The Reach of a Chef (40 page)

“The chef is the one who’s setting the standard,” Keller says. “The chef expresses a vision. The chef motivates people. The chef gives his staff the tools they need to excel. Is that being a CEO? Definitely.”

This fact, the fact that the chef is a CEO, changes the whole restaurant culture, forces the people working in it to reevaluate their skills and their ambitions, a reevaluation that begins now all the way back in cooking school, where so many young culinarians begin their careers. The changing nature of the work of a chef is shaping the schools that are shaping the kids. And the best of them will open restaurants like Primo and Alinea, they’ll move into food corporations and hospitality institutions and raise the standards there. Some of them will find their way onto television and perhaps have the most influence of any of their colleagues because of the vast numbers of people they can reach through this medium, provided they remember food television is about personality and entertainment and only incidentally about food.

The chef is now a powerful force, and with that power the chef can start businesses, develop products, and change people’s minds. Is this a good thing? If the business is a good one, it is; if the product is good, yes. But only if.

Within all this complexity—chefs traveling around the globe, everywhere but in their own restaurants it sometimes seems—all this product development, entertainment, rollouts, buyouts, licensing, and merchandising, where is the romance of professional cooking? The chef in his kitchen, the romantic life of the chef. Was it a lie, a kind of consumer-generated fantasy that made it more fun to eat out and made more respectable the slog of kitchen work? The best in the country scarcely cooked anymore
as a direct result of their success at cooking.
If it was inevitable that the best in this field ultimately selected themselves out, was the American restaurant in danger of a kind of reverse Darwinism? A thriving of the least fit? Somehow that doesn’t seem outlandish in this crazy food-neurotic country, driven by agribusiness that eliminates the variety of our crops and debases our livestock. But is it true?

No, because Melissa is in the kitchen this very moment, and so is Grant, and Masa’s restaurant can’t open if he’s not in his kitchen. Polcyn and Pardus and Turgeon are teaching scores of the next generation—they’re in their whites and holding a student’s chef’s knife to begin a demo, and if that knife isn’t sharp as a straight razor, I hope they keep that knife till the student learns that his or her knives are sacred. They are the tools of the trade—and it
is
a trade, a proud one when it’s properly practiced, and also a trade that can become an art only if the cook chooses to stay in the kitchen. The kitchen is where the complexity of the professional cooking world is not muddled by business-school jargon and greedy ambition and ego. The product is good or it is not, it’s cooked right or it’s not, it’s delicious or it is not. The end makes it clear.

When this whole chef world gets too complicated, when all this talk of branding is too much, and the head spins with notions of rollouts and management contracts and licensing deals and charitable foundations and television opportunities and Vegas, there’s always this: the kitchen. We’ve all got to eat. A kitchen is a good place to be, almost always the best place in the house, whether that house is a home or a restaurant. A place where you can’t lie to yourself. Go to the kitchen. Wipe down your counter till it shines. Set out a heavy cutting board. Steel a paring knife and a chef’s knife. Gather your shallots, your parsley, your tomatoes, and the rest of your mise en place, and stand in one place and cook for a long time. That’s the greatest thing about a kitchen—it’s guaranteed always to be there, will always be only and exactly what it is. That’s where the greatness begins. And it will be there for you when you come back in from the complex world that it opened up for you.

I’d like to thank all the chefs who participated in this book. They were unfailingly generous with their time, their knowledge, and their kitchens.

I’d also like to thank, as ever, my agent, Elizabeth Kaplan, and my editor, Ray Roberts. I’m grateful also to production editor Bruce Giffords at Viking. The copy editor of this book, John Jusino, deserves special thanks for saving me from innumerable embarrassments regarding name spellings and dangling clauses. Two magazines,
Gourmet
and
Golf Connoisseur,
gave me assignments (and travel and expense money) to pursue information that is included in this book, material I’d have been unable to get otherwise.

Last, I’d like to thank my family for allowing me so much time away—and for being so fine when I got home.