The Reach of a Chef (12 page)

By the time I’d gotten the first egg done, three more
bibimbaps
had been called. The next egg went into that same pan. It stuck a bit from the last egg and I broke the yolk trying to free it, so I put pan and broken egg aside. Three pans left, two on burners and hot. I dropped in the third egg, and, thank God, it slid around in the pan on a sheet of hot oil. I was already behind, and the people who’d ordered the
bibimbap
had their arms folded, watching me. I moved to the waiting bowl of salad, lifted the egg with my nifty slotted fish spatula, and—oh my God—the egg stuck to the spatula! Sonofafucking
bitch!
I shook it and broke the yolk, dropped it back in its pan, grabbed a new pan (down to two), and borrowed a clean spatula.

I more or less went down in flames from there. The remaining minutes are a blur of broken yolks and ruined pans, which Pardus himself had to rush to the pot sink to clean to try to get me through this mess and save me from complete and total humiliation, a small cluster of unfortunate students standing aside, watching, waiting for
bibimbap.
On the last egg, I found my rhythm, which was of no use at that point, of course. Service was over. I could stick it up my ass and hold it there, I suppose.

I’d had twenty minutes to fry ten eggs—I couldn’t even do five. I’d been shellacked and sent to the showers before the first inning was over. I was out of the game. I wasn’t good enough. I couldn’t fry an egg to save my life.

Welcome back, writer.

“I’m constantly being told by certain people around this school that fear is not a good motivator.”

This was the beginning of our nightly lecture, and it wasn’t starting out to be pleasant. The rest of the kitchen had done well that night, leaving me alone in my mortification. I was a different person now. But everyone, including myself, had been a little lax in cleaning the kitchen. And Pardus had to nip this in the bud.

“That fear and intimidation are not good tools to use in an educational environment. You make me doubt that.” He paced back and forth along the bank of ranges. “I berated you two nights ago because the kitchen wasn’t clean. And yesterday the kitchen was clean. Why? Because you were afraid I was going to berate you again. Today, I praise you, tell you what a great job you did before you went to dinner, and you get all giddy. And then I have to go around, I have to inspect the kitchen, I have to point out the same stuff I pointed out two nights ago.

“So when I’m caustic and harsh and yell, things work. When I’m pleasant and patting you on the back and saying what a good job you’re doing, everything goes straight to hell. Why is that? You have to answer that yourself and ask yourself which you prefer. Because I’m really leaning toward being a hard-ass. But on the other hand, I’m trying to find a better way to do this myself. It’s up to you. If you can find the discipline within yourselves to get things done without being yelled at, then fantastic, and if not, then I’m afraid that’s the only tactic that I have at my disposal to use. It’s entirely up to you.”

An egg fiasco, followed by a Dad Lecture. What a miserable way to end my days at the CIA.

That very night, head hung, beat, I retreated to my car across the vast, crumbling parking lot behind the towering walls of the CIA. By grace, a dose of divine sugar to help me swallow the pill of the
bibimbap
fiasco, I ran into Krishnendu Ray, a lecturing professor in the bachelor’s program, a sociologist from Balasore, a small provincial town on India’s east coast, and later New Delhi, and in a way, the Sage of the CIA. It was he, for instance, who wrote to his colleagues the most thoughtful response to the student e-mail critical of chef-instructors who yell. After citing an academic source on reasons for anger in a kitchen, he reflected on anger’s sibling:

When I saw him ahead of me in the parking lot, I jogged to catch him. I’d been trying to get in touch with him but we’d kept missing. I’d visited his class in 1996 (he was lecturing, as I recall, about a theory that all religion was simply an attempt to control women’s sexuality—this, at a cooking school!) and wanted to talk with him about the CIA then and now. Kris has an easy smile and a calming manner; he regretted not getting together and asked me to call him when I was home.

When I phoned later in the summer, he told me that he was about to publish a book,
The Migrant’s Table,
about how food choices reflect the dilemmas of ethnicity (this arising out of his doctoral thesis for SUNY–Binghamton), and that he would soon take a teaching post at New York University as assistant professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health. When he first arrived in the United States in 1989, a scholar studying political economy and international development, interested especially with immigrant issues that concerned food, food was not a proper focus in academia. It was OK for anthropologists to study the eating habits of indigenous peoples, but not for a sociologist to study his own family’s table. Since then, however, the food revolution had penetrated the Ivory Tower, and a sociologist’s study of contemporary food culture was now valuable. He noted, by way of example, that he’d been asked by Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study to deliver a paper on Italian cuisine, the first ethnic cuisine, he’ll argue, to go haute in America. He was now at work on a book that touched on my own work: His was tentatively titled
Men in White
and would address, he said, the chef’s rise to prominence in American culture, drawing a strong parallel between the chef and the surgeon, each of whom began as a kind of low-life wretch and became a figure of authority, power, and reverence. I was eager to speak with him about that and hoped also to garner a quick glimpse of his shrewd and candid observations of the CIA.

The CIA both amazed him and often made him chuckle. All these rules, he thought when he first arrived in 1996—unlike anywhere he’d been before. “What other place prohibits colored underwear?” he asked me. He suspects the rules have evolved out of the fear that chefs might fall from grace, return to their wretched state, and so they try to change their language and behavior to mirror the corporate world where professionalism is more standardized.

“Chefs’ humor is very bawdy, very working class, masculine,” Kris said by phone from his office, “and now that has to be given a patina of professionalization, which creates funny doublespeak. The purest, cleanest, most proper chef pronouncements are basically undercut by a private world of vulgarity. If a chef is speaking politely to you, nicely to you, and not making filthy jokes, he doesn’t trust you—I’ll bet that. Which creates a peculiar schizophrenic culture. Which Bourdain plays with. Bourdain I think is so attractive because he outs that.”

The chef’s vaulting into popular culture, as Bourdain has done, has created a situation not unlike that of the musician or painter in the American arts scene.

“Most painters, most actors, are poor and wretched,” he said. “Some are really stinkingly filthy rich and visible, and I think that’s where cooking is. The CIA’s attempt to turn it into a certification system like medicine and law—I don’t know how much of that is going to be successful because of certain skill requirements. What you have to learn in medical school appears to be substantially more complicated long term than what you have to learn in cooking school. Not because cooking is inferior, but because there haven’t been substantial technological transformations in cooking. So I don’t know whether that wager is going to work completely—the wager of certification, that this is how people are going to be and this is what professional means.

“Though we try desperately to do that through attire and rules and proper behavior, and basically eliminate working-class attitudes out of a working-class institution. Bad behavior, bad boys behaving badly, is out. It gets sublimated, gets invisible, but it’s the culture of the class. You try to legislate it away, that’s why we sound so shrill. Dress codes and everything else—so loud and repetitive and so endless. You sit with faculty at lunch, the most important discussion they have is which student is out of dress code…. They know the past, and they know their own past. That’s why it’s doubly poignant, it’s the fear of falling. They know what their real selves are, they can easily slide into some nice racist jokes and sexist comments, we know the temptations—that’s why it’s a little like being a born-again.

“I think as we cook less at home,” he went on more generally, “cooking becomes more magical, and if that goes hand in hand with affluence”—that is, the more affluent you are the less you have to cook—“then you buy it like art, like craft. And like craft, it’s riding up the escalator of status. Precisely because we can’t do these things. We don’t even know how to begin to do these things. And so cooking begins to turn magical. And then for magic to happen you need magicians to claim that it is magic, which is what chefs are now doing.”

The gender aspect he found interesting and telling—that now women are increasingly influential in professional kitchens. The CIA demographic described it accurately. Only a handful of women graduated from CIA programs through the 1960s. For a time women could not enroll at the CIA because the building didn’t have separate facilities to accommodate women, and until the 1970s there wasn’t enough demand by women to make the construction of such facilities worthwhile. “The CIA never stopped women from entering,” Kris noted, “they just couldn’t get
enough
women, which is revealing. As long as women are doing the cooking at home, they don’t want to go to school to learn it. They stop cooking at home suddenly, and their percentages go from zero or one percent through the 1970s—by the end of the 1980s, the post-feminist generation has grown up: young girls have grown up who no longer have the idea that the girl is in the kitchen, so now they’re ready to come back to the kitchen, in a professional sense—and the demographic goes up to twenty-five percent in the ’80s and ’90s, which is quite dramatic, in fact.” (As of the end of 2005, women made up 37 percent of the total enrollment, with 27 percent in the culinary arts and 76 percent in the baking and pastry program.)

And this he concluded underscored the fact that cooking for show, cooking for performance, becomes meaningful only once we have stopped cooking and others have stopped cooking at home.

Again, it can’t be called magic if we all do it. For cooking to remain magical, for chefs to maintain their status as celebrities, to be thought of as artists rather than laborers, it’s critical that we continue to pay other people to do our cooking for us, which ensures that the process will remain mysterious. But more than that, he’d said, we have to have magicians who “claim that it’s magic.” It’s the chef claiming it’s magic. Does that make the chef a shaman or salesman? Perhaps a little bit of both.

Also interesting to note is that as more and more people become interested in cooking, more do begin to do it at home. So what does that do to the magic aspect? I asked. “Magic will turn into fashion and the quest for the next new thing,” he said, “which is much more temporary.”

Krishnendu provided my perfect intellectual launch out of and away from the CIA and into two kitchens of CIA graduates: a woman and a man of roughly the same generation (she graduated in 1988, he in 1994) but who couldn’t be more different in terms of their style of food and style of restaurant.

Grant Achatz was one of the most impressive cooks I met while writing
The Soul of a Chef.
He worked the fish station at the French Laundry. He was young, twenty-three then, in 1998, yet he’d been at the Laundry for a year and had spent a year at Charlie Trotter’s. These were two of the greatest kitchens in America; Grant’s positions were coveted and difficult to land. Indeed, he’d mailed a letter a day to Keller to get Keller to respond, and ultimately, after receiving about twenty letters, Keller did, if only to stop getting the letters. Enhancing his actual youth was his even-younger appearance, with fair, light red hair cut short; a narrow face; sincere, brown deeply set eyes; and abundant freckles—a look befitting his disposition, that of a sweet, soft-spoken, earnest Midwesterner.

I liked Grant immediately. He stood out at the French Laundry even among a brigade that was almost uniformly standout. There was something about the very appearance of French Laundry cooks that set them apart from other cooks in other kitchens. Part of it was cleanliness. They worked clean—their jackets weren’t coming out of their aprons; they didn’t have blood all over themselves. There was an elegance, a natural efficiency, to their movements. But also something more. Their faces were unusually vivid. Someone else mentioned this to me—I think it was Steve Reiner, the
60 Minutes Wednesday
producer—he said: “They even look different.” He was right. Somehow the intensity of work there, the demands for focus and 100 percent commitment, somehow result in—I don’t know how else to put this—a clarity of being that is actually visible. It sounds crazy, but it’s true. You go to the French Laundry or Per Se, you look around, and if someone is not comfortable, doesn’t quite belong, you can
see
it. They don’t shine. Their discomfort, their inelegance, appears as if through a smudge on a lens.

That said, there was something even beyond this look about Grant. He was impressive in his movements, in his determination, in his articulation (uncommon in chefs as a rule, and especially uncommon in twenty-three-year-old cooks), and in his skills as a line cook. Being a line cook at the French Laundry is something. During any given service, Grant was responsible for prepping, cooking, and plating about nine separate dishes. And we’re not talking steak-frites. His were complicated dishes with multiple components, along with expectations of perfect cooking technique and on-the-money internal temperatures.

The most interesting thing Grant taught me then was the importance of cutting your own shallots. The importance of this didn’t have to do with the quality of the shallots, either, but rather with how you thought about them and how you used them. In some kitchens, it’s fine to dump your peeled shallots into a food processor and pulse them till they’re reduced to a kind of shallot medley, everything from juice to mince to big chunks—a compromise made by lazy cooks. In other kitchens, a single prep cook will mince the shallots for the entire line. Grant learned to appreciate chopping his own shallots, even though he scarcely had time for it.

“It affects your psyche,” he told me. “If you take a half hour to chop shallots, you’re going to make sure they don’t get wasted.” This was a remarkable thing for a twenty-three-year-old cook to have sensed and learned—and, moreover, articulated.

When I next sought Grant out, six years later, he was the executive chef of Trio, in Evanston, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. He’d been named a Best New Chef by
Food & Wine
in 2002; he’d won the Rising Star Chef award from the James Beard Foundation in 2003, given to one chef age thirty or younger; and in 2004 he’d earned four stars from the
Chicago Tribune,
which said he was “the most dynamic, boundary-stretching chef to hit town in a long, long time.”

I arrived in Evanston on a night the restaurant was closed and so was able to have dinner with Grant and his wife, Angela, at their home. Grant grilled some sausages and corn still in its husk while Angela finished the potato salad. We ate in their backyard near the Weber, while their two boys, Kaden, age two and a half, played, and Keller, age six months, gurgled. When I asked Grant how he was doing, he shook his head as if still disbelieving it. “Really good,” he said, “amazingly good.” He’d arrived at Trio July 1, 2001, and this summer, 2004, would be his last. He planned, he told me, to announce to his staff in a few days that he’d be leaving Trio on July 31 to open his own restaurant in Chicago called Alinea.

The reason I’d wanted to return to meet him again was not only to explore the trajectory of a young cook moving up in the chef world but also because of the
kind
of food he was serving. Trio cooked what was sometimes referred to as “out there” food. Weird food. What-is-it? food.
Is
-it-food? food. For example, I’d heard “pizza” came as a tiny square of white paper, stuck on the tip of a pin. Even Thomas Keller, Grant’s mentor, had told me, “I’m a little worried about Grant.”