The Reach of a Chef (6 page)

Three years later, Wolfgang Puck opened Spago in West Hollywood, then fired up the steamroller and carried his California cuisine—American nouvelle gone rustic, but still created with classic French technique and served on fine china in a dramatic setting—across America, first with restaurants and innovations, such as the open kitchen in a fine-dining restaurant and Asian fusion cuisine, then with his pizza and fast food.

After these three chefs, whose rise and monopoly span about a decade, comes a slew of groundbreakers, but few stand out to match these forerunners, chef-restaurateurs whose influence on the American dining scene remains apparent even today (less so with Prudhomme, though his spices helped pave the way for celebrity-chef products). Who followed? Larry Forgione, An American Place, 1983 (American regional cuisine). Charlie Trotter, who opened his eponymous Chicago restaurant in 1987 (big tasting menus, small portions), and also in Chicago that year, Rick Bayless, who debuted Frontera Grill (popularizing an authentic artisanal approach to an ethnic cuisine, in this case Mexican). Jean-Georges Vongerichten (innovative techniques and food in exciting rooms, Jojo and Vong) and Nobu Matsuhisa (fine-dining Japanese) in Manhattan. Thomas Keller in Yountville (numerous innovations in classic French technique, presentation, and conception).

That would be my list of the Great American Chefs to date—a list that would be fun to argue with anyone because no doubt legions would be up in arms about his or her omission: How can you leave out Madeleine Kamman, Jeremiah Tower, Jonathan Waxman, Barry Wine? My response: They don’t hew to the four criteria. The shorter the list, the more meaningful it is.

But the guy who really started things for this modern era of the chef as cultural star, the man Tim Ryan calls “the Elvis Presley of the culinary world,” the person who could be said to be the original great modern celebrity chef was French. Paul Bocuse.

“There have been celebrity chefs for a long time—La Varenne, Carême, and Escoffier was undoubtedly a celebrity chef,” Ryan said, but it was the arrival of “Bocuse, starting in the seventies—that’s when things started to heat up.” Bocuse was really the first to play to the media and begin to elevate the chef’s standing toward what it is today.

When Ryan was starting out, Bocuse was who everyone wanted to be. In America, the role model had been Soltner—the chef as monk. But that changed in the seventies. Young American chefs went to Europe and returned aspiring to be, Ryan said, “like Bocuse and his band”—the Troisgros brothers, Alain Chapel, François Bise, Louis Outhier, and Raymond Thuilier, all disciples of the legendary Fernand Point and La Pyramide.

“And then we have the beginnings of the American food revolution in the eighties—folks become a lot more media savvy—media certainly gains traction and wants to write about chefs. They used to be called ‘star chefs’ back in the eighties. That’s when Wolfgang Puck started, and Larry Forgione and Jasper White, Todd English, Dean Fearing, Jeremiah Tower, and you can go through the list—many of them still big names today, or bigger names today.

“Then comes television, and I think that notches it up, because you have twenty-four-hour cable television, and that makes a big difference.

“But by and large I think it’s a good thing for the industry. The respect that chefs have as professionals is enhanced and higher than it ever has been before.”

To support this claim he mentioned two names synonymous with American fortunes and high society who now attend the institute. Indeed, that becoming a cook was now acceptable in the American aristocracy said everything about what America thinks of its chefs.

“This is a wonderful profession and opportunity,” Ryan said. “You can really do something great, and make a name for yourself, and maybe make another fortune if you already come from a fortune. It is socially not only acceptable but desirable.”

But I wondered aloud at this. This fact is due to a romanticized version of the chef. How long will the scion of blue-blooded aristocracy last in his first kitchen where he does nothing but peel veg and turn artichokes. You don’t just open a restaurant after graduation and expect booming business and TV show offers. It takes years of hard, hot work before you have the clout to move into the upper echelons of the profession—for those who make it at all into the upper echelons.

“Is this romanticized version of the chef harmful?” I asked Ryan.

“The answer to every question legitimately is, it depends. It’s no different from wanting to be Tiger Woods and having an idealized version of that, or wanting to be Tom Cruise. Very few people end up making it to those rarefied levels. But part of being American is to be able to aspire to that. That any kid can be president, that may be a uniquely American perspective—I don’t know. But is that ability to dream, to aspire to do great things, good for society? I have to believe it is.”

“Why are so many people interested, some would even say obsessed, with this work, with ‘The Chef’?” I asked.

“It sounds trite,” Ryan answered, “but it’s one of those things that everybody in the world has in common—everybody eats, and everybody has to cook or go out or whatever.” In the fifties, the country had different priorities, he explained. We weren’t focused on food. But society began to change—America began to change. “Without a highway system, the food-service industry really doesn’t evolve in the way that it does—without a popularization of the automobile, you can’t forget about that and modern transportation. But people can relate to food, and think they have some experience with it and try it out. I can admire Ernie Els or Phil Mickelson or Tiger Woods just by watching them on TV even if I’m not a golfer. But if I go out there and try to do it, and see how hard it really is, your appreciation and respect is enhanced, and since everybody eats and the majority of people cook, when you see a truly great practitioner you can appreciate it in a different way.

“I think we have some characters, too,” he continued. “Chefs have personalities, there’s no question about it. We tend not to be bland individuals. God bless all my friends in the accounting industry, but you tend not to want your accountant to be flamboyant and adventurous and risk-taking. But in an artist and in a chef those things are desirable. That’s part of who they are. These people have personalities and are entertaining and they have talent. They’re not just comedians or actors—they are practitioners of a craft.”

The comedian remark made me think of Emeril, the biggest celebrity chef there was, but whom Amanda Hesser in
The New York Times
had called a “jester.”

“You have to take a look at the big picture,” Ryan said immediately upon my bringing this name up. “Is Emeril Lagasse good for the profession? The answer is yes.”

This of course was a tacit way of saying he didn’t like what Lagasse did on his show, an all but unanimous opinion among chefs.

“I don’t know if you read
The New York Times
article,” he said. “That was true.”

Politically astute and in a position of authority, Ryan didn’t want to say anything bad about Lagasse publicly, but I pressed. He was willing to talk off the record about his feelings and ultimately composed an opinion via e-mail that he felt comfortable with:

I sensed the remark about raw spices was a particular peeve of his—he’d mentioned it before—and it’s one I appreciated. Emeril had become famous for throwing raw spices on food and shouting
“Bam!”
That was his trademark, the move he was most associated with, the technique that half a million households were being trained to do nightly. Be like Emeril, go out and buy your own bottle of Emeril’s Essence and “kick it up a notch” by taking big pinches of raw spices, slamming them into the pan, and shouting at your food. For me, fun though it was, good TV though it was, this single act was symbolic of the worst of Emeril: His most famous message and lesson to millions was a bad one (not to mention a sales pitch for his line of spices). He was teaching a lot of people a lesson in mediocrity. How do you best use spices? You toast them for maximum effect. Do you
have
to toast the whole seeds and grind them fresh in order to use them? No. Can you just open Emeril’s blend, which you’ve had in the cupboard for six months, and throw it into your food? Sure. Will it change the flavor? Yes. Should people know the difference between one way and another, the right way and the compromised way, at least be able to make a considered choice in their own kitchens?
I
think so. To me that’s what cooking’s all about. Cooking is not about shouting at your food, but also there’s nothing wrong with shouting at your food. We take the good with the bad. And anyway, I’d feel too much like a foodie snob to say anything truly bad about Emeril. I’d hear about how great a guy he is—has a big charity fund. Kids with terminal illnesses have made a trip to this guy’s show their top make-a-wish priority. He’s a unique American celebrity, the first of his kind, an original.

Ryan leaned back in his chair, relaxed and comfortable. Behind him spread the beautiful Hudson Valley, students in chefs’ whites thronging below, the CIA nearing its sixtieth anniversary, stronger than ever in a culture that promised only to increase the opportunities and esteem for chefs. I just looked at him.

I said, “You must be having a blast.”

“Yeah, I totally am,” he said, smiling warmly—it seemed he was dropping his guard. “I think I’m at one of the great places of the world. And I would say, part of what has happened [in the chef world], the CIA is responsible for. Don’t forget in 1946—”

He halted. The scent was powerful, and we’d both smelled it at the same time and thought the exact same thing.
Spices.
The aroma of coriander seeds and peppercorns being roasted somewhere below had wafted up and into the room. Ryan was delighted to have support material floating in through the window. “See! We’re not throwing in raw spices—somebody’s got ’em in a pan, toasting them!”

It smelled great, and I wondered how they’d be used—some sort of Asian preparation, perhaps, or maybe someone had finished curing a beef brisket and was about to turn it into pastrami.

“In 1946,” he resumed, “the image of a chef is pretty damn low. Anything good is European dominated, and Mrs. Roth, with the help of Mrs. Angell, formalized culinary education. The level the CIA was aspiring to achieve did not exist in the world. And so we started off with this uniquely modern approach.”

Frances Roth, a lawyer by profession, founded the CIA, then called the New Haven Restaurant Institute, to give war veterans a skill useful in the food industry. She could scarcely have imagined that the American food industry would in four decades become a food revolution. The place opened with a class of fifty students. Today approximately fifty-five thousand people are enrolled in hundreds of culinary degree programs throughout the country. Ryan believed that not just the school but the level of professionalism this lawyer brought to the mission of the school was responsible for its growth and prominence, and the status of the chef in America.

“Without professionalization it doesn’t happen—chefs are perceived as fry cooks and hash slingers,” he said.

“When modern-day chefs do things that somebody—let’s say there are some things that people see in Rocco’s show that they don’t like or in Emeril’s show culinary-wise, or in Tony Bourdain’s book, their fear is that we’ll go back to those days when we were viewed as hash slingers. So there is some real fear of that. But I think the momentum professionally is too great.”

“So where’s it going?” I asked. “Are we at a crest?”

“I have to think that we’re only beginning on this journey,” he said, noting that he’s been searching other businesses and industries for a model he might learn from, but as yet he hasn’t found a profession that’s “become so white-hot and done some wrong things and exploded.”

He also notes that the world is different than it was when the CIA opened its doors. Ryan is well versed in business literature, often bringing up gurus Jim Collins and Tom Peters. It’s not just a matter of getting the right people on the bus; you’ve got to get them in the right seat, he explained when talking about hiring his staff.

Business in the old economy, he says, is like a crew race on the Charles River: a competition on still water against a clear competitor, a rigorous, organized, concentrated effort expended over a known period. At the end there is a clear winner, and it is done.

Our current business world is white-water rafting: “You’re hanging on for dear life,” he said. “It’s not linear. It’s
directional
at best. You can’t see obstacles, you can’t see competitors. This white-water situation is permanent, so get a grip.”

And it’s that kind of world he wants CIA graduates prepared for when they leave. Students have to be more than cooks. The dynamic of history can be described as one of “increasing complexity.” There was only one time in history when we went backward, he noted, and we named it the Dark Ages. Everyone entering the work world, culinary graduates no less than anyone, needed to account for this increasing complexity. To the kids who come in here saying I just want to learn how to cook, Ryan says, once you’re out in the world “you don’t get to
just
cook. You’re going to be doing a whole lot of other things, so to prepare students to just cook, it’s belittling to the profession.