chef's a clever boy!

Chefs are by nature clever...Well we should be...and frankly alot of are not...I am an old school guy...which surprises me about myself...when I was learning my trade I was all about surprising people with wild combinations of styles and ingredients...I embraced cross cultural blending...I actually made grilled kobi sushi...and springrolls filled with chicken and chillis...but as I defined my craft...it came to me that the surprise should lie in surpassing the expectations of the diner...the steak being created, seasoned and sauced in a way that makes you stop mid fork and look astonishingly at the steak like you have never had it before.. to find the zen in the spaces between food...not to pile it all together....subsequently I managed to avoid foams and dusts...I found deconstruction-ism far, far too clever...

What I have found is that the food network...has a very two edged sword affect on my industry...it has educated the customer to new foods and showed them ways to prepare them...but it has created the "chef as a media star" concept and brought a group of people who could not have survived in an earlier period...to my business... I meet 20 year old kids who have business cards that say chef...read about openings where the chef straight out of some culinary institute is raving about how he or she will change the "bizniss" forever ... I never called myself a chef when I got my first kitchen...didn't even know that an executive chef had to have a defined number of employees to qualify for the title...chefs were guys with medals...educated at the escoffier or cia...I was a very fortunate cook...a savage as we are known...I am self taught...but influenced by the chefs that I have worked under or around.. and I try to impart their and my version of the culinary arts to the kids that come up in my kitchen...and this is what the food network misses on a daily basis...to be a chef is to be a foreman of tradesman....and a cook is liken to a carpenter or a plummer... a chef is not ...a white coat...some silly pants and a knife kit...all available at some uniform store and Marshalls...maybe thats why there are so many pan asian/italian/mexican bistros...or dishes like " pan baked grouper with a asian infused veronique sauce, topped with a lump crab and mustard creme sauce"... and why the death rate of new restaurants hovers around 95%...