Cuisine or death: The real chef’s motto

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 02:01:00 +0000

You have to be so earnestly devoted that if you were any more devoted it would be perverse, and any less, it would not be enough. -- Charlie Trotter, "Becoming a Chef"

When I fell into this thing, this cosa nostra of cuisine, it was by accident. I had a background in fine art, and I was seduced by the creative process of cooking and the satisfaction of making things with my hands. Fifteen years later, I've been a baker, a line cook, a sous chef, now a pastry chef, and I can't imagine doing anything else. But back then, I never planned to make a career out of it, and the "foodie" culture we know today was still in its infancy. Back then, people still craved what came out of kitchens more than access into them.

Now, fueled by cooking shows and the Web, we have a culture of cuisine-as-entertainment. We're barraged by food porn, coffee-table cookbooks, and gritty tell-alls of the professional kitchen. Customers are constantly looking for what's new, the next big thing. As a professional, I've seen this culture make certain cooks hungry for stardom, hoping to be on TV shows and in magazines. But I've also seen that interest in cuisine shrink the world, making exotic ingredients more accessible, and push us to keep discovering new flavors and learning new techniques. It's a truly exciting time to be a chef, but it's always taken certain kinds of personalities to excel in cuisine, to have that geeky kind of masochism that drives us to aspire, impossibly, to perfection in both art and athleticism.

Chef’s night in

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:01:00 +0000

We asked members of our Kitchen Cabinet to briefly share some of their holiday memories with us, and we're sharing them with you all this week. Today, two chefs spend the holidays pretty much alone, and that's alright by them.

From Michael Laiskonis, executive pastry chef, Le Bernardin:

It was a turning point in some way, 15 years ago, when I separated the holidays of youth with the ones I experience now. It was my first Christmas season as a young cook, deep, as we call it, in the shit.

There are busy days in the hospitality industry that are like hard sprints, Valentine's Day or Mother's Day, but the weeks that fall between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve comprise one long, grueling marathon. As waiters and cooks we subconsciously plan for the "season" all year long, but it's always still a little shocking when it hits.

I was a baker at a small outfit in the outlying suburbs of Detroit. We were producing around the clock for over two weeks. By Christmas Eve, it was all flying out of the shop as fast as we could fill the cases. I was feeling that deep, to-the-bone kind of tired, surviving only on what little adrenaline I could summon until we finally locked the doors at 4 p.m.

Salon.com > Michael Laiskonis

Cuisine or death: The real chef’s motto

Chef’s night in