CNO•001-020•Part 1•Final 12/11/00 1:15 PM Page 1 Why Eat Out? part i YOU ARE WHAT YOU EAT: THE IMPORTANCE OF DINING OUT Amy Scherber and François Payard CNO•001-020•Part 1•Final 12/11/00 1:15 PM Page 2 Stephan Pyles AQUAKNOX AND FISHBOWL (DALLAS) “It’s very important to eat out, and to train your palate. For a professional chef, it’s as important as culinary school and textbook study.” hat does it take to become a great chef in America today? Certainly education—either as an apprentice or, more than ever before, in profes- wsional cooking schools—and experience in the kitchen are important. A profound understand- “Understanding what ing of ingredients, and the flavors and techniques that will best enhance their taste, is vital—along with a commitment to excellence at every step it’s like to dine in the of the way. kind of place where But leading professional chefs across America agree that the most im- portant aspect of a professional chef’s development is eating out. What you want to work most of the general public do for sustenance, and many restaurant lovers needs to become part do for entertainment, is the lifeblood of an ambitious chef’s professional development. of an aspiring chef’s “I am a huge advocate of chefs learning to cook by eating in good experience. If you lose restaurants,” says Rick Bayless of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo (Chicago). “I recommend that constantly. The first thing that anyone sight of that, your food who’s serious about becoming a chef should do is save up every penny gets off track and loses they’ve got and eat at the best restaurants in the country. And not just once—they need to go regularly.” its punch.” Bob Kinkead, chef-owner of Kinkead’s (Washington, DC), agrees. “I Rick Bayless have always been of the opinion that I learn a lot more by dining in restaurants than by working in them,” says Kinkead. “That’s how I saw FRONTERA GRILL AND TOPOLOBAMPO the big picture of what a restaurateur aims to achieve. A lot of the time, (CHICAGO) people get stuck in the restaurant kitchen or in the dining room and they don’t get to see what the rest of the picture is all about. For chefs and 2 CHEF’S NIGHT OUT CNO•001-020•Part 1•Final 12/11/00 1:15 PM Page 3 WHY EAT OUT? 3 cooks, it’s important to see the context in which food is presented. The whole dining experience is not just about the food, the service, or the dé- cor—great restaurants pull everything together into a great package.” Eating out offers professional chefs a chance to experience a taste of history; to learn the best practices of those restaurants that excel at one or more aspects of the restaurant experience, such as food, service, and/or ambiance; and to develop a sense of their own place within the context of the contemporary restaurant culture. Suzanne Goin of Lucques (Los Angeles) believes that it’s absolutely essential for young cooks to eat out. “I can’t think of anything that is more important,” she insists. “When I interview a cook, I always ask, ‘Where do you eat? What are your favorite restaurants? Have you eaten here?’ That is how I figured out where to work—I wanted to work where I wanted to eat! When I walked into Al Forno [in Providence], I smelled the aro- mas, tasted the food, and just knew I had to work there!” Despite the importance of dining out as part of a culinary profes- “My dad had a rule sional’s education, it’s something that is not part of a typical cooking school’s curriculum—underscoring the need for the book you’re now when I was growing holding. “In cooking school, we were never taught how to dine,” recalls up: If we were willing Rocco DiSpirito of Union Pacific (New York). “In fact, I don’t think there’s enough emphasis placed on the notion that you need to dine as to try something new much as you cook in order to really have a full understanding of the two and it turned out we sides of the experience.” Rick Tramonto and Gale Gand of Tru and Brasserie T (Chicago) con- didn’t like it, we could cur. “Young kids should spend more money on travel and eating,” argues always get a cheese- Tramonto. Gand adds, “We think dining out is so important that we even recommend that cooks invest in themselves by maxing out their credit burger. So, as a kid, I cards on restaurants instead of clothes!” would order everything Investing in this book is an excellent place to start, to point you on your journey. from blood sausage and head cheese to Eating Out as a Life-Changing Experience oysters on the half In the best of circumstances, dining in restaurants can literally be a life- shell and Oysters changing experience. In fact, it was in this way that several leading chefs found their calling. Rockefeller. And I “My dad was a total Francophile, and took us to lunch at Roger Vergé found that I liked when I was around twelve,” recalls Suzanne Goin of Lucques. “I was served a whole fish, with slices of cucumber on top as the scales. As a them all!” kid, that fish completely blew me away! We had a cheese plate, and the Cindy Pawlcyn waiter was so great to me and my sister as he showed us all the differ- ent goat cheeses, which I loved. Plus, the restaurant is a beautiful stone MUSTARDS GRILL mill in a dreamy, fantasy setting. It felt like we were members of a (NAPA) little club. CNO•001-020•Part 1•Final 12/11/00 1:15 PM Page 4 “The experience was not just about the food, but about the restau- rant—the whole magical world of it,” says Goin. “It made me want to get closer to that world, not only by becoming a chef, but by opening a restaurant—so I could really be creating something, as opposed to just cooking something.” A visit to the Drake Hotel when she was sixteen was a turning point for Cindy Pawlcyn of Mustards Grill (Napa). “I had soft-shell crabs, which were sautéed tableside with sherry, and I remember thinking, ‘This is so cool—I want to be a chef!’ I had already been thinking of becoming a chef, but this was the experience that really convinced me. It was every single element of it, from the exotic aromas, flavors, and Rick Bayless of Frontera Grill and Topolobampo (Chicago) Learning the Potential of the Dining Experience at Age Twelve I WAS DEDICATED TO GOOD RESTAURANT EATING FROM A VERY EARLY AGE. But I didn’t have a lot of family support, despite the fact that I came from a family that owned and operated a restaurant. The notion of eating in a really fine restaurant was beyond the scope of my immediate family. A couple of years after Julia Child had started cooking on television, when I was twelve years old, I got her book Mastering the Art of French Cook- ing and cooked my way through the volume, week by week by week. I was fa- miliar with the dishes and really excited to go to a restaurant that knew how to make them. I had saved up my money, so I made my own reservation and took the bus downtown to Oklahoma City for lunch at the High Tower Restaurant. It had been there for a long time and was very sophisticated, with lots of tableside service. I sat down and told them what I wanted, because I knew what the dishes were. I think at first they didn’t know what to make of me—a twelve-year-old dining alone. But they were very nice. I can still tell you everything I had: I started with a bowl of vichyssoise, then I had broiled flank steak, which was laid on a wooden platter, surrounded by browned piped potatoes. Then they brought an enormous silver punch bowl filled with chocolate mousse to the table, and I had a scoop of chocolate mousse to finish my meal. It was, with- out a doubt, the most dramatic moment of my life. I felt like a million dollars when I walked out of there, and that feeling set a benchmark for me. 4 CHEF’S NIGHT OUT CNO•001-020•Part 1•Final 12/11/00 1:15 PM Page 5 WHY EAT OUT? 5 textures to the beauty of the dining room and their treating us like ladies—the whole nine yards.” Paul Bartolotta, formerly of Spiaggia (Chicago), found himself working in restaurants in Milwaukee as a teenager, but his job developed into a calling. “I ended up working for a Florentine chef,” he remembers, “and I would sit around late at night, listening to his stories about growing up in Italy. I was enamored with all the folklore. He told me, ‘If you want to get closest to real Italian food, you need to go to Doro’s in Chicago.’ “So, when I was seventeen, I put on my white polyester suit and took the train to Chicago for the first meal I had ever had by myself. Doro’s had white leather chairs, white linen and fine silver, and served north- ern Italian food.