Sheraton Dallas (Downtown) Hotel: Fill & Download for Free

When I was growing up, I enjoyed cooking very much too. That’s saying a lot too because my Mom really was not good at cooking but more than that, she/we canned all our own foods, made jams and jellies, did lots of baking, especially for the holidays. Over the years, somehow cooking became a passion and even before I went to college, my most read books were cookbooks and Gourmet Magazine etc. I had no restaurant experience whatsoever but if you came to my apartment, I was always spending hours preparing some something I had never done before. My roommates had it made because we ate like royalty and all they had to do was the dinner dishes. I could spend three or four hours making dinner and they spent fifteen minutes doing the dinner dishes and wiping the table.Unlike you, I was unsure about culinary school, in fact, I was unsure about education after high school. I was legally on my own since the day I turned 18 and had great concerns about tuition. Finally, when I was 19 I applied to Cornell Hotel School in Ithaca, New York. The hotel program, at that time, it was considered the best program in America. I was not accepted primarily because my SAT scores were not high enough and secondly, I had no demonstrated experience in any hospitality setting. I was crushed but pushed ahead and got accepted to the hotel school at University of Wisconsin Menominee, I visited the campus and decided I was too good for the place and basically abandoned my plans for hotel school.Yes, I am going to answer your question here, where I am headed is to show you that there are options, even when you are set on one thing, one plan, there is more than one way to achieve, to gain specifically, the unique training/education you are discussing.If you are like me, or even a bit similar, you do not want to approach your future at some second rate school, you want to hit the runway and prepare for liftoff, so to speak. I believe that you seek an authentic culinary training from the finest in the land, not from some “cookie cutter” “wannabee” cooking school with a French name, am I right? I assure you I did not, and if that was all I could do, I wasn’t gonna do it at all, why embarrass myself graduating from The Jiffy Lube Culinary Academy?I ended up going to Evergreen State College, Olympia, Washington, my studies now geared to pre-med. Before I attended there, I want to Harvard night school for a year to get myself oriented/adjusted to a new plan. Getting into Harvard night school is not a big deal, you simply signup but, the beauty of it all is, the professors are the exact same ones that teach at Harvard during the day. You can get a Harvard education at a tenth of the price from the same faculty, you just don’t get all the prestige of graduating from Harvard, if that makes sense? I took out student loans to go to Evergreen, and I had a job on campus to earn spending/rent money.I did great at Evergreen for a couple years but started to get burnt out. I had gotten a job on campus security which required me to work from midnight to 8:00 am, and my classes began at 8:30 am. Slowly, i began slipping and wondering how I was going to pull it off? One day a friend of mine said he was going to Guatemala to study Spanish, a total immersion school where you study Spanish with a tutor 7 hours a day, one to one, and live with a local family that does not speak English so you will be forced to use what you are learning in class. I decided to go with him and we spent a year down in Central America, mostly in school and a few months hitchhiking all over Central America from Belize to Panama. Evergreen State allowed students to design their own education curriculum for credit so the whole time I was there, I got college credit.When I got back stateside and eventually back to campus at Evergreen, my focus had shifted again, I had a travel bug in me which actually has lasted my entire life now. Getting back to the point, I was at Evergreen, I had a student loan, but my heart and mind was miles away. I had a modest presence on campus but it dwindled quickly, and soon I was no longer attending college. About a month later, I got a call from Oregon State Bank saying their records show that I was no longer attending classes and that meant my loan was now due. The lady told me I had thirty days to pay it back or I would be charge with fraud. That pretty well lit me up inside and panic prevailed because I had taken that loan and bought a sports car. Of course I was not concerned, I freaked out, all I could hear was that lady saying those two big words, bank fraud! Needless to say, the sports car was sold quickly and the funds repaid, what a relief! Of course now I am broke so a job would be handy. A friend of mine said The Melting Pot restaurant in Olympia was looking for a cook, the lights went off in my head and I am thinking, ,made in the shade, of course they will hire me, nobody cooks better than me! The interview went poorly, I was met with this force of resistance because I “had no restaurant experience”, and true as it was, I was stunned.I was however, offered a job as the pot washer/dishwasher, and I took it. The Melting Pot was right across from the capital building in Olympia and as such, got some pretty swanky diners, all the senators, representatives, and related. I humbly performed my duties and when not scrubbing, I was watching and talking to the chefs. I had been there for about six months and the news came that the two chefs were leaving to start their own restaurant. I knew the owner, but not well, I just knew that they needed a chef or two and very soon. I dropped my name in for a candidate, was not taken serious at all, that is until I pushed the chefs to push me ahead. I challenged them to ask me to do anything required of that position and they graciously accepted, put me to the test for a week. I did not fail a thing, they loved it because I did everything including dishes, cleanup and most of their cooking.Round two with the owner and he finally decided to give me a one month trial run, and then would decide if I could be permanent. The month passed and no problem so now I am the chef and they hired me a cook for lunch. I was proud of myself, at least for awhile, and then I got bored, I truly was not learning anymore, I had nobody to look up to or teach me. My girlfriend was born in Hawaii, and in a short time we talked about going there to live. A few months later, we sold everything we owned, except for travelling clothes, and mover to Hawaii. We blew some money at first, ended up in Maui, found a studio to rent on the ocean, and both of us got jobs.It was here that my cooking took a big turn because, of all the crazy things, I am being interviewed by this little tiny man, Sammy Shorrock, and he had just gotten to Hawaii a year before me, he had been the executive chef at DisneyLand in Anaheim, for the last fifteen years. He said he got truly burnt out, the pressure and all, and he had to step down and breathe. This chef was a “game changer’ for certain. We also had a lady sous chef from Denmark, another fine talent. I showed Sammy the menu from where I worked, and at this restaurant they had an exhibition kitchen, all the meals are cooked behind a line, in the dining room, and with lights on low, and a lot of flambe’ dishes, we filled the room seven nights a week, with two turns, doing about 250 or so covers a night. On the line were just Sammy and I. There was not one single thing that I did that Sammy did not somehow refine, alter, fine tune, but all for good reason. I was all ears and here is where my education truly took a giant leap, the fuse was lit, and now I was inspired and sitting on the launch pad of my career.Five bucks say there is no way you expected this kind of response when you asked your question here on Quora, am I right? When I saw your question, bingo, my mind was reeling, I have told this story many times to people asking me about culinary schools. I assure you I am not here to talk you out of going to an incredible school in Switzerland, I want you to grasp how important the “hands-on” , “school of hard knocks” is. One thing I have noticed about culinary school graduates is that, while most of them knew culinary terminology, and basic principles of cooking, such as mother sauces, and from stocks to garde manger, they could at least provide intelligent conversation, but most were impractical when the pressure of time was upon them. Too, if a mistake was made, regardless of what and how, could they correct it, or could they find a next best substitute, could they do magic? I assure you that it is not magic that makes it all work out when the chips are down and servers are hollering, you are soaking wet and there are 15 monkey spankers staring at you wondering, (as they laugh inside) if you can pull it out, and correct the dire problem at hand. The spankers want you to fail so they can say “I told you that guy was a putz, what a loser! You will find when the going gets tough, the only ones who will help you, are the ones that actually can, they recognize the urgency of the situation and they will assist you as you call the rapid commands and gracefully waltz yourself out of hells gates and succeed!I stayed in Maui for a year and there again, I got bored, my job was repetitious, Sammy had taken me about as far as I could go I felt, and I left to go back stateside. I went to see my old roommate from boarding school in Minneapolis, just to visit, but funds ran low so I looked for a job. With luck on my side, I interviewed at the original Radisson Hotel in downtown Minneapolis and got hired to be the saucier. This was a massive hotel with seven restaurants, and The Flame Room, the main dining room had their own symphony that had been doing dinner shows there for fifteen years. The Flame Room alone would do four to five hundred covers a night and one line served two restaurants. The chef there was Ralf Gahlin and I assure you he was every bit a master from the “old school”. He grew up in Denmark and started his apprenticeship, as they called it then, at age seven, working in a kitchen scrubbing pots and mopping and peeling potatoes etc.The kitchen at The Radisson was so old it had mostly these giant copper pots. These pots were so big that we had a cart with some kind of pully rig on it to lift the pots off the flat tops. When they were full, there was no way to safely get them off by yourself. We had about eighteen kitchen staff, not counting dishwashers, from garde manger with two, and the rest pretty much supported the line in one way or another. We served an excellent baked stuffed potato that I could never forget, if it was your turn to get on that nightly production, it was a workout. We would bake 350 large potatoes to yield 700 baked halves. The mix was beautiful with ham and sour cream, caramelized onions, lots of seasonings and cheeses. The mixture once made was then piped out into those 700 skins and that was a true test of your arm muscles. Squeezing that pastry bag for so long was nothing short of strenuous.When I began, I trained on sauce for one week, I’d never made that many sauces and certainly not in such quantity, there was no time for moving slow either, every move you made mattered, time was not on your side. Right at five o’clock each day, Ralf would do his rounds and started with me, I would stand there with bated breath, hoping he would not find flaw with my sauces. If I screwed something up there, it would have been, could have been, disaster, with those massive quantities. The cream based sauces, left to their own device, on a flat top, certainly in constant fear of scalding, or burning, one of the worst mistakes to make as it commonly cannot be fully rectified. I got in the groove quickly and soon was helping in all seven kitchens on top of my saucier demands. The chef was superb, no tantrums or hollering, or demeaning remarks as some famously do. I was there about eight months, got tired of the freezing cold and decided to head south. At that point there was only one other Radisson in America, and it was in Lakeland, Florida. The chef said he would gladly transfer me but the pay scale was much lower, I chose to leave and find something on my own.I went to Miami, had no car, so I walked miles each day looking for work. I lived on the beach on Collins Ave. where today is known as South Beach, at that time it was rundown and closed stores everywhere. I landed a job at the Doral Hotel on Miami Beach, I was to be the saucier and do relief work on the line on the top floor in the award winning Starlight Room. The thirty or so cooks and chefs were all Cuban, I was treated as an outsider, an outcast. On top of that, I would make a hollandaise each day with about sixty eggs worth but, their recipe called for msg. I hate msg. I didn’t tell anyone, I just did not put msg in my hollandaise. I got busted for that and now outcast turned to outlaw. Oh, this was not appreciated, I had no right to refuse to put their poison in such a wonderful sauce. I was soon ignored and no longer graced with so much as a smile. It was not difficult for me to decide to leave The Cuban Coral, as I called it.Now I’m broke and unemployed in Miami, I was living off potatoes because that is all I could afford. I walked miles and miles, came home and ate potatoes, getting ready to be kicked out of my grubby little room. I scoured the want ads and one day I walk into this brand new, still being built establishment called The Outrigger Club. I found my way to the kitchen on the 16th floor, asked for the chef, and out walked this huge man, with a starched chef hat on, he was pushing towards seven feet tall. I had no resume’, I brought my menus I had worked with, he liked that and said he knew from that, what I had done. He would look at a dish, and ask me how the various components were made. His name was Hoerst Roelkes, and here again I struck gold. Hoerst was from Germany and he too was old school, having started at age seven, later in life was the executive chef at The Savoy in London followed by some posh resort in the Bahamas. There was a second chef too, Albert Anduze from Toulouse, France. Albert was really old school and had been everywhere. He had started the landmark restaurant in San Francisco called Ernies, and had Olympic gold medals for tallow carving and hot food competition.My education climbed quickly here though initially I was on edge, Hoerst drank on the job, all day, endless Heinekin beers and kirchwasser. Regardless, these guys were cooking just like I had read about in the Escoffier cookbook, now I was doing it with them and the “the father of cooking” Auguste Escoffier began to make perfect sense. I was impressed and proud, each day I would go home and study more cookbooks and terminology. I did not want to act a fool in front of these guys. Albert and I became friends, he would invite me to his home after work, we would drink wine with his wife and look at his massive stamp collection, get a buzz and go home.I was at the Outrigger for about nine months. I used to be a whitewater river guide in Utah in the summer season so I left there to spend another summer in Cataract Canyon, Moab, Utah. On one of my many trips I met a husband and wife who had just come back from living in the Caribbean, on a charter sailboat. We got to talking and they recognized my culinary skills, they suggested that I would be a shining star if I went to St. Thomas, USVI, to get a chef job on one of the super yachts. They said there was a shortage of talent and I could easily land work. They were going to Africa on safari in September and they made me an offer to come watch their home in California for a month and then I could fly direct from Los Angeles to St. Thomas and look for work. I accepted, lived a life of luxury for a month and flew to St. Thomas, walked the docks and had a job in two days. I started working on a couple different boats and too, I was interviewed on the monster yachts 200 feet or more. What I noticed though was on the big boy yachts, you had to wear uniforms and kind of kiss ass like a servant so, I downsized to where I could enjoy myself. I ended up working on a yacht for over two years, and got to go to every island in the Caribbean, and in style. We would go up to Maine in the summer and charter there. My cooking skills only progressed with study but I did not care, I had an experience of a lifetime. When I decided to leave my cushy yacht job it was to open my own restaurant.I tried to lease a building in the British Virgin Islands, Cooper Island, but the last minute the owners backed out. I scrambled, found a lady partner and a historic house that we soon turned into Wet Willy’s Restaurant. We got it up and running for about ten grand, unbelievable by any expectation, and would be impossible to do today. My partner Diane, used to be neighbors with Jimmy Buffet so he came and did a free concert for us, to raise money, we got permits to shut down the streets, and had a party to remember, and in the end, we had no debt.The house was two stories with two bedrooms upstairs, one for Diane and her boyfriend and one for me. We served lunch and dinner seven days a week and were packed, we could seat about 100 total, half of which were outside. I had no menu and everything was fresh each day. We had a chalkboard menu, and the servers had to verbally present the menu selections. My partner knew some higher-ups in town so we got a 4:00am liquor license, one of only two on the island. What that meant is that when every other bar closed, we filled up no matter what. I had one cook and one dishwasher in a small kitchen, very basic at that. Just having simple fresh food drew the crowds, we filled each day for lunch and dinner doing about 120 covers average each meal. With all the success, I got sidetracked along the way, I could not resist the endless parade of ladies coming in and with a bedroom upstairs, I became very busy. I decided to sell out my half after a year, I was pretty much having far too much fun, and work was becoming far too demanding. I made a choice to leave and did. I went back to my river guide job in Utah, and moved to Arizona at the end of the season.I ended up in Tucson, Arizona and soon had my first sous chef position at the Travel Holiday Award winning Charles Restaurant. The chef, Johnathan Landeen, had recently come from New Orleans, having had worked at Commander’s Palace under the tutelage of Paul Prudhomme. It was during his time there that the American Culinary Foundation was formed, the basic premise being that in America, there were no apprenticeships, there were no guidelines to evaluate culinary skills to determine at what level a person may be. They set out to establish guidelines for evaluations and initiated a formal apprenticeship program designed for on the job learning whereby an apprentice would follow a program covering all culinary skills and ultimately lead to the designation of certified executive chef. Depending upon where you are in your skill set, the average time for the apprenticeship would be two years. I joined the program and worked through it for a full two years and earned the formal designation of Certified Executive Chef (CEC). Soon thereafter, I got my first Executive Chef job at The Tucson Hilton Hotel.I was at the Tucson Hilton for maybe two months and it was sold. I thought I would lose my job but in only a few weeks they approached me and asked if I would go to Texas where they owned a Sheraton Hotel. They said the chef needed some organizing and training, would I go do that? I went to Beaumont, Texas and the chef Tony was indeed an idiot, ten days later I fired him. I put an ad in the local papers for a chef, after two weeks of interviewing, we had no candidates. I was then offered a permanent job there which I did not want. They sweetened the pay, promised to build me a suite to live in on the top floor for myself, my wife, and baby son. I accepted on one condition, I promised them one year only and then I most likely would leave. Life in a hotel is not a good deal, the breakfast cooks would call the front desk saying they were gonna be late or not show up at all. In turn the front desk calls me and now I get to open and survive the day through all three meals. I did make it for one year there, to the day. During the time I was there, a friend of mine called me from Arkansas, he said he had a VIP party coming up and it was far out his element, it was a group called Fifty for the Future, comprised of the wealthiest, powerful people in Arkansas and their spouses and more.The company my buddy Brian represented was Entertainment Services out of Omaha, Nebraska and he called them to ask if he could hire me to do the party. I would take a week of vacation time I had and do the party. The company approved and they said they were going to represent me as their corporate chef. I did multiple calls to the planning committee to plan the rather ambitious menu. I flew out days ahead to organize, meet his staff and put the wheels in motion. The prep was a monster as all the help there were basically used to doing basic fries, burgers, chicken. So the night of the party rolls in and there will be about 225 people there. We had a full seven course meal, and by the time dessert went out, the kitchen got quiet. I do not see Brian, I cannot go out in my messy clothes and nervously wait. Finally about 10pm, he comes back smiling. He said they were raving and to pass on the compliments. I flew back to Texas to finish up my last couple of months. The day I returned I got a call from Entertainment Services and they told me they had gotten multiple calls from the party guests telling them what a fantastic job I had done and to tell me, the so called corporate chef, it was the best party they had had in all the years they were together. One of those calls was from Hillary Clinton, of course I was unsure who she was but know now. My family and I gladly left Texas and went back to Phoenix where my wife’s folk s lived. I was there a week and got a call from Entertainment Services. They had just got the contract to run the then being built Arlington Convention Center and they wanted to interview me to be their official corporate chef based in Arlington. They flew me to Omaha the next day, I had to interview all of the bosses in the whole company which took all day. I flew back that night and the next day got the call that I was hired as their first corporate chef.Two days later I am on a plane to Dallas and a new job, my wife and son stayed in Phoenix until I got settled, and it was too fast for her. I assumed my position readily and starting catering tons of VIP parties all over the country. There were times I would be on the road for a month at a time just doing parties in various cities, Most every party I did from then on would be a thousand or more people, a logistical nightmare. Too, I would do presidential dinners with the secret service clearance mandatory of me and all my staff. During that time I did parties up to just over ten thousand people at a time. I even did a company picnic back in Arkansas for Tyson Company, the chicken people. What would you imagine they wanted for their company picnic of five thousand people? You guessed it, frickin’ chicken! It was there I pulled off one of my greatest culinary feats. Tyson provided all the chicken but they want fried chicken. Hmmmm! Can you imagine breading chicken for five plus thousand? I couldn’t see this being easy but in talking to my buddy Brian who was still the manager there, his brother was a contractor and had just bought a cement truck, brand new. We were drinking and suddenly I got this flash thought and started laughing. I told Brian we should use the cement truck to bread the chicken, he said I was nuts. I persisted and told him how I would do it with massive amounts of flour and seasonings, the chicken soaked in buttermilk, then dropped into the tank, turn the mixer on for a bit, tilt it up and slide the chicken, with a bit of guidance, down the chute and then onto sheet pans with parchment paper and dusted with flour. We did it, and of course sanitized the shiny new tank beforehand. The plan worked like a dream, we then rinsed and cleaned it out and nobody was the wiser.By now, you have read a very nice slice of my days as a chef, I have tons more to go but, my true intent today was not to overload you with my culinary past. My ultimate goal was/is, to give you a perspective of how a chef career can go without formal training. I know I was fortunate to have found the world class chefs I did and get to work with them. Today many aspiring chefs pick out the chefs they like and approach them for a job and why they want to work with them,. I know that if the candidate is seemingly worthy, many chefs will take someone on and mentor them while they are on the job. Many a great chef is born that way.Again, I do not, in any way, wish to cast a shadow on your sights set on a primo school in Switzerland. What I want to stress to you is how very valuable real life training, hands on, under pressure, with the guidance of a master chef, can be. I want you to think about, no matter when, doing an apprenticeship with the American Culinary Federation to eventually earn your Certified Executive Chef (CEC) designation. Ignoring the value of a professional designation can impede your success, and having it can certainly open many doors where some people simply demand credentials.. You could easily merge in working on a CEC status after you finished your schooling in Switzerland.I have a gut feeling, from your one simple question, that you are intent on success. Today, more than ever, the culinary field has exploded and at the same time gotten much more competitive. It is not just cooking, this is artistry in motion, taking food to new heights, using every cell of creativity you own, and adding to the fast paced evolution of food as art, as well as treasuring the undeniable pleasures of comfort foods. I hope you find some value or entertainment out of this far too long answer. More importantly, I wish you great success , don’t let that fire die in you, there is much to be done!***As a footnote: My son Marco, with no persuasion from me, chose to go to culinary school, he went to The Cordon Bleu in Orlando, Florida. When he finished he starting working in cool bistros and cafes, later The Four Seasons as a sous chef and now a Chef at a country club but still climbing the learning ladder to fame. He too has that passion, and seeming natural creative ability, to construct an awesome meal or menu.