At the Chef's Table

Culinary Creativity in Elite Restaurants

Vanina Leschziner

• Éditeur: Stanford University Press
• Année: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804795494
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Sozialwissenschaften
• Sous-sujet: Soziologie

This book is about the creative work of chefs at top restaurants in New York and San Francisco. Based on interviews with chefs and observation in restaurant kitchens, the book explores the question of how and why chefs make choices about the dishes they put on their menus. It answers this question by examining a whole range of areas, including chefs' careers, restaurant ratings and reviews, social networks, how chefs think about food and go about creating new dishes, and how status influences their work and careers.

Chefs at top restaurants face competing pressures to deliver complex and creative dishes, and navigate market forces to run a profitable business in an industry with exceptionally high costs and low profit margins. Creating a distinctive and original culinary style allows them to stand out in the market, but making the familiar food that many customers want ensures that they can stay in business. Chefs must make choices between these competing pressures. In explaining how they do so, this book uses the case study of high cuisine to analyze, more generally, how people in creative occupations navigate a context that is rife with uncertainty, high pressures, and contradicting forces.

CHAPTER ONE

Exploring the World of Elite Chefs

Creativity should be a protected commodity; only some should be entitled to have it. But those entitled should be self-centered, because it is about their creativity, so they have to do what feels right to them.

THIS ADVICE, shared with me by one of the most prominent chefs in the United States, looks odd and even contradictory at first glance. Creativity should not be for everybody because, the chef explained, some chefs are so enthralled with innovation that they forget about flavor. Yet chefs should concern themselves only with their own creative inclinations when they design dishes.

The chef was not being illogical or even contradictory. A chef of long standing in New York, renowned for his refined food and for running a successful business, he has a thorough knowledge of the intricate world of elite restaurants. The advice he offered, somewhat humorously and offhandedly, conveys some of the basic principles that guide the work of elite chefs. If they want to succeed in a city with exceptionally high costs and fierce competition, they must offer original dishes that stand out in the market but not so original that they will not appeal to customers. That chefs should be self-centered and do what feels right does not mean that they should indulge their foibles, but that, after years of working in restaurants, they can intuitively rely on the knowledge they have accumulated over that time. They have an intuitive sense of the flavors that work well together, the techniques required for a dish, and customers’ preferences, and all these skills effectively work as a good corrective for any excessive flight of creativity.

How and why chefs make choices about the dishes they put on their menus is the question I explore in this book. I examine a range of areas to answer this question, including the career paths of chefs, the classification of their culinary styles, their social connections, the ways they exchange information, the work processes behind the creation of dishes, and the ways in which status influences chefs’ work and careers. I look closely at how elite chefs in New York and San Francisco go about their work to explain how they shape their culinary styles and develop their careers. All the factors that go into running a restaurant inform the analysis in this book, but discussion in the chapters focuses on the creation of dishes and culinary styles because the goal is to explain the nature of culinary creation, and nothing is more central than the food.

The Elite Restaurant Worlds of New York and San Francisco

For those who enjoy fine dining, few cities equal New York and San Francisco in terms of the quality and number of restaurants showcasing high-end food and the newest trends in cuisine. New York is typically considered the best culinary city in the United States and among the best in the world, and a hothouse for innovation. San Francisco, viewed as the second best in the country, is the birthplace of the so-called California cuisine, a unique style that has spearheaded the seasonal, farm-to-table cuisine now popular across the country. Both cities possess a great range of restaurants, from the most exclusive to casual bistros, from classical French cuisine to gastropubs, from strictly regional cuisines (e.g., Tuscan, Provençal, or Basque) to culinary styles unbound by any region. Beyond fine dining, the two cities are also a rich source of so-called ethnic foods.

The restaurant worlds in New York and San Francisco differ in significant ways. First, the restaurant industry is much larger in New York City than in San Francisco, with about 8,500 restaurants in 2012 (the latest data available at the time of this writing),¹ compared to about 1,800 in San Francisco (Berkeley and Oakland, two cities in Alameda County included in the study, have a combined 600 restaurants).² Along with its greater size and number of restaurants, New York also has higher real estate costs than San Francisco, and all these factors heighten the pressures on chefs trying to survive in the New York market. San Francisco has a sunny and temperate climate, with great access to local fresh ingredients year-round. New York has more limited access to local ingredients, so chefs in this city must sometimes ship in ingredients and find ways to deal with the loss of flavor in these less fresh or ripe ingredients.

Cooks rely on technique to compensate for ingredients that are less flavorful than desired. This principle is typically used to explain the difference between French and Italian cuisines.³ As the explanation goes, French cuisine has developed a large set of techniques and complex combinations of flavors that minimize the impact of a comparatively limited availability of fresh ingredients. By contrast, with regular access to a wide variety of fresh ingredients, Italian cuisine highlights the flavor of foodstuffs through a relatively simpler technical grammar. Something similar applies in New York compared to San Francisco. There is a predominance of complex culinary styles in New York, with chefs always looking for the latest techniques and intricate combinations to make innovative food, and a focus on simpler styles that showcase fresh ingredients in San Francisco. What is more, the restaurant world of New York is profoundly influenced by French cuisine, whereas that of San Francisco has a stronger Italian influence.

Chefs and Culinary Styles

Chefs at elite restaurants in New York and San Francisco are a varied bunch. Some have the renown of Hollywood stars, and others are unknown outside the local community. Some serve intricate tasting menus at a cost of $400 per person, and others offer simple meals in casual environments for no more than $40. Some are employed by restaurant owners to cook in the styles of those already established restaurants, and others open their own business, selecting the culinary style and whole design of the establishment. Even chefs who own their restaurants are a varied bunch. Some own only one restaurant, and others own an army of them. Some open restaurants in only one city, whereas others open restaurants across the country, and still others extend their business across the globe. Some chefs have television shows, a plethora of best-selling cookbooks, a line of cookware or brand of grocery products, and spend their time shuffling between restaurants or among their various lines of business, while others are fully devoted to one restaurant.

Most elite chefs fall between the two extremes. For one thing, even chefs who are in the kitchen every night rarely cook. Save for those who serve simple food at small establishments with minimal kitchen staff, chefs expedite during service; as orders come from the dining room they call them out to the kitchen staff, and they check dishes to make sure they look right, sometimes adding finishing touches such as herbs or sauces before sending them to the dining room.⁴ Chefs sometimes cook during the day, in the preparatory stages before service, especially if they are developing new dishes, but they generally spend a good part of the day managing the business and overlooking the kitchen. Some may go to farmers’ markets, deal with purveyors, or run around purchasing supplies, and those who own multiple restaurants mainly oversee operations and management. Chef-owners spend a larger proportion of their time on business than those who are employed by others.

Elite chefs also vary widely in the kind of food they serve.⁵ Some work within the confines of a regional cuisine, others combine cuisines of varied origins, and still others have no attachment to any region.⁶ Some keep to tradition, others modify classic recipes slightly to re-create them, and still others assemble dishes inventively, sometimes so innovatively that the dishes hardly look like recognizable food. For the sake of analysis, I classify restaurants, and therefore their chefs, into three status categories—middle, upper-middle, and high status—and consider two categories that comprise culinary styles: regional origin (e.g., Italian, Spanish, or Californian) and innovativeness; the latter I reduce to a binary category—innovative or traditional.⁷ While restaurants are classified according to regional style in reviews and restaurant guides and not by innovativeness, the latter must also be considered because it is critical for a restaurant’s success and a chef’s career. In effect, restaurant reviews and ratings hinge largely on a chef’s innovativeness. The processes for creating dishes, from how chefs understand food to how they make a dish, also differ along with the innovativeness of their culinary styles.⁸

Like many artists, elite chefs must design products with creative appeal and develop a style that is distinctive enough to be recognized as their own. But unlike many artists, they must navigate market forces and ensure profitability, not only to keep their jobs but also to earn a reputation as a chef. Even renowned chefs who serve noteworthy food to a full house every night will lose their reputation if their restaurants are not financially viable operations. These conditions introduce a host of pressures into culinary work, and turn chefs into an especially good case to examine the duality of creativity and constraint that characterizes many fields of cultural production. Though being a starving artist may be the choice of few in any area of activity, some artists can work without remuneration or concern for profit, but this is not the case for those who create cultural goods in the context of day jobs, a world about which still relatively little is known.⁹

Joining the Kitchen

This book is based largely on ethnographic research with forty-four chefs in the most highly rated restaurants in New York and San Francisco, where I interviewed chefs and observed each of them at work in their restaurant’s kitchen. While these restaurants range from the most elite to casual bistros, they are all renowned and highly acclaimed. Interviews were with chefs, and not cooks, because chefs have the biggest role in the creation of dishes. Chefs often consult with their staff when creating dishes; some create dishes on their own and then ask the staff for feedback, and others collaborate more actively to develop new ideas. Cuisine is a collective endeavor in terms of the social organization of the work, but chefs are solely responsible for the food they serve, even if they do little of the creation or cooking. They sit at the top of the hierarchy in a restaurant, managing the business with a general vision for the restaurant and its culinary style; those in lower ranks mainly follow orders to accomplish specialized tasks.¹⁰ Most significantly, the food served at elite restaurants is tightly associated with chefs’ names.

Although chefs are the main source of the information in this book, culinary professionals in lower ranks provided important complementary information about the nature of culinary work. I interviewed staff in the ranks below the chef, in particular chefs de cuisine, sous-chefs, and cooks.¹¹ I also interviewed restaurateurs, restaurant managers, food writers, service staff, and professionals working in the restaurant industry such as food purveyors, lawyers, and architects, who provided a supplementary perspective on a variety of areas central to the success of restaurants. Beyond the formal interviews, I had plenty of informal conversations with chefs and culinary professionals about their jobs, careers, and restaurants. Lastly, I used information from restaurant menus and reviews, as well as articles on food and chefs in New York and San Francisco, in order to paint a thorough picture of the two cities.

This is not a comparative study of New York and San Francisco. The goal that drives this book is to identify characteristics of culinary creation that should be common across locations and to explain how and why the social and organizational dynamics of culinary creation may differ across locations, rather than to systematically compare and contrast two cities. A large proportion of the information I discuss in this book relates to New York. San Francisco plays the role of control case, helping to elucidate whether the patterns of culinary creation in New York have to do with characteristics particular to that city or are to be expected given the mode of cultural production in cuisine.

The Mode of Cultural Production

The kinds of dishes chefs create are shaped by many factors, not least of which are the styles and status of their restaurants. But chefs have room for choice in creating dishes, and their creative inclinations to introduce changes to their cooking or to keep to tradition inform their choices. At the same time, decisions to innovate are significantly influenced by the risks they perceive, as well as by the nature of their work and the social conditions attendant on it.¹² Indeed, how chefs understand the risks of innovating for their restaurants (i.e., will innovative dishes attract attention from the media and customers, or scare clientele away?) significantly inform their choices.

Patterns of culinary creation are shaped by five key attributes. First, the creation of dishes is individualized. Whether chefs consult with the kitchen staff when creating dishes or not, they are perceived to be the sole creators of the food and responsible for it. Culinary creation thus becomes an individualized activity, turning a chef’s name into highly valuable capital and increasing the significance of status.¹³ Second, chefs are also seen to be responsible for the execution of dishes. They may not do most, or any, of the cooking, but customers and critics typically associate cooking with the chef, and collapse the cooking into the creation of dishes in assessing the food.¹⁴ This means that, unlike individuals working in areas wherein the creation and the execution of cultural products are separated into two different jobs (e.g., playwrights and performers), chefs risk their reputation if they make dishes that are conceptually interesting but poorly executed. Third, chefs’ jobs involve the management of their restaurants, which impinges on the culinary side of their jobs in two ways. For one thing, chefs spend a good deal of time on administration, and this limits the time available to create new dishes. And managing the business makes them acutely mindful of issues of cost and profit, which constrains the types of dishes they create.

Fourth, the creation of dishes is an invariably commercial endeavor; no chef can design a menu without concern for the fina...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1. Exploring the World of Elite Chefs
• 2. Career Paths in High Cuisine
• 3. Categories and Classifications in Cuisine
• 4. Managing a Culinary Style
• 5. Cognitive Patterns and Work Processes in Cooking
• 6. Culinary Styles and Principles of Creation
• 7. Mapping Out Creative Patterns
• Methodological Appendix
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index