Words of Success from the Kitchen

Below are selected quotes from two books recently read.

Both, by chefs, are not only about their lives, but their philosophies of life.

The Devil in the Kitchen: Sex, Pain, Madness, and the Making of a Great Chef by Marco Pierre White.

“You can’t just say, “Come on, boys, let’s try to get it right.” That just won’t work. If you are not extreme, then people will take shortcuts because they don’t fear you.”

“Later on, when I went on to run my own kitchens, I too would insist on silence.”

“I discovered that there is something beautiful about the sounds—chopping, clattering, sizzling—of a working kitchen.”

“When I eventually came to run my own kitchens, I promised myself that if an apology was due, I would make it in front of the rest of the staff.”

“But I had seen talent in other chefs—it’s just the touch, the way the food falls, the way the sauce pours, the way the garnish is put on the plate. If you watch a great chef, he moves elegantly as he cooks.”

“I talked to my new friends about food with such passion that they all thought I’d lost the plot. They were amused by my obsession.”

“Three years earlier I’d used my spare time to fish or poach, and now I was in this melting pot of rock ’n’ roll people. The contrast seemed extreme. They did what they wanted, when they wanted, and that attitude was infectious.”

“…lamb, rosemary and Provençal vegetables go well together.”

“Cook’s brain. It’s that ability to visualize the food on the plate, as a picture in the mind, and then work backward. There’s no reason why domestic cooks can’t do the same thing. Cooking is easy: you’ve just got to think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. Too many professional chefs never think about what they are doing.”

“When you fear, you question. If you don’t fear something, you don’t question it in the same way. And if you have fear in the kitchen, you’ll never take a shortcut. If you don’t fear the boss, you’ll take shortcuts, you’ll turn up late.”

“You move on, don’t you? I didn’t feel sad to leave. I felt it was time to move on, time to progress.”

“I became obsessed with what I call the illusion of grandness. The plates and silverware had to be the finest, and the tablecloths had to be beautiful.”

“Young men were coming into the industry because they wanted to be famous, not because they wanted to cook. They aspired to be celebrity chefs rather than chefs. Lots of famous chefs today don’t look whacked, because they don’t work. They have a healthy glow and a clear complexion. There is blood in their cheeks. They haven’t got burns on their wrists and cuts on their hands.”

“If food is that good, you don’t have to do that much to it.”

 

Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain.

“And the cooks? The cooks ruled.”

“No one understands and appreciates the American Dream of hard work leading to material rewards better than a non-American.”

“The ability to ‘work well with others’ is a must.”

“The great cathedrals of Europe were built by craftsmen — though not designed by them.”

“When I hear ‘artist’, I think of someone who doesn’t think it necessary to show up at work on time.”

“I don’t eat mussels in restaurants unless I know the chef personally, or have seen, with my own eyes, how they store and hold their mussels for service.”

“Cooks hate brunch. A wise chef will deploy his best line cooks on Friday and Saturday nights; he’ll be reluctant to schedule those same cooks early Sunday morning, especially since they probably went out after work Saturday and got hammered until the wee hours.”

“I won’t eat in a restaurant with filthy bathrooms.”

“Vegetarians, and their Hezbollah-like splinter-faction, the vegans, are a persistent irritant to any chef worth a damn.”

“If the restaurant is clean, the cooks and waiters well groomed, the dining room busy, everyone seems to actually care about what they’re doing chances are you’re in for a decent meal.”

“Like I said before, your body is not a temple, it’s an amusement park. Enjoy the ride.”

“Popping raw fish into your face, especially in pre-refrigeration days, might have seemed like sheer madness to some, but it turned out to be a pretty good idea.”

“Do we really want to travel in hermetically sealed popemobiles through the rural provinces of France, Mexico and the Far East, eating only in Hard Rock Cafes and McDonald’s? Or do we want to eat without fear, tearing into the local stew, the humble taqueria’s mystery meat, the sincerely offered gift of a lightly grilled fish head? I know what I want.”

“You need, for God’s sake, a decent chefs knife. No con foisted on the general public is so atrocious, so wrongheaded, or so widely believed as the one that tells you you need a full set of specialized cutlery in various sizes.”

“Nothing will set you apart from the herd quicker than the ability to handle a chef’s knife properly.”

“Margarine? That’s not food.”

“It takes so little to elevate an otherwise ordinary-looking plate. You need zero talent to garnish food.”

“…as I came to understand — that character is far more important than skills or employment history.”

“All the food was simple. And I don’t mean easy, or dumb. I mean that for the first time, I saw how three or four ingredients, as long as they are of the highest and freshest quality, can be combined in a straightforward way to make a truly excellent and occasionally wondrous product.”

” ‘You know, Anthony,’ he said, ‘I have many, many enemies. It’s good, sometimes, to have enemies — even if you don’t know who they are. It means you are . . . important. You must be important. . . important enough to have an enemy.’ ”

Finally – my most recent Forbes posts are here.