Filling the guest seat at tonight's Judges' Table was André Soltner, one of this country’s most acclaimed French chefs. Soltner, a native of Alsace, was the chef who opened the classic New York restaurant Lutèce in 1961. In 1972 he bought the restaurant and, with his wife Simone, presided over it until 1994, when he sold it to Ark Restaurants. (Ten years later, the restaurant closed.) Soltner now serves as Dean of Classic Studies at the French Culinary Institute in Manhattan.
I spoke to him on Wednesday morning about his life in the kitchen.
How did you become a Top Chef?
A lot of training, hard work and experience. I started my apprenticeship in 1948 when I was 14 and I did that for three years. After that I earned a certificate and was made a commis [the lowest position in a French kitchen]. You had to be a commis for two or three years. Then you became a chef de partie [head of a cooking station]. After a little while—two, three, five years, depending on the man—if you were lucky you became a sous chef and, eventually, the chef. I was considered very young when I became a chef at 26, but that was after 12 years of training.
Do your students at FCI expect that it’s going to take them 12 years to become a chef?
Here it is different. For us we were learning and working. We learned a lot, but at the same time we paid the restaurant back by working—cleaning the stoves, starting the fires.
When I started at FCI, I said “it’s impossible to train people in six months.” But I really was wrong. After six months or two years, they learn the basics and they can cook.
But without a lengthy traditional apprenticeship, are they missing something?
Yes and no. On the one hand, they spend all their time cooking—no working—and I know that after six months of purely cooking, they know more than we learned after three years. But after an apprenticeship, when you have been working, you have a different attitude, more disciplined. When it’s just school, the discipline is a little lacking.
Do chefs graduating from culinary school these days have unrealistic expectations?
Some of them do. I try to explain this to my students: “You’re not Paul Bocuse. Maybe some day you will be.”
What role does creativity play in cooking?
It is very important, but it means nothing if you don’t know how to cook. In this country, creativity is overdone. I remember years ago when this thing started. Everyone wanted to create new dishes. I have cooked now for 59 years. If you asked me what dishes did I create, I am speechless. I changed recipes—I discovered little things to improve them—but create is a big word. I like to cook the recipes we have.
What do you make of explosion of cooking shows on television?
There’s good and bad. On the good side, people learn that the most important thing is to cook with good ingredients. That is a big advance. The bad thing is that there are chefs on television with two or three years experience. They are put on pedestal like stars and then they think they are stars. But we are not stars, we are craftspeople.
Craftspeople, as opposed to artists?
In my life, I was always fighting that. We are not artists, we are craftspeople. Here is the difference: An artist like a painter doesn’t do great paintings all through his life. One week he does a beautiful painting and another week it is not beautiful. So he puts the not-beautiful painting away.
Chefs have to produce every day. The customer who has a beautiful meal on Monday also has to have a beautiful meal on Tuesday. To do it every day we have to be craftsmen, we have to be consistent.
People always ask me, what is the secret? There is no secret. You need absolutely the best ingredients. The next thing is to be consistent, to cook as well on Tuesday as you did on Monday. Creativity comes after that.
Do you watch Top Chef?
I have not watched it.
How about tonight?
My whole life as a chef I went to bed at one, two o’clock in the morning. Now [since he sold Lutèce] I go to bed at nine. But tonight I’ll stay up late to watch it.