Please Welcome Chris Ward!

[Nicko]

A few years back ChefTalk had a very special feature where we followed the life and times of Logan Worley as he changed careers and attended culinary school (A Day In The Life of An American Culianary Student). We now have another very special feature with Chris Ward who is working abroad in France. Chris has agreed to share his experiences here with our community. You know Chris as Plongeur so tune in each week to find out what is happening to Chris in France.


Following introduction by Chris:


I get two reactions when I tell people what I do for a living nowadays. Those who knew me in the past knew me as Chris Ward the journalist and columnist for The Times (of London as I'm obligated to say to Americans) of some 25 years standing. A chap who lived in a big house (http://www.chateaukeyboard.com) and drove a BMW. So when these people learn that I now work as a dishwasher in a restaurant in Avignon in French Provence they tend to think either that I'm joking or that I'm doing it as research for a story.


Then there are those who think I'm already a cook or, worse, a Chef. They're quite impressed by this at first as it's a trendy profession in the Anglo-Saxon world these days (and always has been in France). Then I explain that, in fact, I gut fish and peel vegetables in the mornings and wash up for the rest of the day and earn minimum wage (EUR1,200 per month - about US$1,450) and suddenly most of them aren't so impressed any more.


So then I explain the whole change-of-life thing, how a divorce and (so far attempted) sale of that big house and BMW made me realise that I wasn't tied to one career for life and that in fact I could do whatever I wanted to. And am doing it.


And that I really, really don't care what those who don't get the whole 'Start at the bottom and work your way up' idea think about it anyway; I started out in journalism working for minimum wage on a local weekly paper (the Forest of Dean Guardian in Gloucestershire in the West of England, circulation 3,200) and worked my way up to become a columnist on The Times and see no reason why I can't do the same over the next 20 years in restaurant kitchens.


Why become a cook? I always wanted to and my mother was a cook too - a proper Chef de Cuisine, really, although she was called Head Cook since she bossed a school kitchen which turned out 1,500 covers a day for the school pupils. Which really, really impresses me now when I see how hard we have to work to turn out our maximum of 100 covers in a service.
The real moment of epiphany for me came in October 2000, just after my 40th birthday. I was up in Paris with a dozen or so good friends staying at my favourite Parisian Hotel/Restaurant Le Thoumieux, http://www.thoumieux.com. While everyone else went off to climb the Eiffel Tower or get their portraits painted by the street artists in Montmartre, I went to the Cordon Bleu cookery school, http://www.cordonbleu.fr. Anyone can 'Assist' (sit in on) any of the classes taking place if you book the day before, so I sat with 20 American, Japanese and English students watching Chef make a giant cherry charlotte. Hmm, I thought. So, I'm selling this house and it's going to leave me with an interesting sum of money, what do I do with it?
Open a restaurant! Obvious! And come here to learn how to cook properly first too. Then I saw their fees and thought, hmm, OK. Perhaps not here. Back home in the South of France I found the Vatel school in Nimes. http://www.vatel.fr who do a Masters degree course in 'Restauration' in one year which seemed to offer all I wanted: three months in the classroom and working in the school's own four-star hotel's restaurant, three months learning business administration the French way and six months doing stages - work experience in real kitchens. And, as soon as I could sell my big old French farmhouse I was going to do that.
That was two years ago and that big old French farmhouse is still a victim of the slump in sales of big old French farmhouses (make me an offer!) and I couldn't afford to both pay the course fees at Vatel and not earn any money for a year.


And then just before Easter, 2004 I talked to the owners/chef/Maitre de Restaurant of my favourite eatery, the Grange de Labahou http://www.lagrangedelabahou.com Franck and Isabelle and they said - hey, come and work here for a day or two a week and see how you like it. So I did, and I loved it. Loved it very much indeed, but it was only a day or two a week.


By now I'd really given up chasing the journalism and needed to earn a living, so followed up on some adverts on the French Government's employment website, http://www.anpe.fr and a Traiteur - caterer - in Nimes offered me a job as 'Aide de Cuisine' - Kitchen Porter, Washer-Up and all-round dogsbody in September 2004.


I lasted two months there, leaving with the words - screamed into the chef's face in the middle of his crowded shop one busy Friday morning - "Je m'en fou de ce putain de merde de travail! Je demission!" (it's rude but I meant it and he really, really deserved it).


Not being completely stupid I'd already lined up another job, at La Table des Agassins just outside the city walls of Avignon where I'd followed a young lady (who subsequently dumped me, of course). There I also found the Ecole Hoteliere - the School of Hotellery, http://www.provence.org/eha/presentation02.htm. I enquired and they offered me a place on their 'Formation Continue' - Continuing Education - course to study for a CAP de Cuisine, a Certificat d'Aptitude Professionel in Cooking. And, at just €1,500 for the whole year the price was right too.
We do one day a week, every Monday from 8 am to 6pm and cook at least two dishes, sometimes three or four; we get an hour of lectures on the legal aspects of business, food hygiene and so on and - of course, this being France - an hour for lunch. Otherwise we spend eight hours in the kitchen and, I have to say, I absolutely love it.


It's not easy, not least because I'm doing all this in a foreign language; but I'm working hard at it, harder than many of my fellow pupils and am pleased to say that I got the top marks (17/20) in our first 'Examen Blanche' - trial exam - last week.


I couldn't have done this without my restaurant chef who has helped me enormously in all this. He's organised everyone's working hours so I can be free at least during the day on Mondays - I work some Monday evenings but not all. He wants to know what I've been doing every Tuesday and what I'm going to be doing the next week, so he can help me work on it. So, when we're doing choux pastry at school he puts profiteroles on the restaurant menu and I spend a fair amount of my time making them; same goes for working on ribs of pork, shoulders of lamb and whatever fish is up next at school.


Our next trial exam is December 13 and my chef has volunteered to come along and help mark how we behave in the kitchen whilst doing it; my teacher wondered if he might not be too kind to me - Chef said he'd be even harder on me than he is on the stagiaires (work experience students) he spends his time shouting at in the restaurant, and he's not lying. He's firm but fair. Very firm, in fact, and a great cook with it.


Here on Chef Talk I'm going to be posting at least weekly details of what I've been doing, and in the next few weeks will be posting details of how I've been getting on since school started a couple of months ago. You're welcome to post observations and questions.
Bon Appetit!

[cape chef]

Welcome,

Looking forward to reading your journal.