The Reach of a Chef (8 page)

My favorite complaining story in a kitchen comes from Thomas Keller during his Rakel days: It had been a killer service and a long week, and one of his beat, sweaty line cooks couldn’t wait to start breaking down his station to begin the work of cleaning the kitchen so he could go home. Then, at 10:55, five minutes before the kitchen closed, a server entered the kitchen announcing a late walk-in—“Order in!”—and slapped a ticket on the line cook’s shelf. The line cook groaned. Keller fired the guy on the spot. The incredulous line cook said he was sorry. Keller told him to go home. The line cook couldn’t believe it—said he was
sorry.
Keller told him to get out, told him if you don’t like to cook, I don’t want you in my kitchen. Keller meant it. And that was that.

You didn’t complain in a kitchen—you quit.

Another Keller-related complaining story: Keller was evidently fairly demanding of all his cooks, and often what he asked didn’t make sense to the one doing the work. He had one such prep cook picking basil. The prep cook had a pile of leaves in front of him and had thrown all the stems in the garbage. Keller, who was experimenting with infused oils—it was earlier in his career; he’d never use stems now, but at the time he was trying it—told the prep cook to get all those stems out of the garbage. This apparently was the last straw. The prep cook grabbed for the nearest knife and began chasing Keller around the kitchen. The guy had snapped. This is a more conventional form of complaining in the kitchen.

It all goes back to the fact that a professional kitchen is a place unto itself, a place where you can’t lie. To allow people to complain opens up the doors to self-deception, laziness, and a lack of accountability. The work is hard; no one’s forcing you to be here. If you don’t like it, leave. If it’s too hard, if you can’t do it, we’ll find someone who can—nothing personal—but service starts at 5:30 and there’s a lot to do.

Certainly there has been behavior in revered kitchens on the part of the chef that would be considered criminal in the corporate world. It’s hard to imagine the boss at your software company or ad agency jabbing your ass with a carving fork to get you to work faster, actually drawing blood—it wouldn’t fly. But it happens in kitchens—a good thing houndstooth check hides spots. Thrown knives, sauté pans whipping past your ear—it happens.

But it’s a different world today. You could get sued. The world of the restaurant has gotten complicated. In 1997 a hostess at the four-star restaurant Lespinasse in Manhattan, led by Gray Kunz, sued the maî tre d’ for sexual harassment. Her actions, being a form of complaining by one of his staff, prompted Kunz to fire her. But hundreds of workers at the St. Regis Hotel, which housed the restaurant, protested the woman’s dismissal, disrupting work and forcing guests to carry their own bags. The hotel rehired the hostess the following day. The issue grew so volatile that Chef Kunz left the kitchen for three weeks, till people cooled off. A half year later, he was gone (he said it had nothing to do with the event, that he wanted to open his own place—something that wouldn’t happen for six years). Could that same Keller line cook file a wrongful-dismissal suit today? Maybe. Four-star kitchens have become haltingly respectable. In Keller’s kitchens, everyone addresses everyone—from the lowest culinary school extern to Keller himself—as “Chef,” a term of respect. There’s no yelling and no throwing of utensils, and it’s been years since anyone’s chased Keller around the kitchen with a knife. Indeed, in the fall of 2004, the French Laundry fired a sous-chef for what was described by numerous sources as grossly unprofessional behavior involving physical and verbal aggression and intimidation.

The CIA, of course, happened to be training those people who would go out into the new professional kitchen and other segments of the industry. It believed the standard of professionalism was not relative to one’s surroundings—standards applied to the corporate boardroom and skills kitchen in equal measure. But it was the power of the students to complain, combined with the changing nature of the workplace, the country’s increasing ethnic diversity, and the growing sensitivity generally to discrimination and harassment, that was causing some Sturm und Drang among the teaching staff. What was acceptable behavior on the part of the chef-instructor and what was not seemed to be changing. Screaming was once considered an effective tool for getting something done in a kitchen—that didn’t fly anymore, and no one had a problem with it, but did that mean you couldn’t express anger? If you could, how much and in what form? If you wanted a kid to be accountable for his work, to be prepared for the day’s lesson, say, come to class with a To Do list or having memorized key techniques and terms in cheese making, and he didn’t, you could get mad at him, but nowadays, that kid could complain that your getting mad was intimidating. And, now, intimidation is not allowed.

Turgeon later described the effect of this on chef-instructors to me this way, a small example from a uniformly respected and admired teacher who, though considered tough, generates very few complaints: “When I was in Bounty, I didn’t think twice about saying ‘fuck,’” he told me. “But one day in here, I got really upset at a group that was under-performing. I turned and walked toward the sink and said ‘fuck.’ This was a Friday and I went home and worried about it
all
weekend.
Am I gonna get in trouble for that? Maybe the group thought I was yelling at them. Or maybe one of the kids is really sensitive and is gonna report me.
” Turgeon has had a student begin to cry in front of him. They’re a different bunch these days. Many chefs say the student body has gotten younger, though during the past few years the average age of a student has dropped from twenty-four to only twenty-three. In Turgeon’s class, the oldest student was twenty-three—except for one career-changer, a forty-one-year-old woman named Mary, who’d left mortgage banking to pursue her culinary ambitions. (That’s a serious career change, but it seemed kind of a no-brainer to me.
Mortgage banking or working in kitchens…hmm, let’s see.
Mary wasn’t sure what she’d do with her culinary education but thought she was headed toward catering.) And another profound change: Most of these students didn’t even want to be chefs. It used to be that sixteen out of the eighteen students would want to be chefs. “Now,” Turgeon said, “it’s half.”

All things considered, the timing of the student e-mail was apropos as far as my addressing this issue at the school and underscored its pervasiveness. The e-mail, by a student named Emily Annas, had been disseminated unsigned to the entire faculty by Jerry Fischetti, the associate professor who teaches Introduction to Interpersonal Communication. It had been written in response to a class assignment and was less dramatic itself than the response it elicited from the faculty.

“In my IIPC class,” Fischetti wrote, “one assignment is to answer the following question: Comment on the statement, ‘When emotions are involved, the emotions become the message.’” The student agreed with the statement and his response followed:

Turgeon immediately dispatched an off-the-cuff response, one that every chef who’d come to the warm world of the CIA from the dark and stormy world of restaurants appreciated, many of whom wrote similar responses:

Now that’s intimidation. And yes—chefs do yell sometimes!

On the other hand, a number of students told me they didn’t think the school was hard enough. Carrie Whealy, a twenty-two-year-old from Iowa, was among them. “I expected it to be really hard core,” she told me. “I’ve been a little disappointed.” She also said, interestingly, that she’d arrived at the school planning to be a chef, but now, almost two years later, recently back from her externship at Chez Panisse and with graduation six months off, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Perhaps go into writing, she confessed.

I was also spending time in Chef Pardus’s class. I had dinner with him and several of his students—after service and before cleaning the kitchen and lecture—and I voiced what I’d heard from some students, that it wasn’t as hard as they’d expected. They agreed unanimously. The chefs were great they said, but they didn’t push you.

I was sorry to hear that. I didn’t want to think that chefs here were going soft on students. Being hard and pushing me was the making of me, and I wasn’t even a student. Not giving me the opportunity to take the easy way out was something that didn’t just help me while I was at the school, it could be applied to everything I did. In a lot of ways, learning to cook saved my life. So to think that the school was filtering out what had been the most valuable part of it to me, personally, and doing so because it had allowed our culture of complaining to weave itself into the fabric of the school, was especially disheartening. Some chefs even wondered aloud if it wasn’t the result of the school’s pandering to consumers, trying to get and keep their business.

Nonsense, said Ryan. (Uncharacteristically, and with annoyance, he used a stronger word when I pressed the issue.) It’s not a kinder, gentler kitchen, he said, and they aren’t pandering to any consumer or competing for students’ bucks. (They
are
competing for the very best students, Ryan said. The CIA accepts about 80 percent of its applicants, though the school notes many of the 20 percent are not accepted because the applicant doesn’t complete the process, often because of the school’s requirement for previous work in the industry.) But if by kinder and gentler, what was meant was more professional—that would be true, he said. If it meant that when someone was dressed down for not being prepared, it was their performance that was criticized, and that the student was not personally belittled, then that was true, he hoped.

“This institution as far as I know and throughout our history has never been about anything but continuing to raise the standards for our industry, for the profession, and for the individuals who are here,” he said.

Yes, there were issues of how best to teach the work of the chef as the profession changed. More and more, the school looked toward how best to teach the individual rather than institute a blanket approach to instruction.

“There are two thousand three hundred students here and probably twenty-three hundred approaches to take,” Ryan explained. “Does that require faculty members to be smarter? Yeah. Does it require them to work harder? You bet—and what’s wrong with that? So I don’t see any of these things being mutually exclusive, and I don’t see them as being anything but a natural evolution.”

Some of the faculty had noted the changing nature of their work and the continual struggle to be rigorous without being intimidating, an especially tricky tightrope given the extraordinary diversity of the student body—from sensitive high school graduates to knuckleheaded cooks to forty-one-year-old former mortgage bankers.

“I don’t think people are confused, Michael,” Ryan said, doing his best to temper my annoying persistence on the issue. “I think that people are struggling in accepting their personal responsibility, whether here or elsewhere. It’s hard to accept responsibility. It’s easier to walk by a piece of paper that’s on the ground and pretend that you don’t see it than to stop and to pick it up. It’s easier to fool yourself into saying, ‘Oh, somebody’s going to come down on me or a parent might call me, therefore I can’t push these students,’ and that’s not the case. Do we have to be more sophisticated about it? Yeah, absolutely we do, that’s the way the world works. We’re not cooking the way we were a decade ago, either.”

That was a good point. It did come back to cooking in the end, and I liked how cooking metaphors were always quick at hand.

One of the chefs who had taken the new teaching environment most deeply to heart was my chef, Chef Pardus. He had a reputation for being a hard-ass. He had pushed me and challenged me, but he never intimidated me. I was bigger than him and this helped, since he could kick my ass on the line. Also, we were both in our thirties at the time—I wasn’t an impressionable youth easily intimidated. He was unfailingly challenging, articulate, passionate, and really smart in his approach to food. But a lot of students now complained about how hard he was. They either liked him or hated him (the surest indication that something powerful is going on—you couldn’t have a tepid response). True to form, he wanted to be the best teacher he could possibly be, and so he struggled mightily with softening his style without lowering expectations of student performance or diminishing his own passion. And he had an ongoing dialogue with the assistant dean, Chef Felder, a longtime veteran and spiritual torchbearer of Chez Panisse, who was another chef I had no end of respect for.