What I would like to talk about is that I finished my apprenticeship in Baden-Württemberg, and my first job afterward was in the city of Munich. I would like to share a bit about where I worked and what I did during that time.
It is of great importance for a young cook to have about four or five years to travel to different parts of Europe and work in some excellent hotels. Each country has its own style of cooking. Even though most of the hotel kitchens I worked in practiced French cuisine, I had the opportunity to visit small neighborhood restaurants and co-workers’ houses where their mothers served great local specialties.
My first job was in one of Munich’s finest hotels, the Bayerischer Hof. Even today, in 2021, it remains one of the premier hotels, often seen on TV, bringing back memories of times past. My position was commis de cuisine in the grill room. We served regular grilled meats like filet mignon, entrecôte, and chateaubriand, with appropriate sauces like Bordelaise, Béarnaise, Chasseur, and Périgueux. We also offered grilled lamb with mint sauce and the Bavarian specialty of Schweinshaxe (pork knuckles) roasted on a spit with Champagne sauerkraut and Bavarian dumplings. During game season, we served venison, pheasant, and quail. All fish dishes and desserts came from the main kitchen. Our crew consisted of four cooks: the grill chef, also titled chef de partie; the second in command, the demi-chef; and two commis de cuisine, the lowest on the totem pole, of which I was one.
Culinarily, Bavaria is very rich. The beer brewed here is world-renowned, and Weißwurst (white sausage) is unique to Bavaria, typically served with sweet mustard and a pretzel as a snack during the summer. Families spend afternoons in beer gardens, and the saying goes that a Munich baby will spend its first year in a beer garden, while man’s best friend, the dog, enjoys the bones of his master’s Schweinshaxe (pork knuckle). This dish, along with pork knuckles served with potato or cucumber salad and sweet cabbage salad, is a staple.
Another popular dish is Pichelsteiner, a stew made with pork, veal, and beef, along with potatoes, leeks, carrots, celery, broth, and fresh parsley. Soups in Bavaria range from clear to pureed and green. The innards of animals, such as sour tripe, lungs, hearts, kidneys, and liver, are also commonly used. Bavaria is also the largest cheese producer in Germany, with varieties like Allgäu Emmental and Bergkäse available in abundance at butcher shops. There’s a saying in Germany that the day revolves around sausage: from breakfast to lunch, dinner, train station eateries, autobahn restaurants, local festivals, and fast-food outlets. I particularly loved the whole roasted chicken, which was popular everywhere. It was so ubiquitous that in the 1960s, a restaurant chain named Wienerwald, which mainly served roasted chicken, existed.
If I have the energy and time, I hope to write more about the culinary specialties of Germany, which would take me at least a year to accomplish.
Moving to Munich was exciting and exhilarating. It was my first big city, and during this period, Munich was the city in Germany, especially with Berlin divided. The movie industry moved to Munich, the recording studios relocated, and the Bohemian scene was in full swing in the Schwabing district. The British rock ‘n’ roll movement was in its infancy, and everyone who was anyone performed on small stages or arenas around town. From The Beatles to The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones, The Mamas and the Papas, and many more, all performed in the big arenas. Lesser-known acts like The Animals, The Yardbirds, and Jimi Hendrix played in clubs. I had the privilege to see them all. The stages were small, as was their equipment, and they played long sets, sometimes for hours, sometimes totally drunk and stoned, and nobody cared. It was rock ‘n’ roll in its purest form. They mingled with the audiences as the big music machine had not yet taken hold of their lives.
Munich also had a great theater scene, with well-known German-speaking actors and actresses wanting to perform on its stages. Many movies were produced at this time, mostly sentimental dramas. The great directors from Berlin had left for America shortly after the Nazis came to power, and the new German cinema was in its infancy. To see great films, you watched movies by great French directors with stars like Jean Gabin, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Alain Delon, and Gérard Depardieu, or Italian movies by directors like Vittorio De Sica, Fellini, and Visconti with stars like Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, and Gina Lollobrigida. There were also James Bond movies with Sean Connery. Classical music was well-loved in Munich, with its great opera and symphony performances, and let’s not forget Oktoberfest, which attracts thousands of visitors each year.
Munich was full of cafés, bars, gigantic beer halls, and the world-famous Hofbräuhaus, where you could get liter mugs of world-famous beer, big platters overflowing with food like Schweinshaxe with sauerkraut and dumplings, sausage platters, and Munich’s special Weißwurst with pretzels and sweet mustard, traditionally only served in the morning. No real Bavarian would have it any other way. The other great season was Christmas, with the traditional Christkindlmarkt, and we can’t forget Carnival, with its various balls and festivities, which I will describe when I talk about my workplace.
Munich had a great variety of restaurants. Not only did they serve German food, but also Greek, Yugoslavian (Yugoslavia still existed back then), Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian cuisines, brought by guest workers. Munich had some of the best tapas cafés, pizzerias, and gelato places, and they were as delicious as those in the home countries of the respective owners. There’s a funny anecdote about guest workers: on any given Sunday, the train station was packed with guest workers wanting to be close to their home countries. There was even a song on the radio called “Kleiner Italiener” (“Little Italian”), about an Italian dreaming of home. I always found it a bit racist, but spending most of my time away from my birthplace, I understood the sentiment.
Germans often saw themselves as superior to the rest of the world. Günter Grass, the German Nobel Prize winner in literature, once made a profound statement when he spent time in China. He had a nightmare of looking out of his hotel window overlooking Tiananmen Square, filled with millions of Germans. He contemplated in horror what would happen to the world with so many of them. He thanked God when he awoke from the nightmare that it was only a dream. Grass’s nickname in Germany was “the conscience of Germany.”
Munich was a wonderful town with beautiful architecture, wide alleys, and castles like Nymphenburg, the residence of the Kings of Bavaria. Ludwig II, the “Mad King,” resided there and built Neuschwanstein when he fancied himself a knight of the Teutonic Order. Some architects call Neuschwanstein the birthplace of kitsch. It is still prominently featured in the Walt Disney logo and does not look like a castle from the Middle Ages. Ludwig’s spending left him no choice but to take money from Bismarck to join the first German Empire, effectively selling his country to the Germans. However, even today, a good Bavarian is Bavarian first and German second.
Munich was well designed and laid out, with beautiful parks, great museums, the City Hall with its magnificent clock tower, many churches, and the River Isar running through the middle of town, packed with sun worshippers and bathing enthusiasts. Lots of women were topless, which was fantastic for an 18-year-old guy with nothing more on his mind than sex. When you’re young, that’s what you think about.
Now, let’s talk about my career. How could I live in such an exciting city like Munich without work? My parents were not rich. Unfortunately, two world wars took away everything on my father’s side, and my mother never had any family money. My grandfather worked for the railroad, and what little he had, he lost to the communist East German regime. Ending up in the United States in my later life, I can say from experience that the only way the world goes around is capitalism. Just look at the two sides of Germany: the West was booming, and the East had nothing. I saw it every time I visited my family in the East. They were all Germans, with the same standards of hard work instilled in them. So if someone tells me that socialism works, they’re full of it.
There were two big-name hotels in Munich: the Bayerischer Hof and the Vier Jahreszeiten. Both were excellent with a very good reputation. The Vier Jahreszeiten was owned by the family of Walter Spiel, considered by many to be the greatest chef in Germany. The clientele was old money and, as far as I was concerned, too stuffy and overbearing. So I was happy to be accepted for a position at the Bayerischer Hof, which was considered “the place.” The hotel catered to movie and theater stars, Germany’s nouveau riche, and trust fund babies of bygone eras. The hotel had a pool on the top floor, a great nightclub with international bands, a big banquet hall always booked for international conferences, parties of all kinds, and special events. During Fasching (carnival), we never left the kitchen before 5:00 AM.
The kitchen was big—really big, three times as big as the place where I learned to cook. I was definitely overwhelmed. The main kitchen was a great production area where everything was prepared for all the functions. The pastry shop was superb, and the cold kitchen was one of the busiest places. Many functions consisted of classic buffets of terrines. According to Larousse Gastronomique, a terrine is a fairly deep dish with straight sides and handles, a tight-fitting lid, and an inner lip. This is where terrines are poached. The preparation known as terrine can be made with mixed meats, fish, seafood, and even vegetables. They are usually served in the container they are cooked in or sliced and served on platters with accompaniments like gherkins, pickled onions, cherries, or grapes. Fish and vegetable terrines are sometimes served warm with sauces. Terrines are often rustic dishes but can be very sophisticated preparations with partridge, pheasant, and wild rabbit.
The classic buffets also included poached seafood like salmon, trout, langoustines, and lobsters, paired with smoked seafood like salmon, trout, and eel. There were thinly sliced hams from Spain, Italy, and Germany, assorted oysters from Brittany and other parts of the North Sea. I cannot forget the chaud-froid, a hot dish served cold. These are pieces of meat, poultry, fish, or game coated with a brown or white sauce and garnished with slices of truffle, hard-cooked egg, rice, or tongue. They typically form part of a cold buffet but can also be served as an entrée.
I was introduced to this style later in my career when I arrived in Montreal, Canada. You might ask why I’m delving so deeply into the aspect of cold buffets. The reason is simple: most grand hotels in Europe served similar styles of food on such occasions.
The kitchen was classically organized with a chef de cuisine, sous chef, saucier, poissonnier, garde-manger, entremetier, and pastry chefs. Each station had not only a head chef but also demi-chefs, commis, and apprentices. The team worked with enormous amounts of energy, each member fulfilling their role under the vigilant eye of the chef de cuisine. It was like a symphony orchestra or a great sports team; everything had to be in harmony to serve great food. That harmony is the hard thing to achieve as a chef, but without it, you’ll never be any good.
In my position, I was assigned to the grill room, which was the hotel’s gourmet restaurant. It had an open kitchen with a beautiful cast-iron rotisserie where we spit-roasted ducks, suckling pigs, whole lamb legs, veal shanks, pork shanks, and during hunting season, partridge, pheasant, and quail. We had a wood-fired grill for different cuts of beef, pork, and veal. Our vegetables and starches came from the main kitchen, including all our sauces and garnishes. Consequently, the main kitchen was not our friend, and we were considered the pretty boys. We didn’t sweat and were right in front of our customers, often receiving thanks for a wonderful meal as they left.
Our grill chef could have easily graced the front page of any fashion magazine. His relationship with the personal assistant to Willi Bogner, a famous fashion designer, meant he always had the best ski outfits from top resorts in Switzerland, Austria, and France. Despite being cocky, his time away from the restaurant was noticeable, as the restaurant would suffer without him.
I worked there for one year, and our small crew of four cooks worked well together. During this time, I met and spoke with some of the biggest stars in the movie and recording industry, from The Beatles to Paul Newman, Sophia Loren, Robert Redford, Gina Lollobrigida, Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, and many more, including heads of state and royalty.
Seeing the front of the house opened my eyes to a new view of the world, wide open to explore and experience. When my colleague spoke of a hotel in Switzerland looking for cooks for the summer season, I was ready to go. Particularly since my three-year relationship with my first girlfriend had just ended; she left me for someone else. In hindsight, I’m happy she did. My wife says one foot in a relationship and one out would have tied me down.
During my time off in Munich, I explored neighborhoods, spent hours in coffee houses, and visited the English Garden, museums, and discos. Working in a first-class establishment meant the pay was meager, but the experience was invaluable for my future. Looking back, I think they were right.