Hello chefs, this is Chefs PSA Podcast.
I'm your host Andre Natara. On today's episode, we're going
to talk about why you need to respect the last generation of
chefs. Stay tuned
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it. Anyway, what is this episode
about? This episode is about respecting
the chefs that came before you. I think there's a certain rite
of passage that we all have to go through where initially we
think our chefs know everything and then we believe that they
know nothing. And then we think we're better
than them and then we call them up for advice because we
realized they were right out all along.
Similar to the relationship that we have with our parents, a lot
of us at least, right? Sometimes you think your parents
know everything when you're young and then they know nothing
when you're a teenager. And then when you get older you
realize that maybe they were right the whole time.
Maybe not all parents and maybe not all chefs, but there's
something to be said about the previous generation that came
before you. I like to use the expression if
you had to dig a 10 foot hole and someone else dug 9 feet and
the only thing you had to dig was the remaining 1 foot, could
you take credit for digging A10 foot hole and give no credit to
the person that dug the 1st 9 feet?
Well, that's basically what happens here because a lot of
new chefs get in position and they want to diminish the old
guard as if everything that is current is right.
Everything that you're doing right now with regards to food
trends, the way that you cook, what's popular, that's the right
way to do it because it's now you may have blind spots.
The previous generation thought the exact same thing and the one
before that thought the exact same thing.
So who's right? There'll be a generation in
front of you that's going to look at what you're doing now
and think it's wrong. When I was a young chef and I
got my first executive chef job, my chef mentor was still in the
building. And I remember when I got that
job, I thought to myself, I'm going to change this.
I'm going to change that. We're going to stop using that
Morton's kosher salt and go to Diamond Crystal.
We're going to make our stock this way because I like oxtail
in my stock. And I started making little
subtle changes because now I'm the chef and I knew better and I
tried so hard to outshine my previous chef.
The funny thing was is when you're in the shit, that's the
first person you call. Everyone knows what they're
doing until they get to that point when they realize, oh
shit, I don't know what I'm doing and I need help.
And then you start to understand some of the decisions that were
made and why they were made. You have to think about all the
chefs that came before you. You know, you look at the chefs
that are very relevant right now.
And even the chefs that I may name might not be the most
relevant chefs, but they're relevant to me.
When you think about a lot of these Nordic chefs, Renee
Rezeppi, you know, he's the, he's the king of the Nordic
chefs. And you have to think to
yourself, they learned that from somewhere.
Yes, they put their own interpretation and their own
personality into what they did with their restaurants and their
food, but they learned it from somewhere.
They had to have come from great kitchens.
They had to pass through there. There's no way around it.
We all went to culinary school. Well, maybe not all of us, but a
lot of us went to culinary school and we had chef
instructors there that were teaching us the fundamentals,
the classics, the classic repertoire of Escoffier, classic
cuisine. How do you make a stock?
How do you make a consomme? What are the five mother sauces?
No one ever talks about the father sauces.
Are there father sauces? I don't know.
And you build this foundation by going to culinary school because
when you leave, you have a certain skill set that the
employer as the chef who's hiring you knows that you should
have a certain baseline of knowledge.
They're not expecting you to perform at the highest level
right out of culinary school. They're expecting you to have
the basics. You know how to use a knife.
If they tell you, do you know what a brown stock is?
You know what it is. If they ask you to make a
bechamel, they, they know you have a general idea of how to
make a bechamel or a hollandaise or balute, or you know what Mira
poi is. You know basic terminology.
You know how to move in a kitchen.
You know what the uniform looks like.
You don't need the culinary dictionary to answer every
question. If I tell you I need something,
there's a good chance if they taught it to you in culinary
school, you'll have a vague understanding of what it is.
So where do we begin to respect the teachers at culinary school?
Right? They are the ones that are
providing you with your first level of education.
I am still in contact with my very first chef.
My first chef instructor and I are still friends to this day.
Spoke to him last week. Shout out to Kirk Bachman who
has the Ultimate Dish podcast and runs the Escoffier schools.
So another good podcast to go check out.
But I owe him a lot. He gave me my first lessons.
He taught me about stocks and sauces and culinary 101, taught
me how to use a knife, taught me how to not be afraid and to not
get my hands dirty when marinating chicken.
I'm using my chef in a practical sense.
His father was also a chef who taught him right.
One of the chefs that I worked under for many years taught me
so much, the fundamentals, how to make a stock better than how
I made it in school, how to improve on the fundamentals that
I have. But who taught them?
We think we just arrived at the Internet or the light bulb.
We don't think about the hundreds of failures that went
into developing something before it got to the point which it's
usable for us. Bad ideas get pruned off 100
hours of doing something gives you the right to make the
decision on it because you've already figured out the
variations and the nuance. The person questioning it and
being told hasn't put in the 100 hours to do it yet, so you have
to give respect to the person who, through countless hours of
trial and error, figured it out. We take a lot of things for
granted, and you don't have to like everything about the
current system. But had it not been for
Escoffier, codifying everything for us, developing the kitchen
brigade, structuring kitchens in a certain way, giving you
guidelines for many recipes, where would we be right now?
Respect is due there. Where would we be if it weren't
for chefs like Marco Pierre White or Pierre Kaufman or Paul
Bacoos or Joel Rubuchon? Everyone out here making
rubuchon potatoes and no one stops for a minute to think.
How long did it take Joel Rubuchon to come up with that?
How did he figure it out? How many times did he fail
before we got to the end product?
And what were the iterations after that to make it more
efficient for service? You know, a lot of times I put
up these chefs. PSA is like, no one cares how
you did it in school. No one cares how you did it at
your last job. Partly true, partly not true
because respect is due to the person that taught you and gave
you some new skills. Now, it doesn't mean that they
necessarily translate to the new job.
You have those skills now, they belong to you and they were
taught to you by someone. And unless you know, they're
they're tuning into another dimension and downloading
information directly into their brain, they learned it from
someone. And I promise you, most of the
things that I've seen in cooking haven't been downloaded from the
ether. And sometimes we like to give
shit to culinary students when they come out of school.
They say, well, in school, they taught me how to do it this way.
Or, for example, you're doing it wrong because school said to do
it like this. So if you're a culinary student,
I want you to listen to this right now.
There's a reason why school teaches you a certain way and
they tell you to not deviate from the way that they're
teaching you. And I'm about to tell you why.
This also may help chefs who get frustrated when culinary
students tell them why are they teaching them to cook that way.
There's more efficient ways. Well, put yourself in the
position of the culinary school director.
You have 20 chef instructors, and all of them have differing
opinions on the right way to make a veal stock or a Demi
gloss or an Espanol. Whatever the case may be, they
all know a different way to do it.
But how are you going to pass a student from one class to the
next class? And how are you all going to
sign off and agree on something if all of you do it a different
way? You're going to confuse the
student. There has to be a baseline of
expectation that they all agree on and say, look, we might know
100 different ways to do this, but this is how we're going to
graduate our students by doing it this way because this is this
is the way that we all agree is the most universal method.
That's why they do it. It doesn't mean that they don't
know other ways, and it doesn't mean that all the other ways are
wrong. It's just that school teaches
you a certain way as to not confuse the student with 1000
different ways to do it. It establishes A consistency so
they could progress through the program or the curriculum with
the correct answers. So students, if you're listening
to this, you understand now that there are more ways to do it
than what you're being taught in school and chefs out there in
the real world, you also understand now that's why
they're being taught that way is because they need to graduate
them through the system the same way it is in your kitchen.
I want you to do it this way because you're working here.
It's not that you don't know other ways, it's just that this
is the most efficient way for you to do it while you're
working at this particular place.
I would never have any of the success that I've ever achieved
as a chef had it not been for the chefs that came before me.
As a young chef, I used to sit down and listen to the older
master chefs talk and I was just quiet.
I would just listen. I would absorb it and whatever
they said now to me seems like common sense, but back then it
was magical. Some of the culinary advice that
they'd give me, like make sure you cook the duck fat side down.
I had never cooked a duck, so I was like, OK, I remember that.
I logged that into the back of my mind.
It's like duck cook, fat side down.
Got it. It's like stuff that we take for
granted. It's the curse of knowledge.
We take it for granted now, but when you're hearing it for the
first time, it's mind blowing. The old stories that I used to
hear, you know, they would test meet with skewers, metal skewers
or cake testers. And I remember the chef telling
me the reason we all have mustaches is because we all have
burns on our lips from the cake testers.
I would always use my wrist. Sometimes I use my, my lower
lip, whatever. A lot of times you just use a
digital meat thermometer. Anyway, we digress.
But that knowledge is transmitted from the previous
generation of chefs to the new generation of chefs.
Not just that knowledge, but a lot of the things that we do as
chefs currently. If you're, if you're a chef
right now running your kitchen, you might say the only way to do
this right is this way. You have to ask yourself, why do
you say that? Is it because that you've
iterated hundreds of times and come to that conclusion, or is
it that someone else did before you?
Is the preference of a previous chef that you worked for the way
that your chefs cooked will shape how you view food moving
forward? When I got out into the real
world and I had my first executive chef jobs and I wanted
to do my food, I realized I really didn't have my food.
Even to this day, I can't say I have my food.
I cook a certain way, but it's not necessarily my food.
It's stuff that my chefs have taught me that I've maybe
adjusted a little bit to my style or to current trends or
techniques, but it's the transfer of knowledge from the
previous generation. If you go back and you watch a
lot of old cooking shows, you'll see a lot of really bad habits
in the kitchen from great chefs, mind you.
You know, they got the big clunky tongs.
Their stations are messy, unfolded towels everywhere.
Their uniforms look tattered. And then they go through all
this work and then they put up a dish that you're like, oh, holy
crap, that food doesn't look anything like what I would serve
today. Food evolved very quickly and
what you're serving right now is going to evolve with the future
might be served by robots. When you watch those old shows
and you see the look on their faces, they were doing the most
innovative food for their time. Go watch old Iron Chef and stuff
that you look at like, well, that doesn't sound good or that
doesn't look good. Know that that was the hottest
food at the time. Go watch old Iron Chef America
and Chef Bobby Flay coming in blowing people's minds with
Chipotle Lays. No one had ever seen those
before. Now you take it for granted that
you use Chipotle on everything. There's a restaurant chain.
You take that for granted. But back then they were
introducing things for the first time.
You have culinary traditions that are passed on from chef to
chef. Making things a certain way.
Make a pasta like this, use double O flour.
No, make your gnocchi like this. You got to bake the potatoes.
No, don't bake them. You got to boil them.
No, don't boil them. You got to steam them, right?
Everyone iterated a slightly different way, which by the way,
I bake them. For the record, when I was a
chef, even just a few years ago, I used to think to myself, I'm
putting out some of the best food I could put out and I'm
very proud of it. I was very intelligent to what
the trends were. I understood what was modern,
how to plate things, what the trendy ingredients were.
I was very happy with the food that I was putting out.
Now I've been retired for over 2 years.
Even though I've dabbled in some dinners and some consulting and
stuff like that, sometimes now when I look at food, I'm like,
holy shit, Food has really evolved quickly and I see things
that I didn't really see two years ago.
In two years we've introduced new ingredients and new
techniques. Blows my mind.
But then I see a lot of chefs, which I find super interesting
because I see a lot of chefs preparing old classical
technical food, slightly modern. You know, they, they could
incorporate some modern techniques, right?
They might be using transglutaminase to stick the
meat together instead of just using, you know, egg white
powder or whatever we had to use back then.
But all of a sudden, retro is cool, plated, modern.
So retro techniques, modern plating, maybe more ethnic
ingredients. I think it's really cool to see
chefs pay homage to the classics, right?
Classics reinvented. I'm all for that.
That's the kind of food I like. When I think about the food that
I crave, I think about like, I want a good onion soup, I want a
lobster thermidor, I want a perfectly roasted chicken or a
nicely cooked piece of fish, a sole or a skate wing with a
bernoisette over it, some capers, some lemon.
That's what I crave. The classics, the simple.
And a lot of times chefs need to focus on making food more simple
because you always are really quick to introduce your new
creativity and the new spin that you want to do on things.
And you have an idea and there's nothing wrong with that.
But sometimes your ideas and your spin on things is fucking
it up. It's not making it better.
You're actually detracting from a really good dish by messing
with it a little bit too much. Let the ingredients shine.
Stick to your techniques perfectly.
In season produce doesn't need much perfect tomatoes, don't
need much. Good olive oil, good salt, maybe
some burrata cheese, some pickled onions, I don't know.
Fresh basil, Good pesto. Then you want to put your spin
on it by taking the burrata and breading it and putting in the
deep fryer and serving it with a comfy egg yolk fudge.
It's like it was just fine before that.
You didn't need to do all that. You didn't need comfy egg yolk
fudge on the burrata with the tomatoes.
The tomatoes were enough in the good, olive oil perfect, right?
So what can we do better as an industry one?
If you have a chef in your life, a mentor, a chef that you worked
under, even some of you chefs that have bad relationships with
your chefs, reach out to them. Thank them for what they gave
you because I'm sure there's some good with some of the bad.
And if you have a good relationship with them, cherish
that relationship. Reach out to them, have a cup of
coffee with them. Sometimes chefs just want to
chat with the younger generation.
We could not be where we are now had it not been for the
generation of chefs that came before us.
So big respect to those chefs, but we also won't get to where
we're going if it's not for the current generation of chefs that
are doing it. Anyway.
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