Creating a Tasting Menu

This week I was introduced to the Netflix series Chef’s Table. I’ve now watched 9 of the 22 episodes, and at least one from each season. The personal story of each protagonist is fascinating; there are some commonalities to all, but they come from diverse backgrounds, cultures and nations. Each individual is intensely creative, very hardworking, and experiences significant moments of failure and disillusion. The food visuals are mouth-watering, and well-juxtaposed into the narrative. The creator of Chef’s Table is David Gelb, famous for the superb Jiro Dreams of Sushi; it permanently changed my view of sushi.

Watching each master-cook at their craft in Chef’s Table prompted me to consider similarities and differences to my own craft – teaching primarily, professoring generally. Long before reaching their creative acclaim, each of the featured chefs had early extensive training and practice in the standards or classics of a particular cuisine. Apparently, the strategy is to apprentice at the best possible restaurant that will take you. Is that the strategy that aspiring academics take in considering graduate schools? In early chef training, French and Italian cuisine play a large (historical) role, but other cuisines also come into play, and it is the mingling of different ideas that spark those creative mouth-watering dishes that also double up as eye-candy. It reminded me that to be creative, you must have a strong knowledge base, so that you have something to be creative with.

Let’s take the oft-quoted 10,000 hours as a proxy for expert-hood corresponding to some level of mastery. In the chef apprenticeship model, aspiring chefs-to-be work really, really hard and very long hours. Let’s say 80 hours a week, or about 4,000 hours per year, so it would take two-and-a-half years to reach expert-hood. If I think about graduate school as preparation for an academic career, then 40 hours a week, or about 2,000 hours per year, means five years to reach expert-hood. (I likely worked between 45-50 hours per week in graduate school on research and teaching. I did more teaching than the typical graduate school because I enjoyed it!) Graduate school, at least in my day, did not train me for much of my job description as a professor in a liberal arts college. How does one actually get better at professoring and teaching? Well, you have to do it. Six years to tenure provides the opportunity to hit the 10,000-hour mark when that major evaluative stepping stone comes up.

Before opening up their own restaurants, these master-chefs slogged easily surpassed the 10,000-hour mark, some by multiples. But when they then struck out on their own, with their new creative ideas, it was hard. Very, very hard. For some, it took years to gain recognition, with many failures and frustrations along the way. I did not have that experience, probably because the analogous thing was if I set up my own independent school with an avant-garde yet unfamiliar teaching pedagogy. I’m more like the chef who stays at an established joint, working on established cuisine with steady tried-and-true recipes. (Actually I did help start up a new international liberal arts college some years back, but the curriculum was not unfamiliar, nor was the pedagogy way-out-there.) It is certainly the road-less-travelled. Who knows how many aspiring chefs out there did not ‘succeed’?

But maybe I should gain some inspiration from these creative chefs to strike out and try something new in a field that I care greatly about. I might even be able to do this from the comfort of my own perch. I was particularly intrigued by the concept of the tasting menu. The chef chooses and creates what you, the diner, will eat and experience; I have never experienced this as a diner (I’m too cheap). Now as a professor, I can decide what gets taught (to some extent) and how it gets taught, and how creative I would like to be. There are some agreed-upon limitations. All over the country, chemistry professors have general agreement over the main things that are taught in a year-long general chemistry (G-Chem) or physical chemistry (P-Chem) course. (These are the classes I teach the most often.) G-Chem is a pre-requisite for a host of other courses so there may be less room to maneuver, but upper division P-Chem doesn’t have many other classes that depend on it, at least at the undergraduate level. That being said, the P-Chem curriculum, however, is quite standard across colleges and universities in the U.S.

Could I break out of tradition without shortchanging my students? If a series of creative dishes come from mixing-and-matching new combinations from familiar ingredients, perhaps there is an analogy to new pedagogical approaches to a similar base curriculum. This approach is already being tried all over with varying degrees of offbeat-ness and varying degrees of ‘success’. I’ve attempted a few things, again with varying degree of success, but nothing too revolutionary. The general advice I’ve read from folks who overhaul their classes is to change a few things in a progression. Changing too many things too quickly is often a recipe for disaster, not to mention tons of prep work. I will have to weigh these considerations as I plan my upcoming fall classes – I’m teaching G-Chem and P-Chem as usual. Perhaps a special topics class best matches the tasting menu. I’m due to offer one soon according to my department’s rotation schedule. Not having a graduate program and running lean means that we can only offer one (sometimes two) electives outside the traditional chemistry per semester. I could call it “Great Tastes of Chemistry” although students would likely associate it with a food chemistry class.

A tasting menu is about enjoying an experience, albeit an expensive one. At top restaurants, these typically run in the $200-$300 range for a 2-3 hour gastronomic experience. At my private college, a typical (three credit hour) class costs $5,000. Let’s say this class meets three hours per week for 15 weeks, i.e., a little over $100 per hour, closely matching the per hour cost of a tasting menu dinner. I’d like to think learning chemistry is an enjoyable experience, but learning it takes a lot of hard work from the learner. As a diner, you don’t do any work (under than the enjoyable tasting than digesting), but the experience is fleeting. I hope that what my students learn in chemistry class sticks with them, at least the core concepts. Perhaps Chef’s Table has fewer touchstones than I thought. Maybe a better comparison would be Master Chef Junior (I’ve seen a couple of episodes) or Nailed It (which I haven’t watched but sounds interesting).

What was my favorite episode of Chef’s Table so far? Christina Tosi featured on Episode 1 of Season 4 – the Pastry season!