The Reach of a Chef (9 page)

“I agree that tempering emotions is a necessity, you’re correct in that and I will continue to struggle with it,” Pardus wrote in an e-mail to Felder while I was there.

“The perpetuation of the belief that ‘fearing the wrath of the Chef is a time-tested tool for getting young cooks to follow directions,’” Felder wrote back,

She signed it, “Respectfully, Eve,” and the conversation continued long after I left the school. Felder was right and Pardus was right; Felder expressed a utopian ideal, and Pardus described the reality as he experienced it daily in the kitchen with a score of new, very different students every fifteenth class day.

Felder’s idea, echoed by Ryan, about cooking to the item, to the potato and the strawberry, is apt and what makes teaching today so much more complex and difficult than it used to be (and probably so much more effective). Truth is, the cooking world is filled with knuckleheads. It’s filled with humanity of every stripe. For a knucklehead, a group I include myself in, yelling works. Fear is a splendid motivator. Turgeon learned this way, too. Why did he start to hustle so hard at his first job after the CIA, at Vidalia under Jeffrey Buben, what made him excel? “I wanted the chef to stop yelling at me so much,” he said, grinning at the memory.

But there are a lot of people out there who don’t respond to chefs who, as one phrased it, “discuss with volume.” Mary the mortgage banker surely doesn’t need some hard-ass screaming in her ear to clean her goddam station. Nor the thoughtful Carrie, who was moving from the hope of cooking to the intent to write about it. How does an instructor pitch his or her teaching to students with such diverse goals in the same class? The only way I know of is smaller, more specialized classes, but until that happened, Pardus and Turgeon, both CIA grads, both cooks and chefs who learned by getting their asses kicked and by working really, really hard, would continue to grapple.

“Hard to believe,” Pardus wrote to me toward the end of the summer when I asked about the issue, “but I’ve become an anachronism. I’m looking at it as a challenge. If I can soften my delivery without diluting the intensity, I will become the teacher I want to be: one who is tough and rigorous but engaging. Alienating students is not in the long term best interest of my career.”

I wrote back to Pardus, telling him he reminded me of Cool Hand Luke after he’d dug that dirt out of Boss’s hole for the last time—
“I got mah mind right, Boss!”
Pardus said he was afraid I’d say something like that.

After I’d finished in garde manger, and saw Turgeon in the hall, I asked him if he remembered to hug his students today. He grunted, shook his head, and looked away.

I’m sure I was annoying to them, and they knew they were taking a risk before their colleagues, if not the CIA president and his administration, just by
talking
to me, and for that I was truly grateful, but I couldn’t help it. I loved this school and all these chefs. They were really passionate about what they did, and what they did was to teach people how to work with food and everything that followed from that—which, as far as I was concerned, meant pretty much everything.

And as far as the students went, there were good ones and bad ones, diligent ones committed to extracting as much information from this place as possible and others who preferred to let the information wash over them. In my observation, the students who complained said more about themselves than about the school or this or that instructor—they defined themselves as people who put blame elsewhere rather than take responsibility for their actions. The harder they argued their point, the deeper they entrenched themselves. Those students who said that the school wasn’t tough enough, that the instructors didn’t push hard enough—they were the ones you wanted on your team.

“I want to welcome you. I’m Michael Pardus, your instructor in K-1 for Asian cuisines.”

This was the pre–Day 1 meeting in which the chef set the ground rules for the next block or course of study and did his best to ensure that all were prepared and ready to roll the moment the block began.

With the curriculum revamp in 2001, not only had the name of the class been changed to more accurately reflect the cuisine (it used to be “Oriental” cuisine), it had been lengthened from one half block—seven days, followed by seven days of charcuterie, to a full block. The eighteen students now seated around a long table in the Continuing Education Center’s dining room were currently finishing up their three-week block in American regional cooking, a course that also had been expanded from a half block (split with fish cookery) to a whole one. This made a huge difference. Pardus noted that in his class, for instance, instead of spending a scant one day each on Japan, Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam, they spent two. India and China got three days. This was enough for a brief overview of these styles, and importantly, the students got to prepare their menus at least twice rather than once. So, if your Thai papaya salad and green pork curry were lame, you had a chance to figure out why and try to fix it the next day. Previously the food with which most students were least familiar went by in a blur. Cuisines of Asia still remained a sprint, but there was now time for the class to develop a routine—they were still mastering basic restaurant service in addition to the food itself, rules of sanitation, station setup, and the order-fire-pickup that began at 6:00 sharp.

“I don’t care who gets the food as long as it gets there. I don’t care who cleans the floor as long as it’s clean and half of you aren’t in the courtyard smoking,” he says, running through the rules of his kitchen after handing out tracking schedules, who’s on which station on which days, what each station is responsible for, and a sheet spelling out exactly what he means by being prepared. “I know at five-thirty if the sous-chef has done a good job…. I really emphasize how you organize yourselves. Come to class fully armed with all the information you can bring to show you are prepared. You have daily assignments. I do not collect homework. This is so you cannot do a Google search of key terms and cut and paste.”

Key terms included materials and methods—such as
paneer
and
katsuobushi
on days for the cuisines of India and Japan, respectively—about eight to ten a day.

“You do this, you don’t understand your menu or a recipe, or anything, you ask me at three-fifteen, you’ll get a gentle, patient person. Never hesitate to ask me. What’s a severe bias cut—hell, what’s a bias cut? What’s it mean ‘medium-low wok’—what’s medium low for a wok? You come and ask me that at five-thirty, I’m going to tell you to go take a walk around the block, because you aren’t prepared.

“I have a reputation for having a really hard edge. But I’m very passionate about what I do and when people don’t join me in my passions,” he says, and his lips curl into a tight grin, “I get a little cranky…. I’m really into it.” Pardus has traveled in Japan, Thailand, has connections in Singapore—they speak English there, he tells the class, so it’s not an intimidating place to extern, if they want that, he can help them line up work—and he has begun this year to organize a culinary tour of Vietnam. This is his fourth course during the ten years he’s been at the school. “It’s been my best so far,” he tells them. My final days back at the CIA would be the first four days of his course, cuisines of China and Korea. The menu included Hot and Sour Soup, Smoked Bean Curd and Celery Salad, Lacquered Pork Ribs, Crispy Tangerine Chicken, Moo Shu Vegetables, and Shanghai-Style Fish with Bok Choy and Fried Rice. Pardus’s kitchen, like Turgeon’s, was on the basement level of the main building and so had no windows and was long and narrow. Its dry-storage cage contained unfamiliar items, such as
nam prik pao
(a Thai chili paste), various fish sauces, noodles made from mung bean starch. There was a bank of ranges, but there was also a tall box used for steam-roasting and smoking pork ribs and pork shoulder butt and Peking duck; a tandoor oven; and three traditional restaurant woks with about 135,000 BTUs beneath them (a normal range produces about 20,000)—lift a wok off its base, the dozens of jets of flame below looked like rocket-engine output. Cooking in one of these numbers was an education—the kind of experience you can get only by doing it. The wok got so hot, you couldn’t let your food sit still in it; you had to keep your food dancing above the surface continuously or you’d burn it. Above these woks were wall spigots for cleaning them with a big wood-handled brush, then tipping the water out into a trough that channeled it to a drain behind the stove.

It felt good to be back in class. You arrived and got straight to work—no lecture or preamble from the chef, no dithering while others got their shit together. In K-1 we gathered product and began making our dishes, developed by Pardus, Shirley Cheng, and their colleagues in Asian. At first, Pardus said he felt a little intimidated and unsure—how authoritative could a white boy from Connecticut be on Asian cuisines? Eventually, after a lot of study and travel, he thought he might have an advantage over Shirley Cheng, from Chengdu, China, or Prem Kumar, from Kerala, on the southern coast of India. They cover seven regions of the Eastern world, and while Cheng or Kumar would no doubt bring an authoritative depth to their native regions, they also had their own biases. Pardus hoped he’d bring both knowledge and balance to every region.

Early on the first day, a student approached Chef Pardus with a chunk of ginger she’d just peeled. “Do you want this grated or minced?” she asked.

He said, “Minced,” then paused. “Ya know, why don’t you get me a piece of ginger, a peeled carrot, and a scallion at your station, and I’ll show everyone how I want them done.” The first day, he answers a lot of questions and demos a lot of the basics they’ll be using each day.

“Hey, folks, come on down here so I can show you something real quick,” he called to the class when the ginger, carrot, and scallion were ready at the station. But he scanned the long steel table, lined with food and cutting boards, and said, “Where are your tasting spoons? How can you cook without tasting?”

“We’re that good,” a student in front of him said.

“I’m gonna call you on that one,” Pardus returned. “That’s the kind of statement that’s gonna come back and bite you on the ass. I’m the only one allowed to be cocky here.” He grinned, then moved on to peeling ginger: “Instead of using a knife or a peeler, use a spoon. It gives you a better yield and you can also dig into the crevices. When you mince it, don’t cut it into random chunks”—he makes a frenetic chopping motion—“and talk about what you did over the weekend. You bruise it. I want a nice, clean, dry mince.”

Next he demoed a scallion—long cuts on the bias, noting that there are all kinds of biases you can use on a scallion, but he wanted, he said, “nice, long, pretty, thin, feathery pieces…. I’m holding my knife like they taught me in Skills. Don’t worry about raging speed. Do it right.”

And he demoed a carrot. Rather than squaring it off, removing the rounded edges, he sliced it on a bias into thin sheets, then fanned the sheets like a deck of cards on the board and rocked his knife across the sheets to create a quick julienne, uniform in width but of differing lengths. “No waste, a lot faster,” he said. “Are these good enough for a consommé? Probably not. Are they good enough for a stir-fry? Absolutely.”

And on we went through to service, three and a half hours that zip by. This is another part of the life and spirit of the kitchen—the nature of time feels different here. Time goes by really fast in a kitchen, but not in the sense of your not being aware of it, an effect often described by artists and craftsmen when they become deeply engaged in their work. It’s the opposite. You’re intensely aware of time—service is at 6:00, after all, and you’ve got to know where you stand relative to that. But because time moves at a rate that’s different from normal clock time, you simply have to learn to sense that those nuts you put in the oven or those beets roasting in foil ought to be done by now.

One result of this unique time dynamic is that it’s easy to spend twelve hours in a kitchen and have it feel like a normal day at work. Are you tired? Yes, but not that tired—it’s not like time spent sitting at a desk or taking call in your hospital’s ICU for twelve hours or a shift in the mailroom. There’s something about the combination of working with food—the nature of the craft of cooking, its physical and mental demands—and the irrevocable deadline of service that changes one’s sense of time. The relentless daily service is critical to the dynamic. It keeps you engaged in the time you might otherwise tend to forget about altogether, as a painter or woodworker does. You can’t be heedless if the deadline of daily service looms—when you will either be prepared (and have a good night and your soul is nourished) or you will not be prepared (and you get your ass kicked and your soul is bruised).

I thought about this squishy time business because I’d spent that morning, starting before seven, in the Caterina kitchen, the school’s showcase restaurant serving the public, watching another class study balsamic vinegars, then prepare for service. By the time I got out of Pardus’s class, after dinner, cleanup, lecture, and a quiz, it was after nine and getting dark. And I felt great, tired as if from a good workout, not beat. This was a beneficial aspect of the kitchen. But also it led some chefs to work too hard—those chefs who wouldn’t leave the kitchen feeling good, because if you felt good it meant you could still do more work, and so they invariably worked past that point of feeling good, always trying to do more, because they were chefs and that’s how they lived. A fourteen-to sixteen-hour day is fine, but if it’s all you do, seven days a week, it’s gonna run you down and crush you eventually. You had to know your limits; you had to find the right balance of work to nonwork time.

Theo Roe’s Skill Development I ran simultaneously with Pardus’s class, and I’d make periodic dashes from one to the other for numerous reasons. I was curious about how Skills had changed, because it had been so important to me, was the place where I learned what I needed to know in order to learn the rest. Roe, moreover, was a brand-new teacher, and this was his very first class—all new instructors begin by teaching Skills, as is appropriate, I suppose. Roe, I discovered, had been a sous-chef under Pardus when Pardus was running the kitchen of Mustards, in the Napa Valley, Cindy Pawlcyn’s seminal bistro, then followed Pardus to Sonoma when Pardus took over the Swiss Hotel. And, finally, I wanted to know the students who were currently entering Skills at the CIA. This was perhaps the most surprising of all.

I don’t think what I found was unusual, but it felt dramatic. Before Roe’s class, I’d attended a meeting of incoming students, about ninety or so, and afterward met by chance an accountant, a sales and marketing professional, and an attorney—two women, one man—each in his or her forties or early fifties, entering culinary school, what some people still considered a trade school, Dr. Ryan’s views notwithstanding. From there I headed to Roe’s class. His students, having arrived early, lingered outside under and around a gazebo. I met a personal injury lawyer and a New York City landlord, a cop from Wichita, and a Boston social worker, each in the early to mid-forties. Dan, a Chinese American still in his twenties, had grown up in the restaurant owned by his dad in Brooklyn, then had been on Wall Street for five years but wanted to return, he said, to the work he felt he ought to be doing—restaurant work. A UCLA graduate who’d worked in L.A. entertainment and also the dotcom world before it burst was among them, along with Guy Anderson, thirty-six, who’d left his job as a director of communications for West Virginia University. And there was also a fifty-three-year-old orthopedic surgeon named Phil Farris, from southern Louisiana. He’d been working in hospitals since age fourteen, but when two close friends died of heart attacks, he took it as a warning to seize the day and decided to follow his passion for food. He was such a foodie, he said, he felt like a Jew wandering the desert until he arrived here, and realized, “I’ve found my people!”

He’d enrolled hoping to one day open a restaurant in Belize, where he owns some land, but then discovered, he said, “now I don’t know, there’s so many opportunities.”

On their first day, after a thorough tour of the kitchen, the first order of business was to begin stocks, and it was helpful to have an orthopedic surgeon such as Phil in class. Chef Roe discussed various types of bones and how they affected the final stock—young bones have less flavor but more gelatin for body; older bones have more flavor but less gelatin; joints are loaded with gelatin; meat still on the bones is loaded with flavor. Roe lifted a large joint from a tub of beef bones, and Phil commented as if they were rounding on a patient and lecturing his interns.

“Anytime a bone meets a bone there’s going to be a lot of articulated cartilage,” he said, the class huddled around a pot on the stove. Roe held up the bone as Phil pointed. “This is the femur, and you’ll see at the distal end—the far end of the femur—here you’ve got your articulated cartilage. And that’s the meniscus,” he said, apparently delighted to see the connective tissue, the fibrocartilage, he’d so often repaired in aging and sports-damaged knees. Good gelatin means good body in your stock—ask your purveyor for extra articulated cartilage.

There was, indeed, an extraordinary range of students here. Far more eclectic than when Chef Roe, class of 1994, had been here. Theodore Roe, thirty-eight, from State College, smack in the middle of Pennsylvania, was a big, solid chef, six-two at least, blue eyes, brown hair, and an aw-shucks easiness in his conversation, whose early ambition to be a ski bum hastened his fall into cooking (he’d worked in kitchens throughout high school). He did his CIA externship at Mustards and there met Pardus.

I found Roe down in his cubicle—chef-instructors have desks on the top floor of the main building and typically share space with another instructor—with his
Pro Chef,
the CIA textbook, open to “Egg Cookery” and studying his computer terminal. I’m a fan of eggs, and we discussed the subject and agreed that much finesse was required for superlative eggs. Eggs lead Theo immediately into a personal testament to the importance of excellent egg technique.