was immediate. He decided to leave Johnson and Wales.
"I'm not going back," he said, abandoning culinary school for life in the
real world.
He was good. He had to be. Kinkaid clearly knew he was on to
something. With Scott barely out of high school, Kinkaid packed him off
to France with the one-word instruction: "Eat!"
Like me, Scott is conflicted on the issue of the French. We like to
minimize their importance, make fun of their idiosyncrasies. "It's a
different system over there," he said, talking about the work habits of the
surrender-monkey. "You start young. For the first ten years of your
career, you get your ass kicked. They work you like a dog. So, when you
finally get to be a sous-chef, or a chef, your working life is pretty much
over. You walk around and point." Putting a last twist on his foie gras
torpedo, he shrugged. "Socialism, man. It's not good for cooks."
But when he sees bad technique, technique that's not French, it's torture.
As Scott well knows—and would be the first to admit—as soon as you
pick up a chef's knife and approach food, you're already in debt to the
French. Talking about one of the lowest points in his career, a kitchen in
California, he described going home every night "ashamed, and a little
bit angry", because "the technique was bad . . . it wasn't French!"
They may owe us a big one for Omaha Beach, but let's face it, without
my stinky ancestors we'd still be eating ham steak with pineapple ring.
Scott knows this better than anybody.
Back from France, he rejoined Kinkaid, opening 21 Federal with him on
Nantucket.
Now here, exactly, is where our career paths divide.