The dawn and rise of the American chef commenced when Americans, from coast to coast, and in large numbers, began voluntarily, enthusiastically cooking in restaurants for a living — a once forbidden and unrespected professional course — screw the consequences. Many started like Marder, spontaneously, rebelliously, often in isolation, with no idea there were others like them Out There. A few stuck their toes in the water in the 1960s, a few more in the 1970s, and then hordes jumped into the pool in the 1980s and ’90s, after which there was no looking back.
These weren’t the first American chefs, or even the first prominent ones. There had always been exceptions, like the astounding Edna Lewis, who for five years ending in 1954 had been the chef and a business partner at Café Nicholson in Midtown Manhattan— that she did this as both an African American and a woman in the 1950s is nothing short of miraculous. But those stories were few and far between, not part of an overarching national phenomenon. And the lower kitchen ranks were more often than not populated with lost souls who lacked ambition or the aptitude for a traditional career, weren’t pursuing a love of food and/or craft, or acting on Marder-like epiphanies, a version of which became a rite of passage for an entire generation. Professional cooking was viewed as menial, unskilled labor performed, often in unsavory conditions, by anonymous worker bees. The United States Department of Labor categorized chefs as domestics through 1976 when — after lobbying by the American Culinary Federation, who themselves required nudging by Louis Szathmary, the Hungarian American Chicago chef, writer, and television personality — it recognized them as professionals. Domestics suggests chauffeurs and housekeepers; most Americans regarded cooks as something grittier.
“One of the comparisons I make today that illustrates the difference between then and now is back in the day you never would put your uniform on or anything that made you look like a cook on the way to work,” says San Francisco–based chef Jan Birnbaum, who started his career in New Orleans and New York. “Because it wasn’t a proud thing to be. You’re that guy behind the door who has no skill. He’s certainly not intellectual, and he probably is either a criminal or he’s amongst them. There’s just a whole lot of undesirable stuff. Today the streets of San Francisco, man, they proudly walk down the street all the time in full uniforms.” Even in France, historically the Western capital of fine dining, this stigma attached to the profession through the 1960s. Chefs were not renowned or celebrated; at best, they were regarded as craftsmen. Alain Sailhac, who grew up in the mountain village of Millau, France, and would go on to become the chef of Le Cygne and Le Cirque in New York City, remembers the moment he first became enticed by the kitchen, in the mid-twentieth century: At age fourteen, at his brother’s wedding, he struck up a conversation with the chef, which sparked an interest he couldn’t shake.
“Why do you want to be a cook?” demanded his father, who wanted his son to take up the family’s glove-manufacturing business. Sailhac persisted until his dad relented, walked him into the town’s only one-star restaurant, where the chef was a World War I buddy. “Do you want to take my son?” asked the senior Sailhac. “He wants to be like you, a stupid chef.” (Even after he became a cook, Sailhac hid his profession from women; if they learned he worked in a restaurant, he told them he was a chef de rang [dining room captain], which was more prestigious.)
Consider, too, Auguste Escoffier, whose crowning achievement, Le guide culinaire, first published in 1903, was the kitchen bible of its day. The book codified basic recipes and techniques, set forth a system for organizing the kitchen brigade, and recommended a front-of-house structure. Yet Nathan Myhrvold, author of a defining tome on modernist cuisine, unsentimentally dubs Escoffier “the Henry Ford of the conventional kitchen. . . . His masterwork was fundamentally motivated by gastronomy as a manufacturing process rather than as an art. . . . He was an artisan striving to run a factory rather than be an artist.”
So what happened? To impose biblical simplicity on the narrative would be dishonest; there was no Garden of Eden, no aproned Adam and Eve from whom all future American chefs descended, no single moment that lit the fuse. The movement was scattershot but not coincidental, produced (Big Bang–style) by a confluence of events and phenomena: the Vietnam War and the resistance at home; the counterculture; easy access to travel; the music, movies, and literature of the day; drugs, including “the pill”; and a new approach to restaurant cooking, to name the factors most often cited by those who were there as the ones that propelled them into the kitchen.
“It’s a universal mind,” says Thomas Keller, chef-owner of a restaurant empire founded on Yountville, California’s The French Laundry, of the national reach of those influences. “We all talk about universal minds and how people come up with the same idea relatively around the same period of time without having had conversations about it personally. They’re just doing the same thing.”
Jonathan Waxman, a California chef who has toggled back and forth between the coasts throughout his career, puts it slightly differently: “We all had the same acid flashback at the same time,” he says. “But each of us did it differently.”
These weren’t the first American chefs, or even the first prominent ones. There had always been exceptions, like the astounding Edna Lewis, who for five years ending in 1954 had been the chef and a business partner at Café Nicholson in Midtown Manhattan— that she did this as both an African American and a woman in the 1950s is nothing short of miraculous. But those stories were few and far between, not part of an overarching national phenomenon. And the lower kitchen ranks were more often than not populated with lost souls who lacked ambition or the aptitude for a traditional career, weren’t pursuing a love of food and/or craft, or acting on Marder-like epiphanies, a version of which became a rite of passage for an entire generation. Professional cooking was viewed as menial, unskilled labor performed, often in unsavory conditions, by anonymous worker bees. The United States Department of Labor categorized chefs as domestics through 1976 when — after lobbying by the American Culinary Federation, who themselves required nudging by Louis Szathmary, the Hungarian American Chicago chef, writer, and television personality — it recognized them as professionals. Domestics suggests chauffeurs and housekeepers; most Americans regarded cooks as something grittier.“One of the comparisons I make today that illustrates the difference between then and now is back in the day you never would put your uniform on or anything that made you look like a cook on the way to work,” says San Francisco–based chef Jan Birnbaum, who started his career in New Orleans and New York. “Because it wasn’t a proud thing to be. You’re that guy behind the door who has no skill. He’s certainly not intellectual, and he probably is either a criminal or he’s amongst them. There’s just a whole lot of undesirable stuff. Today the streets of San Francisco, man, they proudly walk down the street all the time in full uniforms.” Even in France, historically the Western capital of fine dining, this stigma attached to the profession through the 1960s. Chefs were not renowned or celebrated; at best, they were regarded as craftsmen. Alain Sailhac, who grew up in the mountain village of Millau, France, and would go on to become the chef of Le Cygne and Le Cirque in New York City, remembers the moment he first became enticed by the kitchen, in the mid-twentieth century: At age fourteen, at his brother’s wedding, he struck up a conversation with the chef, which sparked an interest he couldn’t shake.
“Why do you want to be a cook?” demanded his father, who wanted his son to take up the family’s glove-manufacturing business. Sailhac persisted until his dad relented, walked him into the town’s only one-star restaurant, where the chef was a World War I buddy. “Do you want to take my son?” asked the senior Sailhac. “He wants to be like you, a stupid chef.” (Even after he became a cook, Sailhac hid his profession from women; if they learned he worked in a restaurant, he told them he was a chef de rang [dining room captain], which was more prestigious.)
Consider, too, Auguste Escoffier, whose crowning achievement, Le guide culinaire, first published in 1903, was the kitchen bible of its day. The book codified basic recipes and techniques, set forth a system for organizing the kitchen brigade, and recommended a front-of-house structure. Yet Nathan Myhrvold, author of a defining tome on modernist cuisine, unsentimentally dubs Escoffier “the Henry Ford of the conventional kitchen. . . . His masterwork was fundamentally motivated by gastronomy as a manufacturing process rather than as an art. . . . He was an artisan striving to run a factory rather than be an artist.”
So what happened? To impose biblical simplicity on the narrative would be dishonest; there was no Garden of Eden, no aproned Adam and Eve from whom all future American chefs descended, no single moment that lit the fuse. The movement was scattershot but not coincidental, produced (Big Bang–style) by a confluence of events and phenomena: the Vietnam War and the resistance at home; the counterculture; easy access to travel; the music, movies, and literature of the day; drugs, including “the pill”; and a new approach to restaurant cooking, to name the factors most often cited by those who were there as the ones that propelled them into the kitchen.
“It’s a universal mind,” says Thomas Keller, chef-owner of a restaurant empire founded on Yountville, California’s The French Laundry, of the national reach of those influences. “We all talk about universal minds and how people come up with the same idea relatively around the same period of time without having had conversations about it personally. They’re just doing the same thing.”
Jonathan Waxman, a California chef who has toggled back and forth between the coasts throughout his career, puts it slightly differently: “We all had the same acid flashback at the same time,” he says. “But each of us did it differently.”
by Andrew Friedman, Longreads | Read more:
Image: getty images + 123RF images, composite by Katie Kosma
