After 20 years of cooking, much of it in the Jean Georges restaurants of New York and Shanghai, Three on the Bund’s executive head chef Paul Eschbach talks about the grueling times, sacrifices and privileges that truly made him a chef.
How did you start cooking?
I started off doing computer science at school, and absolutely hated it. My father said if I wanted to cook I’d need a “real job,” and wouldn’t waste any more of his money. I worked in an Italian restaurant, and then enrolled in the Culinary Institute of America. After I graduated, I moved to New York and got a job with Jean-Georges.
What was it like being a chef in New York, as intense as people say?
The old saying about New York is accurate: if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. And being a chef, it’s an insane grind. I would wake up every morning dry heaving because I was nervous about how the day would go.
Even when I reached executive sous chef, you still didn’t know what each day would entail. Who wasn’t going to show up, who was going to be sick, was Jean-Georges going to be in a bad mood, is our supplier going to arrive on time? Are your cooks going to have their stations set up correctly, are you going to go down during service because the first seating is so rough, is Michelin going to come in?
You either handle it poorly or learn to adapt.
Rent in New York is crazy, and the pay for cooks across the board is terrible. If you don’t have financial support from your family, it’s virtually impossible. Cooks were making maybe, $10 an hour? Even sous chefs, don’t make that much more, because guess what? The better the restaurant, the lower the pay. It’s a teacher thing – you’re paying for the privilege of learning from the best.
In their defense though, many recruits leave in under 6 months. You can get a good experience in a year, but less? No way. Then there’s people that lie on their résumés. I still get phone calls asking, did this person really work at Jean Georges?
For someone that actually did it, to have another person try and rob your experience isn’t something we look kindly upon. That life is about selling your PlayStation to your friend for $300 just to make rent so you can carry on doing a job that pays $9 an hour where you might not even make it. Walking around with a literal hole in your shoe because you can’t afford to buy another pair.
Does any one memory stand out in your mind as being particularly grueling?
Tons. I used to get yelled at for “not smiling.” Jean-Georges would say, “what’s the matter with the guy? That guy is never smiling. I don’t trust him.” Eventually I’d just smile like an idiot every time Jean-Georges was in the room.
Things get better though, don’t they?
For me, it was watching my mentors, even when doing my own thing. I learnt that Jean-Georges is always looking for details. He walks around the kitchen picking things up off the floor, if someone dropped a tissue, a little piece of carrot peel, or if a runner had dropped a torn piece of ticket. If something were stuck on the floor, he’d scrub it off. But even more than that, I’ve seen him pick up whole trashcans, dump them on the counter and start screaming about food costs. It’s about not letting things slip.
Years ago, one of the hardest jobs I had was at Nougatine [another Jean-Georges restaurant in New York]. I was tasked with weeding out the people who obviously weren’t going to make it ‘upstairs’ [to the Jean Georges kitchen], to make their lives so difficult that they’d quit. I did that for about two years.
The idea was to break chefs down, strip away the ego until they were just simple cooks again, and then re-teach them.
It’s never personal, it’s about “You have bad habits, and you learned them from somewhere. You have a spoon in your front pocket, your apron is always dirty, you’re a mess, your station looks like garbage. It’s a constant question of if we don’t rid them of these bad habits; they’re going to take them upstairs to Jean Georges where there is an immaculate open kitchen.
Shanghai isn’t much different. There’s no way a cook fresh from culinary school can work in the open kitchen at Jean Georges, they’d be a mess.
Open kitchens in Shanghai run rampant. They scare me. I don’t want to see what’s going on in there, and then I’m eating that food. You go to Din Tai Fung on the other hand, and they look dope. They got masks on, they’re organized, coordinated, and immaculate.
Do you think obsessiveness is necessary to get to the Jean Georges level?
Of course. The way structures like Jean Georges work is that the window of acceptability is very, very, very small, but you have dozens, hundreds of people with bad habits trying to fit through, stretching the window wider and squeeze one by you.
Working in Shanghai isn’t the same as New York, how do you create a climate for excellence here?
We have people like Chef Kelvin at Mercato, who just absorb everything around them, who go home and read cookbooks, that get online and research what food should be. You can be a fine cook, but if you’re not looking at what others are doing, you’ll never be creative.
The quality of local cooks is also improving, and they’re getting younger thanks to culinary schools and great new restaurants in Shanghai. But then there are standouts. We have one junior sous chef, and when he cooks, it’s sexy. He’s wiping down [counters], he’s touching everything delicately and deftly; when he cooks he does so with attention and love. He’s like a machine. And guess what? The guy speaks no English. It’s not about where you’re from.
What brings you the most joy in this role?
Seeing my chefs be successful, and watching them grow into the best cooks that they can be.
See a listing for Jean Georges, Mercato and Chi-Q
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