EDUCATION | Driving tomorrow’s achievements
04 December 2008
Making Memories to Make a Living
By Walter Scheib
Begin with one measure talent. Add one measure dedication, two measures preparation, and half a measure luck. Blend thoroughly, and allow the mixture to age.
That’s the recipe American celebrity chef Walter Scheib followed to advance from the kitchen staff in small restaurants all the way to the position of White House chef.
Walter Scheib was White House chef from 1994 to 2005, serving the families of Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He now speaks and consults about the hospitality industry in his business, The American Chef.
I served a rack of lamb, curried red sweet potatoes, and braised Swiss chard when I cooked one of the most important meals of my career for the first lady of the United States.
All you have to do is look at the plate to tell whether people like your cooking or not. An empty plate means they like the food. If it’s not empty, that means they don’t like it so much.
I looked at the plate in front of Hillary Clinton that day and saw that not only had she eaten the entire rack of lamb, I noticed she was chewing on one of the rib bones. Three days later, they offered me the job as White House chef.
Almost 20 years before that moment, I took my first steps to become a professional chef, and my father just about threw me out of the house. After one year at college, I told him I was going to drop out because my goal was to become a chef. He told me I had to start paying rent, or move out.
My father was a nuclear engineer, a very academically oriented man with multiple degrees from prestigious institutions. Some time early in my own college days, I realized I didn’t want the kind of life he had. It just wasn’t interesting to me. I didn’t want to be a suit-and-tie guy; I wanted to be a white-jacket guy.
So I entered the cruel world of American capitalism, learning a trade, making a living at it, bumping around for a few years. I worked as an assistant manager and a manager at a steakhouse chain in the Washington, D.C., area. I worked as a chef in a number of small restaurants and at various places belonging to corporate chains, learning what the business side of it was like. I didn’t learn much about cooking from them, but I learned a whole lot about systems management, how to manage people, and how to work with folks.
I recognized that I wanted to be in the hospitality industry as a professional and I was going to need more training. I went to the Culinary Institute of America in New York, America’s preeminent culinary school at the time. It was about a 20-month program where you spent seven months in the institute, then worked in the real world for some months, then went back to the institute.
I discovered I was in the right business when I was working as an assistant banquet chef on one of those apprenticeships away from the institute. One day when a banquet was done, the big chef said, “OK, we’re going to be introduced to this crowd in the dining room.” So the banquet staff goes out there, and 1,200 people in tuxedos and gowns get to their feet and give us a standing ovation. I actually remember getting goose bumps. It was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.
That’s the attitude you need for the restaurant or hospitality business. If you don’t love — and I mean love — making people happy, you’re in the wrong business. The conditions are brutal. It’s a 10- to15-hour day, late nights, early mornings. If you don’t like to see people smiling, then you are in the wrong business. Our goal is to have people say, “Wow! That was wonderful.” The secret is to be part of a moment, to make people really enjoy what they’re doing right at that moment.
A few years out of the culinary institute, I got a great opportunity at the Greenbrier, a famous old luxury resort in West Virginia. That’s where I was when the White House job came open. After I applied, I learned about 4,000 other folks had too. Then the field was narrowed down, and I was one of about 10 invited to actually cook for the first lady, a luncheon audition.
What was I going to do? It was the biggest challenge of my professional life. I listened to everybody. “You should do this, do that, do the other thing.” In the end, the best idea was to do what I really did best. If I had tried to do something else, or to be pretentious or fancy, it wouldn’t have worked. Food that was simple but very intense really represented what I was. It’s a take on a country style that I was doing at the Greenbrier resort — basic sweet potatoes, greens, and lamb. It’s a very regional cuisine, but I made it upscale in the presentation and the flavor components. That’s what made the difference to Mrs. Clinton.
I told her that day that we could bring contemporary American cuisine to the White House, not just for her private dining but for all the great and grand state dinners and public receptions. She recognized that American cuisine was ready to replace the European style haute cuisine that Mrs. Kennedy [First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy] had introduced to the White House in the 1960s. Mrs. Clinton directed me to bring America’s cuisine to America’s home at the White House. So I formed a team to bring that style of food to the White House, and it was a tremendous professional honor to do that.
And, of course, it was a great personal honor to cook for two unique and distinctive American first families. You got to see them offstage, as the true people they are, regardless of their politics.
The author’s Web site is http://www.theamericanchef.com/index.asp
