“We all sort of paid our bills,” says Zweben. “But no one worked there to get rich; we worked there because this was a place to work where eventually we were going to be like, ‘You know what, Daddy? It’s time for us to be a chef. We’re out of here.’ And then he would let us go.” (A fringe benefit of being a sous at The River Café: O’Keeffe gave sous chefs a fifty-dollar-per-week dining allowance to try other restaurants around town.)
“I MAKE BIG-NAMED CHEFS; I DON’T HIRE THEM.”
If there was a common trait among the chefs, O’Keeffe says it was that “they all had to have some kind of an ego to pursue excellence. You have to want to pursue that somehow.” It’s a make-or-break trait for him. He once told a sous chef who wanted to fill in for a chef on leave that he was a good enough technician but that he lacked the pursuit of excellence. “You have to be crazed to make it perfect.”
He knows of whence he speaks: To this day, O’Keeffe remains a stickler for detail. He can tell you the perfect way to serve Perrier (well chilled, in a chilled glass, rather than with ice, which threatens the minuscule carbonation bubbles when it melts). From day one at the restaurant, he kept dairy, meats, and fish in separate coolers, so they wouldn’t absorb each other’s odors (“Cream is like a sponge,” he says). His idiosyncratic perfectionism and taste extended to his choices of chefs. Forgione, says O’Keeffe, wanted a name chef to replace him when he left, but O’Keeffe had other plans. “I make big-named chefs; I don’t hire them,” he said.
“I was the only one of my staff who wanted to take Charles Palmer. He was a big country boy. I said, ‘No, this is the guy it’s going to be because I think he has the pursuit, the energy, and he’s pursued me.’”
Eventually, Burke, like the others, left The River Café, for the Park Avenue Café in Manhattan. “I don’t like to see them go,” says O’Keeffe. But go they do. It’s been an inevitability, a fact of life at The River Café.
4
French Resistance
I don’t think it bothered us that we thought they didn’t respect us. I don’t know if we respected them.
—Tom Carlin
HOW THE FRENCH GUARD AND A GENERATION OF YOUNG AMERICAN COOKS LEARNED TO LIVE TOGETHER IN NEW YORK CITY, AND THE “CULINARY UNDERGROUND RAILROAD” THAT HELPED BRIDGE THE GAP
David Kinch, chef-owner of Manresa, a Michelin three-star restaurant, plies his trade in the affluent placidity of Los Gatos, California, an hour south of San Francisco. Kinch exudes West Coast tranquility—he even surfs on his days off—but he has been in one fistfight in his life. The year was 1984, and the Pennsylvania native, then in his early twenties, was working a stage at Hôtel de la Poste in Beaune, France, an ancient, walled town in the heart of Burgundy country. Late one night, after most of the brigade had cleared out, Kinch found himself alone with the pastry chef, brother of the restaurant’s sous chef.
Kinch considered the brothers “the definition of douches,” who laid rubber on their way to and from work in a Citroën sports car, a flaming eagle emblazoned on its hood. As was the case in many kitchens of the day, the French masters rode the Americans in their kitchens harder than the rest of the crew, seasoning the punishing workload with a pinch of prejudicial ridicule. Kinch usually brushed it off, but that night was different.
“He pushed me too far,” remembers Kinch. “He was deriding me: ‘Américain, Américain.’ He was saying some really derogatory things. I just snapped and pushed him against the wall.”
With action-movie convenience, a pile of egg flats was stacked within Kinch’s reach; he began chucking the orbs at his tormentor.
“He went down,” says Kinch. “I was hitting him hard; I was throwing them like baseballs. He was cowering in the corner and I emptied the whole fucking tray on him, just one after the other, maybe sixty eggs as hard as I could from fifteen feet away.”
Kinch fully expected to be fired but when he returned the next morning to face the music, the place was spotless and his nemesis, humbled, greeted him as if nothing had happened. He had proven himself worthy of fear and respect, and his reward for taking that leap was peace—and survival.
The showdown illustrates the love-hate dynamic between a subset of young American cooks desperate for knowledge in the 1970s and ’80s and the French chefs who possessed and, in many cases, hoarded it. This complex relationship acts as an overlay to the story of the Five Couples and to The River Café and other boundary-breaking restaurants of the time, and also defined the formative years of many cooks who came up seeking little more than a mastery of French cooking technique.
“YOU HAD TO LEARN FROM THEM, THEY HAD THE KEYS.”
The United States and France had long enjoyed a warm relationship, but the professional kitchen was French territory, and when Americans began infiltrating that sacred ground it often led to friction: The French, generally speaking, considered the Americans talentless, with palates honed at McDonald’s; the Americans considered the French haughty, exclusive, and oftentimes abusive.
Neither camp was entirely right, or wrong.
This culture clash was mostly an East Coast phenomenon reflecting the Atlantic Seaboard’s inherent conservatism, predilection for French food, and relative proximity to Europe. The Five Couples and other Ottos were the exceptions. Generally speaking, young Americans in the tri-state area sought to emulate the French, and also coveted their approval.
It made sense: France continued to dominate and define what for most was the epitome of Western cuisine; tourists hadn’t yet discovered or developed a respect for the pleasures of Italy’s regions in droves as they would in the coming decades. Those who ruled the roost in France—especially nouvelle cuisine honchos like Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and Alain Chapel—still towered like deities over the gastronomic universe. And the touchstones that united American home cooks pointed toward France and its cuisine as well: Julia Child, Richard Olney, and Elizabeth David were all culinary Francophiles; French restaurants were the only venue for fine dining in America’s major cities; and, of course, the language of the kitchen itself—sauté, flambé, julienne—was French.
One book resonated more than most to these young cooks: Great Chefs of France, by food critic Quentin Crewe and photographer Anthony Blake. A collection of portraits, profiles, kitchen layouts, menus, and recipes, it depicted the culinary chieftains of every three-star restaurant outside Paris at the time of its publication in 1978. The fascination with a tome devoted to the professional kitchen highlighted a key difference between this subset of cooks and many of those who took up professional cooking in Northern California, and the Five Couples, who were devoted to the likes of Child, David, and Olney. (French culinary supremacy was such a given that Great Chefs of France author Crewe could include the following sentence without irony: “The relative indifference shown to its chefs in the past only compounds the mystery of why France is the only Western country to have made cooking into an art and raised its appreciation to the level of connoisseurship.”)
Terrance Brennan, who grew up in Annandale, Virginia, and would go on to open his own Picholine restaurant and Artisanal bistro in New York City, remembers receiving the book as a gift from a friend’s mother after he catered a party for her. “That was the turning point. When I opened that book, my mouth dropped. I saw those Michelin-starred kitchens, all the copper and silver and the chef’s tie underneath the suit. Louis Outhier and Bocuse, and seeing them squeeze sauce through cheesecloth. I was like, I’ve got to go to Europe!”
“I was always fascinated by that book and what they were doing. I would just stare at it and read it. I had the menus memorized,” says Kinch, who was born in Pennsylvania and started cooking as a teenager in New Orleans, where he worked for Paul Prudhomme. “These were French guys who grew up in this amazing gastronomic tradition. There wasn’t Spain or Scandinavia or everything else back then. France was the glowing epicenter where we all strived to work.”
John Doherty, an Irish American from Long Island who became chef of
the Waldorf-Astoria in the 1980s, gave the book to his cooks and says it gives him goose bumps to talk about it. In the Internet age, it may be difficult to imagine a book having such widespread impact, but those were the times. It’s like rocker Brian Eno’s line about the first Velvet Underground album, released in 1968; it sold a mere thirty thousand copies, but everybody who bought one started a band.
A prelude to Great Chefs of France had been Bocuse’s American star turn on the cover of Newsweek magazine in August 1975, a moment recalled by many future chefs who were in their teens at the time. The article, titled “Food: The New Wave,” didn’t merely profile Bocuse, but encapsulated the entire nouvelle cuisine movement, including an appealing evolution from the anonymous, kitchen-bound chefs of the past, reporting that “Bocuse and his friends habitually stroll from the kitchen to chat with the clientele.”
The article went on to summarize nouvelle cuisine’s ripples in the United States and how a new strain of gastronomic connoisseurship was taking hold: Supermarkets had begun stocking fresh herbs and organic produce; specialty shops were doing a brisk business in cheeses, pâtés, and escargots; and kitchen supply shops were selling out of such exotic equipment as woks, which the authors took the time to define as “a Chinese cooking pan,” all in spite of an economic recession.
Seeing a chef in the space usually reserved for national and world leaders, entertainment phenoms, and athletes sparked the imagination of young Americans who enjoyed cooking but would never have considered it a viable—or desirable—career. More and more of them began to consider chefdom as a profession, but with no homegrown toques to mentor them, they quickly realized that a necessary rite of passage was to get next to a French (or European) chef and soak up as much knowledge as possible.
“You had to learn from them. They had the keys,” says Mike Colameco, a working-class Philly native, amateur boxer, and gym rat who cooked around New York City in the 1980s. “They knew. Making consommé, the first time you actually made that clarification, or the first time the chef took you in and showed you how to make a pâté or a pike quenelle, it was like you were being handed something special, a knowledge skill set that not a lot of people had. And the only way in there was through them.”
“IT’S LIKE PRISON.”
To many of these young Americans, culinary schools beckoned, offering a crash course in the fundamentals of cooking and proximity to French, or at least European, masters. (That same Newsweek article touted an increase in enrollment at these schools, helping plant a seed that would lead to further matriculations; many readers had never heard of such a thing as a “chef college” until then.)
Traditionally, culinary academies had been trade or technical schools, a notch up from where you might become an auto mechanic or hair stylist. The most well-known U.S. cooking school was, and remains, The Culinary Institute of America, though it was hardly the only one of note.* With dreams that went beyond merely learning a marketable, menial skill, a new, more ambitious breed of young Americans began mixing in with the traditional student population at The Culinary Institute of America throughout the 1970s, with a steadily escalating concentration of aspirants toward the end of the decade and into the 1980s; some were, by traditional standards, a bit old for school, but were swept up in the food craze. Doherty, who trained there from 1976 through 1978, recalls, “One or two guys were career-change people in their thirties or forties. They were old dudes. They had struggled in their career; now they’re chasing their dream, going after what they really want to do, because they can. But most of the people were coming out of high school with very little experience.”
The evolution of The Culinary Institute of America, commonly referred to as the CIA or “The Culinary” by students and graduates, helpfully traces the evolution of the profession and of the ever-changing landscape of restaurant food in the United States. The school was founded in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1946, as a trade school for World War II veterans. The driving force behind its creation was Frances Roth, known to Connecticut society as a strong-willed woman with a talent for achieving ambitious goals: She was the first female member of the Connecticut Bar Association and central to efforts to tamp down vice in New Haven. And so, when a group of restaurant owners sought to improve their establishments’ food, they turned to her with the idea of developing a better class of cook culled from the ranks of returning GIs. Roth found a passionate backer in Katharine Angell, wife of Yale University president James Rowland Angell, whose oldest son was killed in the waning days of World War II and who subsequently poured herself into veterans’ causes.
In May 1946, the school kicked off as the New Haven Restaurant Institute with fifty students and a modest faculty comprising a chef, a baker, and a dietician. The six-week or ten-week curriculum (sources differ on the length) pumped out worker bees proficient in making American staples such as beef stew and apple pie. By 1950, the institute had gone through a name change, becoming the Restaurant Institute of Connecticut, and, according to the school, graduated six hundred veterans hailing from thirty-eight states. A year later, it took on a name reflective of its burgeoning national stature, The Culinary Institute of America. The resulting monogram, CIA, drew curious stares when it began appearing on student sweatshirts around New Haven, implying a class of aspiring spooks, rather than the annual influx of cooks, had infiltrated the college town.
Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, the school’s reputation grew. The New York Times’s Craig Claiborne held a special fascination for it, and for Frances Roth. In a 1958 article lamenting the state of classic French cuisine in the United States, Claiborne swooned, “There is one person making a valiant effort to perpetuate classic cookery in this country. She is Mrs. Frances Roth, a handsome grandmother and lawyer, who until twelve years ago, had never seen the inside of the kitchen of a public dining room.”
By 1960, the CIA’s curriculum had evolved into two courses of study: The first was an extension of the original program, conferring instruction in making the jingoistic grub prepared, carved, and ogled by Norman Rockwell subjects—roasts, gravies, pies—the eighty dishes most requested by American diners at the time. The advanced course was open to the top half of each graduating class and was devoted to the canon of French cookery, everything from cream and wine sauces to baking and desserts. Instruction in special disciplines such as ice carving and pulling sugar were available to those with the aptitude. By this time, some foreign students had begun to matriculate, as had a few women (a very few—just two in a class of two hundred that year).
Despite the incorporation of an auxiliary campus to accommodate overflow, as 1970 approached, the school was straining beyond its capacity. After a search for new homes that stretched as far west as Chicago and as far south as Atlanta, the school landed relatively close by, at the St. Andrew-on-Hudson Jesuit novitiate, a seventy-five-acre enclave in Hyde Park, New York. Within a decade, it had begun to morph into today’s state-of-the-art facility boasting eleven production kitchens, a research kitchen, two pantries, four bakeshops, three student dining rooms, a wine-tasting room, a meat-cutting department, and a fourteen-thousand-volume library. And it was thriving, welcoming approximately fourteen hundred students into a two-year course into which had been folded such disciplines as advanced pastry, banquet planning, ice carving, and business law. The average student age was twenty, and the school remained predominantly male with a ratio of six men to each woman.
The CIA experienced some turbulence in the late 1970s, burning through two presidents in as many years. To the rescue came Ferdinand Metz, installed as president in 1980. A native of Munich who had apprenticed at Café Feldherrnhalle and been chef at the Deutscher Kaiser Hotel, Metz immigrated to the United States in 1965. He worked for Henri Soulé at Le Pavillon and as banquet chef at the Plaza Hotel, and had most recently been developing new products for H. J. Heinz. Tension between his immediate predecessor, J. Joseph Meng, and the school’s twenty-five-member board of trustees had reportedly sunk Meng. Since
Metz was a member of that board, many believed he would be able to navigate the politics of the job.
“It was also an exciting time for the school, since Metz was beginning to take the institute in new directions, attracting high-profile instructors and rounding out the curriculum,” recalled Alfred Portale, who graduated the CIA in 1981.
The CIA mostly trained Americans, but reflecting Europe’s culinary supremacy, most of the school’s instructors were Swiss, German, or French. The school required that prospective students have some professional experience, but memories of people who were there vary about what the minimum was—most remember that it was one or two years. (Current CIA president Tim Ryan, himself a graduate of the school, believes there was no prerequisite, but ironically he is in the minority.) For the most part, though, the experience was limited to casual restaurants in the students’ hometowns. When they got to the CIA, many were exposed for the first time to the phenomenon of chef as drill sergeant—the prototypical, absurdly demanding, occasionally red-faced, borderline abusive European taskmaster. Some became legendary among the legion of cooks who attended the CIA, such as Fritz Sonnenschmidt and Roland Henin.
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