Since attending culinary school, I'm not inclined to put a lot of stock in formal culinary education. I really thought I would be learning creativity. After all they call it an art. Instead they drilled our head with rules, boundaries, order, and the never ending need to do it the same way and the right way. Essentially I joined the food army. I considered it a challenge but the reality is, it could never teach a person ‘talent’. Those with the gift and passion of cooking (and by passion I mean the relentless ability to stay motivated in an environment which demands consistency in product in an imperfectly timed system) may actually end up stifled by the formal learning environment-their talents would be better groomed out in the working world. I would say schooling made me `proficient’ in the sense that I can make nice meals in the comfort of my kitchen but just about anyone can figure that out and it wouldn't require $20,000.00. In the real world of culinary, real talent is proven working a line in a top restaurant with a full dining room and what you can do at home or on your own time is fairly meaningless. At the end of the day, much like McDonald's, what chefs and owners really want are cooks who are consistent not creative. I once asked a very accomplished chef at the Four Seasons if he had gone to school. He was from Italy and he gave me a truly Italian response, "No I didn’t go to school, cooking is who you are, something I shared with my mother, a way of life, not something to go to school for." It took me a long time to understand this response. I now believe that if there were any message an accomplished chef could give an educated hobbyist like me, it would be a message of food's connection to our everyday way of life.

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"What most people don't get about professional-level cooking is that it is not at all about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavors and textures; that, presumably, was all arranged long before you sat down to dinner. Line cooking — the real business of preparing the food you eat — is more about consistency, about mindless, unvarying repetition, the same series of tasks performed over and over and over again in exactly the same way. The last thing a chef wants in a line cook is an innovator .... Chefs require blind, near-fanatical loyalty, a strong back and an automaton-like consistency of execution under battlefield conditions."

-Anthony Bourdain