La Vie en Chef
Jun 20 20186:30am
Punctuality.
Hammered in from orientation day at Le Cordon Bleu: punctuality is paramount. Luckily the summer Parisien sun is well-risen at this point, making it a little easier to make my 7am metro. Classes start at 8am sharp, so 7:45 is on-time.
7:30am
The Cordon Bleu locker room is my cramped home-away-from-home. It takes 15 minutes to get into the full uniform, required for each class:
- Special kitchen shoes - black, slip-proof, reinforced.
- Black socks.
- Houndstooth navy-and-white chef pants.
- White undershirt.
- Chef’s jacket, the pièce de résistance.
- White hankerchief-style necktie.
- Pen, fork, and spoon in the left shoulder pocket of the chef’s jacket.
- Recipe notebook.
8:00am
“Bonjour tout le monde.”
“Bonjour Chef.”
The first class of the day is typically a “demo,” where we watch the chef prepare two dishes, the main one of which we’ll replicate in our following “practical.”
Demo classes are taught in French, with a live translator in the room to translate to English. The translator takes roll at 8am sharp, and the chef begins.
The demonstration is more performance than lecture. There are five or six different chefs for the Intensive Basic Cuisine, who rotate between demos and practicals. Every one of them is like a charismatic college professor, or a one-man show, their cooking space their stage. Glass mirrors on the ceiling give a top-down view of their worktop, and cameras and TV screens around the room make for a live-produced cooking show.
The chef glides between mincing vegetables and stirring hot pans, peppering in historical backgrounds of the dish or war-stories from their careers in the kitchen.
Today’s dish is a “Troute meuniere Grenobloise with almonds, Anglaise-style potatoes.”
For each recipe, we’re provided an ingredients list with measurements, and blank space for our notes. At the highest level, the steps for the recipes are simple - gut the fish, prepare the Grenobloise, turn the potatoes, start the sauce.
But a successful final dish is all in the details. Forget to remove the gills from your trout? The chef will notice when you present your plate. Accidentally carmelize the base for your white sauce? You’re white sauce is no longer white, and there’s no going back. The class asks questions throughout the demo so we don’t miss a detail.
Other than having some vegetables pre-peeled and cut, the chefs don’t skip steps. There’s no cooking show-style deux-ex-machina “and now we’ll just take this finished product out of the oven.” Hour-long baking times take an hour, a thirty-minute sauce takes thirty minutes - they’ll work on other parts of the recipe during the wait.
10:50am
“Degustation.” The best part of the day.
At the end of every 3-hour demo, we each get a tiny portion to taste what the chef has made. Unfailingly spectacular. A few flakes of fish, a couple toasted almonds, a slice of potato. A few drops of salty, gooey, spoon-coating sauce. The payoff.
11:00am
Our first break of the day. We hit the cafe in the ground floor of the school for a captive-audience-priced lunch and a coffee.
11:40am
Back to the locker room to change into cooking gear. For the practicals where we’re doing the cooking, we add a few accessories to our basic chef’s uniform:
- Apron.
- Tea towel.
- Cook’s hat.
- Knife bag, which holds our personal set of knives and other kitchen tools.
- Net bag with our scale, timer/thermometer, and tupperware.
- Evaluation notebook, where the chef gives us grades on each plate.
12:00pm
Practical.
We enter the long, narrow working room. Our abbey, our battlefield for the next three hours.
There are fourteen workstations - seven on each side. Combination stovetop/ovens run down the center of the room, with countertops along the walls.
Stations are numbered - I’m 13, halfway down the right. Each station has a set of pots, pans, bowls, and strainers, a drawer to store knives and tools not currently in use, and about a square meter of workspace. A sink and trash can is in each corner of the room, communal oils, seasonings, and pantry items run down the center.
We’re each given a tray with our ingredients - today, a few potatoes, sprigs of parsely, toasted almond slivers, two lemons, sandwich bread for croutons, and two whole trout.
The room is eerily quiet - we don’t waste a second. We take out our knives and other tools we’ll need for this particular dish - a 10” chef’s knife, paring knife, turning knife, peeler, channeling tool, scraper, tongs, spatula, and scissors.
Work is fast, bordering on frantic. We have 2 hours 30 minutes to cook, plate, and present our dishes in each practical, and every day we take up every second.
Cuts and burns are constant. A chef knife slips while you’re slicing almonds and you end up with a slice of thumb. You take a plate out of the oven, then forget it’s hot and grab the handle, cooking your palm. I’ve earned a few large arm burns from hot pans, lost part of a nail to the chef’s knife, stabbed a thumb with a meat fork, and shamefully gave myself a blister whisking a sabayon.
But I’ve fortunately been spared some of the more gruesome injuries. The mandoline is a particular death trap - waffle-cutting potatoes left a student with a perfectly zig-zagging gash down their palm. Another seared both hands grabbing a stockpot out of the oven. And the near-misses - we’ve splattered fry oil, dropped knives, set kitchen towels on fire.
The practical continues at a hectic pace. Students rush around the room, aprons stained with fish guts. Oil sizzles and crackles, knives knock against cutting boards. Someone gets a whiff of singe and shouts “something’s burning!” Someone else grabs and hot pan and immediately drops it on the table.
Slowly-but-surely though, the smell of fish sautéed in butter fills the room.
2:27pm
Plates are due to the chef precisely two and a half hours after the practical starts.
After over two hours of cooking, the last few minutes are the most important. All the pieces typically come together at once - the meat, sides, sauce, and plate must all be served hot, meaning stovetops and ovens are packed, sometimes with multiple pots sharing the same burner, each piece of the puzzle straining for a touch of heat.
Dishes must be plated precisely like the photo, down to the last minor detail. Fish facing the wrong direction on the plate? The chef will notice. You’re not supposed to use your fingers - tweezers and spoons alone - but it’s nearly impossible in the frantic rush to get each slice of parsley to lay just right.
And then you present to the chef.
They take a small bite of the fish. They test each vegetable on the plate with a paring knife, to see if it’s cooked through. They taste your sauce.
“Pas mal.”
The chef then leaves you grades in your evaluation notebook. Sixteen different categories, under groups like “hygiene,” “organization,” “technical skills,” “presentation,” and for each you get one of three grades: 😁 😐 🙁. Along with a few notes: “Cook potatoes more!” “Brown your butter!”
2:31pm
Cleanup.
Cleaning the practical room is as frantic as cooking the dish. Each station must be complete, and with 28 different pieces it’s easy to lose track. As the dishwasher finishes, students try to gather a complete set of tools for their workstation.
3:00pm
A deep sigh of relief.
On good days, we’ll now be finished. More likely, we’ll have a lecture class - a more traditional-style three-hour lesson about product seasonality, or hygiene practices, or the different cuts of meat, or dairy theory. Or another demo. And sometimes another complete demo-practical pair. On four-class days we’re not out until 10:00pm.
And the next day we’re back. Six days a week, Monday through Saturday. Thirty recipes over just under five weeks.
It has been far more intense than I imagined. Demos are peak focus, for three hours straight. Practicals are peak stress, for three hours straight. Literal blood, sweat, and tears go into each dish.
Here, as everywhere, the “medium is the message.” Hard work, discipline, and a generous dash of suffering is the lesson. This is not about learning new recipes. This is not about honing skills to be a better home chef. This is training to work in a kitchen. It’s demanding, it’s physical. A chef at a Michelin restaurant won’t tolerate you being late, so you can’t be late here. Professional kitchens are hot, stressful, cramped places, with little room for error, and so it is here. You cut and burn yourself in the kitchen and have to keep moving on, and so it is here.
The first step in most recipes is to take your raw ingredients and break them down. Vegetables are washed and peeled and minced and sweat to form the base of a sauce. Bones are burned and carmelized. Fish are gutted and fileted. Only at their smallest, at their most worked and cut up, do these ingredients reveal their best flavor. It’s only then that you begin to build back to the dish itself. And so it is here.
Passion is not loving something at its best, at the end result. Everyone likes good music. Everyone likes good food. Passion is loving something at its worst. At its most base, most tedious, most soul-crushing.
The first few weeks have been a test of grit, and a test of passion. It’s rare you get to experience something so intensely distilled. Something to struggle with, something to savor. There’s a certain clarity to it.