The French brigade system and the ritual of staging has defined what it means to train as a fine dining chef for more than a century — and it broke me after a week
And as in ballet, running a restaurant requires an enormous amount of work and training to make it look effortless, since while we dine we do not want to think about the throbbing back of the prep cook who peeled a giant bag of Yukon Golds any more than we want to think about the bloody, mangled toes of the ballerina as she flits across the stage. TV shows like, where cooking is made to look like a form of tai chi set to Vivaldi, only enhance this romantic image.
But lately, fewer are coming. Today aspiring chefs are far more likely to do their stage in Barcelona or Tokyo or Chicago or Arequipa, Peru, than they are to go to France. The life of a stagiaire in France is notoriously grueling: One American I spoke to, Justin Kent, spent a year at Arpège, Alain Passard’s three-star temple to vegetables in Paris, and said, “I’d get a break for about an hour between services and I’d call my mom and cry.
For 14 hours a day, with a legally mandated afternoon break, I hulled kilos of beans; blanched, peeled, andcrate upon crate of gorgeous tomatoes; disemboweled tubloads of fresh shrimp; reached into the mouths of sea bass with serrated spines to rip out their guts; emptied and scrubbed down the walk-in freezer; lugged giant coolers full of octopus off the back of a truck; plucked the leaves from endless bushels of cilantro; peeled purple potatoes until my hands were bruise-colored; developed an...
What I did learn is that there is no deep spiritual clarity that comes from peeling the skin from 50 roasted peppers, and that success in the French kitchen depends on cultivating numbness, as the chef, described in his recent memoir. All week at La Fenière, I often watched Lucas, who was only 17 but had been at La Fenière for two years , try to handle hot food with his bare hands — and every single time he recoiled in pain, hissing through his teeth.
It’s hard to talk about the obsession with consistency in French kitchens without mentioning the Michelin Guide, whose power remains absolute in France. Acritic can shutter a restaurant; a Michelin inspector can ruin an entire village. While for the past 10 years Michelin has sought to stay relevant abroad by slowly, grumpily expanding the constellation — a crab omelet stall in Bangkok, a street-food hawker in Singapore — its assessment of French restaurants has pointedly refused to evolve.
I spent my time at Le Champ des Lunes huddled between the induction range and the cold station, watching the service and comparing it to La Fenière. Here were two restaurants — alike in dignity, as well as in price, produce, location, clientele, and service — and going from one to the other felt like going through a wormhole. The kitchen felt worlds away.
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