My First Chef's Job
Out of the frying pan...
When I got out of the Army, I was driving a ’73 Volkswagen Beetle, with a rebuilt ’66 engine, iffy brakes, bald tires, and no working heater. Surprisingly, we made it safely home despite a fairly heavy rainstorm outside of Nashville, up and down the two-lane highways through the Smoky Mountains.
My first order of business was to find work. I got a part-time job at Hartter’s restaurant/cafe in Mayfair Mall, but that only lasted a few weeks. The Hartter family had operated a successful bakery for a long time, and the two sons of the original owners had decided to branch out on their own and capitalize on the family name. The married brother was banging the kitchen manager, a plain and clueless woman who set a standard of incompetence unequalled by anyone I’ve ever come across; it was chaos, everyone hated their jobs and turnover was constant. They may not have even noticed I’d quit.
The next stop was Marangelli’s in Glendale. I was interviewed by the manager, a large man who smelled of cologne over cigarette smoke. After listening to him go on for about a half hour and not getting much of a word in edgewise, I was offered a stage (working unpaid for the experience- not an uncommon practice in the best restaurants in the U.S. and Europe) which would last until the chef decided whether or not I was worth paying. I declined. This wasn’t Lutèce. I was offered the same deal from a French chef at a restaurant in Elm Grove, and went away with the same thought. There didn’t seem to be much going on in the restaurant scene, so I figured I’d try my luck getting back into clubs.
Since I’d caddied at Tripoli when I was a kid, I dropped a resume there. Also North Shore, Ozaukee, and a couple others. At North Shore, I recognized the chef, Geno, from my very first job washing dishes at the Anchorage restaurant, where he was the Night Chef at the time. He claimed to remember me, which I thought was almost impossible until I got to know him better over the years and realized that he never forgot a thing. He hired me as a sauté cook, but the starting pay was so low I needed to find another part-time job until I could find something that paid enough to live on. Despite his frugality (he owned a black Porsche 944 but refused to drive it to work because he thought the club members would think they were paying him too much money), I liked working for Geno because he was genuine and had a good sense of humor. He and I remained friends until his passing in the summer of 2012.
Interviewing for a Sous Chef job at Ozaukee with Chef Tom, I learned that this job paid more than most because he had a very bad temper and went through so many cooks. He boasted that he was, at that time, being sued by a waitress whose rib he’d cracked “accidentally” one night while throwing plates down the stairs in the back of the kitchen. I purposely tanked that interview.
When I followed up on the resume I’d dropped at Tripoli, I was hired as a part-time salad guy and prep cook for the summer. I thought at least I could play a little golf on Mondays, and I’d be able to pay the bills.
The two-job shuffle left me little free time, but I didn’t mind, and it gave me a chance to get back into the swing of the kitchen life that much faster. After a couple months, the Executive Chef at Tripoli, Chuck, offered me the position of Sous Chef. The salary was agreeable, but since the job involved working a split shift every day, I had to put in my notice at North Shore. Geno was unhappy but had been expecting it because he knew I was underpaid. He did, after all, have his labor budget to consider.
At Tripoli, I’d generally start around 8-9am, opening up the kitchen, getting the line set up, making the soup of the day, stocks and sauces, coffee for the guys on the grounds crew and members on the course, receiving deliveries, and getting employee lunch together. I usually baked whatever bread and rolls we needed and made the desserts. Chuck and one of the cooks would arrive around 10:30, we’d get through lunch service, and I’d come up with three to five features for the dinner menu that night before heading home for an hour and a half break.
On returning from break, I’d make sure my station was set up for dinner service, finish sauces and garnishes for the features, and usually take care of the employee dinner meal. We’d work through dinner service, put out a party if there was one that night, and prep for the next day. Clean up, do fish and produce orders, go home, and do it again the next day, like any of the clubs around that time. Looking back it seems like a lot, but I was much younger then and it all came pretty easily.
I really enjoyed it. I worked with very good people, the standard of food we produced was high, and I could have as much responsibility as I wanted without having to deal with the politics Chuck did. I really liked him. He’d been the Chef at The Immigrant at The American Club in Kohler and had a good knowledge not only of the classics but also of more contemporary American cuisine. He showed me a lot of new things I hadn’t learned at Milwaukee or Blue Mound. In the kitchen, he was always the good guy and I was always the bad guy. I didn’t mind as long as the work got done. The 82nd Airborne isn’t Dale Carnegie; I was always moving pretty fast and didn’t have time to worry about someone’s feelings being hurt by me telling them they needed to pick their game up. We put together a relatively like-minded crew and started doing some really nice food. Efficiency and productivity were better than ever, and it was good.
We were having a nice run, but year or two after I started, Chuck decided to go work for an equipment manufacturer. Tripoli was a high-stress job; he really cared about the food and took every criticism personally, and he was always fighting a drinking problem. He figured it was better for his health if he found something in the periphery of the business and this new job seemed to offer him the opportunity to work a better schedule, travel, and not have the responsibility of running a big kitchen.
As was customary in clubs at that time, the board formed a subcommittee and commenced on a “nationwide search” for their next chef. Wanting to prove myself, I picked up most of the slack, along with a couple cooks who didn’t mind a little overtime in their paychecks.
The parade of chef candidates began marching through our kitchen. After three or four months of this, I asked the GM for more money because of the extra work and responsibility I’d been asked to take on. After a couple more months of seeing chefs I knew I wouldn’t work for being toured through the kitchen, I gave my two weeks notice. I’d had enough. I told him I didn’t want to work for any of the chefs he’d brought in to interview and I was no longer interested in the chef’s job. Burned out, it was time for me to move on.
It was only then that he made a phone call to the Club President. Five minutes later he told me that they wanted me to be the new chef. So that’s how I got my first chef’s job. I’ll never forget how it felt to have finally gotten there. That was in 1989, and I was 27 years old. I didn’t have a clue, but I was going to learn quickly that it was much more difficult and treacherous than being the Sous Chef.