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not very good tonight, David,” she said. She gave me the name of the hotel where she was staying and said, “Call me tomorrow.”
    Her tone was not as unpleasant as her authoritative message, and I sensed that she understood and had taken into account all I had to deal with—temporarily running a kitchen past its heyday with an insubordinate staff over which I had little influence and no power.
    The next morning I called her, thinking we would share a laugh over how impossible our profession can be at times. I went in that direction, trying to set a confident, relaxed tone. “Hi, Alice, it’s David. What a night!”
    Alice’s voice held none of the pleasant friendliness of the previous evening; in fact, it was outright cold. “Don’t you ever let that happen when you are chef of a kitchen,” she admonished me. “The owner is a friend of mine. I was embarrassed for him, but mainly I was embarrassed for you.”
    She didn’t leave it at that, going on to a meticulous critique of each part of the meal, missing nothing—not even the parts I had tried to fudge. She was indignant about the out-of-season vegetables, finishing on the cheese and the dessert.
    “And the cheese was cold, David, COLD! That’s inexcusable. And I could taste food odors in the cake!”
    Yes, I knew that keeping cake in the walk-in with the rest of the food was bad practice. It’s something any good kitchen knows not to do, but with a staff that needed watching at every step, I had let it go.
    “You are responsible for everything that comes out of that kitchen,” she chided me, “and that has to be your first priority.”
    She was right and I knew it. I had known it that night as I sent out dish after dish of substandard quality. She must have heard how totally deflated I was, all my cockiness knocked out of me. But she wasn’t finished. “Before you call yourself a chef,” she went on, “remember what the word means.” It means “chief,” and in the restaurant business it’s where the buck stops. My heart was pounding so hard that after a while I could no longer process her words. But no matter. Her tone of voice carried her message loud and clear. I had blown a huge opportunity, humiliating myself in front of a woman every cook in America studies and idolizes. And worst of all, I had stupidly tried to charm my way out of a dismal failure.
    Of course she was right, about the bad meal and the cold cheese and the poorly stored cake and about the fact that I—not the line cooks, not the pastry chef, not the server—was responsible for everything that came out of the kitchen. From the moment the call was over, I tried to salvage something from the debacle, allowing my mind to take me back to an old expression: “A whipped dog is a wiser dog.” I vowed I’d never again come to the game unprepared. But I couldn’t help wondering about another possible fallout. Alice would no doubt be visiting Provence and might share with Nathalie her disenchantment with me. I had invested so much in the hope that in Nathalie’s school I would become more than a good cook. I wondered if I had blown my chance for success before even getting there. The thought of failure on my journey had never entered my mind until that Saturday night. And Alice’s implicit judgment was clear: I had a long way to go before I could call myself a chef.
             
    Reflecting on what
brought me into this demanding profession of cooking for the pleasure of others, I realize that it was not just my love of food. The restaurant business, at least back when I entered it by way of a first summer job as a dishwasher, abounds with opportunity for those hungry to get ahead. But the work also provides a hefty dose of pressure for those trying to get by. As with early television shows that aired live, what you serve your guests has to come off right the first time, and that requires top performances from all of the support staff.
    Over a succession of summer jobs and