Top Chefs
How do you become a French chef? Do you take your New York family for a stint in the food center of France? Or, do you have to leave your French birth nation and come to America to find a place in a professional kitchen?
Two chefs find their answers in these notable food memoirs; “Dirt: Adventures in Lyon as a Chef in Training, Father, and Sleuth Looking for the Secret of French Cooking” by Bill Buford the best-selling author of “Heat,” and “Rebel Chef: In Search of What Matters” by Dominique Creen who became the first female chef to receive three Michelin stars.
With the rise of chefs as celebrities in recent decades, there is a plethora of food memoirs. A few of the classics are, “My Life in France,” Julia Child’s 2006 autobiography about her extraordinary transformation from non-cook to beloved personality and French cuisine expert, Anthony Bourdain’s groundbreaking 2000 “Kitchen Confidential,” a revealing look at restaurant kitchen culture, and the recent 2019 “Save Me The Plums,” by former food writer and editor, Ruth Reichl, about the spicy details of “Gourmet” magazine’s heyday and demise.
Great food memoirs satisfy our enjoyment of food, while telling a unique personal story with a compelling voice. With “Dirt,” Bill Buford, a former literary editor, and The New Yorker magazine fiction journalist, has the writing “chops” to deliver. He scrutinizes everything from bread making, to culinary history, to French versus Italian cooking. His observations are immersive, entertaining, often humorous, and always thorough.
In 2008, after a chance meeting with revered French chef Michel Richard, Buford takes his wife and three-year-old twin sons on a five-year adventure to Lyon, France. Why Lyon? Buford calls it a “historic gastronomic epicenter.” The Lyonaise have a shared dedication to the culture of the table, as well as ready access to extraordinary ingredients.
Buford starts as a bread apprentice at Lyon’s best boulangerie. He meets the legendary Paul Bocuse and studies at the l’Institute Bocuse. He cooks at the famous Michelin-starred La Mere Brazier where he braves challenging duties and hours, and rigorous restaurant culture hazing and rituals to prove himself on the line, to get people to reveal their cooking secrets, and tries to understand the city and food history.
Valuable connections are made through his acquaintance with Daniel Bolud, restaurateur, James Beard award winner, and Michelin star chef. Bolud humbly grew up on a Lyon area farm. He began his career at age fourteen, when he declared he wanted be a chef, though he’d never been inside a restaurant, or a grocery store, and everything he had ever eaten, came from the farm.
Buford’s food journey includes a cast of enigmatic fanatics like the family who obsessively make their cheese on a mountain top 7,000 feet high so the milk from the cows, fed only on wild grasses, can be rushed at body temperature from “cow to cauldron” to retain its delicate flavors. Would you expect anything less from a country that has 1200 varieties of cheese?
It’s worth noting his adventure was largely made possible by a wife who took a break from working, and significantly paved the way for his journey — she makes all the arrangements, supports and sets up the home, and cares for the kids.
With “Dirt” we get an insider perspective into one of the world’s supreme culinary cultures, France, a country that has “eating societies,” and where cooking is referred to as “the art of gastronomy.” It’s a dense book full of tasty morsels where you are left satiated.
Dominique Crenns’s “Rebel Chef” is an ironic story. As a French woman, Crenn finds her just desserts not in France, but here in the United States. Starting out as an adopted French orphan in Versailles, she becomes a history-making chef that succeeds in the male-dominated cooking world… by leaving France.
After deciding at twenty-one to become a chef, Creen is discouraged by the culinary schools from even applying, and told that women do well in the “front of the house.” She did not see a way forward in France at time when “the role of chef as artist seems to be reserved for men.”
A tribute to her daring and persistence, she comes to San Francisco and trains on the job under legendary Jeremiah Tower (formerly of Chez Panisse) at landmark Stars restaurant. She asks for, and gets, a job without culinary school or formal training and works as a struggling cook in world-acclaimed restaurants. Determined to forge her way in male-centric restaurant kitchens, she manages to establish herself as a creative innovator.
In 2018, after nearly thirty years, her restaurant, Atelier Crenn, was awarded three Michelin stars. At the same time she spoke out on issues such as sexist restaurant culture, immigration, and climate change. She also received an award from the French government for her cooking which “draws inspiration from French cuisine while reinventing classic French food.”
Her book is not a food classic. It is more a personal story of self-discovery. Crenn defines success as “finding out who you really are and anchoring that discovery to a purpose.” It took coming to America to discover herself and her food. Only 20 female chefs have ever been awarded Michelin stars. Crenn’s unconventional road to become a chef is an inspiring achievement.
Both chefs found the secret to French cooking. For Crenn, it was about reflecting the integrity of the ingredients, its surroundings, and the natural world. And, Buford says, “the French express their respect for food and its relationship to the dirt it comes from.” They both found their answers in location and land. Whether it’s Lyon or Sonoma, the authors take distinctly different food journeys yet end up in the same place.
