“Henin was this tall French guy with these big hands and really long nose,” remembers Colameco. “And he would fuck with you: He’d turn your oven off and not tell you, to teach you that you should check your oven every fifteen minutes. Because you know what happens in commercial kitchens? That kind of shit happens. Maybe the pilot fucking blew out. Maybe the thermostat’s wrong. Maybe some guy just doesn’t like you. It’s like prison.”
John Kowalski, who graduated the CIA in 1977 and is now an instructor there, believes that many instructors just wanted to see if newbies could “hack it.” He also fondly recalls that each of his instructors had at least one off-hours diversion that would allow him to decompress and that revealed another, softer side of his personality: Out in the country, or returning from a weekend with exquisite, fresh, uncultivated oysters from Rhode Island, “they were like little babies,” he says.
The instructors were also the embodiment of the students’ ambitions. As they observed European maestros butchering whole animals, pulling sugar, demonstrating more potato preparations than any American knew existed, whipping up every conceivable sauce from memory, and displaying an exquisite touch with puff pastry, they got their first taste of the Everest before them, and an insatiable desire to summit it. And one of the first realities for culinary school graduates to digest was the gap between cooking school and real pro kitchens. And so French kitchens, and more generally European kitchens—whether in New York City or abroad—became the unofficial finishing schools for cooks, the places where blanks were filled in, skills were honed, real-world chops were earned, and acceptance was conferred.
“The way I looked at school was that when I graduated, that wasn’t the end of my education; it was the beginning,” says Larry Forgione, one of the first of the prototypical modern-day chefs to matriculate at the CIA. “When I left, I was probably the only person I know that was taking jobs for experience and not for position or money.” Forgione’s approach—prizing knowledge over mere employment—was ahead of its time when he graduated in 1974, but by the early 1980s was becoming the norm for a portion of each graduating class.
“Cooking schools are fine,” says Colameco, who graduated in 1982. “But I’m not sure cooking was ever meant to be taught that way; it hadn’t been, historically. You do an apprenticeship—that’s how it is in France and that’s how it is in most of the world. You start at thirteen or fourteen and you just learn how to do the craft from someone that’s good at it.” What you can’t get in school, says Colameco, is “the reality of a working kitchen; a restaurant is not a laboratory. It’s not conceptual.”
Indeed, there was an entire class of Americans who followed the European model, never attending a culinary institute, the most notable example being the most celebrated chef of that generation: Thomas Keller. Another chef who forwent culinary school was Stephen Lyle, an American who trained in France in the late 1970s, and cooked for fellow American Leslie Revsin at Restaurant Leslie, a well-respected nouvelle cuisine outpost on Cornelia Street in Greenwich Village. “I’d worked with some CIA grads,” remembers Lyle. “And they were great with jargon and they’d talk about their mise a lot, but they just didn’t really know what the hell they were doing. Not so unusual for a kid straight out of school, but they thought they knew everything. We would kind of laugh about that. People I worked with, a lot of them had been trained in France. We just knew a hell of a lot more than these kids did.” Lyle describes a rivalry between those who came up in pro kitchens and the cooking school grads, whom he and his colleagues saw both as pretentious and as “rubes. There’s obviously some very talented people but there were also a bunch of idiots.”
A contrast between the East and West Coasts was how few cooks in the Golden State even contemplated culinary school. Traci Des Jardins, a spitfire who had become a protégé of German-born Joachim Splichal in his L.A. restaurant Patina, explains that “Joachim wasn’t oriented towards them. He was looking for hard-core French experience.” Fellow Californian Jonathan Waxman expresses a more Zen version of this attitude: “When people say they go to school to learn how to cook, I always laugh. Where you go to school is in the street. Where you go to school is going to other people’s restaurants or going and working at other people’s restaurants or going to people’s homes or going to the supermarkets. Cooking is so much about just living, you know?” For another sign of California’s distinct sensibility, consider that one of the head instructors at San Francisco’s California Culinary Academy in the early 1980s was Jeremiah Tower, who had been chef at Chez Panisse, but had no formal training.
“THE KITCHEN WILL ALWAYS EMBRACE YOU.”
Whether or not they attended culinary school, many who set their sights on the professional kitchen during these years had more in common than a desire to learn how to cook: They were almost metabolically incompatible with traditional classroom education. Which is not to say that they were not intelligent. As Bruce Springsteen once said: “One problem with the way the educational system is set up is that it only recognizes a certain type of intelligence, and it’s incredibly restrictive. There’s so many types of intelligence and people who would be at their best outside of that structure get lost.”
Frances Roth felt the same way as The Boss. She was said to be upset at the American attitude toward “those who work with their hands rather than in white collars.”
Very often, cooks are among those lost boys and girls, and this was especially true before the alphabet soup of syndromes and disorders—ADD, ADHD, OCD—applied to today’s children was available to the mainstream.
A number of influential chefs hail from the halls of academia, especially those who began cooking in Berkeley in the 1970s and ’80s, but for every higher-educated chef and cook, there were—and to some extent still are—scores of cooks who didn’t do well in school, who zoned out or fell asleep during class.
“If I was a kid nowadays, I most likely would have been diagnosed with ADD,” says Tom Colicchio. “I had all the classic signs of it. I had report cards saying, ‘Tom should be doing X and Y, and he’s doing Z. Seems always distracted.’”
Colicchio’s distractions extended even to his first kitchen forays at home. “I remember serving this particular recipe and it was clear that I didn’t read the whole thing because when it was served, the family was like, ‘Where’s the rest of the meal?’ It was clearly only an appetizer and that’s all I made. So my mother had to get up and bail me out.”
“I was not a great student,” says New York City chef Scott Bryan. “I didn’t really apply myself. I was bad at math, not great at English. But social studies, remembering stats, things like that? Very good at them. It’s ADHD. People who can’t concentrate or focus. A lot of cooks I know, they’re bored at school. They can’t pay attention. They pay attention maybe for a minute or something. Unless something catches them, then they become idiot savants in a way. People joked about me as, like, Rain Man. I’d do the same things over and over. Say the same quotes and verses. It’s OCD and ADHD, in a way.”
“I know a lot of chefs who are dyslexic,” says author, producer, and television personality Anthony Bourdain. “A lot of chefs who tell me—because I heard this from people who read [my book] Kitchen Confidential—that they hadn’t read another book since high school. I think for a lot of people who were uncomfortable in their verbal comprehension skills, reading comprehension; who felt awkward speaking or who struggled with language; here’s a business that’s nonverbal, that’s sensual, where you can express yourself without using language. Reading skills not needed, really. You could get around it.”
None of which is to imply that these are unintelligent people: “I would say that there are one thousand ways for smarts to represent themselves,” says Mario Batali. “Some of which is in developing management skills and some of it is developing your own interpersonal ability to somehow participate and help run something good. And it’s in a very physical way, whether you’re building a house and you’re suddenly a j
ourneyman adding bricklaying. Someone who starts as an introductory knucklehead on a construction job—there is a way for that person to eventually become a general contractor much faster than people who have been there a lot longer than them. And it’s because they possess a faculty for understanding the larger picture while they’re doing the same hand movements.
“It’s the same way with cooks; you look at cooks and maybe these cooks hadn’t made it in the military or hadn’t made it in a place where somehow they hadn’t accepted whatever authority was going to lead them. In the world of cooking you can work outside of the authority in your own mind while watching everything being done. And that allows you, if you’re a quick learner and attentive and watching, to learn a lot of the tricks from the very best people in the field or in your restaurant or within ten feet of you because you are able to mimic their actual hand motions.”
A majority of these cooks discovered the kitchen almost by accident, taking a high school job as a dishwasher. They came for spending money, then fell in love with the atmosphere, the characters, the physicality, structure, and craft.
“The dishwasher position of course is an entry-level position into the restaurant because you don’t enter as a skilled cook, even as a journeyman cook,” says Christopher Lee, onetime co-chef of Chez Panisse. “You start at the bottom, which is a dishwasher. That’s the way into the kitchen and that’s the first station you hit when you come in the back door. You’ve got your toe in and then the guy says, ‘Hey, can you help me with these onions?’ And it sort of accrues from there, it builds from there.”
What’s more, those who found their way to the kitchen were often treated as, or considered themselves, misfits or outcasts in “normal” society: “I also think there are a lot of people who just sensed in themselves a general discomfort with polite society,” says Bourdain. “I mean, working in an office, interacting with others in a larger situation, interacting with a room full of equals. Awkward. Difficult. You don’t see the high school quarterback in a kitchen that much. People who feel adrift, at odds . . . shy people. Some of the biggest shouters are actually very shy, insecure, tenuous people outside of the kitchen.”
“The kitchen will always embrace you,” says Batali, whose first job was as a dishwasher. “If you’re there to do, and do, a good job, the cooks will eventually throw you a fucking steak every now and then because they appreciate you doing the good job and you saved them.”
It wasn’t long before Batali moved on to the kitchen line: “The cohesiveness of the team was something that I grew to like. It was something I had never seen before. People that you loved, and people that you didn’t even like, had to come together as a team and work through the dinner service that you would eventually conquer, and it was about concentration. It was about precision. It was about mastering your hand movements and thinking around the room while you were trying to make sure that everything was going to come up in the right way. There was never anything that took longer than eleven minutes to cook so there wasn’t a lot of complexity to it. But there was certainly the high point of the adrenaline buzz of when it’s working and you’re working together in a team and everyone’s doing their job. It’s very much like a ballet or like a football team playing an excellent play.”
Boston chef Jasper White recalls his first impressions of the kitchen: “My mother had moved to Arkansas and I was nervous because I heard she was going to get married and I actually packed up and went there for a little bit and I got a job cooking breakfast in a hotel. And that was my first real cooking job. I only stayed for six weeks but within three days I met the first openly gay women I’d ever met in my life. I worked with a German chef who had a Peruvian crew. My mentor was a guy named Uncle Charlie, who was a black man who grew up in Louisiana. Within a week, I said, ‘I’m home.’
“I could be who I was. I didn’t have to pretend. It wasn’t a job where I had to dress up. I just threw on my uniform and went to work. I loved the contrast of the humans I was working with. The different personalities. I felt there was compassion at a level I wouldn’t find anywhere else. At that particular hotel there was a dishwasher named Robert, and I don’t know what was wrong with him, but he would try to drown himself in the sink when he ran out of work to do. He was handicapped. Uncle Charlie said to me, ‘Make sure Robert always has stuff, even if you have to give him clean stuff to wash again.’ And that was part of the daily routine. But it wasn’t like, ‘We’ve got to get rid of this guy.’ It was: ‘We’ve got to take care of this guy.’
“You know,” says White, “behind the screaming and yelling and all the tough stuff that chefs can do, there was a lot of compassion.”
“THIS WAS NOTHING SHORT OF A METICULOUSLY TIMED FOREIGN INVASION.”
Like the founding of the CIA, the establishment of a community of French chefs in New York City was a footnote to World War II. The unintentional catalyst was the French pavilion at the 1939 World’s Fair in the borough of Queens, New York. To honcho France’s restaurant there, the French government tapped Henri Soulé, who had worked his way up from busboy at age fourteen to assistant maître d’ at Café de Paris. A front-of-house man, never a chef, Soulé assembled a team that included Pierre Franey as assistant fish cook.
As they bobbed across the Atlantic on the SS Normandie, key kitchen personnel met daily to plan how they’d feed the one thousand visitors expected to dine every day at the French pavilion. “This was nothing short of a meticulously timed foreign invasion,” Franey would later write of the enterprise. “All of the equipment, from ovens to pots and pans, was brought from France. That meant we had to construct a kitchen from the ground up.”
Upon arrival, the Frenchmen devoured New York City at a time when the metropolis swayed to the big bands of Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller, fraternizing at the Vatel Club (an organization for French in the hospitality industry), sunning themselves at Jones Beach, and visiting the cinemas and nightclubs of Times Square. They were to return home after two spring-summer runs in America, but with the occupation of France by the Nazis, most elected to stay put. By 1941, their leader, Soulé, had opened his own restaurant at 5 East 55th Street in Midtown Manhattan, naming it Le Pavillon, and many of his fellow refugees flowed into his employ.
The French pavilion was intended as the ultimate showcase for haute cuisine, and with that DNA, Le Pavillon quickly rose to the ranks of the finest restaurants in America. Ferdinand Metz, the future president of The Culinary Institute of America, worked there as fish and vegetable cook in the mid-1960s, and commented, “I think it gave people the understanding of what cooking and service at its very best could be.”
Le Pavillon became a fixture in New York City and Soulé became one of its most well-known dining room impresarios, welcoming Manhattan’s aristocracy, its Kennedys and Rockefellers, though he wasn’t considered gracious by all guests; he regularly offended Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn, also his landlord, by seating him in the back, prompting Cohn to more than double his rent, from $18,000 to $40,000. Rather than pay it, Soulé moved Le Pavillon to the Ritz Tower 57th Street, eventually returning and reopening on 55th Street as La Côte Basque, a less expensive restaurant.
Le Pavillon became a sort of university for French front-of-house men and cooks in New York City. “Le Pavillon was my alma mater, my Princeton, my Yale,” said assistant head waiter Fred Decré, who left in 1960 to launch La Caravelle. Another who worked there before becoming a restaurateur in his own right was maître d’ Charles Masson, who would go on to launch La Grenouille at 3 East 52nd Street in 1962. Throughout the 1960s, a constellation of additional French restaurants proliferated in Midtown Manhattan, such as Lutèce on East 50th Street in 1961, where André Soltner rose to four-star prominence, and Le Cygne on East 54th Street in 1969, where Alain Sailhac did the same.
“I REALLY BELIEVED THAT THE DINING EXPERIENCE COULD BE SOMETHING SPECIAL, AND CERTAINLY AT THAT TIME IT WASN’T.”
One of the defining threads of the evolution of the Ame
rican chef in the late 1970s and early ’80s in New York City is the story of these three worlds—aspiring Americans, the CIA, and the French-European old guard—colliding, becoming acclimated to one another, and eventually unifying.
First, the colliding: Although many young cooks revered the French, some were rubbed the wrong way by them, regarding them as more haughty than haute. The Quilted Giraffe’s Barry Wine cherished his dining experiences in France—one even brought a tear to his eye—but loathed French restaurants in Manhattan (most especially their snootiness) and delighted that his business was right around the corner from the most fabled French restaurant in town, Lutèce.
“The Quilted Giraffe had printed on the menu from day one the quote from Brillat-Savarin: ‘There is no place like the table for reconciling body and spirit to the anguish of a life that is necessarily too short and too imperfect,’” remembers Wine. “I really believed that the dining experience could be something special, and certainly at that time it wasn’t. In the French restaurants, it was stilted and it was looking down on Americans. And so the goal of The Quilted Giraffe was to show that Americans could run a four-star restaurant.”
Wine’s attitude animated his menu: “You couldn’t cook American food unless you knew who Howdy Doody was,” says Wine. “In 1985, you could say that because anybody of cooking age had seen Howdy Doody. But if you grew up in France, you didn’t understand the Howdy Doody experience. It had to do with looking at things in an American way. And this was the beginning of serving chili for seventy-five dollars, fried chicken for seventy-five dollars.”
Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll Page 23