What’s In a Kitchen

Watching Eve go home last night, I was thinking back to a conversation we had the day of that elimination challenge about the competition. Even before that day of cooking poolside, I know she’d been thinking of resigning the competition because the whole Top Chef thing wasn’t for her. I remember her telling me how happy she was with her life and her career in Ann Arbor, and how much she loves to keep learning about food and about cooking. Eve already has a successful restaurant and a cookbook under her belt, and didn’t feel like she needed to prove herself to Bravo or to the judges.

Of course some of the chefs, like the Voltaggio brothers, were more competitive. At this stage in the show, I for one, wasn’t thinking of the elimination challenge as a competition among the chefs but instead as an opportunity to cook great food for the groom and his friends. That’s probably the caterer in me. I suppose I was a lot like Eve on this challenge–I just wanted to cook alongside talented chefs to craft a great experience and make the guests happy.

There is obviously quite a difference between a top chef in the real world and a Top Chef on Bravo.  Bravo seems to think that a chef should be a highly driven, hyper-competitive badass with the ability to create well-executed food in any kitchen, on any day, in any amount of time, to meet each week’s unexpected challenge. Can I say, that not in 20 years as a chef have I had to pair food with a shot? Great food and boozey shots have never gone particularly well together, in my experience, but I suppose the scenario makes for good television. And what do I know? I’m just the chef.

In reality, there’s so much more to being a good chef than what’s tested on the show. Sure, you have to be able to cook. But chefs, and especially chef owners,  have a diverse set of skills and have to balance many hats. A chef must also be a natural leader, when every day is a battle and you are charged with leading your team of men and women through it, come hell or high water. If the only way you can cook great food is by screaming at your support staff, frantically running around the kitchen and scaring your co-workers into cooperation, you will lose people and often. Such quick turnover in staff is a surefire way to see your product suffer.

My cook, Oswaldo and sous chef, Miguel have been with me at Left Coast for nine years. I’m really proud of that. I think it says a great deal about me as a person, as a manager of people and as a chef. I demand respect from my staff, but I also give them my respect; I thank my staff at the end of every day for their work in my kitchen; and most importantly, I like to make our kitchen a fun place to work. While always a professional kitchen (no music, no cell phones), there’s no reason that professional has to mean monotonous. Today, we had conversations and heard some great jokes while we shucked a 30 lb. box of butter beans. When there are that many beans, what else is there to do but to laugh?

I’ve certainly worked in the other kind of kitchens, where silence is not a lapse in conversation but an order. They are a lot like what I imagine military school to be like, and although those experiences have contributed positively to my skill today as a chef, they also made me very sure that I never wanted to run a kitchen like that. When people are cooking from a place of fear, you can taste that fear in food, the same as you can taste love. I don’t want any part of that.

This week I received a note from a former employee who saw me on the show. He wrote to tell me that mine was the nicest kitchen he’s ever worked in. It was a great compliment.

Back to Eve. I bet Eve runs a really nice kitchen. I’m sure her staff is happy and I’m sure she cooks great food when she’s working at her own pace in her own kitchen. So even though Eve is out of the running on Bravo, I can tell you that Eve is a top chef out here in the real world and that she runs a kitchen that I would love to cook for.