cheffin' & bloggin'

Shuna at Eggbeater requested a few of us to post on the topic of being a chef blogger and more specifically on the subtopic of disclosure (whether it be who you are or where you work or who you work for).  The world of the chef has changed so much in the past quarter century, and throwing factors like 'blogging' into the mix causes more lines to blur.

To address this, I have to first state my purpose for doing it in the first place.  I've always enjoyed writing, although I definitely don't have the chops to do it professionally.  When blogging, it is appropriate to take on a professional tone, but it is done freely with no editor or publisher or anyone else with a big red marker correcting and rephrasing or just simply deleting whole sections of your thoughts.  Basically, you type in a bunch of stuff, hit a button, and it's made freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection across the planet... and maybe beyond that.  The ease of blogging takes the pressure off to a degree.  There must be a billion blogs in the world.  I do believe, however, that there are not so many chef blogs.  Sure there are tons and tons of food blogs, but to have a chef blog you must 1.) be a chef, and 2.) be committed to a blog.  It does not simply take a love of food, but to be an active member in the industry.  You start out simple, feeling your way around this new world, readership is miniscule at first, then... if you stick with it... and somehow hit upon some magic formula... you might have a real blog on your hands.  So now what?  I think that Aki and Alex are right when they say that the blog becomes this strange permanent fixture in your life... even when you're not pounding away at a laptop.  You go to work each day, and get bummed if nothing post-worthy happens.  Sometimes, tons of things happen and you try to organize yourself and your future material.  You begin to question if certain subjects are even worth posting.  I know that I've put lots of things on Chadzilla that most people feel I've wasted my time with... this post may very well be one of them since it has little to do with food, and thus violates my loosely-bound credo.  Truth is, whether something is post-worthy or not, your personality doesn eventually come out and you begin to get what we call skillz.  Your writing does improve.  However, you are still not a professional writer.  It has taken me many years, many lessons in humility, and a lot of heaping spoonfuls of pride swallowed to get to the point where I can accept true criticism of my food... to have someone rip up my writing is another story.  I'd rather write under the radar and not be subject to critique than take a different career path at this point in my life.  I am a chef number one and first foremost.  It is the reason that I do this in the first place.

When I began to blog, we were trying to get a grasp on this new cuisine.  Aside from El Bulli books, and other books written in Spanish only, there was no source of information for what was going on.  Either you booked a plane to Spain, apprenticed under Blumenthal or Achatz or Dufresne, or took a hit and miss approach to it.  Our style is typically the hit and miss variety.  Chef K, Fabian, and myself all took personal interests in learning this stuff, and we each began blogging around the same time.  As things go, I ended up being the only one who committed almost daily to documenting what we were trying, taking pictures everyday, and basically made it part of my daily routine.  I sort of became the 'secretary' of our team.  This role is one I am comfortable with, and it has helped me tremendously in the ways stated above.  There were only a tiny amount of sources available for new techniques and these new powders called hydrocolloids. Ideas in Food were one of the few sources at the time giving away pieces of the puzzle here and there.  We spent hours searching the web, thumbing magazines, and referencing books.  We tried things and I posted the results.  It has helped us all to grow.  Our main driving force at the time (and today still) is to learn what we can from others, and make that information a little more accessible to other chefs and cooks than it was for us in the beginning.  Ego has very very little to do with it.  There are chefs out there who are the innovators, and we are the imitators.  Sure we have small moments of glory here and there but basically it breaks down to this... Wylie Dufresne is Led Zeppelin.  We are Whitesnake.  We may try to sound similar, or borrow a riff here and there, and our own voice does come out, but... you get the point.

Oh yeah, I was supposed to talk about disclosure.  Well, now that you have the storyline built up, the explanation is easy.  In the beginning (and for a long time afterwards), the blog was representative of our endeavors unrelated to the Sonesta-corporate umbrella we work under (and still do for a few more days).  Each of us has been employed by Sonesta for over 10 years, and the relationship has had its ups and downs (hell, I even went through the biggest natural disaster in US history with them).  We've all been through a lot.  Cherished the time, but looking to the future.  I never mentioned Sonesta at any point in my blog simply for the fact that what you see on the blog is not reflective of what we do everyday.  If you came into our restaurant, you would not see the menu you were led to believe we had.  It's not out of deception that we do this.  We are a hotel restaurant (ok... for the record here goes... we are at the Trump International Beach Resort Miami in Sunny Isles Beach, Florida.  On 1 April, we will no longer be under Sonesta management, but instead will go independent under a new management company formed by our general manager and the building owners).  When I say that, it does not mean that we are an independently operating restaurant housed within the walls of a hotel... we are the hotel chefs.  We have a family-oriented restaurant (which means 'NO CRAZY STUFF!!!') and we do crank out banquets, and we sling out hamburgers and chicken tenders to the pool & beach all day long... and all out of one kitchen.  As chefs, we run an incredible operation.  That's the only place any inch of ego comes from.  We, and more specifically Chef K, have created an operation that allows us to handle our business on a daily basis and allows us small windows of time to play with food the way that we want to.  It is truly an orchestrated work of art.  Restaurants shut down daily and job security is a true luxury in the food industry.  We are a very rare animal indeed in who we are and what we do.  Sure, I get frustrated at the days when 10 of the 12 to 14 hours of my work day are spent doing things that are not post-worthy, but it's the 30 minutes here and there of trying new ideas or learning something new that I may in turn share over the web that make it worth it.  I have met lots of great chefs through Chadzilla... people I would have probably never met otherwise.  It has helped me to learn more than I would ever learn alone.  There is a new commraderie among chef these days... especially the experimental chefs.  We do not embroider the entire alphabet behind our names on our jackets and we don't go to meetings.  We go to congresses, send emails, and occasionally talk and work together.  My goal is to stage with other chefs like us and learn whatever I can... and to post away!!!

Comments

[Steamy Kitchen]

What a wonderful post - I loved learning more about you. It's amazing how the blogs bring us all together - learning, growing, laughing, crying.

[Nathan]

Very well said! I've been following your blog for a few months now. I'm a restaurant chef for a hotel in central PA, so I very much sympathize with your situation. One of the things that I find most exciting now (and really, one of the best changes in our industry over the last few years) is the closing of the gap between us as individuals. All over the world are people working at roughly the same skill level with the same interest set and same passion for what their doing. The problem was that generally there might be one (exec chef) or two (sous chef(s)) in an organization and that was it. I was working down south in the mid 90s and besides a small network of 20-something linecooks who floated around the Orlando scene, I had no professional engagement and certainly not people talking about food and learning from each other's work. Today, I regularly communicate with a handful of people I've never met in person and follow chef blogs that I often find inspirational in small and unique ways.

[Chris]

It has been a pleasure to read your blog and have had the opportunity to work with you. I am inspired to create and find new ideas everyday. Be on the lookout for Tech-train or commis. Haven't decided on a name yet but am working on a collaborative effort to get a blog going, not just my own but a group of chefs where we all have access to posting what it is we are doing. Hopefully this will take the pressure off of the individual blogger and bring a wide range ideas, tenchniques, and backgrounds from different schools of thought. Be on the watch for mid-summer.

[shuna fish lydon]

Chad,

Thanks for the post! I do find it most interesting that you are a chef in a hotel & blogging about it. My experience has been that hotel chefs are particularly hidden, or separated from ind. rest. chefs.

And I, too, love the exchange of ideas, methods, stories, questions, musings, rants etc. we all share no matter whether we've met each other or who or what owns the operation we cook in.

For other chefs I think disclosure is safe because we all have the same issues, basically, but the bigger picture has more variables.

Thank you for addressing this topic here.

[David]

I like the concept of something being 'post-worthy'. I think it should be added to the pastry chef lexicon..dl

[Barzelay]

it's the 30 minutes here and there of trying new ideas or learning something new...

It's interesting that you say that, because I'm not a chef, and I don't work in the industry. I'm a law student, and [not] looking forward to a career as an attorney. I realized halfway through law school that all I really wanted to do was to cook. And right now, I've got a good bit of free time (all of which I spend experimenting, and learning the things I would have learned a lot faster if I'd gone down the path I wish I'd known I should have). But what's keeping me going when thinking ahead three months to taking the bar exam, or six months to starting my twelve-hour a day job is the hope that I'll at least manage to stake out those 30 minutes of play time.

In a way, your post makes me feel both happy and sad. Happy that maybe my next few years won't be all that different from those of someone in the industry, and sad that one of the really inspiring people in that industry doesn't get more time to do interesting things. And it may not seem like it from your perspective, but you are one of the innovators. In my experience the creative process is seldom distinguishable, by those involved in it, from the simple refinement of the true ideas of others.

[shuna fish lydon]

I think the comment from Barzelay is so interesting. It's another topic altogether-- the one where everyone thinks being a chef is being creative everyday, when so much of what we do day after day would kill the average person (except those who have worked in a factory. Which, btw, I have.)

For me I get so excited in the day to day of organizing and I find managing to be one of the most creative parts of the job, but I meet so many "young" cooks (by quotes I am not referring to age in years) who get bored after 6 weeks in one station or 3 days of the same shift.

Maybe this will be the next thing we expose:
The Boredom.

Ha!