The Reach of a Chef (4 page)

My strategy would be to visit new kitchens and new segments of the industry such as the Food Network and the incredible impact of televised cooking lessons. And I’d return to some old stories and old chefs to explore how their world had changed in the intervening years. It wasn’t only Keller’s life that had changed. In no instance did I find a situation that I’d written about previously unaltered; in fact, the changes were profound given how little time had passed. The restaurant kitchen had been an amazing world; it was even more so now. This was an exciting time to be writing about the work of the chef, but it wasn’t all hopeful and salutary. Much of it was simply confusing, and some of it was sad.

The chef in America had undergone extraordinary convolutions even since I first learned what it meant to be a chef, a job now influenced by sweeping cultural changes—chef branding, the remarkable popularity of food TV, this country’s dysfunctional relationship with food, the growing popularity and influence of restaurants as dining out evolved into a new kind of theater. I would try to describe not the soul of a chef but rather the reach of a chef: how the work has changed even during the past five years, let alone twenty years or longer, and what The Chef means in this huge, sprawling, food-neurotic country.

“I’m not telling you fifth-of-gin-and-waitress-in-the-bathtub anymore,” Michael Pardus said. “You’re like the press.” That was a change I hadn’t anticipated before my return to hallowed ground. It meant I was not the person I used to be; he said, “You’re like
the press.
” (At least he was kind enough to say “like.”) The kind of information I’d be able to dig up might be a little tougher to come by now and might be of a different nature than when I first began writing about this world, when no one in it knew who I was or what I was likely to do with the things that came out of their mouths.

I’d returned to the place where it all began for me. In the eight years since I’d left the campus to write that book, my skills teacher had become a friend. I could e-mail him about his thoughts on the finer points of poaching duck legs in fat (you don’t want the fat to get much hotter than 190 degrees; we’d both had stringy, tough confit and were sure that too-hot fat was the reason) or advice on natural pickles (pickling vegetables using saltwater in a way that encouraged good, acid-producing bacteria to make the vegetables sour and also preserve them—he was a nut about this stuff ). When he’d invited a Vietnamese chef from NewYork City to do a dinner and presentation at the institute to raise money to bring a group of students to Vietnam, he asked my help in luring celebrity Anthony Bourdain—a Vietnamophile and, with his black leather and foul, hilarious mouth, a guaranteed crowd-pleasing ticket seller. Pardus suggested I come along as well, which, ever game for a food boondoggle, I was only too glad to do.

A word about Bourdain
—for clarity, if such a state can ever be connected with the man…

My first encounter, in January 2001, with the skeletal six-foot-four-inch former chef—now celebrated author, popular television personality, globe-trotting gadabout, restaurant-kitchen pundit, and exuberant bon vivant (or perhaps
mal
vivant is more appropriate)—had proved harmless (as far as I could know). Stopping in Manhattan the night before I flew to Puerto Rico with Eric Ripert and crew, I went for a steak-frites at Bourdain’s superb bistro Les Halles. We talked there, then caught a taxi to Siberia, the subway bar, where Eric met us, dressed in a black jacket, black wool cap, black backpack, and black jeans. He looked like someone you’d see scaling a Midtown building thirty-four flights up. Tony kept bringing beers from the bar, and the evening grows hazy for me at this point, and then goes black.

I awoke the next morning at 30,000 feet, seat belt buckled and blanket tucked, Eric having upgraded my coach ticket to first class, where he snoozed beside me. Bourdain had slipped something into my Heineken, evidently. (In his book
A Cook’s Tour,
he conceals the details of that night beneath a veiled description of “senseless debauchery and indulgence,” alas, so I’d never know what Eric’s and Tony’s chuckling about that night referred to.) But as I had my wallet, all my teeth, and apparently plenty of sleep, I closed my eyes and thought about San Juan.

Later that spring, Bourdain flew me, Ripert, and his chef buddy Scott Bryan out to the French Laundry to have dinner while his crew filmed the kitchen all day and then our marathon meal all night for an episode of his show, also called
A Cook’s Tour.
The kitchen there served Bourdain, an unapologetic pack-a-day-plus smoker, a dish called Coffee and Cigarettes—a coffee tuile served with a custard infused with tobacco from a Monte Cristo cigar, which tasted and felt when it slid down your throat exactly like the first drag of a really good cigarette—an astonishing work of craftsmanship and good humor.

Bourdain was turning out to be a lot of fun, I thought, and the brief CIA jaunt had been more of the same—a talk with the students, a signing, an evening of Vietnamese street food by Michael Huynh, chef and co-owner of Bao 111 in New York City’s East Village—until I returned home to find that Bourdain had posted on a popular Internet forum lunatic ravings of incredible intensity about some of my actions at the CIA.

What sparked his preposterous rant, an extended hallucination of our brief time on campus, who can say? Jealousy? While I still have a few remaining shreds of integrity, he’s far more popular than I am and his books outsell mine by several miles—so jealousy is not likely. Insecurity? Perhaps. Sudden successes, especially sudden successes who happen also to be chefs, suffer from the impostor complex: he’s terrified of being found out. Or perhaps he’s simply twisted by nature. He’s a great writer, I’ll give him that, something of a freak of nature, in fact. He’s got a hilarious mouth and is a gifted raconteur in the best scoundrel fashion. And I’m often lulled into complacent vulnerability by his large very dark brown eyes, which have a down-turned curve that gives them a sorrowful, soulful, almost feminine aspect. Regardless, I’d promised myself to be careful when he was in the vicinity.

And yet, for all my ambivalence about this Bourdain character, I owed him: I would never have made this trip to the CIA were it not for him, and it was a revelation for me.

I had to come back to the CIA and see how the place had changed. The kitchens and the hallways here remained powerful, like a drug. And it was more than the fact that it had become a marker in my working life, a place that transformed me and sent me on a new and unexpected course. It was still the world I remembered, a place
seething
with chefs, a huge mad hive of manic culinarians personifying chefness before fleets of gonnabe chefs of every shape, size, color, and age. I started buzzing the second I got back.

It was spring in the Hudson Valley; the air was fresh. I walked with Pardus, my chef, the guy who started it all, maybe changed everything, by treating me not like a writer when I first arrived but rather like one of his lazy-ass students, and telling me I wasn’t good enough but that it was OK, we were just different, that’s all. The guy could really piss me off when he wanted to.

It was that very night, in fact, in winter 1996, after he’d said those words to me, that we went out after classes were over, ate fries and drank beer, and he told me his story, which included some youthful shenanigans involving a fifth of gin, a bathtub, and a waitress. It wasn’t really germane to the “making of a chef,” but it wasn’t without its own message regarding the life of a chef, either, and so it went into the book.

When he indicated eight years later, rather frankly, that there would be no such stories forthcoming this time, it occurred to me exactly how different I was and that my work of gathering information was changed because of who I was. Most people in my home city of Cleveland have no idea who I am, but at the CIA I’m a personage, “the guy who wrote that book.” This has its advantages, but not when I’m working.

I recalled as I strolled through the quad not only who I’d been when I first arrived but also who I’d been when I left, changed. I was different now from
that
person, too. I’d been out in the industry; I’d worked closely with and written about some of the best chefs in the country. My standards had only gone up. And I was nearly ten years older—a middle-aged man now—and most of these students seemed fresh out of high school, half my age.

The Culinary Institute itself had changed. It had always looked like a proper college campus, especially with the dorms and the new library that had gone up after its move from New Haven, Connecticut, in 1972. But now there was a state-of-the-art fitness facility—weight-training and cardiovascular machines, swimming pool—a gorgeous stand-alone Italian restaurant and teaching center straight out of Emilia-Romagna, with terraces and herb gardens. And further changes were in the works—new housing for students in the bachelor’s program, an underground parking lot in front of the building for visitors, a plan to replace the massive crumbling blacktop out back, a real eyesore, with grass and trees and a playing field.

The makeup of its student body had changed as well. Demographically, of course, but that was less significant than an evolved zeitgeist reflecting broader societal changes. The personality of the writhing organism of the CIA student body, a huge chunk of which had come of age during the Clinton presidency, had known only national peace and prosperity, had been raised by doting baby boomers who remained intensely involved in their kids’ adult lives. All the lifestyle articles about parents being in continual communication with their kids in college via e-mail and cell phones and text messaging applied at the CIA. These students felt just as entitled as the ones down the road at Vassar and across the river at SUNY–New Paltz. Which meant that they complained just as much as the next—kids bitching about grades was nothing new in academia, but it seemed to me unseemly in cooking school. And not only did the kids complain here, their doting, involved parents did so, too, in noticeably higher numbers.

This school had another interesting demographic facet that academic colleges did not: a huge influx of career changers, roughly 15 to 20 percent of the student body. The work of the chef had come to seem so glamorous that white-collar professionals who were not happy in their work looked to culinary school and the exploding opportunities in the food world as an exciting new option for financial reward and personal fulfillment. So in addition to the twenty-year-old high school graduate who’d had two years’ restaurant experience and was entering the CIA’s four-year bachelor’s program (a cooking school–business school hybrid), I met students who were former real estate agents, social workers, educators, cops, bankers, lawyers, and physicians. These career changers ranged in age from their midtwenties to their early fifties, and, importantly, those coming out of the corporate world brought their corporate behavior and corporate expectations with them.

Traditionally, kitchen culture has been, let’s say, unfettered by social niceties, political correctness, and inconvenient laws prohibiting things like discrimination and sex-related intimidation. When I was first at the CIA, I’d heard a funny story about an instructor who, when approached by an inept student asking where he should hold his now-worthless pot pies, replied, “Why don’t you stick them up your ass and hold them there?”

This was once acceptable repartee in a kitchen, but try saying that to a fifty-three-year-old female marketing executive well versed in laws concerning sexual harassment in the workplace. The chef-instructors now knew this and were even given special seminars and instruction in appropriate and inappropriate behavior. And the students knew it, too—until they left this place, they were the consumers and they were entitled. It’s a brave new world out there—you can hear it anytime a cell phone goes off in a student’s knife kit—and it made some chefs sad. I talked to Corky Clark about this, the madman who used to run the CIA’s fish kitchen and delighted in burying his class in weeds and making them fight their way out. I liked and admired the man. They’d taken away his fish kitchen in a curriculum revamp (fish cookery would be integrated throughout); he lectured and butchered, but he no longer cooked. Things were different now, he said quietly—he didn’t even want to talk about it, just shook his head and looked down. His expression broke my heart.

Part of the appeal of working in a kitchen had always been its draw as refuge for outcasts and misfits and, undeniably, immigrants needing to enter the weave of a city. Also, a kitchen was a place that worked when the rest of the world was relaxing, by nature set apart from mainstream society. You could see what was happening in America from the top of the profession, in kitchens like the French Laundry’s and Charlie Trotter’s, to the place that taught and generated the workers, the Culinary Institute of America. The professional kitchen was going mainstream. It was getting respectable, and the CIA insisted on bringing standards of white-collar professionalism to every one of its thirty-nine teaching kitchens—yet another of the changes rolling like a wave over America’s culinary landscape.

I’d always known the CIA was a place that rarely changed, and if it did, it did so slowly. Tim Ryan himself had said it to me years ago: “We’re not trendy.” And yet how could the most prominent and influential cooking school in the country be immune to the food revolution and the incredible changes reaching into every corner of the industry.

It couldn’t, of course. I suspected the opposite might be true: that the changes at the CIA might reflect and make vivid the broader changes in the industry as a whole, especially now that Ryan had been named president. Ryan—an American baby boomer fond of using the adjective
cool,
who urged you to call him Tim and was easily accessible by e-mail—had replaced Ferdinand Metz (whom everyone, even Ryan, called
Mister
Metz), who represented the older Germanic order and European traditions and formality.

When I’d first come to the CIA to write about the institute and the work, I’d waited till the very end to meet President Metz, whom I came to admire greatly. Old European order or not, Metz, who had come to the States as a young cook at Manhattan’s famed Le Pavillon and risen through the chef and corporate worlds to one of the industry’s most prominent and influential positions, was considered a visionary in the field, one who’d brought the CIA strongly into the twenty-first century, shaping up a sloppy student body, building innovative restaurants, exploring nutritional and regional cuisines, and instituting forward-thinking educational initiatives no less significant than a four-year Bachelor of Professional Studies. But I was no longer a student, and so this time reversed my course, requesting first a discussion with the new president to see where he thought the chef stood in this new world and how the Culinary Institute itself had evolved along with the changing role of the chef in America.