I have a friend who has a list of movie credits as long as ”Gone With the Wind.” She`s never said a word on film. Usually she`s hard to find on the screen. Sometimes she`s on the cutting room floor. She`s an extra. But if you read her resume, you`d think she were a bigger star than Kathleen Turner.
Chef`s resumes are beginning to look like my friend`s. Every upstart who wears kitchen whites now claims credit for every job he or she has ever held for more than 4 minutes.
The press releases say this one is ”formerly of Le Cirque.” That one is ”formerly of Arcadia.” This one worked under that great one in France. And everyone is a ”CIA graduate,” as if a two-year program in cooking basics and restaurant management at the Culinary Institute of America transformed every student into a young Escoffier.
Making a stage
What the resumes don`t say is that the ”chef,” then the lowest of the low cooks, scraped carrots and peeled onions at Le Cirque. Or that she was charged with cleaning the kale at Arcadia-they use a lot of kale at Arcadia. Or that he interned at Paul Bocuse in Lyon for a couple of weeks, then spent a weekend looking in at Giradet`s famous, immaculate kitchen in Switzerland. (In French, this kind of short apprenticeship is called ”making a stage,” an expression American chefs love to throw around-though they often don`t pronounce it properly.) Somehow, as time goes by, those fortnights and weekends grow into major positions.
Then there is this scenario: ”My client is very upset that all you really liked was the hamburger,” a restaurant publicist called to complain recently. ”He doesn`t think you`ve ever been to his restaurant. He doesn`t think his restaurant is just a bar with a good burger. He`s paying all this money for a CIA graduate.”
Then your client is a fool, I had to tell the publicist. His ”CIA graduate” may have gotten an ”A” in Hamburger, but he obviously didn`t do better than ”C” in most everything else.
(It`s like this old Jackie Mason story: You go to the doctor with a liver problem. How do you know the doctor didn`t fail liver? He passed kidneys and heart. The grades averaged. He became a doctor.)
The restaurant hustle
Chef credits are the new restaurant hustle, another way to try to pack the place; associate yourself with someone else`s hard-earned reputation. This wouldn`t be profitable if: 1. the materialistic 1980s hadn`t spawned so many chefs who are in it for the celebrity, not love of cooking, 2. there weren`t so many diners who eat for status and respond to the name brands and designer labels, and 3. there weren`t journalists like me with space to fill who report these associations unquestioningly.
Unfortunately, it does not go without saying that there are chefs (and restaurateurs) with real credentials-with long-honed cooking and managerial skills, discipline, a sense of harmony, integrity, service. They are the ones for whom the other ones peel carrots.
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