"My Kid Wants To Be a Chef. Now what?"

For 25 years, I have heard words to that effect from many parents. My answer usually goes like this:

“Being a chef can be an exceptionally rewarding career, especially at the high end. It is still possible for someone to reach the top at a relatively young age, though it is becoming more and more difficult.”

The next questions usually are, "Cooking school or college?"

"Can a great palate be acquired? Or do you have to be born with it?"

And, "How long does it take to achieve mastery as a chef?"

The answers are complicated, and people are often surprised by what I tell them.

Let's take the questions one at a time.

“Cooking school or college?”

“The more ambitious your child is, the higher the level of cuisine the person is aiming for, the less important is a culinary school and the more important is the proper apprenticeship. 

Someone who wants to become a “four-star chef” will learn less than one percent of their technical training from culinary school. 

Ninety-nine per cent of the training will happen in the field, training under Master Chefs.  A culinary school degree is not a disadvantage, nor is it a great advantage.  As long as the student keeps it in proper perspective, it can be an effective beginning point.”

At the very high-end of the field, a culinary school education does not even begin to qualify the graduate to be a chef.  It is more or less a good survey course that prepares one for apprenticeship.  No one has ever become a top four-star chef without at least a decade of intensive formation in the field. 

Almost every “star-chef” became so by apprenticing under one or more of the world’s best chefs, starting at the bottom and working their way up over years and years.  The student should not expect to graduate culinary school ready to be a chef (especially a high-end one). Those false expectations will lead to resentment and frustration.

False expectations are a real problem.

Over the last twenty-five years I have looked at more than 45 thousand résumés, the majority of which are from students who have recently graduated or who are about to graduate from culinary school. 

Unfortunately, most of those applicants are looking for a Sous-Chef job (second-in-command) with a high salary.  This would be equivalent to a young person who just graduated with an MBA applying to IBM for a senior executive position.  I have never met anyone who was capable of handling a Sous-Chef position who had not had at least ten years of bottom-to-top training under at least one superstar chef.

It should be underscored that the culinary schools would be doing a disservice to the students if they were, in fact, targeting their curriculum to prepare students for a career in the four-star restaurants.  In any given year there are only fifteen or twenty of these four-star restaurants in all of America, and each of them may have only two or three entry-level positions that open up. 

That means there are only 45 to 60 openings for the hundreds of thousands of new people joining the field.  I remember reading a couple of years ago that the hospitality profession is the largest employer in the country – something like 10% of Americans work in the industry.  Even if we include the entry positions of the better three-star restaurants, we are still only talking about an infinitesimally small percentage of the jobs out there. 

Culinary schools do a great job preparing students for the overwhelming majority of job opportunities, but they cannot and should not be expected to prepare students for advanced positions in the very high-end.

A business degree could be an enormous competitive advantage.  The chef today is half CEO-half artist.  The modern Chef-Owner must be as competent with spreadsheet as with recipes.  He will probably spend more time and managing costs than creating new dishes. Property management, marketing, sales, customer service, accounting, M.I.S., administration, compliance – all of these disciplines will come into play daily. 

A great chef also must be a great communicator – the job is more like being a symphony conductor than a  violin soloist.  Perhaps that is why many of today’s most dynamic and innovative chefs chose to get a traditional liberal arts degree rather than a culinary degree.

In the end, there is no simple answer to the question of cooking school versus college. There really is no one way to do it.

"Can a great palate be acquired? Or do you have to be born with it?"

There's an old saying, "To write well, first read well." The culinary equivalent of that would be, "To cook well, first eat well."

Dine at the greatest restaurants in the world if possible. That is what Charlie Trotter did abundantly and continues to do.  But if that is not possible, because of economics, work only at the best restaurants in whatever capacity gets your foot in the door – even if that means working for free for a period. The palate training you'll get will be priceless.”

All artists, chefs included, draw from all of their life experiences. 

Every book, every passion, every painting, every heartache, every joy, and every love, everything in life – it all counts.  The richer those experiences, the more depth of artistry can be expected. 

"How long does it take to achieve mastery as a chef?"

You must accept the fact that apprenticeship is the heart of the matter. More than any other pitfall, what hurts young people's maturation most is the tendency to plump up their résumés.  In the attempt to build an impressive C.V., one jumps from place to place and never gets beyond the superficial. 

Almost without exception, the chefs today who have achieved great success, who own (or are a partner in) a high-end restaurant, who are becoming star chefs in their own right, are those who stayed with one master chef for seven to ten years.

That's the model of the traditional apprenticeship in Europe.  The cook spends seven to ten years in one extraordinary restaurant, rising in the ranks, until they have spent at least two years as Sous-Chef. 

The next phase is called the Companionage. 

Having received great depth of preparation, the protégé will now do several short-term “finishing” stages with other great chefs. The initial 7 to 10 year formation delivers such a depth of understanding that the student is then able to learn in new kitchens at a vastly quicker pace.

I have consistently seen those who followed this formula learn more in one week in a new kitchen than those who constantly jump can learn in a year.

Having completed the Companionage, the next step is the position of Chef-de-Cuisine.

To this point, the student’s training has been primarily technical and artistic. The student should by now be an extraordinary cook. Now comes perhaps the most powerful phase of development.  – the Chef-de-Cuisine phase.

As a Chef-de-Cuisine, the student  learns the intricacies of all aspects of the restaurant: the dining room, the wine program, finance, management, and on and on.  Only now is the student truly ready for the  deepest insights his or her teacher has to share. This is the phase that will make the greatest difference in the future chef’s ability to run a restaurant that not only thrills the clients but succeeds as abusiness.

I remember my own three and a half years as David Bouley’s Chef-de-Cuisine as the most intensive and rewarding time in my entire formation. 

David would talk with me on a philosophical level that I had never experienced before.  It felt like I had been “tapped” into a secret society at Yale. 

Suddenly, the “Gods”--like Daniel Boulud, André Soltner, Gilbert LeCoze, Jean-Louis Palladin, and Charlie Trotter--treated me as a peer. Those years challenged every fiber of my being. 

I would work twenty to twenty-three hours a day, six days a week. Often I slept in the locker room or in the train station, having missed the last train home.

Only three or four times in as many years did I actually sit down to eat a meal.  After nine or ten months, it was like an “out-of-body” experience. I could no longer feel physical pain even if I accidentally sliced open my palm with a knife. 

Yet I felt my power as a cook – as a chef – grow exponentially. Without that training, I do not think I would have stood a chance to succeed, given the circumstances, at the Ryland Inn.

It is said, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

This I have found to be absolutely true. 

Of course the corollary is equally true:

“It is the duty of the student to get ready.”

 

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