Letters to a Young Chef (2 of 2 free samples)

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COPYRIGHT
Letters to a Young Chef by Daniel Boulud. Copyright 2003 by Daniel Boulud.
All Rights Reserved. Sharing not permitted.

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DO YOU REALLY WANT TO BE A CHEF? (CONT'D)

First, do not be in a hurry. Even if things fall into place perfectly, it will take you at least ten to fifteen years before you can truly call yourself a chef. You will need those years to acquire the culinary skills and absorb the management and people skills that you'll need as a chef.

So then the question becomes, How am I going to spend those beginning years? And I would answer that you should begin by spending at least two years traveling the world, working as you go, experiencing what is becoming an increasingly global cuisine. This is a luxury that I did not fully have in my early years. Once you have done that, spend a half dozen years working for the very best chefs you can find: Bear in mind, you will gain a lot more from making salad in the kitchen of a great restaurant then you will from attempting Lobster Thermidor in an average joint.

Sometimes you will be what we call a stagiaire (like an intern) and you may not even be paid. I know that sounds like being a medieval serf, but there's a lot of competition to get into the best kitchens and it may require that you do whatever it takes to get your foot in the door. Furthermore, once you have that kind of head start on your resume you will only advance by working harder and longer than the rest of the kitchen crew so that you become noticed by your chef. If you do this, you will have taken a tremendous first step, because that chef more than likely will give you a full-time position or provide a connection to a new job and more education in another restaurant with another talented chef.

I was very fortunate to begin my career in Lyon at a time when that part of France was at the forefront of a culinary revolution. I went from one great restaurant to another, learned as much as I could and was given more and more responsibility. I learned cooking. I observed a lot about what went into the front and back of the house. And I also learned something about luck.

In those years, when I worked in the kitchens of Roger Vergé, Michel Guérard and Georges Blanc -- at three of the top restaurants in France -- I never had the feeling that these chefs were merely lucky. They made their luck by working very hard, honing their skills and developing their art.

When you go to work in the kitchen of a great chef, chances are you'll learn as much or more from the souschefs around you and your fellow cooks in training. The best places attract the best people. You'll learn from them, compete with them, challenge them. Right now in my kitchens in New York, besides my mostly American cooks and chefs, we have people from China, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Israel, Italy, Spain and France. Every one of them knows something about food in his or her country that none of the rest of us knows.

Sometimes this international polyglot makes me laugh at the mishmash of cultures in modern kitchens. We had one Japanese cook who was very good but handled everything -- from a leaf of chervil to a lobster tail -- with his chopsticks. He was fast and precise, so I learned that there is more than one way to do things right in the kitchen, but still the technique amused me because it looked so strange in a classique kitchen. With slicing, though, he had the greatest precision I have ever seen. He could slice radishes for our cucumber soup blindfolded and they would look like they had come out of an expensive mandolin.

So, with the advent of truly global cuisine, a chef's education is not as straight a path as the one I took when I went from my first job at Nandron in Lyon and two years later drove sixty miles up the road to Georges Blanc. For a young chef today, you can make part of the global tour that I mentioned earlier simply by working in the right kitchens in the wide range of cuisines available in most cosmopolitan areas.

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