The Gift and the Curse of a Great Chef

  As a diner when you enter a restaurant, the minimal expectation is to eat food that reaches your sense of value.
But for the chef it means everything....

Every item that comes out of the kitchen is an extention of the chef. It is a combination of his vision, his hard work, dedication, 16 hour shifts, his time away from his family, everything that makes the chef what he envisions himself to be pours out like a cornucopia onto the plate.

The food for the diner is the chef's summation of who he sees himself.

So what the diner doesn't see is this pursuit of perfection that is transferred around the kitchen, an energy that is unspoken yet blanketed around everyone involved from the dishwasher to the sous chef. For the chef this vision of perfection is seen, but never felt, except for brief moments before it slips through their fingers like water in a cupped hand.

It is the true essence of madness....pursuing something knowing that in your heart it is truly impossible to achieve.....and yet it still is your motivating factor.

So what the diner experiences at best is a taste, a taste of their sense of perfection, but for the chef buried in the kitchen he will never know perfection was achieve. But they will attempt to reach it on the very next plate.

This is the gift and the curse of a great chef......

Obstacles....

To pursue my dream of becoming my chef I had to go part time at my job so I could attend school full time. I figured after budgeting I could deal with the pay cut, I just had to be wise about managing my expenses.

But then "it" happened.

After the first week of school my car died, or more accurate, my clutch died. A major expenditure that I hadn't budgeted for, nor did I now have the money for.  And to make matters worse I didn't have a back up plan.

On certain days I was fortunate enough to be able to drop off my girlfriend and borrow her vehicle when her schedule permitted, and somedays my brother would pick me up from school and take me to work. But most days I would have to use public transportation.

Due to the way the public transportation system is structured where I live I had to walk a half a mile, take two buses and two trains to cover the 18 mile distance to my school. My commute had been changed from a 20 minute drive to a two and a half hour journey one way. I was taking morning classes so I could still work at my job in the evening. I had to make work enough hours to repair my car.

Everyday felt like an internal battle between my desire to succeed and the temptation to just quit. I was trying to keep up with my studies but the wear and tear of my long days was catching up to me.

I use to ride the train and think of the movie The Pursuit of Happiness, I felt like I had to be tested to determine how bad I wanted this, for me to figure out how bad did I really want to become a Chef?

My answer.....really bad!

I began to look at the struggle as part of my voyage, and I passed my first test. Due to some fundraising, and literally asking anybody I knew to "donate" no matter how small the amount, I was able to raise enough money to repair my car. And even though I received my first and last "B" in one of my classes, missing in "A" by only ten points, I knew in my heart that for the rotation of classes I had excelled in conquered my obstacles.

The Beginning.....

My first class beginning my culinary career was Foundations I, an injection of the obvious, was a class meant to teach us the foundations of French cuisine.

We studied Escoffier, stocks, mirepoix, dimensions of knife cuts, mother sauces, and different cooking techniques. The class was taught by a serious chef in both skills and demeanor who would flash his dry witty sense of humor.

 He taught with the fervor of a symphony conductor. He lined us up ten minutes before class started everyday and inspected our uniforms for cleanliness and appearance, ensuring that we were clean shaven, nails trimmed, shoes shining. And if we weren't points were taken from our daily grade.

Some found it tedious, but I felt its importance. They were shaping us to become young professionals with the habits we were forming then to impact the kind of chefs we should become. All great chefs were detailed oriented....sometimes bording on insanity, or at least OCD.

How unforgettable it was when we were given our knife kits, I am sure that is a memory that will always stay with me. Having the knife kit in some ways validated me. I felt like a chef now and it help remove a layer of  amateur insecurities I felt about myself.

I looked around at my classmates. For this moment all of us having various skills, experience, and backgrounds but were all given the same tools to succeed.

But how we mastered them would be what would eventually seperate us from each other.

Life is all about timing....

I was excited.....

I felt like I had already had a lifetime full of education, but my first day at culinary school was the first time in my life I could ever remember being excited for school.

It was different.

My whole mentality had changed. If I had went to culinary school straight out of high school I wouldn't have the maturation I currently possessed now. School now to me was a place of infinite possibilities, possibilities that I knew wouldn't be given but could be achived only by the sweat on my brow and the end of my blade.

School to me was now about networking, volunteering, receiving the most value for the money I would eventually have to hand over to Sallie Mae. My goals spanned from achieving straight "A's" throughout my program, to studying abroad for my externship, to not missing a single day of class throughout the program. I was confident these were goals weren't easy, but all were within my reach.

I was going to blog, I was going to Twitter, I was going to map out my journey and share it with all of those who wanted to hear.

I was humble, yes, or maybe I had been humbled through time.  Gone was the young man that would snicker at someone else's suggestion on how to do anything better, a young man that had felt that he had done everything and seen everything, a young man who was at one point uncoachable, unteachable, and in some aspects unreachable.

I knew my  chef instructors I would defer to, as if I was now let into a secret society where they were my superiors. They were men and women who had been in the industry, and I wanted to absorb as much knowledge and skill  as possible.

Life is all about timing, and I knew all of my experiences had brought me to this point and put me in the best position for me to succeed, I could feel it. But I had to put mentally and physically position myself and do things I had never done before to achieve things I never have. So the first day I did something I had never done in ALL of my years of schooling.

I sat in the front of the class....

Mise En Place

It seems like I have walked through so many different paths to have reached this point, to begin this walk, even though it seems that this pathway I have begun was running parallel to the other ones I had been walking all along. Maybe its destiny for those who believe in that, maybe its a form of self realization for those who would psychoanalyze it, but for now I can say it is reigniting my passion for life at a time when I had felt certain aspects of it waning.

Out of high school I wanted to attend culinary school. I had always enjoyed cooking, and at the time I had thought maybe it could become a career, but like most eighteen year olds, I didn't know what I wanted. And I was to many at the time a lost cause anyways. I was barely C average students in remedial classes, and was in trouble quite frequently and known for hanging out with the proverbial "wrong crowd". I had even had one of my teachers during my sophmore year tell me I was going to "die young" during an afterschool conversation with her. My troubles not being unique, nor were the ways I dealt with them. I was a lost soul searching for something to complete me.

Based on my academic career and my attitude my guidance counselor had recommended to me and my mother that I attend a trade school or the military.

My mother wasn't having it.

She thought that the guidance counselor's suggestions were an insult. She had worked too hard to raise me and my siblings on her own, and even though I wasn't the oldest I was the first to graduate high school, and she envisioned me going to college as  an act of repayment for all of her hard work. She believed I had the ability to be great at academics, I just never applied myself. Through her coercion and the opportunity to play basketball at a junior college with hopes of improving my grades and going to a divisioin one school I enrolled at a local junior college.

Right before the season started I got injured during practice...injured enough to have to be redshirted for the entire season. Without basketball as a motivating factor I almost flunked out, literally almost flunked out of school. I was relapsing into old bad habits. I remember being failed by my english 102 professor even though she told me I was probably one of the best writers she ever had, but I refused to come to school and do the work, and she didn't understand the company I kept or why insisted on wasting my talents.

Then I met professor Laufe, in an Anthropology class. She wasn't the first teacher that believed in me, but she was the first that literally  refused to let me fail and made it her mission to make sure I didn't. She beleived in me so much that she would check my grades for my other classes, and I began to feel if I failed other classes I would be letting her down. She made me her project, and got me involved in student activities, and I turned around my grades to the point that I made the Deans list, and on her word I was able to get into an honor's college. I eventually graduated with a Psych degree and worked in the mental health field, but my passion for the culinary arts never waned.

Cooking had always been a part of me. I learned to cook out of necessity, because I had a mother who worked tireless hours to put food on the table. But it was something I had a passion for, it was a way to show people I cared about them without being able to put it in words, I would put it in food. Cooking allowed me time to escape, to have instant validation for something I put effort into, it was the culmination of creativity, balance, hardwork, and affection. It was love, and an extension of me. It was art by all of its definitions.

So with much encouragement, I decided to enroll in cooking school. And it has been a worthwhile journey, full of highs and lows, and I can say that it has opened my eyes to a whole new world, a world that  I want to share with you.