Chef's School

I don't want to go to chef's school.

I do love to cook. I love the dance of a new dish—will this work? how will I know? (I trust the process and my decades of experience in throwing food together and making delicious things happen.) I love seeing something online or in a cookbook and then meticulously following the steps so that I know what it's supposed to be, and I also love doing that so many times that I know by feel how much is just right, the angle of the knob on the stove, the smell of doneness and almost-but-not-quite-overdoneness. I love playing with new ingredients, going to upscale markets and plebeian grocery stories and import monoliths. I love the behind-the-scenes energy of making my own sauces and condiments—why bother, except to learn how to do it and how the science works—and the little jewels of finished product on my plate and in my pantry.

I love reading about food—strange ingredients from all corners of the planet, hot young chefs, kitchen politics, best-of lists, memoirs of lives lived among grease spatters and tiny bowls. I love to leaf through cookbooks to understand different parts of the world. I love photos of people at the market, bicycles piled high with greens or noodles or fish or bread. I love interviews with people who care deeply and passionately about their kitchens and what gets made inside them.

I love to think about issues of food writ large—how the systems of capitalism and globalism and colonialism have combined to create a society where Taco Tuesday is a thing but they still want to build a wall. About why women cook at home and why men cook in professional kitchens. I love to think about how food traditions are passed down through generations, and what happens when that tradition is disrupted. I love to think about how all the broken parts of restaurants can be better—how to temper the substance use, the aggression, the machismo, that seems baked into every restaurant I've ever worked in.

But I do not want to go to chef's school.

I don't doubt that there's much to be learned about all those topics, and more. My technique is imperfect. I don't know how to debone a rabbit or make a ballotine or press my own head cheese. I don't know which wine goes with which meal. (I like rosé, with everything, except spaghetti.) I don't know the finer points of fine dining, like which of the several grades of service staff is responsible for wielding the little brush that will dispose of the table crumbs, which is half a chastisement of you, and half a hilarious bit of pretend housekeeping that does not make the food more delicious but sends a clear message about the type of person they want you to be. (Usually, it's the type of person who opts for the seven-course tasting menu and the wine pairings, kthxbai.)

Chef's school beckons and I want to know about food.

But! I do not think French or Italian cuisine is special or even foundational to cooking, and those are the cuisines that baby chefs master when they get their Red Seals. I think the type of cooking and service chef's schools espouse is on the way out, and the schools have not done enough to respond to regionalism in cooking, international influences, and social questions around who belongs in the kitchen and why. Chef's schools, like all educational institutions, are not especially nimble at responding to social shifts; they tend to keep grinding away at the canon. Going to chef's school is buying into the story that the best chefs are white men, and that I need to uphold their traditions in order to be taken seriously. File that story in the fiction section, please.

I've eaten and worked in upscale joints. I've eaten and worked in down-low places. I'm supremely tired of feeling like French cuisine is the One True Light of professional cooking. French cuisine, to me, is fine, but only fine. Fusion cuisine, in which international flavours are married to a French style, is...I mean, yes, but also, gussying up a taco with dusts and infusions and glazes...I dunno. We can talk until the house lights come up about the foundations of cooking, about how learning how to cook in the Bocuse style means that you can launch yourself into other cuisines, but the reality is, graduate from one of those places and you might always think that a big white plate next to a glass of wine is the definition of good food. Recent trends (that have been emerging for, like, a decade or two) like molecular gastronomy, New Nordic, or the boom in fermenting and preserving are unremarked or minimally covered. Hell, even topics like artisan and local foods are glossed over.

What I would love is the chance to go to chef's school and learn more about the stuff that means something to me. I want to be taught from a kaiseki tradition as well as a tasting menu one. I want to talk about why charging $3 per dumpling on top of a $12 Negroni misunderstands the function of a dumpling. I want to learn about feminism in chef's school, and about why we look to women for domestic cookery and why we accept turbocharged drunks as industry leaders—and then I want to know how to challenge that. I want to talk about burnout and self-care in an industry with 2% profit margins and 70 hour workweeks. I'd love to take a rougher-hewn approach, one that strips off the white gloves and looks hard at things like pop-ups, food trucks, cruise ships, cafeterias, supper clubs, take-out joints, catering companies, camp cooking, and more. I want to learn how to cook for people who have just given birth or just lost someone close to them, not just people with company cards or anniversary dates.

I want to understand, in a real and tangible way, how food makes communities happen, and how to feed communities.

Home cooking will always be special to me; and going to chef's school to get really good at home cooking is like getting a Masters degree in Literature so you can be the smartest one at book club. (I don't doubt both have happened.) I want better theory, more light in dark corners, more appreciation for the folks who are grinding away on a four-burner electric stove, trying new shit, playing, experimenting, learning, wanting more from themselves and their food.

One day several years ago, I was biking in Toronto at dusk and I blipped by a side street. In the middle of the road there was a long table, and people were bringing out bowls and platters and setting down mismatched plates. In the blink of an eye, I had a whole portrait of a community of people who liked each other enough to cook together and for each other. It was a magic moment: the light, the street, the smell in the air, the wind in my hair, the feeling in my heart as I got to witness this microscopic moment of togetherness that was built around food. I would bet my last dollar none of them had gone to chef's school; I would bet that dollar again that every last bite was delicious.

Teach me that, chef's school. Teach me that.