The Reach of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman

Author:Michael Ruhlman [Ruhlman, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Chefs, Nonfiction, V5
ISBN: 9781101201657
Google: AHKCDHok6LMC
Amazon: B008W304BW
Barnesnoble: B008W304BW
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2006-05-18T04:00:00+00:00

“I took it really seriously,” Melissa says, recalling her first head chef position. Once all the cooks have arrived, Melissa typically works at a small sink station, between the line and the dishwasher’s station, butchering meat, chopping vegetables, the simple mechanical work providing plenty of time for her to talk.

Her arms are disproportionately long for her body. “I’ve morphed with the job,” she says. “My right arm is longer than the left because I always work the left side of the line”—requiring her to extend her reach to her right to grab pans hanging above the line; at her height she really has to stretch and, in the middle of service, do it fast. At the ends of her taut, slender arms are stubby, raw fingers. She speaks as she cuts and cooks a ratatouille; mixes, rests, shapes, and cuts the gnocchi; boils the butter beans; and gets the risotto started. “I—was—crayzee,” she went on, describing her first days as chef de cuisine at the Beekman 1766 Tavern, at the Beekman Arms, in Rhinebeck, New York. “People who have worked with me in the past who come and see me say, ‘I cannot believe you are so calm.’

“There was no talking in the kitchen at all. I was crazy because I had to concentrate, I had to make sure everything was right and it was so, there was so much to think about. I was twenty-four, twenty-five—I was young to have that position.”

Fifteen years ago, Melissa had short punky hair that she did herself and wore clothes to match. Funky punk or not, a five-foot-four-inch young woman only a few years out of the CIA, Melissa was not an immediately imposing leader at the Beekman. “I was a different person. I was more of a girl then, and most of my cooks were my age or older, and most of them were men.

“I often wish I could have done this,” she says, “just known what it was like to do exactly what I did as a male. I think about that all the time.”

After graduating from the CIA, Melissa tried to get a job with Larry Forgione at An American Place, the New York City restaurant striving to elevate and respect American culinary traditions, but he had no position for her. She found work in the hills of West Virginia at the Greenbrier, a formal resort known for its food. There, under Certified Master Chef Hartmut Handke, she learned volume and speed in the sprawling hotel kitchen and refined her line cooking in its small high-end restaurant, the Tavern Room.

By chance, Forgione happened through the Greenbrier. Melissa reintroduced herself, and he remembered her and asked her to call him when he was back in New York. She did and he offered her a job. Not long after she began, late in 1988, she missed her train in from Long Island. Waiting for the next one would make her late, and she couldn’t be late. She didn’t want to leave her car in the city all day, so she persuaded her brother to drive her in.

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