Yannick Cam - Owner-Chef of Le Paradou

A culinary education, minus the school

After 43 years in restaurants, Yannick Cam, owner and chef of Washington’s award-winning Le Paradou, hasn’t seen anyone come out of culinary school ready to function in the business.

Apprenticing right from scratch in restaurants is a far more productive route, he says. “I’ve seen [culinary school graduates] six, eight months in the kitchen doing extremely well. But it’s completely different timing, technique — everything is different [from school]. You need background. Someone actually trained in a two-, three-star restaurant can finish already at a much higher level.”

When culinary schools send him interns, he’s surprised how much he needs to teach them. “We have the responsibility of training them!” he said, explaining that he needs to instruct them in “handling of food, cleaning, ... the rapport with other employees.” “I wonder what is an actual method of teaching?” he ponders. But it’s clear he believes the way he learned is the most constructive.

Born in Concarneau, a small harbor town in Brittany on the northern coast of France, Cam had no interest in cooking as a boy. But his grandmother was a very good cook, he says, and she persuaded a well-known local chef to give him a summer job in his kitchen. “I was just 16 years. She didn’t want me to stay the whole summer on the beach,” he says, laughing.

Cam did everything: “a lot of peeling vegetables, composing stock. I cleaned the herb garden — a lot of that. I saw how [the running of the kitchen] was done. It was very sophisticated. I immediately decided for me that was the route.”

For the next 10 years, he went from professional kitchen to professional kitchen in hotels and restaurants across France, until he heard that the Four Seasons in New York was looking for a French chef de partie, or line cook.

So he headed to the United States in 1973, but before committing himself to an interview, he spent his second day in New York visiting as many French restaurants as he could. “And I decided I would be better off working American, not French. I would learn the language very well, and I was pretty sure to learn different from French cuisine.”

For the next four years, he absorbed an American approach to professional cooking. He says his compatriots have no idea how easy their jobs are. “The biggest difference is there is a lot of people in the kitchen in France ... ,” he says, then snorts. “I tell them, in America, you will be one-third to do the same work. We can be 60 to 80 hours in the kitchen. In France, they have the 35-hour [work] week! The tempo, the service, how we set it up, there’s not such a need in America for the cooking to be precise as in France. Here they care more about look than flavor. In America it’s quick to pick up on any new fad. If there is a new idea then someone, they have to try it.”

After nearly five years at the Four Seasons, Cam left to open his own establishment, Le Coup de Fusil, one of the nation’s first contemporary French restaurants. There he began to build his reputation. But he says it was only the beginning of what he wanted to do. When, a year later, he was approached to leave New York and open a fine-dining restaurant in Washington, “It was perfect timing,” he said. “I was looking to go to San Francisco” to learn what was going on in American cuisine on that coast, “and I thought I could do two, three years in Washington, then go.” Twenty-five years and countless awards later including two James Beard nominations for Best Mid-Atlantic Chef, he is still in the capital.

The restaurant for which he left New York in 1978 was Le Pavillon. It quickly became one of the best French restaurants in the country, sustaining its reputation for the next 12 years. “Ten things I did I learned in France. They were only at Le Pavillon.” There he developed what he describes as a new style of cuisine.

Sourcing ingredients for Le Pavillon’s sophisticated menu was so complex that Cam flew many of them in on the Concorde from Rungis, the Paris fresh-produce market. When Le Pavillon closed, Cam opened his own restaurant, Yannick’s, in the Radisson Hotel in Alexandria. Then came Provence and next Coco Loco.

“Cooking is almost like painting,” said Cam, who loves to paint and says he would like to take it up again if he could find the time. “A person must develop his own style. It is not successful if you go after [another’s] work ... . Someone who is looking for his own style who will say,” he pauses and makes a deprecating and very French sound through pursed lips, “boooff, we will pick it up.” “NO!” he almost shouts, indicating his objection to chefs borrowing from and copying each other, rather than developing their own styles. “Today it’s what is happening. ... Of course you always will be influenced by people you have worked for. But it will take 10 years to develop your own cuisine.”

He’s his own most stringent critic. He says the service at Provence wasn’t very good. The restaurant was successful but he didn’t like it much. His customers “were happy to be part of a large party,” so he tried to put himself in their shoes, to, as he puts it, his English a little off, “imaginate myself not to be the chef, not to worry about the quality of food coming out. It wasn’t what I like to do, regardless of its success.”

In 2003, his business partner at Le Pavillon offered him the chance to open the restaurant he dreamed about: a fine-dining establishment where he could apply his extensive training and sophisticated technique to a contemporary interpretation of classic French cuisine. Finally, at Le Paradou, cooking dishes like Morel Mushroom Soup with Scallops; Stuffed Quail with Pistachios; and Porcini, Gnocchi of Chestnuts and Turnips, Cam seems to be happy.

Le Paradou (202-347-6780; http://www.leparadou.net) is located at 678 Indiana Ave. NW. Main courses cost $32 to $48.

This article by Julia Watson first appeared in the Northwest, Dupont, Foggy Bottom and Georgetown Current Newspapers.