What’s the best way to acquire skills? Learning on the job? Or attending a formal course? I guess it depends on the nature of the skills. If you want to be a doctor or an engineer, then there is no real alternative to a formal education in the subject.
But there are many fields where it is not so clear-cut. Take fine art, for example. MF Hussain went briefly to art school but dropped out. And it made no difference to his career. Same with Pablo Picasso, who dropped out of art school in his native Spain, saying that it was a waste of time.
Or journalism. Bob Woodward, who may be America’s most famous journalist, never studied journalism. Neither did our own Rajdeep Sardesai nor Arnab Goswami, who are both extremely well educated, but never bothered with a professional qualification. (Since you ask: it never even occurred to me to get a journalism degree.)
What about food? Well, many of the world’s greatest chefs never went to culinary school. In France, Paul Bocuse had no academic qualifications. In Britain, the most famous chefs have not attended culinary school: Heston Blumenthal, Jamie Oliver, Marco Pierre White, or Gordon Ramsay. (Though Ramsay did study hotel management.) The greatest American chef of our time, Thomas Keller, never attended catering college. The great Swiss chef Daniel Humm has no professional cooking degree.
So, how do chefs learn?
To be fair, in both journalism and cuisine, the quality of teaching has improved massively in recent years, so perhaps the next generation of great chefs and journos will have professional degrees.
Frankly, though, I remain skeptical that many of the most important aspects of cooking or journalism can be taught. There are exceptions in certain areas: TV journalists need technical skills in editing, camera work, etc., so a degree can help. (Barkha Dutt has a TV journalism qualification, but then, she started out as a producer.) And I imagine that pastry chefs will benefit from formal training, though, as Marco Pierre White famously said, baking is not cooking, it’s chemistry.
So, how do chefs learn? In France, the tradition has always been that young chefs apprentice themselves to great chefs and learn on the job. That’s how Bocuse, or later, Joel Robuchon, learned how to cook. And it’s the same story with great chefs around the world.
The idea of an apprenticeship is so well established in the restaurant world that there is even a term for it: A stage. A chef doing a stage is called a stagier. (Or stagiaire) Most of the world’s great restaurants will (or used to, at any rate) take talented young chefs on as stagiers and let them learn how the kitchen operates. The French do it as a matter of course and often it isn’t just beginners who become stagiers. Even older chefs apply for stages to pick up skills.
When Ferran Adrià ran El Bulli he allowed stagiers of all ages to come and work in his kitchen to understand how the rules of cuisine were being rewritten. Andoni Luis Adoriz, who now runs the celebrated Mugaritz restaurant near San Sebastián, did a stage at El Bulli and says it changed his perspective on cooking.
Andoni is honest about having only been a stagier at El Bulli, but many chefs muddy the distinction and act as though they were full-fledged members of the kitchen team. This is especially true of stagiers at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that took over from El Bulli as the most innovative and influential restaurant in the world.
More about the stagier system
I have often said that more Indians have done stages at Noma than have ever eaten there. This is as true of former Noma stagiers in other countries as well. Food critics often complain about chefs who forage for ingredients and mindlessly ferment food because they claim that they learned to do all this at Noma. It used to be the same with former stagiers at El Bulli who would put foam on everything saying that they learned how to do this at the world’s greatest restaurant so how dare the critics object?
Most successful restaurants are inundated with applications from chefs who want to do stages. Typically, stagiers are not paid much (or paid at all), so going to Denmark or Spain to work as stagiers can be expensive when you factor in air tickets, living expenses, etc. But chefs compete furiously for these posts, arguing a) that it is cheaper and more useful than going to culinary school and b) they will more than recover the cost by putting Noma (or El Bulli or wherever) on their bios and getting high-paid jobs once their stages are over.
One reason you can’t go to a restaurant kitchen these days without bumping into a cooking range or a person who says they worked at Noma is that Noma used many more stagiers than most restaurants. Usually, 30 stagiers would be taken for 90-day stints. At the end of 90 days, a new batch of 30 stagiers would come in and the previous 30 sent on their way. That way, Noma used 120 stagiers every year. That’s why you meet so many chefs who put foraged food on your plate, claiming that this is something they learned ‘when I worked at Noma’.
The stagiers were usually quickly forgotten at Noma, but occasionally one was good enough for the restaurant to offer him or her a full-time job. That’s how Garima Arora, for example, was hired as a full-fledged chef at Noma.
In much of Western Europe, this practice would be regarded as entirely normal, but in Denmark, questions began to be asked about whether the stage system exploited unpaid interns. Much to the disappointment of potential stagiers, Noma discontinued the system.
The practice still continues in other countries, but last month the stagier system was in the news again when a controversy broke out over the behaviour of Rene Redzepi, Noma’s founder. Redzepi had previously admitted that he bullied and mistreated staff members, apologised and gone for psychiatric counselling. But on the eve of a pop-up in Los Angeles, his bullying behaviour became the centre of new protests against Noma. Redzepi, who had already conceded many times that his behaviour in the past (the most recent allegation was from 2017) had been appalling, apologised once again and stepped away from Noma.
But among the charges levelled against Noma was that it had exploited stagiers. Noma had already given up the practice so there was not much more to be said. However, the controversy has implications for the stage system as a whole. While many chefs feel that charges of exploitation come from people who either don’t know the history of the stage experience or deliberately choose to forget it, the public mood is such that few dare speak up to clarify the issue. Those who came close to doing that faced a barrage of criticism. For instance, Ferran Adria who asked why the stagiers did not leave if they were so unhappy at Noma was criticised and called out.
We will have to see how this plays out. In Denmark, as the New York Times noted, reaction has been muted, and even in such European countries as France, the controversy has had nothing like the impact it has had in America.
But perhaps restaurants will now be careful about letting stagiers into their kitchens. In that case, the system through which so many of the world’s greatest chefs learned to sharpen their craft will wither away.
Will cuisine lose out as a consequence? Will culinary institutes learn how to make up for the lack of practical experience available to young chefs?
We will just have to wait and see.
