HERE’S A $40,000 SECRET. For all of its glamour and mystique, I learned only three things in culinary school: how to salt food properly, not to fear cooking over high heat, and to knock back beers like a pro. Nearly every chef who attended culinary school will tell you that your real education begins once you’re working in a restaurant. And that it’s a hell of a lot harder than any class.
Culinary school wasn’t an obvious choice for me after I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2006. When I returned home to New York City, my parents expected me to pursue a “real” (read: office) job befitting my almost two decades of rigorous schooling, but I saw things differently.
“I want to cook,” I announced to them one evening at the dinner table.
“You can cook any night you want. Think of it as earning your room and board here at home until you find a job,” my mom joked.
“No,” I said. “I want to really cook. In a restaurant.”
“Lauren, don’t be silly. Think about the money we’ve spent on your education. What was the point of all that hard work?”
“Maybe I shouldn’t have gone to college,” I said, pushing her buttons.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said.
“So if you become a cook, will the Bank of George Shockey be supplementing your nine-dollar-an-hour income?” said my father, finally mustering the energy to take part in our debate.
“Money doesn’t always bring happiness, you know,” I said.
“Maybe not, but it does pay the bills,” said my father. Maybe he was right. There might be a reason that chef jobs weren’t advertised on the University of Chicago’s career counseling website.
Yet despite the repetitive and sometimes menial aspects, I saw cooking as an intellectual process. It’s been argued that cooking—that is, applying fire to food—is what spurned our evolutionary development and made us human. Even though techniques and ingredients differ across oceans and lands, cooking is performed multiple times a day in every single culture in the world. It nourishes our bodies and propels our existence.
We can trace the rise and fall of modern civilizations by examining the transport and consumption of specific foods like salt, sugar, peppercorns, apples, or potatoes. We can learn more about a specific culture by analyzing the foods it cultivates or by discovering its culinary taboos; a book of recipes from a particular era is a diary of cultural tastes and mores. I love reading cookbooks and recipes for the stories they tell—whether they are about a famous chef, a home-cooking guru, a celebrated restaurant, a cuisine, or a culture—as much as for their recipes.
But cooking has always attracted me for other, more personal reasons. I wanted to cook because of the calmness that washes over me when I peel the ruddy outer layer of a carrot. As the blade emits soft grating sounds and thin strips of nearly translucent flesh fall into the garbage can, I contemplate the range of possibilities at hand. I can shred the carrot and transform it into a salad; I can chop it in chunks and boil it in salted water; I can leave it whole, rubbed in Moroccan spices, and grill it until caramelized; I can cut it in pieces, dip it in tempura batter, and fry it until golden brown; I can dice it and sauté it in a wok with sesame oil; or I can eat it plain and simple. I can follow any number of carrot recipes, or I can invent my own recipe on the spot. With cooking, the opportunities for creativity are boundless.
I had learned the culinary basics from my father (and, to a lesser extent, my mother), and growing up, I took pride in being a good amateur cook, though I still relied on cookbooks to guide me through the kitchen. When I was twelve years old, I cooked an elaborate dish of braised lamb shanks for my parents’ anniversary. To their annoyance, I used every pot in the kitchen and made a complete mess, but they didn’t leave a single bite on their plates. In my teens, I began throwing dinner parties for my friends, following recipes from cookbooks and savoring the praise that came at the end of the meal. To me, cooking for others was an easy means of finding approval and was a way that I, a somewhat shy person, could open up to others. But I wanted to become a bona fide chef so I could create my own recipes and cook for people with more discerning palates than those of my friends and family.
Unfortunately, my parents didn’t see this in my future, and I was eager to please them, so we compromised. I moved out of their place and into a small apartment in the Lower East Side, and I joined a public relations agency that represented major food companies. If my job couldn’t be making food, I could at least talk about it on a daily basis. Or so I thought. Instead, under the stark glare of fluorescent lighting, the photocopying machine became my primary companion. Shipping packages to clients became the highlight of my day, since that required leaving my gray-walled cubicle, stretching my legs, and giving my eyes a welcome break from the computer screen. The corporate environment just wasn’t for me; with each hour I spent at the photocopier armed with a mountain of press clippings, I vowed to escape.
“This job sucks,” I complained to my mother over the telephone after a particularly fruitless day.
“Lauren, all entry-level jobs are like this. Stick it out,” she said.
So I did, but I still felt that I was shriveling in that office. As the months of perdition in my cubicle crept by, my craving for the warmth and pleasures of the kitchen increased. I began cooking more frequently in the little apartment that I shared with Alainna, a college friend. We baked pies and made homemade ice cream, scattering flour and sugar all over the twelve inches of counter space, and I strolled through nearby Chinatown to procure bok choy and lemongrass for one-pot dishes, since we lacked a dishwasher and our rack dryer perched precariously against the sink’s faucet. After a year, in a big leap of faith, I quit my job and enrolled at the French Culinary Institute in SoHo, in downtown New York.
Culinary school was a revelation. No photocopying! No cubicles! No pantsuits! Where before I had been on the fast track to carpal tunnel syndrome from typing in a desk chair, I now used my hands to chop carrots into perfect little squares and to break down a chicken into eight pieces in less than two minutes. I whisked oil and egg yolks into mayonnaise and crimped uniform edges on an apple tart. Culinary school was physically tiring, even in the required orthopedic-style shoes, but it wasn’t that difficult. Sure, we had practical and written exams, but they were a far cry from my college statistics exams and twenty-page papers on seventeenth-century French literature.
Or maybe culinary school was hard, but I was just too excited to realize it. At my office job, the most human interaction I had consisted of small talk over coffee from the communal machine. But in culinary school, my new friends and I chatted a mile a minute as we cut potatoes and turnips into jardinière-sized pieces—an exact five millimeter by five millimeter square, four centimeters long—and played juvenile pranks like sticking our hands up chicken carcasses to make them dance or mooing while holding cow tongues up to our mouths. With each new day came a new kitchen skill to learn and a task to master, so different from the monotony of low-level corporate life. My new classmates shared my obsession with good food and drink, and we spent our afternoons over cold beers at nearby Toad Hall or martinis at Onieal’s. After cocktail hour, which began at three on the dot and ended around seven, we headed out for long dinners at lively restaurants like La Esquina, Momofuku Ssäm Bar, and Dos Caminos, where we ordered for the table and critiqued the chef’s offerings. “Needs more seasoning! Oui, oui! More seeeeeeesoning!” we joked in mock French accents, mimicking our instructors.
When culinary school ended, my practical education was far from complete. I had more to learn and more to see, so I sought out a stage. A stage, which—like most culinary terms—is French (and is pronounced “stazj” in English), is culinary-speak for an apprenticeship offering hands-on experience and familiarity with new techniques and cuisines. I decided to go to France to learn traditional techniques, and with the help of the school’s job coordinator, I found work at a tiny restaurant in Toulouse called Au Gré du Vin, owned and run by Sami El-Sawi, an American chef of Egyptian descent, and Beatrice Wandelmer, his French wife. I was fortunate enough to secure grant money to fund my kitchen adventures, and I hopped on a plane to spend the summer of 2008 learning French cuisine as a stagiaire (pronounced “STAH-zjee-air”), or kitchen apprentice.
Toulouse is known as “La Ville Rose” for the red-and-pink brick buildings that line its narrow streets. Although it is France’s fifth largest city, it feels like a small town, divided by canals and the Garonne River and dotted everywhere with sidewalk cafés. At Au Gré du Vin, I was hired to work five days a week, from ten a.m. through the lunch service. After an afternoon break, I would return at seven to work the dinner service and finish around midnight.
“Hello! Welcome, welcome. We’re informal here,” Sami said in English at the restaurant on my first day of work which began with that night’s evening shift. He led me through the brick-walled dining room and into the minuscule kitchen.
“I guess I don’t need to wear my neckerchief,” I said nervously. In culinary school, all of the chefs wore white jackets, but Sami wore blue jeans, a black chef’s jacket, and an apron tied around his waist. He resembled a late-forty-something James Dean: rugged and rebellious, with a pack of Camels always within arm’s reach.
“Do whatever you’re comfortable with,” he said. He escorted me to the restroom, located in the adjacent courtyard, where I could change into my culinary school uniform of a white chef’s jacket, black-and-white houndstooth pants, apron, baker’s cap, and black leather clogs.
When I returned to the kitchen, Beatrice had arrived and was ironing a pile of white cotton napkins and folding them into neat little squares. She was petite, reaching only to Sami’s shoulder, and she trotted back and forth between the kitchen and dining room, setting out napkins and lighting votive candles. In black slacks and a short-sleeved blouse, she looked effortlessly chic, even without makeup.
“You do everything for the front-of-house?” I asked, wondering how Beatrice managed all the restaurant duties that weren’t specifically kitchen related.
“Yes. I greet the customers, take orders, pour wine, and I also do the ironing and serving and I take the dishes away. Since it’s only me and Sami here, I’m like an actor, always taking on a new role,” she said.
“How do you manage it all?” I said. Even with only a handful of tables, I couldn’t envision running a restaurant without at least one waiter or dishwasher to help out.
“It’s been slow recently. We don’t have any reservations tonight. I hope you won’t be bored,” said Beatrice.
“Oh. Um, okay,” I said, trying to conceal my disappointment.
I began by following Sami’s instruction to snap off the woody ends of a heap of asparagus, my first official task. Asparagus can be tough and will break naturally at the base when snapped, letting you know exactly where the woody end stops. It was a basic task, but I was happy to do it, since it was virtually impossible to screw up. Even though I had excelled in culinary school, being in a real restaurant—even one as small and homey as Au Gré du Vin—made me anxious.
“Here, you can clean these, too, when you’re done with the asparagus. We picked them ourselves in the woods by our country house,” said Sami, materializing from his cigarette break and retrieving a large crate of chanterelle mushrooms from the refrigerator.
I faced nearly five pounds of firm chanterelles, the golden-hued mushrooms that look like miniature tree trunks. I hunched over my workstation and set about precisely scraping the stems with a paring knife and removing excess dirt with a small wooden brush.
“Some people wash mushrooms under water or soak them in a bowl of water filled with a couple drops of lemon juice to remove the grit and sand, but they can get waterlogged that way,” Beatrice explained. “Instead, you can just use a brush to wipe off the dirt and then a paper towel to lift off what remains.”
As I worked, I listened to the sounds of silence punctuated only by the repetitive tick-tock of the wall clock. Why weren’t there any reservations tonight? Or walk-ins? Why didn’t Beatrice or Sami appear concerned as they multitasked their way through the interminable silence?
“Perhaps when we’re done with this, I can show you around the neighborhood,” Beatrice said an hour later. Clearly no one was dining at Au Gré du Vin tonight. I wondered if Sami had prepped food earlier in the day and if it would go to waste. Since the only menu options were prix fixe four-or five-course meals, though, I figured their food costs were probably lower than those of restaurants offering six or seven different entrées. Or maybe the prepared food would be served to customers tomorrow. If there were customers tomorrow.
“That would be great,” I said, noticing that Sami had tied up his apron and left without bidding either of us farewell. This was an odd situation, but I appreciated Beatrice’s thoughtfulness. I didn’t know a soul in Toulouse, after all; I was renting a cramped, un-air-conditioned room overlooking a stairwell in an apartment occupied by a woman and her two teenage sons, and I already felt like an intruder in their home.
We placed the cleaned mushrooms back in the crate and covered them with a damp paper towel, which Beatrice explained would keep them from drying out overnight. I changed back into my street clothes, sat at one of the seven empty dining room tables, and waited while she locked up. The snug dining room, with its chalkboard wine list and dried flower arrangements, was certainly welcoming, but as a mournful aria played on the restaurant’s radio, I wondered whether I might be entering my own culinary tragedy.
A cool evening breeze accompanied us as we meandered through the cobbled streets, observing the bustle of the city’s nightlife. Suddenly Beatrice halted in front of a generic-looking pizzeria. She said in a voice tinged with resignation, “This restaurant is always packed.”
She wasn’t kidding: Every table was occupied, and frenzied waiters hopscotched among them.
“But it has no soul,” she added, and we continued walking.
As I left her, I couldn’t help but think that even though that pizza restaurant might lack a soul, it had paying customers. Which was more than I could say for Au Gré du Vin.
Over the summer, tension lingered in the kitchen air like mildew on a damp wall, festering anew with each customerless day. Sami and Beatrice’s situation illustrated the difficulty of becoming a chef and owning a restaurant, a topic rarely discussed at my culinary school (unless, of course, you took the separate restaurant management classes, which came with an additional $9,000 price tag). Sami had forged his own path, but at a high price. At Au Gré du Vin, Sami and Beatrice were literally chief, cook, and bottle washer. As much as I wanted to learn to cook, my savings were limited, and I didn’t want to end up like Sami and Beatrice, always worrying about paying the bills. I also didn’t want to ask my parents for financial assistance. Was it time to unpack my business-casual attire and rejoin the corporate world?
But when I remembered the photocopying machines, computer screens, and gray cubicles, I couldn’t give up. In the kitchen I felt at ease and at home, but I fantasized about a different kitchen life—one in the spotlight, with lots of cooks and a full dining room. So I contacted Wylie Dufresne, chef at the acclaimed molecular gastronomy restaurant wd~50 in New York City, to see if I could be a stagiaire there. Molecular gastronomy, which is based upon rules of food science, is a new school of cooking that focuses on manipulating the flavors and textures of food using high-tech equipment. While the movement has been popular in Europe for about fifteen years, it hasn’t yet gained the same traction in the United States, where only a few restaurants specialize in it. Some restaurants in New York City may use specific techniques like sous-vide, in which you cook foods in vacuum-sealed bags at low temperatures for extended periods of time, but wd~50 is the only restaurant in New York City that serves molecular cuisine exclusively, and it had the reputation of a place that intellectualized food without taking it too seriously.
I heard nothing for weeks and figured it was a lost cause, but then I received a voice mail message from wd~50’s manager. She said there were no openings for stagiaires until February 2009, but I would be welcome to undertake a stage then. A six-month waiting list for free labor? Wow. This made me even more determined. I could learn to cook traditional French food anywhere in France (and probably in New York as well), but I could learn molecular gastronomy in only a dozen or so restaurants worldwide. Yes, Wylie Dufresne was worth waiting for. I was eager to replace my whisks and wooden spoons for immersion circulators and culinary syringes and check out a larder stocked not with basics like butter and flour, but with unpronounceable ingredients like methylcellulose, hydrocolloids, and alginates. And in the interim, I could keep busy by continuing classes at New York University for a master’s degree in food studies, a program I had begun the year before while still enrolled in culinary school.
Then it occurred to me: If I really wanted to immerse myself and learn the best techniques possible, why limit myself to one restaurant in one city—and in my hometown, no less? At twenty-four, I wasn’t ready to settle down into something predictable. And although there wasn’t a big gender divide in my culinary school class, I wanted to discover what it meant to be a female chef in different countries around the world. Graduate school had also cultivated my interest in knowing more about the ways of the kitchen; I realized that if I wanted to analyze this from an ethnographic standpoint, then I’d literally have to get my hands dirty. So I started to plan my year-long world tour of kitchens.
Financially, it would be challenging. Apprenticing around the world rather than taking a paying chef job would mean working for free, since I didn’t want to be unfair to the chefs and restaurants by applying for and taking a paid position only to leave a short three months later. But I had some savings, and I reasoned (or rationalized) that it would actually be cheaper to live anywhere but in New York City.
I thought about the best places to cook and eat. I wanted to go to Vietnam because I knew almost nothing about Vietnam’s food culture except that I wanted to know everything. I had fallen in love with Vietnamese food in New York, but I knew that couldn’t be the real deal. I wanted the authentic experience, filled with bowls of steaming pho and plates piled high with grassy herbs and slippery rice noodles.
I wanted to go to Tel Aviv because I figured it might nourish me, professionally and spiritually. I am Jewish, though actually more like Jew-ish, and I wanted to explore my ancestral home. And I knew that Israeli cuisine, long thought of only as cucumber salads and hummus, was finally coming into its own.
Finally, I would go to Paris because I needed to give France another shot.
So, armed with a set of chef’s knives and determination, off I went.