This article by Marryam H Reshii in Banking & Finance about Chef Steven Liu who is apparently doing a great job of teaching the native Indian (gora) cooks to prepare western style food at Graze, Taj Residency in Bangalore, took me back to the good old days when I used to argue to my staff (and later, my students) that anyone with the will and the fundamental technical skills could cook any cuisine well if they would only take the time to eat it. Reshi writes
“As any chef from a Western country will tell you, that is the biggest hurdle in India: Indian nationals working in Western kitchens never eat the food they cook, so the nuances of their adopted cuisine are entirely lost on them. It is the reason why many middle-rung European restaurants across India suffer from over-seasoned food.”
While I have never been to India and so cannot comment on the truthfulness of Reshi’s allegation about the state of western food there, I am painfully familiar with the phenomenon she describes. If I had a dollar for each time one of my cooks chose to eat a hamburger or pizza when they could have cooked and eaten almost anything in the walkin, I’d have that Porsche turbo Carrera in my garage now. (I know it dammit.)
At the CIA the whining by some A-Blockers (new students) about having to eat French Food for lunch everyday used to make my ears bleed. In the face of this moaning and groaning my colleagues and I were always like “WTF? You are paying 26 thousand dollars to learn how to make haute cusine and you don’t want to eat it! You want to be chefs but you can’t bring your Cocoa Pebbles poisoned palates to learn what sweetbreads taste like?” And don’t even try to get me going about the complaints by children who seemed to think that since the CIA and haute cuisine had developed in a mobile home, the multiple changes of silver and courses were an unnecessary affectation foisted on them by snobs whose sole intent was to intimidate them or piss them off.
Of course, not all of my cooks and not all -not even most- CIA students were knuckleheaded infantalized anti-fine-dining-and-food-snobs, but I’ve seen enough of this type to know that there are plenty of cooks who don’t actually like what they are putting on your plate. And I’ll go one step further and say that if the person cooking the food doesn’t like what he’s cooking, he may be able to cobble it into something edible, but it’ll never be great.
I’m running out of time now. But remind me to tell you the one about the CIA grad poissonier who hated fish, got promoted to chef then quit after two years to open an auto body shop.
Filed under: chefs, cooking techniques, restaurants | 17 Comments »
A Hunger Aritist (Redux) 
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