The following review was written by Matthew Simmons.

What does it mean to be a chef?  At the most basic level, the word connotes an air of professionalism in the preparation of food for other people.  Beyond just skill, a chef possesses a dedication to the craft that the best cooks, even the ones who cook for a living, cannot muster.  That basic description covers the chef’s role in the kitchen: overseeing staff, creating dishes, and sometimes inventing whole menus that advance the craft – and the art – of food.

But there is another aspect to the chef.  Increasingly, the chef has a role in a diner’s experience beyond the food he or she prepares.  It is this new development that Michael Ruhlman explores in his masterful book The Reach of a Chef: Professional Cooks in the Age of Celebrity, the latest in his Making of a Chef series.  Ruhlman is, in some ways, uniquely qualified to address the subject; he trained as a journalist and at the Culinary Institute of America, and clearly respects the best traditions of both institutions.  The author has parlayed his connections from the other CIA into access to and friendships with some of the most famous, talented and ambitious chefs in America and on the planet.  Names like Emeril Lagasse, Rachael Ray, Anthony Bourdain and Thomas Keller are sprinkled throughout Reach as Ruhlman crosses the country to uncover what it really means to be a chef in the first decade of the 21st Century.

For the uninitiated, Ruhlman’s heady company and the culinary wonders they create can be intimidating.  Just as it’s hard for most people creating a document in Word to relate to what Bill Gates goes through on a daily basis, it is tough to relate to the work of Keller, Bourdain and Masayoshi Takayama, the man many consider the best sushi artist – and there is no other way to describe what Ruhlman has the pleasure of watching him do – in the world.  Tables at Keller’s Per Se and Masayoshi’s Masa, located across the hall from each other on the fourth floor of a glass tower in New York, are booked weeks or months in advance, and the cost of meals at either restaurant typically runs well into four digits.  With such rarified company it would be easy to discount Ruhlman as insulated or even advertising for his friends’ restaurants.  But there is a serious and insightful motive to the author’s survey of the greatest kitchens at work in this country.

Reach opens on a cautionary note with an illustrative vignette about Thomas Keller standing in the kitchen of his new haute cuisine restaurant in his stocking feet.  Declaring that the chef has “lost his shoes,” Ruhlman springs from that simple anecdote into an analysis of whether the chef, and the entire exercise of eating in the United States, has lost his footing.  As he says:

Since the end of World War II, this country has been out of sync with the natural order of sustenance and nourishment, embracing processed foods, revering canned goods, ‘instant’ breakfasts, and frozen dinners, then elevating fast food to a way of life with such force that its impact has become global, then simultaneously abhorring animal fat for health and dietary reasons, while still becoming the fattest community on earth, then turning around to proselytize on diets composed entirely of salt-rich protein and animal fat, and banishing bread of all things – the stuff of life was now the evildoer, and just when bakers in this country had figured out how to make it well.

Reach, at its core, is motivated by Ruhlman’s concern that as they become global media conglomerates – complete brands with their own Vegas boutiques and custom-designed cookware – chefs will become as debased in America as the ingredients we use in our food.  While he interviews at least half a dozen prominent thought leaders in the food world, Ruhlman’s faith is bolstered most by two chefs who approach their art from opposite poles.

Grant Achatz’s kitchen at Alinea in Chicago may be the center of haute cuisine, at least in the U.S.  The menu notes for new recipes in his restaurant ask questions like “How can we make ‘snow’?” and “Transglutimate!!”  Ironically, his drive to create a unique and thoroughly excellent dining experience was spurred by an inspiring, if more traditional experience in the hills outside of Florence.  According to Ruhlman, Achatz’s Italian experience was “his first-ever experience of regional European food, and it blew the Michelin stars [highly regarded restaurants internationally recognized for their service as well as their cuisine] by a mile.”  That meal led him to Thomas Keller, the French Laundry, Trio and, ultimately, his own restaurant, Alinea, and concoctions like shrimp cocktail served in a fine mist atomizer.  In Ruhlman’s view, Achatz defines and redeems the reach of a chef by breaking food down to its most essential materials and rebuilding a complex and sophisticated dining experience from the most basic components.

Melissa Kelly runs her kitchen on a wholly different model from Achatz.  Where Achatz breaks food down to its most basic elements to build it back into wild and surprising forms, Kelly builds her menu from the garden behind her restaurant and the memory of her best family recipes.  The saltimbocca at Primo – the signature dish and her grandfather’s favorite in a restaurant that carries his name – never leaves the menu, which makes it unique in a place that thrives because of its reliance on local and seasonal (even daily) ingredients and menu alterations.  Nothing about Primo is experimental – a point Kelly makes herself in her conversations with Ruhlman – and yet Ruhlman’s infatuated descriptions of the kitchen there suggest that the magic of simple food refined and nearly perfected is at work there.  Ruhlman says it exactly:

In a chef world increasingly giving itself over to branding and multiple restaurants and TV shows, chefs trying to cash in on their fame, I had been completely happy and at ease to be hanging out at this uniquely American restaurant with the garden, with all the cooks and their many advanced degrees abandoned for cooking, with Price [Melissa’s partner] and Melissa, who run a little restaurant in an old house on the coast of Maine.

The genius, the grace, of Michael Ruhlman’s Reach is that for all of its gloomy proclamations about how we treat the ingredients of our meals and the media and branding over saturation facing our most talented chefs, he still finds wonder and magic in kitchens both avant garde and rustic.  His faith in the care and joy of chefs pursuing their art out of the love of food and the experience of their patrons shines throughout the book, including his closing remarks.  In parting, he offers this advice to all chefs:

Go to the kitchen.  Wipe down your counter till it shines.  Set out a heavy cutting board.  Steel a paring knife and a chef’s knife.  Gather your shallots, your parsley, your tomatoes, and the rest of your mise en place, and stand in one place and cook for a long time.  That’s the greatest thing about a kitchen – it’s guaranteed always to be there, will always be only and exactly what it is.  That’s where the greatness begins.  And it will be there for you when you come back in from the complex world that it opened up for you.

If only all professions where that simple and that sublime.

The Reach of a Chef: Beyond the Kitchen
352 pages