Goodness gracious, can this get any more amateurish?

I'll start with a quote from a recent article:

San Francisco Chronicle food critic MacKenzie Chung Fegan dropped a bombshell of a story about visiting the three-Michelin-starred restaurant the French Laundry, wherein chef Thomas Keller asked her to leave. This is, of course, one of the cardinal sins of a business built on hospitality, especially if the diner hasn’t done anything worthy of getting 86’d other than existing as a restaurant critic.

Let's take it from the top. Fegan is a B-tier, underqualified critic that elbowed her way in via Bon Appetit and serves as a perfect example of what happens when a publication doesn't actually care about putting someone who has expertise in a position that mandates a vast amount of it. Now as I mentioned back when she first took the position, I expected a subdued but steady degradation and eventual failure, much like her predecessor. Not being terribly aggressively online, as well as preoccupied by the overbearing and perpetual sense of impending disaster that seems to refresh as readily as someone's Facebook page, I haven't bothered to keep terribly tight track of that over the past two years. But to discover tonight that the article referenced in that quote probably helped seal the win on a James Beard Award? I am, to put it mildly, appalled. 

Hospitality is rather more nuanced than most would be comfortable understanding. It is the foremost duty of a host and their environ to curate the experience for all those permitted entry. If someone is where they shouldn't be, that's a problem. Calling the use of a privilege, duty, and burden as essential as that a 'cardinal sin' should be grounds for a flogging. "...especially if the diner hasn't done anything worthy of getting 86'd other than existing as a restaurant critic." Well, if they shouldn't exist as a restaurant critic, maybe that might have been a clue. 

Maintaining the balance of what goes through a restaurant's doors is a delicate dance, and the steps are more subtle the higher the stakes, something I know quite well. While I don't have a 3-starred restaurant in my background, I've worked in 1-starred places before and had the head chef of a 2-starred place offer me its head pastry chef job half an hour into preparing for a demonstration class together. Nowadays it's very easy for someone noisy and shameless to get a thoroughly wrong message in the eyes and ears of hundreds of millions of people, so giving someone the boot is not actually a problem- nor should it be. 

That, however, is weighed against perceived public image. The French Laundry- a fantastic restaurant but one reliably overhyped. Years of steady media attention crafted a legacy it's never felt quite worthy of- rather like Chez Panisse, another inexplicably iconic California spot. I'm not talking out my ass here-  a friend went for dinner there over the weekend, so my most recent intel on the place is as fresh as it gets. When something awkward and controversial happens such places often suffer in the courts of public opinion, and those at the center of the discord often reap the benefits. 

That seems to be what happened here.

Perhaps the winds are shifting, and Thomas Keller's star has dimmed. The hungry and envious backing those in conflict with the French Laundry restaurant consortium have managed to sneak in an eye gouge here, and put an award where it really should never have gone. This undermines the James Beard Awards somewhat severely in my eyes. After all the hullabaloo a few years back and their supposed newfound attention to detail, I don't like this mess one bit.

Book Review: The Soul of a Chef

The Soul of a Chef (the Journey Toward Perfection). Written by Michael Ruhlman, published by Penguin-putnam.

This book is one of the many emerging 'insider' accounts of various celebrated kitchens, culinary icons, and the internal society of cooks and foodservice workers. This particular volume deals with three completely different mindsets, yet very similar outlooks on the world, and how, in the end, it really is all about the food, giving a double handful of phenomenal recipes and preparations.

The first third of the book deals with something most people, even most culinary enthusiasts know much at all about: the exam to become a CMC, a Certified Master Chef. Proctored at the Culinary Institute of America in New York, this is a test that distills centuries of preparation techniques to their fundamental essence. For a modern chef in an age of improvisation, of jazz-like innovation, this return to ruthlessly enforced basic principles is both enormously taxing and immensely humbling. There's a very good reason this test has only a handful of candidates every year, and very few success stories, even from those.
However, the downside to this component is that it's rather choppily written. The candidates are rather flat, and while their trials illuminate them, it's often not enough. Most of them aren't detailed with enough personality or history, so it's hard to cheer them on except in an abstract manner.

The second part of the book dives headlong into a renowned restaurant, Michael Symon's Lola, in Cleveland. It goes into detail about the modestly laissez-faire kitchen, its loyal staff, brilliant menu, and the restaurant's enormous success, serving beautiful food with their own unique style. This section is much more smoothly written, and serving in seeming counterpoint to, the beginning's rigid focus; underneath though, the very same intensity and passion for excellence is still strong and easy to see.

The third section finds what may be the perfect synthesis of the CMC exam's classical pedigree and the modern groove of a contemporary restaurant, Thomas Keller and The French Laundry. A superb analysis of the man, his history, his food and his philosophies is accented by a breathless commentary on the food itself.

A short epilogue revisits the highs and lows of the book, doing some thoughtful comparing and contrasting between the sections and characters portrayed throughout. It does an excellent job of bringing the components together and closing out the manuscript.

But it's not over. Following that, as I noted earlier, there are recipes; some from each part of the book: the CMC exam candidates, Lola bar and bistro, and Thomas Keller's French Laundry. Each stands on its own merit, and are much less intimidating outside of their environments of origin. Home cooks will adore dishes like Lola's Slash-and-burn Grouper (p 352), but may avoid trying their hand at Keller's intimidating Oysters And Pearls (p 358). Nonetheless, there are recipes for all degrees of intensity, and most levels of casual or professional talent.

I liked this book. It gives useful insights into a field that is defined by excellence, and in thorough exposition, shows how difficult it can be to define something that sounds so simple. There seem to be many forms of success, from business savvy, popularity with locals, with media, or even sheer mastery of technique, creativity, and that elusive, ephermal quantity that's either there, or it's not. The industry is trying to define it one way, many successful chefs are defining it another, and the world of people they serve often has something else in mind entirely.

Who's right?

Whoever's happiest.