The last year of my apprenticeship was totally different than the first two and a half years. Suddenly, everything had changed. Hodgi started to deal coke more and more at work. He got John, the director of food and beverage, hooked so bad that he was outside the hotel in his BMW waiting for Hodgi to get off every single night. John had a master’s degree from Cornell in hotel management. What a waste. He got fired and a couple of years later he decapitated himself in a single car accident flying down a canyon going to get just a little more from Hodgi. Hodgi was fired shortly after, and within a couple of years he was pulled out of a lake with a bullet in his head.

Shane had just graduated.  Roget won’t let you work with him anymore after you graduate; he just schedules you somewhere else. He doesn’t even ask you where you would like to work. He sent Shane to Stanford Court Hotel. My best friend at work was now gone.

Chuck had gone back to Alaska for the summer, and Jimmy had kept having surgeries on his leg. When he finally announced that he was going to retire from cooking to go into teaching, they made Bruce the acting chef of the Roof. We all just assumed he would get the job; after all, he had been doing it two days a week for over ten years. A month or so later, Chuck was back. What was up with that? The ski resorts weren’t going to open for another couple of months. Then, Roget told us they had hired a new chef for the Roof.  It was Chuck. Awesome! Chuck was my friend, not to mention a great boss. We all felt really sorry for Bruce but he didn’t really seem to mind that much.

I knew Roget had made the right decision. Even though Chuck skied every day, he was much more interested in food compared to Bruce. Chuck would always buy the latest issue of Food and Wine or Cooks Magazine, and then give them to me when he was done reading them. Bruce was always talking about cars and bikes and how fast he could go. Chuck was always trying to teach himself how to evolve with the latest cooking trends.

I would read something like “nothing browns in the presence of steam,” then Chuck and I would stand on the line and discuss all of the different applications that this applied to.  For instance, if you don’t pat all of the water off of your sea scallops before you start to sauté them, they will be overcooked way before they will ever caramelize and turn that beautiful golden brown. Or, if you’re a shoemaker and you use frozen chicken breast, the skin will never crisp until all of the water evaporates. Bruce would just stand there and listen to us.

“Both of you guys should become professional food detectives. No shit nothing browns in the presence of steam. Everybody already knows that!”
 
That’s the problem with Bruce and most cooks, they just don’t think hard enough about what they’re doing. You don’t just do things because it works and people like it. You take it a step further and figure out exactly why it works, from an elemental standpoint. Cooking is not just an art, it is a science…a science bound by the laws of chemistry and physics.  I challenge all aspiring chefs to learn as much as they can about chemistry and physics and how they apply to the art of cooking.  This knowledge, coupled with years of line time, is what separates the chefs from the cooks.  That’s why Chuck got the job. He was constantly trying to figure out, not how, but why, things worked the way they did.

Bruce and I had the same day off, so he, Stacey and I rented some horses and went riding. When I went into work the next day Chuck called me aside.

“There’s been a bad accident. It’s Bruce, and the doctors say they don’t think he’s going to make it.”

Bruce had just bought a brand new Ducati, an Italian racing bike. He was flying down Wasatch Boulevard at speeds in excess of 120 miles per hour, when a car flipped a u-turn right in front of him. They say he impacted at over 100 miles an hour. I went to the hospital the next morning to see him.  He was in a coma and had broken just about every bone in his body. He was black and blue from head to toe. It made me sick to my stomach.

Chuck made me the acting sous chef. Any other time this would have been the greatest point of my career, but it was for all the wrong reasons. Bruce was in a coma for a few weeks and in the hospital for a few months. Contrary to what the doctors initially thought, he did make it. But, he was never the same again.

Two days a week, on Chuck’s days off, I was calling all of the shots at the best restaurant in Utah, that was in one of the best Hotels of the world. At the age of nineteen, I was still the youngest person in the restaurant, but I was in charge. There were waiters that had worked there for over fifteen years, yet they respected my authority because I had earned it.

I would be off when Chuck would come back, so we wouldn’t see each other for four straight days each week.  He would come in from skiing, take a look at the sauté station and see two boxes of shrimp that needed to be peeled and de-veined, and a case of snow peas that needed to be picked and cleaned. So, he would rush downstairs to quickly pick up all of the food for the restaurant so he could get to all of the work that needed to be done in time for dinner. However, when he would pull out the boxes of shrimp he would see that I had already peeled and de-veined them and placed them back in the box to trick him.  It was the same with the snow peas.  See, when we processed food we always placed it in food containers when we were done, but I would put it back in the box so that Chuck would have a pleasant surprise during a hectic night.

On one of Chuck’s days off, the General Manager of the hotel Stuart Cross walked into the Roof kitchen.

“I would like to speak to Chuck.”

“Sorry, he’s off today” I explained.  He got all perturbed.

“I want you to make an order of Veal Scallops Meniuer.”  We weren’t even set up yet, but I just pulled out the stuff and whipped one up.  He took one bite, and then discarded the plate.  “I will be in for dinner tonight with Robert Lawrence Balzer, the food writer and critic for Travel Holiday Magazine. He will order Veal Scallops as he always does, so make sure that you do them just as you did. Don’t try to be creative, just do it like that,” and then he walked away.

First of all if you tried to change anything on the Roof menu, Roget would kick you in the teeth. I would never dream of it. But now I was nervous. The Roof had received the award of excellence for over ten years. They had each and every year’s certificate posted on the wall right when you walked in the dining room. If I fucked this up, then everybody would know for years to come, because it would be the only year out of succession that they didn’t receive the award. The Roof was the only restaurant in the state that had this award. I did fine and once again we received it.

The following day I was in the dining room having lunch. The restaurant was only open for dinner, so I was the only one in there. Then, this little old man came in with a camera and started to take pictures of the Temple down below.

“This is exactly like this restaurant in France that looks down on the Cathedral De Notre Dame.”

“Wow, you have dined in France?”

“I get paid to dine all over the world.” I knew right then that he was Robert Lawrence Balzar.

“I am Todd Hall, one of Roget’s apprentices.”

“You are a very lucky man.  Roget is one of the greatest chefs in the world.” He said very matter-of-fact. “What is the name of the chef that prepared our meal last night?”

“It was me.”

“I thought you said you were an apprentice?”

“I am getting ready to graduate. I am the acting sous chef, and it was the chef’s day off.”

“How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“That’s fantastic, congratulations Todd!”

I didn’t know it then, but Robert Lawrence Balzer would be giving me many more awards in the years to come. Later in life I wondered, “Was the food that good, or did I get it just because he knew that I was one of Roget’s apprentices?” I decided that the food was just that good.

Mike Gardner had gotten his girlfriend pregnant. So, just Dawn and I were living in the house when Stacey told me she was pregnant also. Here I was, barely twenty years old, and on one hand I was the most successful apprentice chef in the nation yet on the other hand I was the biggest fuck up on earth (according to Stacey’s parents and, more importantly, Roget).  He was so pissed. He was getting ready to send me to London to work with Anton Mouismen, at the Dorchester; he had already started to make the arrangements. When I told him, he called me into his office and just screamed at me for not using a rubber.

“In France, when I was your age, a blowjob was good enough. We didn’t have to be greedy and try to screw every girl we dated!”

He made me feel like shit.  He screamed at me for over two hours, in some kind of weird language that was half English and half French.  Though, I understood every word. The next week, he screamed at me every time he saw me, and then didn’t talk to me for about two.  Adolph told me that I was Roget’s favorite and best apprentice because he got me at such a young age. He was able to mold and develop my cooking skills better than any that had gone before me. He had big, international plans for me, and I just ripped them right out from under him, and myself.

That year I had finished high school, graduated my apprenticeship, been promoted at work, and gotten married.  To this day it was the busiest time in my life. Stacey moved in with Dawn and me and the local newspaper had donated the entire front page of the food section to the graduation of my apprenticeship. The headlines read, “Who is training the great chefs of Utah at such an amazingly young age?” They had a great big picture of me holding up an apple bird that I had just carved. Today apple birds are just about one of the stupidest things you could do in a kitchen, but back then it was the shit and it took a lot of practice to get good at it.

I quit selling pot, and would never keep more than a quarter ounce at one time in the house. Just when I quit, Vern’s connection, Dale, read the newspaper article and asked Vern if I would come up to his house in Park City and prepare a gourmet meal for him and his friends. I would still be a middleman and pick up a couple of pounds and drive them down Parley’s canyon to someone’s car and make a few hundred bucks on the deal. I was careful to never have Stacey with me. I was responsible now. I had grown up. I had to.

I made a promise to myself that no matter what happened between Stacey and me, I would never leave my child. I promised that they would never have a stepdad as long as they lived. Finally, I promised that they would never know the taste of powdered milk, the embarrassment of food stamps, or what it feels like to have a welfare Christmas.

Bruce was eventually able to come back to work, yet even though he was back, he wasn’t himself. He would work the middle when I was on sauté, which was weird. Bruce had also lost his sense of taste and smell from the brain damage. He would make me taste every pan of food he made to make sure it was balanced. Fifteen years later when someone shot me in the chin, I thought about Bruce.  I thought about the fact that I might never taste again.  Most people would be worried about dying, but to me that was death.

Then, one day in the Spring of 1983, I went down stairs to check my schedule. It read: Monday – off, Tuesday – Off, Wednesday – Roof, Thursday – Le Parisienne, Friday – Le Parisienne, Saturday – Le Parisienne. Immediately, I went to Roget.

“So you want me to go help out Max this weekend?”
 
“No, you are the new chef of Le Parisienne.”

Just like that, I was kicked out of the nest. There was no job interview, no discussion of my salary; nobody even cared if I wanted the job. I was kicked out of the nest and it scared me. Le Parisienne was a very well established, very busy, very great French restaurant and I was the new Executive chef, at the age of twenty-one. I was so surprised that I couldn’t appreciate what a great opportunity it was. All I could think about was that I would have to leave my family. The surrogate family God provided for me at the Hotel Utah was more of a family than I had ever had at home. 

Le Parisienne was a trip. It was too cold to ride my bike, so I would catch a bus from Bountiful to Salt Lake. I would always get off at the Hotel Utah and ride my skateboard the six or seven blocks to Le Parisienne. Max had concerns about his new executive chef riding a skateboard to work, but he eventually got over it. 

The first thing I learned at Le Parisienne was that just because you graduate an apprenticeship, and someone hires you as a chef, doesn’t mean you’re actually a chef. I went in there acting like a big shot and in just a matter of weeks I had alienated the entire crew against me.  They wouldn’t tell me when we were running low on food staples, they wouldn’t point out that I had made a scheduling error and there was an uncovered shift, and so on. I quickly realized that I needed them a hell of a lot more then they needed me.

I wasn’t really allowed to change too much. Max had been open for twenty-five years and he had his market pegged. Le Parisienne was Whole Dover Sole from the English Channel, Shrimp Scampi, Beef Bourguignon, Chicken Coque Au Vin, and Escargot.  It was real classical French food, but more peasant style opposed to The Roof which was definitely classical gourmet.