By Joe Pollack
Photograph by Tanya Braganti
Barbara Rich began working in restaurants while she was a student at Clayton High School, and she has since cooked in top restaurants on both coasts. A couple of years ago, she moved out of the restaurant kitchen and began teaching basic gourmet cooking at the Art Institute of New York, where “culinary” is one of the arts, and at the National Gourmet Institute for Food and Health, whose name barely fits on her chef’s jacket.
At New York’s Gramercy Tavern, one of St. Louisan Danny Meyer’s highly successful restaurant operations, Rich talks about food, cooking and the joys associated with them.
You’ve been working in restaurants since you were a teenager. Talk about what you’ve learned, and where. I was in high school, and my first kitchen work was for Barbara Schwartz at Gourmet to Go. Later I spent a summer shucking oysters for Gregg Perez, but I really learned how to work in a kitchen from Bill Cardwell at Cardwell’s at the Plaza. Later I learned to cook from Judy Rodgers at the Zuni Café in San Francisco.
There’s a difference between working in a kitchen and cooking? Bill Cardwell taught me, and everyone else who worked for him, how to make sure that a restaurant runs smoothly, that people know their jobs and practice them enough to do them almost automatically. Most important, I think, is that he taught us to keep a restaurant kitchen spotless. No place was so unreachable as to be immune from scrubbing. Judy Rodgers was a hero of mine before I realized she had grown up in St. Louis. I read a New York Times Magazine piece about her, and from that day forward I wanted to work in the kitchen at the Zuni Café.
Describe what she taught you about cooking. There was nothing magical or convoluted about it; she just insisted that what was on the plate needed to be perfect—not fussy or overarranged, but perfect in taste. Judy could taste a dish and decide that it needed eight grains of salt—not seven or nine, but eight—to make it right. And it did.
Where does your introductory class begin? It’s as simple as possible; we start with basic stock, because that’s the first building block. Then we go into the five basic sauces, what we call the mother sauces. They include velouté, which can be meat- or fish-based; béchamel, the classic cream-butter-flour sauce; espagnole, the beginning brown sauce; tomato; and, of course, hollandaise, which blends egg yolks, butter and lemon juice. From there, you can go anywhere.
