The Soul of a Chef

This is my first post to this blog, so if the formatting, book photo, etc. don't look quite like Steph and Andrea do 'em, hey, give me a break.

A friend of mine works at a nice wine bar here in Austin, and at a brunch once I mentioned to her that I once had dinner at the French Laundry. After she finished looking at me with jealous contempt, she pulled herself together and recommended I read Michael Ruhlman's The Soul of a Chef. It's a quick bit of nonfiction that follows three chefs -- Brian Polcyn of the Five Lakes Grill, Michael Symon of Lola (these days, Lolita), and Thomas Keller, the chef-owner of the French Laundry, who has a handful of other restaurants these days, too.

The format of the book is a little odd. It's split into three sections, with actual section header pages dividing them from one another. In that regard, it's more like three short stories than anything else. Furthermore, as much as I enjoyed the book, I have to admit the sections stood pretty much entirely on their own. There's a bit of juxtaposition from one section to the next, but not too much, and Ruhlman makes something of an effort to tie them all together with a nice little bow at the end, but it feels forced.

I easily overlooked that, though, because the stories themselves are fascinating. Polcyn's follows him through the Culinary Institute of America's Certified Master Chef exam, a grueling 10-day test, each day focusing on a different technique, ingredient, or style, and each day consisting of many hours of non-stop cooking. At the time the book was written, the exam wasn't even held in terribly high regard by many practicing chefs (the classic academy-versus-vocation friction) and Ruhlman explores Polcyn's motivations for taking the test and neatly covers the actual cooking itself in vivid detail while, in parallel, tracking Polcyn's emotional state, his successes and failures, and the ultimate results of the exam.

Symon's is a change of pace, following the chef through the opening and success of his restaurant Lola, in Cleveland, and contrasting his unconventional style with the rigorous, unforgiving technique demanded of Polcyn in the CMC exam. Ruhlman paints a compelling portrait of Lola's kitchen and its staff, the tensions and camaraderie, and manages to communicate well the love each cook has for their profession and also the incredible challenges they face. There's nothing terribly romanticizing about Ruhlman's depictions; if you don't want to be a chef before reading the book, you're not going to jump at the opportunity afterwards. But you can see why the cooks do what they do.

Keller's, the final section, is the best, and probably owes to Ruhlman's deep familiarity with the chef. They collaborated on the French Laundry Cookbook, and so Ruhlman spent a very long time with Keller, even had the chef come to his house in middle America to get away from the restaurant long enough to focus on the book. Ruhlman casually describes Keller cooking in his own house, having friends over for the dinner, like an outrageous fantasy: "Come on over for dinner," I could say to my friends, "Thomas Keller's staying in my guest room, and he's cooking." Great if you can get it, I suppose.

The core of the book is the exploration of the motivations of these chefs, and in that way it transcends its little genre of "culinary documentary." It's a study of three passionate craftsmen (or artists -- Ruhlman struggles with that question throughout) and touches on significant issues: The worthwhile use of a lifetime, the origins of passion, the value of diligent work, and the very idea of a "calling" or "purpose."

Ruhlman's prose is solid and compelling, and the material itself is so vivid that even with the slightly cumbersome three-section format, I'm tempted to give it 5 stars. But then I think about other books that are obviously better, like Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, and hesitate. Ruhlman's is not a timeless work of Western literature, but it's a well-written, very enjoyable and inspiring read. An easy 4 stars.