The Making of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman Page A

would say, “Travis, do you have the thyme?” and Travis would oblige. People found their personal routines. Greg was the unspoken leader of our table. When Chef Pardus needed clarified butter he would have each table clarify five or ten pounds of it, and Greg would be the one from our table to do it. I wanted my onions out of the way first—onions for mirepoix, half an onion sliced, half an onion minced, and move on from there. Bianca, next to me, almost never made a sound moving through her standard mise en place. She had worked five years in a bakery but had no kitchen experience. And David, who set his board between Travis and Greg across from us, worked earnestly and affably—after graduating from the University of Southern California he had begun a career in banking before coming to the Culinary.
    Erica had a hard time getting going, her blue eyes notwithstanding. She kept forgetting to put her hair net on and thus lost most of her sanitation
points every day. Her uniform was badly soiled, even from Day One, before anyone had cooked a thing.
    Erica worked across from Eun-Jung Lee. Eun-Jung, a young nutritionist from Seoul, had worked with one of Korea’s best-known chefs who had taken courses at the Culinary and had recommended that Eun-Jung apply. Eun-Jung, who couldn’t have been much over five feet tall but whose wavy black hair was always properly constrained by a hair net, first appeared to me as shy, but I soon realized that this trait was more likely an Asian delicacy of spirit combined with a limited understanding of English. To compensate, she took notes like a bandit, always moved her chair smack up front for lecture, and studied continually. She endeared me to her by inviting me on Day Three, before anyone was really talking to me, to a kimchi party in her dorm room, where we would eat various pickled vegetables and she would show off her Korean cookbooks. She missed home.
    Ben Grossman, a tall twenty-five-year-old from Rockland County, New York, with short dark hair, was the group leader and thus in charge of making sure everyone had course guides for each class and addressing problems that anyone in the group might have; he made announcements of special meetings, and generally kept school life in order for the group. Ben received his bachelor’s from SUNY Albany, then got his C.P.A. from the state of New York and worked for about a year as an accountant, before jumping ship. He can trace his career switch to a 1993 New York Times article and recipe for turkey meatloaf. That’s when it clicked, he said, and he knew he would go to the Culinary Institute. He worked first for a caterer at the South Street Seaport and then, through a family connection, got a job in the kitchen of the Stanhope Hotel, where for seven months he worked on everything from garde manger to pantry to banquet.
    He did not make a good first impression on Chef Pardus. What kind of group is this going to be, Chef Pardus wondered, when the group leader forgets to put his name on his paper? Others failed to hand in initial assignments. Perhaps these were just two of many details—such as Erica’s netless hair, Eun-Jung’s incomprehension, or the ten thumbs attached to Lou’s hands—that gathered in the chef’s mind. This was not going to be a good group, he was thinking. But there was Greg, already very proficient, and Adam, tall, skinny, with hair so short and black it looked almost sharp. He rarely smiled and usually seemed angry. When I asked Adam how old he was, he scowled and said, “Twenty-six? Twenty-seven? I don’t know, man.” But Adam asked a lot of good questions.

    Susanne, too, had an intellectual bent. She was a slight twenty-seven-year-old with curly black hair and dark eyes set deep into her narrow face. She had spent three years as an English major at Barnard before dropping out, dissatisfied with her classes, she said, and tired of living in Harlem. She