These days when a vacancy is advertised for a chef, all sorts of folks show up for interview. Some are chefs, some saw Jamie Oliver on the television the night before, some are people who have worked in a kitchen for a while and know how to wash dishes, pots and peel vegetables and some are people with almost no kitchen experience who somehow take to it like a duck to water. I recently hired a guy to wash dishes and do general cleaning. I was stuck one day and needed help making pies so I showed him how to do it. Within a week this guy was correcting me and telling me how to do it more efficiently than the method that I had shown him. Good Man! Optimism goes a very long way.
In Ireland in the late eighties when I returned and went to look for a job as a commis chef I soon learned that there was a strict ranking or pecking order to be observed. This pecking order did not take into account previous experience. When you commenced your first year of college you were a first year chef. Apparently any experience prior to that did not stand for years of ranking or apprenticeship but may enhance your credibility. Having accepted this situation I commenced work as a first year chef having at least three years good solid experience behind me. That meant five more years before I could call myself a chef in the eyes of the Irish kitchen hierarchy. One of my college instructors told me that he had a similar experience in France. He went there as a qualified and certified chef and was put to work as a first year commis because they didn’t think that he was up to their high standard. Maybe he wasn’t.
For my first year of my apprenticeship I cycled to work every day. It was a one hour cycle or a three hour bus ride. So I chose the bike. By the time I was in my second year I bought a motorcycle with a loan guaranteed by my mother. It was like a new world had been opened to me. I could go anywhere, no sweating on a bicycle, no waiting in a bus queue and then there was the speed… Ahh!
Even with this new lease of life it was still relative drudgery tackling the often inclement Irish weather. I can recall so many times driving home in the dark with the rain beating down. As any motorcyclists or former motorcyclists reading this will know, when the rain gets very heavy it is difficult to see through the visor on the helmet, especially in the dark. You sometimes must make a decision to have reduced visibility with your visor down or to open your visor, have fractionally better visibility but then suffer the icy cold rain beating off your face and your eyelids. It was probably about the same level of safety or danger either way. Then there is the decision on if it is better to stop and put your rain gear on or to continue and hope that it is a shower that will pass. So you hold off and the rain continues to pour down, and then you decide to put them on so you look for a place to stop by which time you are wet through to the skin and your hands have become so cold that it is difficult to move your fingers and navigate buttons and zippers. Sometimes in the worst part of the winter my hands got so cold and wrinkled that a blister or rash similar to a burn used to form and take days to heal. I had two pairs of leather gloves and leather boots so that each day one pair could be used while the others were drying. I used to spend hours waxing and waterproofing my leathers, in vain. In retrospect I think that for about three years I was actually working for the motorcycle. On 80 pounds per week I was paying my accommodation and food, the bank loan, the repairs, paying for leathers, tyres and then paying for the second motorcycle when the first one was stolen form outside the college. Back then motorcycle insurance was available only from one company and it was third party only, no fire or theft coverage. A car would have been out of the question, financially.
At this time I was attending day release classes in The Dublin College of Catering in Cathal Bruagh Street in Dublin. I met my first mentor there, my instructor for practical Patrick Carey. Patrick and I still keep in contact to this day. One of my instructors for theory was Mr Hegarty. He could not be described as a jolly man, by any stretch of the imagination. He told us many tales of his adventures, including one where he claimed to have been sent in “undercover” to a hotel to identify why they were losing money n the food. He worked there posing as a kitchen porter etc.. A veritable James Bond of the culinary petty theft world. A less inspiring man I have never met. As there was no degree programme or even diploma programme for the culinary arts in Ireland at that time you had to settle for a certificate from City and Guilds of London. Prestigious as it was, a certificate limited a person in how far they could climb the career ladder in life, as was pointed out to me by another instructor at the college, Mr Linnane. So I approached Mr Hegarty, by appointment, who was also the college vice principal (or some senior position) and asked him for some career guidance. I explained that after finishing my culinary studies I wanted to do a degree in some discipline that would compliment my culinary skill. He basically said don’t bother.
Some years later when I was nearing the end of my advanced courses, one of the assignments that Mr Hegarty gave the class in his capacity as our theory instructor was to do a book review of the book Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance. He gave us a month to complete the task. So I managed to read the book in a week. It is not exactly light reading. I didn’t make much sense of it so I read it again. I still could not fathom any subtle messages nor reap any nuggets of guidance from this book (other than the whole quality concept) that I could identify as being specifically pertinent to the career of a chef. So, being the diligent soul that I am I read it again and finally put together a nicely bound review of the book that I compiled on my computer at work. This contained all of the messages from the book that I thought were worth mentioning, especially the concept of quality, and I had also outlined how I may apply them to my life and career.
I was the only one who had read the book three times, some had not read it at all, I was the only one who had taken the effort to do the review on a computer (chefs in the early nineties generally didn’t have computers or were not computer literate), I was the only one who had bound the review and finally I was the only one who he failed. I remember his words, “McHugh, fail. I asked for a book review” that was all. I think that part of the reason was valid. He asked for a book review – period. Not a book review that relates the lessons of the book and the concept of quality to my life. I had some suspicions that he disliked me for other reasons. I was making a lot of money at that time. He knew my salary because I was asked how much I earned at the interview for the course, he knew my aspirations, he knew that I was a member of the Panel Chefs of Ireland, If I am not mistaken I was the youngest member ever at that time. Finally he knew of my friendship with Pat Carey, who was probably the shining light of the college and had won the Toque dÓr award a few years prior, one of the most prestigious awards in the world that a chef can win. Maybe he had some conflicts with Pat, I don’t know. Maybe my review was not philosophical enough. I must salute him for his many personal accolades and achievements, he is a very clever man indeed. Perhaps it was not a good review in his opinion, nothing personal – end of story
The whole Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance incident with Mr Hegarty taught me a lesson though. Not necessarily about philosophy, metaphysics of quality or chautauquas as may have been the objective intended. It taught me to listen to the question and answer the question that you are asked, not any other question.
