Carbondate

Thirty years ago we didn't have the net. The only source of inspiration outside of going to culinary school and picking up a few books, and I mean only just a few were available was to hone your craft by practice, trial and error, you learned from someone else, it may have not have been correct, but that was about the extent of it.




I started out graduating from high school and going to college like most of my peers, this was in the early eighties, my focus was back then computers ( later on in life I would become incredibly good at working around and with), this is back in a day of punch cards and drum drives, very different than today. while going to college I saw myself getting frustrated with the archaic quality of what I was studying. I had a friend whose father had opened a restaurant in Georgetown, we used to go and eat there sometimes, the Maitre d was from Sweden. he went into telling about his wife and how she worked up the street at Cafe la Ruche, and about how wonderful their desserts were, well you see where this is going. In school....not happy, intrinsically good with my hands, looking to master something to make into a livelihood.




There was a school in the district at the time, that lay the foundations for a journey, I was going to school, and one of my first positions in the biz was working for Marriott, it wasn't so much the organization that was lacking, it was the Pastry chef and the Exec. that were how shall I say absent. I was only there for 10 months, making at that time If I remember less than 5 dollars an hour, I moved on and my next venture was the Jefferson hotel, I landed the Pastry Chef's position at just nineteen, too green, way too inexperienced, but it was an opportunity under Terry Tiplitsky and Paul Limbert as the GM. Imagine a kid working 6 to 7 days a week on the night shift, sometimes a hundred hours a week. with a stack of Thuries editions and not even an ability to read French.....bold, but being the kind of guy that I am I looked at the pictures, translated a core of verbiage and gave it my best shot.




I after a year, and several botched batches, essentially being self taught, I created some extraordinarily things, with no one looking over my shoulder. It was raw, crude, nothing but copy cat stuff from the books, and whatever inspiration I would get from running over to Watergate in the middle of the night and seeing what Mark Randolph would have whipped for the day, that I tried to emulate to a T. Mark is a bit of an icon, a Titan here in the area, we would later become good friends while at my stint with Dean and Deluca, Video interview to follow.




A major source of inspiration indeed! because that is exactly what Mark was doing, he also had the Thuries editions and was replicating those desserts to exacting specs...he was an inspiration to say the least. I still was like soft un molded clay at this point, but had a strong desire to understand not just the fundamentals, but the whys, I left the Jefferson, and took a Sabbatical, jetting off to AIB (the American Institute of Baking) and taking their residency curricula in science and technology. AIB is an info source, more for the big boys out there, the Dolly Madison's, the Campbell Taggert's, George Westin's of the world, huge production mostly automated, but it was those big level techniques and concepts that would prove very beneficial later on, imagine taking something and elementally breaking it down into a smaller constituent, you get the idea. this was 1985, and I told my mother that I needed to sell my car and go to France to now get the art side of it down, now that the science end of it was under wraps. so in the spring of 86' off to Plaisir, and Ecole Lenotre...Lenotre and my travels to Paris were an awaking, an epiphany of sorts, everything I imagined about the way they were doing things there and more. Even a small little Patissiere in a place like Versailles made a top notch product, amazing....the French just "have it", very passionate, a bit neurotic, but that's what it takes to be a bit "gooder", a commitment and relentless dedication to a Craft.




Coming back from Europe did not yield immediate success as I had hoped, but at 21, I was able to put what I had learned into motion, what was created even by today's standards, miniatures, showpieces, confections.....was nothing short of remarkable in the time that I was at the Crowne Plaza, 30 years later several venues along the way....as they say some things do get better with age, oh yeah and I almost forgot, we do now have something called the world wide web....