The Reach of a Chef by Michael Ruhlman

and a lack of accountability. The work is hard; no one’s forcing you to be here. If you don’t like it, leave. If it’s too hard, if you can’t do it, we’ll find someone who can—nothing personal—but service starts at 5:30 and there’s a lot to do.
    Certainly there has been behavior in revered kitchens on the part of the chef that would be considered criminal in the corporate world. It’s hard to imagine the boss at your software company or ad agency jabbing your ass with a carving fork to get you to work faster, actually drawing blood—it wouldn’t fly. But it happens in kitchens—a good thing houndstooth check hides spots. Thrown knives, sauté pans whipping past your ear—it happens.
    But it’s a different world today. You could get sued. The world of the restaurant has gotten complicated. In 1997 a hostess at the four-star restaurant Lespinasse in Manhattan, led by Gray Kunz, sued the maî tre d’ for sexual harassment. Her actions, being a form of complaining by one of his staff, prompted Kunz to fire her. But hundreds of workers at the St. Regis Hotel, which housed the restaurant, protested the woman’s dismissal, disrupting work and forcing guests to carry their own bags. The hotel rehired the hostess the following day. The issue grew so volatile that Chef Kunz left the kitchen for three weeks, till people cooled off. A half year later, he was gone (he said it had nothing to do with the event, that he wanted to open his own place—something that wouldn’t happen for six years). Could that same Keller line cook file a wrongful-dismissal suit today? Maybe. Four-star kitchens have become haltingly respectable. In Keller’s kitchens, everyone addresses everyone—from the lowest culinary school extern to Keller himself—as “Chef,” a term of respect. There’s no yelling and no throwing of utensils, and it’s been years since anyone’s chased Keller around the kitchen with a knife. Indeed, in the fall of 2004, the French Laundry fired a sous-chef for what was described by numerous sources as grossly unprofessional behavior involving physical and verbal aggression and intimidation.
    The CIA, of course, happened to be training those people who would go out into the new professional kitchen and other segments of the industry. It believed the standard of professionalism was not relative to one’s surroundings—standards applied to the corporate boardroom and skills kitchen in equal measure. But it was the power of the students to complain, combined with the changing nature of the workplace, the country’s increasing ethnic diversity, and the growing sensitivity generally to discrimination and harassment, that was causing some Sturm und Drang among the teaching staff. What was acceptable behavior on the part of the chef-instructor and what was not seemed to be changing. Screaming was once considered an effective tool for getting something done in a kitchen—that didn’t fly anymore, and no one had a problem with it, but did that mean you couldn’t express anger? If you could, how much and in what form? If you wanted a kid to be accountable for his work, to be prepared for the day’s lesson, say, come to class with a To Do list or having memorized key techniques and terms in cheese making, and he didn’t, you could get mad at him, but nowadays, that kid could complain that your getting mad was intimidating. And, now, intimidation is not allowed.
    Turgeon later described the effect of this on chef-instructors to me this way, a small example from a uniformly respected and admired teacher who, though considered tough, generates very few complaints: “When I was in Bounty, I didn’t think twice about saying ‘fuck,’” he told me. “But one day in here, I got really upset at a group that was under-performing. I turned and walked toward the sink and said ‘fuck.’ This was a Friday and I went home and worried about it all weekend. Am I gonna get in trouble for that? Maybe the group thought I