Don't Get Cocky

In my pursuit of happiness I have always marked a healthy sense of humility and the constant checking of one's ego as paramount to success.  I so zealously believed in this practice that I dug myself deep in to insecurity, went a bit overboard, and convinced myself there was no way no how I was going to cut it in New York City as a cook, as a chef, anything.  The culinary industry seemed a zero-sum game, one person's success meant another filled niche zoning me out of the play.  The task set before me just seemed too big, my training too lacking and my experience too little too late.  How could I compete with people who grew up cooking, got high-level training at a young age and seemed not only blessed with prodigious talent but the sagacious foresight to make all the right decisions?  So I hemmed and hawed about applying to culinary school and toyed with as many options as possible that would take me out of the pond-over-saturated-with-mega-fauna that is New York.  Find a quiet pond, less big fish, make your statement in less dangerous waters.

Then I actually went to culinary school.  Then I actually started kicking ass.  Then I went on externship, worked at a first-rate restaurant.  And then I kicked some more ass.

And then, for maybe the first time in my life, I got cocky.

I went in to school with the idea that everybody there was like me.  Some upstart young cook who had his eyes set on the gold, garnering as many Michelin and New York Times stars as possible, willing to sacrifice everything and give it all to become the best.

That was far from the case.  Instead, what greeted me were all sorts of people, mainly fresh high school graduates, who were just as lost and unsure as to where they were going as I was when I was a college freshman.  They had never eaten a meal that cost more than $20 a plate, never heard of Thomas Keller, never cooked a piece of fish (many completely unwilling to eat a piece of fish, much like myself when I was 7), and couldn't tell you what season morels start popping up.  They were kids, convinced by our growing obsession with food that it would be fun and glorious to cook for a living.

A disclaimer, they don't all suck.  Obviously, the school has produced some seriously high-caliber chefs and will continue to do so.  But what became apparent was that the number of rising stars was getting watered down by the expansion of the brand, and that it wasn't the school that made you great, it was your own merit and drive.

To be sure, the school gives you the opportunity to do so.  All the tools and knowledge are there for you to play with and absorb.  But if you have the wrong attitude, it's all going to be a massive waste of time.  You could cruise by on the coattails of your teammates and slink by on the exams, but then that hefty tuition tag really didn't give you much on return.

I didn't have the right attitude.  Not when I started and not when I returned.  And I kick myself for only realizing now.

At first, I thought I was better than all the students.  It was my job to show them who was boss and walk around with my dick out, i.e. to establish dominance.  I thought the chef-instructors were wash-outs; people who couldn't cut it in the restaurant game and gave up for greener pastures.  What did these guys know?  They were years out of the game and never truly played in the big leagues.

What an unforgiving and brash assumption to make.

Can you really blame someone for stepping out of the line-cooking gig, something that makes a family life nearly impossible?  Can you blame someone for not gambling everything in the bid for a restaurant?  Only to have your life chained to the stove and putting your livelihood at risk with every slow Tuesday night?  Can you blame someone for just not liking the big city, never aspiring to play at the highest stakes?  Does avoiding any of this make you a lesser cook?

The answer, I found, is no.

There is no such thing as the "best" restaurant.  Food is completely subjective, and while there may be people redefining our concept of what a restaurant is and pushing the boundary, and they may indeed be the pioneers of our industry, there is no shame in wanting to enjoy the comfier parts of life.  And there is no detriment to your ability to cook great food and be a good chef.

And despite them having been removed from the game for a few years now, it doesn't mean the totality of their experience is not useful.  What makes a good line cook, for the most part, has remained the same for many, many years.  Organization, speed, hard work and precision translates through the decades.

So I should really fucking listen.

But my head got in the way.

I have never been truly good at something.  Some people may say that I have a vast array of talents, but all that means to me is that I'm pretty good at a lot of things, but no master of any one skill.  Even with the cello and with music, something everybody told me I had a bright future in and had an innate knack for, I never fully realized my potential.  As every teacher since the 4th grade has told me, I don't apply myself.  I was nothing short of a colossal Jamarcus Russell; talented, hyped, someone from whom everybody expected great things, but inevitably fell short... a bust.

I've never been terribly good at pushing myself to do something my heart wasn't fully committed to.  So I never truly excelled.  Until I found cooking.  It was something I wanted so badly and it terrified me how inept I was at it.  But then as I slowly began to earn my chops, develop my skills, I came to the realization I have been prepared for this my whole life.

I got a bit ... exuberant.

Though I never cooked growing up (another thing I often kick myself for), I had the fortune of being in a family who appreciated food.  We love to eat, hence why we all struggle with maintaining a flat stomach, and we know what good food is, making the problem exponentially greater.  We serve good food and we have a great respect for what food can do.  This lifelong appreciation has given me one of the best tools I never realized I had; a good palate.  Even with taste buds deadened by smoking, I still know damn well when something tastes good.

It was only when I went to culinary school that I realized that not that many people actually have a great palate.  It's about exposure, it's about constantly eating well-prepared food in a great variety of cultures that allows you to develop a true scope of how to separate the good food from the bad, and to adjust a weak dish in to a solid one.  It's like reading.  Reading won't make you intelligent, and having a good palate won't necessarily make you a good cook, but it gives you the proper software to operate at a high level.  As for the hardware...

If having a good palate and knowledge of food is good software, then being a good line cook is the hardware.  I found that I had great advantages in this department as well.  I had already worked on the line for about a year.  While it wasn't life-changing food, it was solid, and for whatever reason the chefs I worked under in Chicago allowed me free reign to learn and try as many different things as possible.  Four months of working at Va Pensiero and I somehow managed to become a chef tournant; working saute on Mondays, grill on Tuesdays, pastry and garde manger through Thursday, and then pasta throughout the weekend.  And I understood the whole process of getting the food from raw ingredient to on the plate in front of the customer better than most, having grown up in the industry.

So I got arrogant.  Insufferably so, and my ego blocked my receptors to all the knowledge I could have had.   To be sure, I did very well academically, I still tested at the top of my class.  But the only real lesson I learned was that I was fucking dominating and I should be happy with myself, instead of realizing the information has to be set in hard to be of any real use.

Humility would come.  As I have documented before, Cafe destroyed me.  It reduced me to ashes.  But somehow I had been reborn and emerged a stronger, even more confident cook.  I realized that that was probably the intention all along.  That cooking well had a lot to do with confidence, and that much like basic training, the goal at high-caliber restaurants is to break you down and build you back up.

And here we encounter the problem.  I came back to school probably more obnoxious than ever.  Unwilling to learn, unwilling to participate and only giving my most half-assed effort.  I didn't want to be group leader anymore, I didn't do homework or do any personal research, I just whittled away the time to just get out and finish.

Two problems arose; the first, working without interest and passion makes the work abhorrently boring and painful.  The second?  I should cherish this time in the academic bubble while I can, because as the reality of holding a real job with no cushion approaches I grow more and more terrified of the real world.

I didn't listen.  I didn't care what the chefs had to say, I didn't care what this class on menu development had to offer.  I dragged myself through class and went through the motions.  I threw recipes to the wind, just did it my own way, got scolded for it, didn't care.  I already proved I could cut it in the industry, I don't need this school to tell me that I can't.

What a twat I had become.

Cooking doesn't work if you don't have passion and you don't buy in to the system.  If you cook with indifference, your product isn't worth shit, you are not worth shit.  You'll half-ass everything, just show up for your paycheck and eventually when you are faced with the difficult crossroads of either doing it the easy way and passing up some bullshit, or doing it the hard way and sacrificing your time, pride, energy to do it right... if you don't care, you'll take the shortcut every time.  It simply doesn't work.

If you don't buy in to the chef's system, it doesn't work either.  Sure, chefs aren't always right.  And a good chef will listen to the his cooks when they make honest inquiries in to how to do something better.  But it is not the cook's job to change the recipe.  You are a soldier, you are a worker bee, it is your job to follow orders.  If a chef can't trust you to do the simplest things his way, as he should, then you are not worth your $10.00 an hour.

I got cocky.  I thought I was better than the school and there was nothing left here for me.  Even if there is truth to that, that is no way to go through life with your head inflated so that you can't see anything around you.  A champion can win on any field, dominate at any challenge.

I always like to relate cooking to basketball, partly because I love basketball but also because I think the analogy works in a lot of ways.

The coach creates a system; maybe it's horns, maybe it's the triangle, maybe it's Princeton offense, whatever.  It doesn't work if the players don't buy in to the system.  Now, that's a term constantly thrown around ESPN, but it's true.  The players have to trust the system, trust the coach, trust each other for it to work.  But you can't rely on the system either to do the work for you, all systems do some things well and other things not so well.  It's the player who has to know when to adjust but always to work hard.  If you live and fail by the system, then fine.  At least you played with integrity.  But if you're constantly bitching, giving zero faith, and practicing little work ethic, then you either leave or die a villain.

Well, it's much the same in cooking.  The chef creates a system and you have to believe in it, die by it.  It's not your job to change the system, only to adjust to it and work with maximum effort.  When you get cocky, think you're above the system, then it's time you were 86'ed.  Sure, you may get to call the shots one day, but until then you work with integrity and humility.  Don't be Dwight Howard.

Don't be Dwight Howard.

EP6