FOUR
Course Work
After nearly a lifetime of wanting to become a chef, I’d like to say that I spent weeks researching all the different New York City culinary schools, comparing programs, checking the instructors’ pedigrees, evaluating their job placement programs. But I didn’t. I simply called the number I saw on a television commercial that emphasized career change and made an appointment with the New York Restaurant School. After acing a ridiculously easy basic math skills test, all I had to do was fill out some student loan forms, sign some papers, and I was in.
The majority of my fellow students were also career changers, though most were younger than me. Most were men, and at least one was rumored to have been recently incarcerated and to have enrolled in the school as part of a job rehabilitation program. Some students had worked in kitchens, mostly in hotels or catering halls, and came to school with the hopes of improving their skills or at least gaining a leg up via a diploma. The majority of these students (predominantly the men) thought they knew more than the rest of us and were eager to show off their superiority. I kept my job at Nobu to myself for quite a while, not wanting to risk sounding arrogant. I’d already learned that working in a restaurant, even a highly regarded one, didn’t necessarily mean you knew what you were doing.
Our classroom was set up to mimic a restaurant kitchen, with four stations, each with a set of burners, an oven, an overhead broiler, a grill, and a fryer. We sat attentively at four long stainless steel tables, each one of us in identical standard issue black-and-white-checked pants, starched chef ’s coat with our name, thick-soled black work shoes, and white socks. It was mandatory that we wear toques, the tall pleated paper hat that, to my mind, served no purpose but to get in the way. At Nobu, however, the cooks wore baseball caps or even just kerchiefs wrapped around their heads. We pastry people simply tied our hair back.
“You have chosen a difficult career,” Chef Fenton, our teacher, greeted us on our first day. He was short, with a protruding belly and thinning hair, and bore a profound resemblance to Homer Simpson. He shuffled around the classroom, dressed like us but with black pants instead of our black-and-white-checked. He made it clear that the nine-month, part-time course in which we had enrolled was meant for serious students working toward a career in the culinary arts, not for weekend hobbyists, and we would be treated accordingly.
“If you think you’re going to get out of school and make a lot of money, you are wrong.” He paused, waiting for disappointment. We just sat there. “You will work fifty, sixty, seventy, sometimes eighty hours a week and be on your feet the entire time. You will do the same thing every day. The. Same. Thing. Every. Day. You will be yelled at.”
Pause.
“If you do not love cooking—absolutely love it—then you should leave now while you can still get most of your money back, because there is no other reason to go into this business. No. Other. Reason.”
Some people shifted on their stools; others stared back at him blankly. I waited, eager to move on to the actual learning part: the cooking. Enough with the intimidation.
He gave each of us a thick, black vinyl roll filled with tools: an eight-inch chef ’s knife, a three-inch paring knife, a boning knife, a tourneau knife, a whisk, wooden spoon, slotted spoon, rubber spatula, a set of measuring cups and spoons, and an eight-ounce ladle.
We had to learn about our tools before we could use them. We spent hours just on the knives: stainless steel versus carbon versus a hybrid, the virtues of a full tang (the metal of the blade extends into the full length of the handle, making it stronger), boning versus serrated versus tourneau (one with a short, curved blade ideal for “turning” vegetables, shaping them into small football shapes). I took notes as Chef Fenton went methodically through the rest of the tool kit, smirking when he got to the large kitchen spoons. He told us that slotted and nonslotted spoons were sometimes called female and male. It’s easy to remember, he explained; the female ones have the holes.
Did he just say that? I looked around for someone to commiserate with. A couple of the younger guys snickered knowingly at his little joke. Was he kidding? Or just preparing us for the rumored sexism of kitchens? Marina, my only real friend in the class, an African-American woman fifteen years older than me, rolled her eyes in commiseration. We thought he was ridiculous.
We got used to his inappropriate remarks. They were easy to ignore, and coming from Homer Simpson, they hardly threatened us. When Chef Fenton failed to appear one day and was subsequently replaced by a series of rotating teachers, we simply assumed he’d finally offended the wrong person.
Once familiar with our tools, we were allowed to use them and spent an inordinate amount of time on knife skills: how quickly and effectively we could use our new knives to chop, cut, slice. We brunoised (chopped into tiny 2-millimeter squares) carrots; we diced (cut into ⅛- to ½-inch squares) potatoes; and we chiffonaded (sliced into very thin strips) leafy herbs, making sure the entire time that we remembered all the new vocabulary as well as how to perform the skills they referred to because both would appear on our test. If we practiced, we were promised, our muscles would eventually “remember” how to get the vegetables and herbs to cooperate.
Once we’d gotten the basics down, we did eventually move on to actual cooking, though with only nine months of weekend classes, we had to breeze through the culinary canon: a single day each was allotted to sautéing, frying, broiling, and roasting of meats; two to sauces; two to butchering (we did fish and shellfish one day, meat and poultry the next); a day to pasta; a day to Chinese cooking (I could have learned more going out to eat in nearby Chinatown); and so on until we were done. Though the classes were always hands-on, and our tests were practical exams in which we had to reproduce particular food items (pesto, a medium-rare burger, shrimp bisque), they were overviews nonetheless, and little of the actual information I’d been so intent on learning there really sank in.
Despite the brevity with which we covered each topic, I loved class. I loved learning the techniques behind the endless cookbooks I’d pored over since childhood, and I loved impressing my roommates, friends, and family with my ability. I had my job at Nobu to keep me grounded. I knew with absolute certainty that, contrary to what some culinary students believe (especially those who go through prestigious two-year culinary programs), culinary school is simply a step on the way to becoming a chef. No one, absolutely no one, walks out of school ready to be a chef. Cooking as a trade simply involves too densely packed a skill set to be picked up over a few months (or even years) within the walls of a protective classroom. Experience—real experience—is everything.