Roland G. Henin
The book is rather dry and long
If you're familiar with Chef Henin, then this is the book for you. It is an ode to a mentor from a devoted student. That's all it is.
Tuesday, November 14, 2017
Roland G. Henin Honoring A Mentor
It is hard to get a good mentor - no matter what profession you're in. Yet some chefs have had the honor - and fun to work under the great master chef Roland G. Henin. One, Susan Crowther, has honored him in a new tribute book.
Roland G. Henin : 50 Years Of Mentoring Great American Chefs (Skyhorse Publishing 2017 ) was written by Chef Henin''s former CIA student , Susan, Crowther. It is not just a biography/autobiography, it's a variety of different interviews with such famed and former students as PBS's Mike Colamico and French Laundry's Thomas Keller. Interspersed amongst such are Chef Henin's own recollections on everything from his early years in Tartare, France, a small village not far from the culinary world heritage site of Lyon to his early years in Montreal and Grand Bahama Island. There are some amusing anecdotes , about the cooking competitions and the hijinks that accompany them. Then there is his teaching at the great CIA - Culinary Institute of America in New Hyde Park, New York, and how he treated (and mistreated) students including the author. Most have very good memories of him, even becoming his friend.
The book is rather dry and long. I found it hard to get really enthused about. It should have been a straight biography, with more details about Chef Henin's life in France. Instead, it was interview after interview with fellow chefs working with him on various national and international cooking competitions. Either that or ones with former students that had suffered his wrath. I would have loved to have seen recipes from the competitions as well as ones from the CIA along with some of his family recipes. This would have made the book much more palatable and appealing. Instead, Ms. Crowther has endless conversations with all sorts of chefs and , frankly, one just blended into the next. This is meant to be a valentine, from a former student to her mentor, and it does achieve that. Yet Ms. Crowther should have allowed the chefs to write their own chapters along with providing some kind of recipe associated with this great cook. There aren't even any pictures of the dishes he created , instead there are those of him with fellow chefs and fishing stuck in the book's middle
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If you're familiar with Chef Henin, then this is the book for you. It is an ode to a mentor from a devoted student. That's all it is.
Roland G. Henin
The book is rather dry and long
If you're familiar with Chef Henin, then this is the book for you. It is an ode to a mentor from a devoted student. That's all it is.
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1 comment:
I’m going to make the assumption you’ve never met Chef Henin. What he’s valued over the years, has and always will be those chefs telling their own stories, and what they accomplished. He has never made their stories about him.
Chef Henin has, in every sense of the word, embodied what it means to be a true, and selfless mentor. Where you’ve missed the mark, is that this is not just Susan Crowther’s love letter to a former mentor, it’s a love letter from every chef she’s spoken to. Chef Henin was very clear, their was no biography, there was no life story. He didn’t want a book of recipes, if the man wanted to be Jacques Pepin he could’ve been. He chose a different path. Had Susan Crowther written a straight foreword biography (in the vein of The Apprentice) there would be no book to speak of. Henin would’ve immediately shut it down (and told her as much.) This is what he wanted out there, stories about his mentees, them taking the spotlight. Through that his story would told. The proceeds from the book went to Ment’Or, so that even in retirement, Henin is continuing to mentor young chefs.
I’m not sure what qualified you to be a food critic, but I know for certain it wasn’t trudging away for twenty years or more in a kitchen, or a dining room. If you had, you’d know that recognition, and “telling our story” isn’t why most of us do what we do. Chefs “cook to nurture” as Roland has famously told hundreds of chefs and cooks, not for publicity. This is a book about a chef, written for chefs, not one for suburban foodies.
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