Here is a paper I wrote

I wrote this essay for my Creative Nonfiction class and here is the rough draft, which is now finished. It's kind of long so I would forgive you if you didn't actually read it. Once again, Dr. Orr, if you find this on a plagiarism sniffer, this is my personal blog and I wrote it so please do not have me kicked out of college!

From French Fries to Foie Gras: Episodes in the Life of a Would-Be Chef

I want to be a celebrity chef.

I want to serve Kobe beef with truffles and black caviar, just because I can.

I want to have my own sets of cookbooks and officially-licensed set of knives with my face on the hilts.

I want to spend 75% of my time running a restaurant and the other 25% on television, either teaching people how to cook things that they will never attempt in their own kitchens or traveling to restaurants around the country, eating a single bite of other people’s food, and self-importantly saying, “Hmm, not bad. There’s a good smoke flavor in this brisket. Is that real mesquite? Wow, wow. You know, that’s how we do it in my restaurant too, except we use pimento wood coals for that extra flavor boost you can’t find anywhere else. But this is still pretty good.” Both the viewers and the restaurateur will know that I am unimpressed.

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A confession: As much as I want to be a celebrity chef, it’s not something I’m actively pursuing. It’s a cool idea in theory but extremely impractical in the grand scheme, like being an astronaut or a pro wrestler, except that this one holds special significance for me because the food community is one I can always actively be involved in, if only by trying new restaurants and styles of food. I’m aware that only the tiniest fraction of chefs get to be famous, and that it’s not a particularly glamorous job for the rest. It’s not even glamorous for some of the ones that do make it. I’m not particularly anxious to spend every day on my feet, blistering my hands in a hot kitchen, and I can barely micromanage things well enough to keep a SimCity town running. I spent my undergrad career preparing for law school, and that’s still what I want to do. Despite that, the idea is always in the back of my mind—hey, maybe today is the day I should forget about law and go to culinary school instead.

The real problem with being a celebrity chef, though, is that there is perhaps no career choice more inherently contradictory. Traditionally, a restaurant’s head chef is in command of a tiny army of sous-chefs, pastry chefs, line cooks, and waitstaff. The chef commands his army in the kitchen, behind closed doors and out of the public eye. From all I’ve read and seen on TV about the restaurant business, it’s a dirty job that often requires less charisma than calculation, precision, and ruthless efficiency. An effective head chef generally has to be a taskmaster, instructing his underlings on how to make the kitchen run smoothly, rather than a cuddly, catchphrase-spouting figurehead. Maybe they’ll come out of the kitchen to shake a few hands or talk with a journalist, but otherwise they stay back in the kitchen, out of sight, until the work is done.

So why the celebrity chef phenomenon? Sure, being a celebrity chef brings in boatloads of money from cookbook proceeds, advertiser revenues, and attention for one’s restaurant(s). But beyond that, why would a chef want to give up the comfort of the kitchen and step into the spotlight? I realize that the premise of the question is ridiculous: there is no “beyond that,” but bear with me. I would argue that the essence of what makes a chef a chef is stripped away: they are thrust into the public, wearing pristine white aprons embroidered with their names, and told that their personality is more important than the food itself. Their sous-chefs and cooks, the ones who make the gears of the restaurant turn, are taken from them. In fact, the whole restaurant is taken from them. The idea of reproducing a certain number of dishes precisely to a certain standard of quality disappears when they only have to make one for the camera. Suddenly the process of making the food becomes more important than the finished product. The chef prepares food for people who are not us, yet we look on approvingly at this practice. “Oh how wonderful!” we say. “Go ahead, Paula Deen, put another two cups of mayonnaise in that spinach-artichoke dip. How decadent!”

Furthermore, why do we as a society feel the need to watch people cook food we can’t actually eat or even smell and probably will never make ourselves? And in the case of competition shows like Iron Chef, why do we need to watch a panel of judges eat the delicious-looking food, listen to them make near-orgasmic oohs and aahs, and then try to imagine what it tastes like based on obtuse comments like “I feel so gentle when I eat this sushi. The combination of the shad and gizzard is so playful”? It would be like forcing James Joyce on stage, having him write three or four chapters of a novel in an hour only to say, “This is some really profound stuff I’ve written here. It’s too bad you don’t get to read it, but I’ll put a basic plot outline and some character sketches on my website so you can have a crack at it yourself!”

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I usually have a TV or radio on for white noise when I’m working, and this is where my celebrity chef obsession began. I was 14 or 15 years old and Food Network seemed like a good channel—not too interesting to be distracting, but not so boring that I couldn’t stand to watch it. This worked for a while, just faceless people cooking in the background, but then Iron Chef came on, the first show that really drew me into the seedy Food Network subculture. The premise of the show is that the top chefs in Japan come to Kitchen Stadium, the home of Chairman Kaga, the show’s host, and engage his elite team of Iron Chefs in culinary battle with a secret theme ingredient, and the whole thing is dubbed in English like a bad 70’s kung fu movie. If the challenger defeats the Iron Chef, he or she wins not cash, not glittering prizes, but “the people’s ovation and fame forever,” like a noble food samurai. Does this sound convoluted? It is. This is probably why most cooking shows don’t have storylines anymore. In spite of this, I was enthralled.

These guys were beyond extravagant—they slung around foie gras like it was peanut butter and sometimes used thousands of dollars worth of lobster just to flavor some vegetables. Sure it was wasteful and unnecessary, but my god, the pageantry of it! I knew that food could be more than grilled cheese and hamburgers, but this performance took things to a new level; this was the first time I had ever seen food as not just a basic human necessity, but as art—not just in the plating, but in the cooking too.

When I was growing up, my mom usually cooked fairly simple things like meatloaf in tomato paste or smoky collard greens with streak o’ lean or shepherd’s pie topped with lumpy, buttery mashed potatoes: things you just had to boil on the stove or chop up and put in the oven. She’s a good cook, but most everything at my house was country cookin’ served up family style, in a bowl or dish in the middle of the table, and you had to scoop it out and put it on the plate yourself. Never before had I seen a beef tenderloin in a basketball-sized salt crust that has to be cracked open with a hammer and chisel, never before had I seen a carrot carved into a Japanese pagoda and plated as a garnish, and never before had I seen sea urchin roe being skillfully whipped around in a wok without the aid of utensils, doused with enough brandy to create a cherry-red, eyebrow-singeing pillar of flame. Never mind that I didn’t, and still don’t, have any idea what sea urchin roe tastes like—this was how food was supposed to be cooked and how food was supposed to be eaten! How could my mom’s food, prepared in Currituck, North Carolina, possibly compare? There was exotic food out there begging to be eaten. I was a timid kid—to crave carpaccio instead of roast beef, coq au vin instead of fried chicken—this was an act of rebellion by my standards.

The problem with this was that the Iron Chefs had set the bar too high. This kind of cooking was both near-impossible in terms of technique involved and economically infeasible due to the ingredients. I could barely make fried rice without burning half of it and spilling the other half on the counter—preparing multiple time-sensitive dishes without ruining the flavor and/or setting the kitchen on fire was little more than a pipe dream, and to attempt to chop a cucumber with the blinding speed and mechanical precision of an Iron Chef was to sentence my fingers to death by guillotine. And even if I did have the culinary chops not to ruin the food, I couldn’t see my mom ever giving into my requests to buy me a $50 homard lobster so I could try out this new recipe for lobster and peach salad. “But mooom,” I would say, “the noble sweetness of the peach makes for a marvelous union with the texture of French lobster!”

Despite being my gateway into the “foodie” subculture, Iron Chef is by far the most discouraging show that an aspiring cook could watch. It’s not educational aside from the occasional fact about the medicinal powers of shark fin, and its entertainment value is almost outweighed by the sheer jealousy one feels toward the judges for being able to taste the Iron Chefs’ obscenely expensive food with smug, satisfied grins that say, “Only five people in the world will ever know what these Prawns in Chili Sauce taste like, and I am one of them, and you are not.” If anything, Iron Chef is a bad influence: the chefs’ dishes are most often too daring or too absurd for anyone in their right mind to prepare themselves. You will never be able to make these dishes at home, and attempting to do so would be like attempting to recreate the Sistine Chapel ceiling to scale with an 8-pack of RoseArt crayons.

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Luckily, I soon discovered that there were other chefs with shows on Food Network, shows that were designed to cater to people like me—that is, people who can barely boil water without sustaining second-degree burns. They used phrases like “put two tablespoons of” and “set the oven to,” which were exceedingly more helpful than anything ever said on Iron Chef. Unfortunately, a lot of these cooking shows proved to be dreadful. Still, Food Network still seemed like a worthwhile venture: most of its programming was educational, the topic of discussion had a largely visual element, and I felt less like a weirdo than I would have sitting around reading cookbooks.

Emeril Lagasse was and to an extent still is the standard by which instructional cooking shows are measured, so I started with him. However, his actual cooking instruction was eerily similar to Iron Chef—the kitchen was re-prepped during commercials with ingredients already chopped and measured out, so all he had to do was dump them in a pot or put them in the oven and shout catchphrases while the audience cheered. To me, it somehow seemed to lack the spirit of true cooking. I’ve never tried Emeril’s food but he has a reputation for being a legitimately great chef; on his show, however, the cooking was just a vehicle for this jolly Cajun man from Massachusetts to yell things and mug for the camera. I was more offended by this than I really had any right to be (how could I criticize Emeril for not caring enough about the food when I had barely cooked anything in my whole life?), so I searched for other avenues to becoming a great chef from the comfort of my home. All of them would be dead ends.

The next option I tried was a guy who Iron Chef brought in to play the “ugly American” character, a Southwestern chef named Bobby Flay. After he finished his dishes on Iron Chef, he climbed atop his cutting board and showboated for the audience—this was taken as a sign of disrespect in Japan, and he was widely considered to be a pretty big jerk by the Japanese people. In spite of this, it seemed like a perfect match since his show Boy Meets Grill focused primarily on two areas near and dear to my heart: grilling large slabs of meat and the use of cornmeal, one of my mom’s traditional staples. He definitely hosted with an air of arrogance, but his recipes were largely easy to follow and the few I actually tried turned out pretty well. I still use one of his corn muffin recipes from time to time—very moist and peppery. However, soon after I started watching him, he began a new show called Throwdown! with Bobby Flay, and this is where the trouble started.

Throwdown! was essentially Punk’d with food: small-town chefs specializing in certain dishes are told that they are going to be featured in a Food Network show and instructed to host a party for their friends and family at their restaurants (if they have one—some of the chefs are amateurs). Bobby Flay then shows up at the party with his cooking gear and challenges the chef to a cook-off of their signature dish. The challengers sometimes appeared to have partied a little too hard before Flay showed up, giving him a slight advantage. In many cases, he also had superior equipment and ingredients, along with multiple recipes that had been practiced in the Food Network test kitchen. I found the concept of the show to be a bit morally bankrupt. I like schadenfreude as much as the next guy (maybe more), but I had no desire to see a big-time celebrity chef come in and mop the floor with an untrained amateur. It actually made me lose the desire to watch Flay’s other shows in protest and proved to me that the Japanese thought he was a jerk because he was, in fact, a jerk. I also learned that maybe Emeril was onto something—in this case, the chef’s personality really did prove to be more important than the food, but in the worst way. If food really was art then Flay was a master artist, but did seeing him act like a pompous ass cheapen his craft’s value? I suppose it did, as far as I was concerned.

There were other Food Network shows and other Food Network chefs and they were largely unimpressive. There were only so many ways to watch someone grill up a ribeye and garnish it with warm potato salad or show you how to make a classic roux to thicken your soups before you started to get a little disillusioned with the celebrity chef product. Perhaps the most egregious offender was Sandra Lee, the host of Semi-Homemade Cooking. Here was a woman who, instead of offering legitimate cooking instruction, advised viewers to coordinate their kitchen’s color scheme with their sweaters and told them that Jell-O cheesecake in a little plastic cup is just as good as the homemade kind. There is no culinary integrity in these statements; if anything, they are a cry for help.

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Worst of all, as much as I practiced, my dishes never turned out quite right and I seemed to be getting worse as I went along. From the beginning of my reluctant obsession with Food Network, I’ve experimented sporadically, and even now, the results are almost inevitably disappointing. I had some bad habits. For one thing, I insisted on cooking foreign dishes (usually Asian) with hard-to-find ingredients. In high school, I would ask my mom to pick up a few things at the grocery store so I could try making a “gourmet dinner,” a phrase my dad grew to love to tease me with. Naturally, it was impossible to find ground Thai chiles and kaffir lime leaves at Food Lion, and this always resulted in a substitution. Mom made a solid effort, but chili powder and regular lime zest didn’t taste right in place of the authentic ingredients. Or so I imagined, since they were impossible to find.

Another bad habit was finding one ingredient in a recipe that I liked individually and doubling the amount of it while removing another that I disliked—in the case of my Vietnamese egg rolls, I doubled potatoes and eliminated carrots, which resulted in their being starchy, overfilled, and bland without the natural sweetness of the carrots. The extra spices I added to the Kung Pao chicken raised the capsaicin content to what seemed like near-fatal levels. The additional layers of puff pastry on my beef and Guinness pie, instead of rising up like a Russian onion dome, stuck together in a doughy clump.

Beyond that, my technique with most kitchen utensils was simply atrocious. I sometimes tried to sauté a couple cloves of garlic in some oil to release the flavor, only to find that the pan was too hot and that my garlic had already burned up, even after I took it off the stove. I didn’t know that it was possible to over-mix cake batter, which led to some very tough baked goods. It took me seven or eight minutes to peel and cube a potato, and I reluctantly admit that I’ve only shaved about a minute off that time since then.

I had some successes here and there, like the aforementioned corn muffins and simple recipes like slow-cooker chili, but only a cowboy can live off of corn muffins and chili. My abundant failures in the other culinary arenas were causing me to lose my passion for this cooking thing. I wondered if I’d get to experience the dishes I’d seen on TV—it was apparent that I’d never be able to make them in my own kitchen. The situation was beginning to look grim. Maybe food really was just fuel to shove in your face to keep from dying after all.

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My Epicurean crisis of faith was cured by a couple of cruises around Central America with my family. There, I got my first chance to taste some of the dishes I had coveted since seeing them on Iron Chef, the ones my mom wouldn’t cook and the local restaurants didn’t have on the menu.

On these trips, I learned the value of traveling to other countries firsthand in order to sample cuisine at its most authentic. We found a restaurant in a small shack in St. Maarten that served jerk chicken as I’d never had it before, smoked over green wood with fresh Scotch Bonnet peppers and allspice served with a sweet green jelly. The chicken took a backseat to the strong and intense flavors of the seasoning, which was unlike any collection of dried herbs I could get at the Food Lion—Chef Paul Prudhomme should be ashamed of himself. They served fried local yuca root, pronounced “joo-ka, not yuck-a,” starchier and sweeter than potatoes. In Costa Rica, every restaurant served beans and rice with every meal, including breakfast, whether you wanted them or not. They were flavored with native herbs and had a flavor reminiscent of coffee. I don’t even like coffee, yet the beans and rice never seemed to get old, even after a week. On a trip to England, I sampled Cornish pasties, the savory steak-and-potato pies that miners’ wives traditionally prepared for their husbands. I ate aged steak of Scottish “heeland coo” (highland cow, for the uninitiated), unusually lean and more robust in flavor than the American Angus I’d tried before. Even haggis, a disgusting-sounding combination of sheep innards and oatmeal, turned out to be rather tasty—savory, like sausage. These dishes all had two things in common: they were delicious and I’d never seen them in North Carolina.

On the cruises, at dinner, the new experiences continued: there was sweet, chilled watermelon soup, almost as thick as sorbet and just as crisp on the tongue. Delicate, buttery foie gras, soft and smooth enough to be spread onto the toasted baguette garnish like cream cheese. Fatty, gamey duck meat with the skin left on, roasted until crisp. Rich crème brûlée, the caramel crust torched just long enough to be hard to the touch but able to produce a satisfying crack when punctured with a spoon. Baby escargot served in the shells with garlic butter, which was disappointingly reminiscent of garlicky Vienna sausage. But it was okay, because everything couldn’t be good, and I was a better person for having tried it.

This was why I wanted to get into the food culture in the first place—the flavors were bold and unique. Sure, I might be an abysmal cook, but I could still enjoy experiencing food even if I couldn’t make it myself, in the same way a film buff could enjoy movies without being a Hollywood producer. And the more outlandish the better: steak was good, but I was not content to settle for the New York Strip with so many other options before my palate. While I was on the cruises, I ate two appetizers, two entrees, and two desserts at dinner each night. The waiters almost certainly hated me, but the meals were already paid for and my childhood would only offer me so many chances to indulge like this.

I regret nothing.

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Only recently, this whole celebrity chef fascination of mine has shown me a future way to immerse myself in the world of food. A few months ago, I discovered a BBC show called Kitchen Nightmares, in which a harsh, profanity-spewing Scotsman named Gordon Ramsay travels to failing restaurants across Europe (and now America, thanks to a Fox spinoff) and tries to correct their problems so they can turn a profit within a week. Although Ramsay is a highly accomplished chef, Kitchen Nightmares placed no emphasis on cooking for the home viewer, instead focusing on the restaurants’ troubles with service, organization, sanitation, and other problems. It stood out against the chipper, upbeat figures on Food Network, and opened my eyes to another facet of the world of food that I’d never really considered.

I would be hard-pressed to call managing a restaurant an art form in the same way that the actual preparation of food might be, but Ramsay almost made it look more appealing. Unlike all the other celebrity chefs, he was crass and brutally honest. His aggressiveness and sometimes outright meanness was a stark contrast to the chefs I’d seen before, but he made it abundantly clear that successfully operating a restaurant didn’t have to be overwhelmingly difficult, but it did take more work than most people were willing to put in. Hey, I can do work! And I can just hire a chef to do the cooking for me? Maybe this is possible after all, I thought. My ambition was rekindled, albeit with a new focus. Perhaps if I can’t make the food, I can at least bring it to the people.

I can only hope that my passion for food will last until I’m through with school and can afford to invest in starting a restaurant. I’ve evaluated my options, and the best of these right now is to start an overwhelmingly godawful restaurant in an abandoned warehouse somewhere and hope that Gordon Ramsay comes to fix it up for me, and this doesn’t strike me as an economically sound decision. Of course, the irony of my wanting to start a restaurant thanks to Kitchen Nightmares is that it has made me examine restaurants with a critical eye, thereby making my perception of them more pessimistic. I now examine the décor upon entering to see whether it’s formal and stuffy, or casual and inviting. Does the lighting match the theme of the restaurant? Are there wall sconces? There should probably be wall sconces. When I receive the menu, I check to see if the dishes are reflective of authentic, rustic flavors that could use fresh local produce. I look at plates on the tables around me to see if the chef is more concerned with flavors or frills before I order. How long does it take for someone to take my order? How long does it take to arrive at the table? Does it come out of the kitchen correctly? And most importantly, how does the food taste? How’s the texture? Portion size? I never used to care so much about these things, as long as the food was edible and there was enough of it that I didn’t have to go home hungry. Now if the restaurant fails any of these criteria, I immediately wonder how far in debt the owner is and how much longer the restaurant will be able to stay afloat.

I perversely imagine the day my restaurant earns its third Michelin star (it’s a European restaurant—how else am I supposed to have cred?) and the grand celebration that will accompany it. I wonder what kind of extravagant, psychotic features I can include for my foodie customers that only they will appreciate or even care about. Maybe I could dust all the tables with silver on a nightly basis. Maybe I could brine the roast rack of lamb in a sea turtle’s tears. I envision dessert plates dipped in melted chocolate and frozen. Bowls made out of ostrich eggs. Motion-sensitive track lighting along the entrance that changes color when someone walks by. None of these things have any effect on the food, but these deranged ritualistic behaviors are the things you are expected to do to have a famous restaurant.

People like me, who want to go to restaurants like this, see the emotion in food and we want to experience the emotions of food in every meal, and a Subway sub, for example, has no emotion. We want to eat for entertainment just as much as sustenance. It’s a little ridiculous, but it’s a lot of fun too.

In the meantime, some of my short term dreams and fantasies still revolve around the pursuit of high-quality food. My dreams are filled with the top-flight big-city restaurants I’ve only read about, like Peter Luger Steak House and Daniel Restaurant and Mario Batali’s Babbo in New York City or, yes, Gordon Ramsay’s eponymous restaurant in London. My friends think I’m weird for buying obscure Asian fruits like rambutan and mangosteen at the specialty grocery store instead of sticking with apples and bananas. In fact, I hope to one day make a pilgrimage of sorts to Jungle Jim’s International Market, a four-acre grocery adventure in Cincinnati that offers, for example, 1600 kinds of cheese, 100 varieties of honey, and a meat section diverse enough to include wild boar and kangaroo steaks.

The prospect of kangaroo steaks is one of the most exciting things I can imagine.