Woman's journey to success filled with challenges

Ronni Lundy | For The New Mexican

5/6/2008 - 5/7/08

Over the last decade, the proliferation of the celebrity-chef, food network face-offs such as The Iron Chef, and reality bites programs such as Hell's Kitchen have begun to make the profession of restaurateur/chef look less like a vocation and more like an extreme contact sport best suited to those with well-muscled egos.

At first glance, Gillian Clark seems an unlikely candidate for this highly charged milieu. A divorced mother with two young daughters, Clark is also black.

In case you hadn't noticed, the position of executive chef these days is still dominated by men, and few of them are black. Although the number of women food professionals has been steadily rising in recent years, the overwhelming trend still is for women to fill support positions in restaurant kitchens. And even the most motivated working mothers often accept the position of pastry chef because its classically early hours get you home in time to greet the kids after school.

In fact, Clark didn't set out to have a food career as either a restaurateur or chef. When she decided to leave a successful corporate marketing career in the early 1990s it was, she says, to save her soul and perhaps her marriage. She first tried having her own promotional consulting firm from home but soon discovered she was "still living on antacids." When the stress was too much for swigs from the blue bottle to sooth, she writes, "I found solace at the stove."

Cooking was a bit of Zen meditation with immediate gratification from those she fed. So Clark took the plunge and her savings, left the corporate world entirely and enrolled in cooking school. Her plan was to learn as much as she could about restaurant kitchens — not to command one, but to supply many. She found a farm for sale in Virginia, near Washington D.C., and decided she and her husband and two daughters would fill it with geese to be fatted up just like those in Gascony, their buttery livers to be sold to high-end restaurants for a premium. It was a savvy game plan, but before you could say foie gras, her dream was gone.

Her husband left the family and his job and soon was in an addiction-treatment program. Without his signature on the loan, Clark could not buy the farm. Without financial support from their father, she wasn't sure she could even support her two girls. She found herself with a culinary diploma and an entry-level position for minimum wage at a high-end restaurant in Virginia and nothing to do but work her way up.

"With no husband or geese to fall back on, I was left to basically sink or swim in my new stiff checked pants and chef coat," she writes in this, her first book and a food memoir unlike most others. Hers is not a tale of morsels savored, lucky alliances and languorous tasting trips through Italy and France, or even the Napa Valley. Instead it is a story of dogged determination, strong personal ethics, and hours upon hours of back-breaking, tediously hard work told in an utterly no-nonsense, no-self-pity voice.

"I had no choice but to succeed," she writes. "Not being good at this second career meant starving." And so for the next 10 years (or 230-something pages and 45 recipes), succeed she does. The book ends with Clark's triumph as the owner/chef of The Colorado Kitchen, a down-to-earth American eatery that she and a friend opened in 2001 in a borderline funky neighborhood in D.C., and, against tremendous odds, turned into a national success. These days she can also be heard as a commentator on food, family and society on National Public Radio.

Teaching tough love

But despite its happy ending, Clark's journey is one filled with setbacks and disappointments and the hard lessons learned from all. One good job doesn't necessarily lead to another in Clark's professional life, and because of that, we get a picture of the restaurant world in this book that is much more realistic than the bombast and high drama celebrity food writers more often serve.

Describing how she developed her "tough love" style of managing in the first kitchen she ran on her own — one filled not with culinary-school grads, but a ragtag cast of misfits — she calls that kitchen "the underbelly of the industry. This was not the glamour job of a chef," Clark writes, "which I now recognized to be a myth. I was smack-dab in the middle of a subculture of dysfunctional people who worked in the food business and at many of the jobs that employ the working poor.

"I owed that first kitchen staff a lot. Wasn't I one of them? My privileged upbringing didn't matter on a Friday night in the heat of busy. And during the day I dealt with some of the same issues that touched members of this struggling staff — a single mother abandoned by an alcoholic husband, struggling to make ends meet. Before taking this better-paying job, I had been working two jobs and rolling pennies from the jar in the girls' room to get enough gas to go to work. The most gratifying part was that whether we faced empty bank accounts, crack habits, or rap sheets, we became the team that made Evening Star Café a success."

Clark attributes much of her success in the restaurant world to the lessons she learned as a single mother, and likewise says that what she learned about running a kitchen was invaluable to her when dealing with her growing girls. This blending of the home and work worlds is one of the most appealing features of her book, although it is by no means sentimental. In fact, it puts the lie to the idea that women, particularly mothers, may be too tender-hearted for a business that seems to require hard shells and big personalities.

Clark finds her "tough love" works best when it is tempered by the rare understanding that sometimes a soft voice gets better results than shouts. Describing a set-to with an obstinate cook who insists on doing things his own way, often to deleterious results, she says, "Another chef would have insisted that he get his white work shirts out of that locker and get out. But I'm a mother. The two most important people in my life have done the unthinkable, and I hoped that my daughters would learn from their mistakes." She gives her cook the chance to learn from his mistakes as well and, in turn, gets a more thoughtful, responsible employee.

"Did having two children at home make me soft? I preferred to think it made me better able to put aside my ego for the sake of the restaurant," she says.

Home cooking revealed

Does having two children at home make her a better cook, as well? The recipes at the end of each chapter would have us believe so, although they don't always make the case that convincingly. On the plus side, these are not the technique-sotted, exotic ingredient-laden concoctions we have come to associate with big reputation chefs. The fanciest among them — Seared Breast of Duck with Red Currant Sauce and Parsnip Turnovers, or Corn-Crusted Scallops in Apple Brandy Sauce — are few and relatively straightforward. Simplicity can be a virtue, but in a few too many cases here we get the ordinary instead.

Daddy's Tuna Salad is a standard-issue version distinguished more by Clark's loving memory of the man who made it than anything original in taste. The pineapple-upside-down cake with maraschino cherry in the middle of each pineapple ring — the signature dessert of The Colorado Kitchen — would appear familiar to generations of readers of women's magazines. The basic sugar cookies that get two pages of text are iced with melted chocolate chips applied from a squeeze-tip bottle. And the cornflake-coated pork chops are, Clark explains, simply the cornflake-coated chicken from the recipe on the cereal box with a change in meat.

However, when Clark hits upon a small but telling twist — often by the serendipity of the situation — it can make for a simple, but worthy, pleasure. Such is the case with the recipes that follow, all from Gillian Clark's Out of the Frying Pan.


The trick in this simple recipe is the use of masa harina for part of the flour, giving the waffles a distinctive airy crispness. Note: If you don't have a waffle iron, you can use this recipe to make pancakes.

CORN-FLOUR WAFFLES WITH STRAWBERRY SYRUP
(Makes 20 waffles)

For the waffles:
2 cups flour
1-3/4 cups masa harina
2 tablespoons sugar
5 teaspoons baking powder
2 teaspoons salt
3 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk
3 cups whole milk
1/4 cup vegetable oil
For the syrup:
1 pint strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
1/4 cup water

Sift together dry ingredients into a large bowl. In a separate bowl beat eggs and whisk in buttermilk and milk. Pour well-blended liquid ingredients into dry ingredients. Mix gently but thoroughly. Let stand at room temperature for 5 minutes, then whisk in oil.

Heat a waffle iron and brush it well with oil. While iron is getting hot, wash, trim and slice in half the strawberries. Place berries in a heavy stainless-steel saucepan with sugar and water. Simmer over low heat until liquid is reduced and berries are quite soft. Strain and set aside.

Cook the waffles on iron according to specifications and directions for your equipment.

If you don't have a waffle iron, pancakes are a great substitution: Follow all above steps, except use a heavy bottomed skillet and heat 2 tablespoons of oil over medium heat. Spoon 1/4 cup of batter into skillet. When bubbles form on the top and the edges of the cake start to brown, turn pancake with a spatula. Cook on other side for another 2 or 3 minutes, or until steam begins to rise from pancake. Remove from skillet.

Keep cooked waffles (or pancakes) warm in a 200-degree oven. Serve with cold butter and strawberry syrup.


Rushed for time in a busy restaurant kitchen, Clark blended the carrots sooner than usual, before they were fully cooked. She discovered this added an extra element of brightness, and now this is how she always makes this soup.

CARROT-SAGE SOUP
(Makes 8 cups soup)

2 large onions, coarsely chopped
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
3 pounds carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
1/2 cup white wine
6 cups water
1/2 cup heavy cream
4 bunches (about 1/4 pound) fresh sage, tied with kitchen twine
Salt and pepper

In a large pot, sweat onions in vegetable oil. When onions are soft and translucent, add carrots. Cook carrots and onions together, stirring constantly. Do not let carrots brown, but cook them until they glisten — about 5 minutes. Add white wine and simmer until it is almost gone. Add water and boil the mixture until you can easily slide a sharp paring knife into the fattest piece of carrot. Do not cook until carrots fall apart. They should be just tender.

Purée this in a blender on highest speed. Return it to pot and add cream. Tie sage to pot handle with twine, using enough twine so that the bunches are immersed in the pot. Let soup simmer on low heat for 20 minutes. Season with salt and pepper. Discard sage.


Created for a restaurant whose owners didn't fully appreciate her talents, this entrée was served one night to a customer who, based on that dish, offered Clark the executive chef post at a place he was just opening. To maintain the crunch of the crust, Clark recommends putting sauce on the plate and serving the fish on top instead of vice versa.

GARLIC-CRUSTED HALIBUT WITH SALSA VERDE
(Serves 4)

6 eggs, well beaten
3 cloves garlic, finely minced
2 teaspoons salt
1/2 teaspoon pepper
2 tablespoons butter
1/4 cup vegetable oil
4 (6-ounce) halibut fillets
2 cups dry bread crumbs (preferably panko)
Salsa Verde (recipe below)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a bowl whisk eggs with garlic, salt and pepper. In a heavy-bottomed skillet melt butter into vegetable oil over medium heat. Dip halibut into egg mixture. Coat halibut in crumbs.

Brown each piece of halibut in pan with butter and oil. This should take about 4 minutes. Turn pieces of fish and place pan in the oven. While halibut is finishing, make salsa verde. It should take about 6 more minutes for halibut to cook through.

SALSA VERDE

1 clove garlic
1 small shallot
2 cups flat-leaf parsley leaves, stems discarded
1 tablespoon capers
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper
1 cup olive oil
1-1/2 teaspoons anchovy paste
Juice of 2 lemons

Blend ingredients in a blender on high speed. Be careful not to blend too long. You want the sauce to remain bright green. Pour a spoonful of sauce on each plate and position halibut over the sauce.


When Clark gave the fruit the fine-dine treatment, though, both of her daughters would clean their plates to earn this dessert.

STRAWBERRY-WATERMELON GRANITA
(Makes 4 dessert servings)

2 pints strawberries
1/2 cup sugar
6 cups seeded and cubed watermelon
2 cups whipped cream

Wash, trim and halve the berries. Toss with sugar in a non-reactive bowl. Set aside for 2 hours (sugar will dissolve into berries and draw out sweetened strawberry juice).

Blend cubes of melon on a high setting. Strain liquid from the pulp. Strain juice from the berries. Combine juices — you should have about 4 cups of liquid — and pour into a shallow baking dish. Discard berries.

Freeze for 45 minutes, or until just starting to ice over. Remove from freezer and with a spoon or fork, stir and break shards of ice. Freeze again for another 20 minutes and remove, repeating the breaking and flaking of ice. Freeze again and repeat until there is no more unfrozen or unflaked juice. Spoon into chilled bowls and garnish with whipped cream.