a point that I cannot emphasize too many times: do not waste anything. Think instead of how you can fully utilize every ingredient or ensure that your leftovers are used smartly. The young chef who thinks ahead like this has an approach that takes in the total picture, both culinary and financial. Many chefs (including talented home chefs) can create wonderful recipes if they buy expensive ingredients, use them extravagantly, and waste all the trimmings and cooking liquids that inevitably result from any recipe. The true “chef in the raw” instinctively understands that waste is bad and increases food costs, so he or she figures out a way to use the totality of every product. When I see a young chef who thinks this way, it tells me that here is a person who not only understands food but also understands process and how to organize many things at once.
Do you remember how I told you that you must make yourself valuable to the chef? I am not only giving you good advice; I am doing a favor for whatever chef you work for as you begin your career. You see, everybody thinks that we top chefs are entertainers and magicians—that we personally have a hand in every dish that comes out of the kitchen. In fact, to believe this is to confuse the orchestra with the conductor.
Of course, true chefs pride themselves on their own cooking ability, but the truth is that as a chef gets more successful, he or she can no longer cook to the exclusion of everything else. That means carefully choosing the personnel with whom we chefs surround ourselves is critical.
If you become a top chef, being good is not good enough. You need to hire great. I remember an event I did in the late ’80s at De Gustibus, the cooking school at Macy’s, in which a young Asian man, Alex Lee, introduced himself. I was still at Le Cirque then, but I was thinking about striking out on my own. Alex and I made a great connection, but then he left New York to spend some time in France. He came back as the first chef de cuisine at DANIEL, and the two of us worked side by side, often seven days a week, for about ten years with a synergy I haven’t had with anyone since. We could finish each other’s sentences but also fueled each other’s individual creativity and passion for the craft. It was a special era that I remember fondly. I have no doubt he’s part of the reason DANIEL is what it is today.
So never worry that someone will come along who is as good as you are. Two good coo
ks—working as a team—are much more valuable than one good cook badly assisted. In cooking, as in music, harmony is greater than the sum of its parts. It opens up possibilities that are inaccessible to the solo chef. If you always work with good, dedicated people, both above and below you, then you will learn to thrive in an environment of excellence. At this stage of my career, I would not mind—indeed, I welcome—people working for me who can cook some things better than I can. Good people raise the whole level of the game. They also are in full charge of their programs at each restaurant. My people are my greatest asset, every one: the pot washer, the pastry cook, the waiters—they are all my allies. Treat them with respect, and they will remain an asset. Treat them as interchangeable and expendable, and you will have difficulty holding any team together. Turnover is inevitable, but earning loyalty among cooks is still the most rewarding accomplishment.
It is a fine and delicate balance, dependent on nuance and detail. Take the team on the road (which often happens when chefs do a guest appearance in another city or country) and the food is rarely as on the money as in the chef’s home kitchen. After being in business for five years, I closed the original DANIEL (Café Boulud is there now) and relocated to the original home of Le Cirque, where I had cooked for so many years. I took my pots and pans, my recipes, and most of my staff and marched eleven blocks downtown to a new kitchen—seemingly not a very big move. But re-creating all those almost instinctual moves in an unfamiliar situation—new stove, new layout, having to reach to the right for a plate rather than the left, the rotisserie station being five steps from the meat line rather than three—affected timing, coordination, and, inevitably, the end result. We had to relearn to function as a team. We were good when we opened the new DANIEL, but not as smoothly efficient as we’d been at the old DANIEL. We were transplanted, and it takes time for any organism to accept a transplant. In the case of a restaurant, it takes time for even the best people to mesh in new surroundings and return to the top of their game.
When you work in a top restaurant, you naturally begin to feel some pride. This is good, but be careful. You need a healthy ego and driving ambition, but you also need to put them on the shelf for a while and concentrate on the needs of the chef for whom you are working. Young chefs should give two years to their mentor. Out of our hundred cooks, though, I have found that the ones who stay even longer and pay their dues succeed better than the impatient ones who move around to different places too fast.
I know about ego and ambition. I have a healthy dose of both. When I was a cook, I wanted to be a chef de partie. When I was chef de partie, I wanted to be a sous chef. When I was sous chef, I wanted to be chef. Then I wanted to be a restaurateur. Then I wanted to open another restaurant. It is inevitable, if you live and breathe this business, that your passion will grow, that this will fuel your ambition, and that your ego will help to drive it. These are all good things… in good time. But while you are a young chef, the motto in any respectable kitchen is: leave your ego at home, do your job the best you can, and soak up every lesson you can.
SOME ELEMENTS OF SUCCESS
WHEN YOU BECOME an executive chef, or chef-restaurateur, the first question you must ask yourself every day is, Why would people choose my restaurant? In a great city there are hundreds of choices, and we often share the same supplies, customers, and local business support. As a hip musician friend once asked, “Does it pass the ‘Who cares’ test?” In terms of what’s trendy, dozens of restaurants serve pastrami-cured everything, grass-fed steaks, microherbs, burnt leeks, and so on. Or more classically, half a dozen places in New York shave as many truffles as we do and offer the best squab or the finest caviar.
So why would someone pick my place… or yours?
At the level of restaurant we are talking about, food is the first consideration, although comfort level (both emotional and physical) in the dining room also comes into play. That you have technique is taken for granted. That you serve the best ingredients is a given. It’s not simply about ingredients. Nor, surprisingly, is it about perfection. It’s a about a unique experience.
I do not mean this in some mystical sense (although a succulent leg of spring lamb can transport me into a state of nirvana). I mean it in the direct sense that the food has to give you a feeling of well-being. It needs to make you happy. Yes, the technique must be perfect—meticulous and precise. Yes, the food must amaze you. But first and last it must make you happy.
There are chefs who accomplish this through a daring and complex combination of ingredients and techniques, others through restrain and simplicity. Complexity is rewarding and even remarkable, but when the result, as in many cases, is simply a short-lived display of culinary fireworks, it can leave you amazed but not touched. As a chef, you want to move your patrons, to touch them with the honesty and personality in your food, service, decor, wine.
It all comes down to balance on the part of the chef. I constantly think of the creative tension between eccentricity and simplicity. The former without the latter leads to a grand fireworks display, but no oomph. Light but no heat. That is why I think simplicity is so important.
Jean and Pierre Troisgros put it very wisely when I was a young chef. They spoke of La Règle de Trois, or the Rule of Three. By this they meant that there should only be three main components in a dish. For example, their iconic dish, Saumon à l’Oseille, was composed of just wild salmon, white wine cream sauce, and sorrel. A delicate oceanic flavor tempered by the smooth creaminess of the wine sauce and the tanginess of the sorrel. Another inspiration, purely Lyonnais, is the combination of frog legs in a watercress velouté alongside wild mushrooms. My first chef at DB Bistro Moderne, Jean-François Bruel, dreamed it up using a classic combination of ingredients from my home region in a creative way. In 2003, Jean-François became the executive chef at Restaurant DANIEL, and once in a while he makes the same simple preparation with perhaps a touch more refinement, yet his history with the dish has made it somewhat of a new classic. Simple? Yes. But also inspired.
Or take one of my all-time signature dishes, the Paupiette of Sea Bass. I have probably sold more orders of this item in my career than anything else. It’s very simple: sea bass in a crust of thin potato slices, served on a bed of leeks with a pungent, highly concentrated red wine sauce. I think part of the reason it became a classic in my repertoire, of course, has to do with its pleasing combination of tastes and textures, but equally so, its simplicity makes it something that lingers in your taste memory and never really goes out of style.
I am reminded of a meal I had when I took my sommelier to France to spend time with some of the great winemakers of Burgundy and the Rhône valley. It was a real party: six good friends drinking great wine, eating great food. My longtime pal Dean Santon, the master of mixtapes, made us an entire trip’s worth of traveling music: Howlin’ Wolf, Django Reinhardt, the Clash, Bob Dylan. We had a big black BMW. I called this journey the 100,000 Calorie Tour because we ate more great food more often than you would think possible. In fact, some of the guys were convinced it was impossible, but when amazing food is on the agenda, somehow my capacity is hardly ever reached. As for wine, some days the tastings went from nine in the morning to seven at night. Even if you just look at that many wine bottles in a day, you get a buzz.
Making our way slowly to Burgundy, we stopped off at Georges Blanc in Vonnas. The place had grown since I’d worked there nearly thirty years before. Such an elegant but unfussy establishment. The wine room in the back of the restaurant was beautifully lit, and just to separate the true gourmets from casual foodies, Georges had one small shelf filled with bottles of eau de vipère—a French farmhouse tradition. Whenever a poisonous snake was found in a barn or around the house, farm families (including mine) would capture the snake, stick it in a wine bottle, fill the bottle with eau de vie, and let it sit for a few years. Because of the curve of the bottle, which acts like a big magnifying glass, you see a giant snake head. Georges had about twenty well-pickled vipers li
ned up on that shelf, and the display always got ooh la la’s, especially from the ladies and children.
Georges made us a lovely tasting menu, and months later, when someone asked me to name the most memorable dish we had on our trip, it was not the amazing turbot en croûte from l’Espérance, or the rich and bold veal en cocotte with carrots and orange juice from Bernard Loiseau at La Côte d’Or, or the equally dazzling partridge and porcinis at Lameloise. What I remembered most was an exceedingly simple Georges Blanc vichyssoise with scallops, oysters, and caviar—in other words, a basic peasant dish, vichyssoise, transformed by a few pristine ingredients into something noble and sublime. Simplicity and glamour made it memorable.
Such a dish is eccentric, yes, but not so eccentric that it leaves people scratching their heads. Remember, if you are successful in establishing an identity, people will have certain expectations of you. If you have concentrated on a certain culinary tradition, then your eccentric dishes cannot be terribly far afield.
Cities such as Paris, London, New York, and San Francisco have a tremendous variety of ethnic communities whose heritage is often reflected in restaurants located outside their ethnic enclaves. I urge you to try as many of them as you can while you are starting out. It will pay off in the future when you are seeking inspiration. It is only through real experience—and lots of it—that you become well-versed in different culinary traditions and can begin to offer them to your clientele and, in so doing, differentiate yourself.
Letters to a Young Chef Page 8