Ceritfied Master Chef Fritz Gitschner of The Houston Country Club. Photo by Ed McCain 

Interview With a Master

You have thirty minutes to present a hand-written menu inspired by a mystery box containing a whole fish, another protein (usually a cut requiring braising, maybe a lamb shank), vegetables such as fresh artichokes or cactus leaves, and starches that could include Israeli cous cous, Arborio rice or Peruvian purple potatoes. During the next four and a half hours, you will have total access to arguably the finest kitchen in Houston, working among sixty five professionals who have all been in your shoes (or clogs) as they prepare to serve up to one thousand members and guests. Before time runs out, five courses will be presented to one of seventy Certified Master Chefs in America. He will then evaluate everything from the tidiness of your workspace and uniform to the clarity of your consommé and acidity of your vinaigrette. When he’s done, you will have completed the final step in the interview process and know whether or not you have earned a cook’s position at The Houston Country Club.

Executive Chef Fritz Gitschner has been feeding and educating members at The Houston Country Club since 1991. Carrying his Austrian accent on a tall, lean frame, Gitschner’s reputation and resume precede him. A search on Google brigs up hundreds of hits that cumulatively reveal his past training as an apprentice in Austria and his work as a chef in Europe, the Middle East, Bermuda and the Caribbean. He is a member of the American Academy of Chefs and early in 2005 competed in the Bocuse d’Or World Cuisine Contest in Lyon, France (placing eighth overall). The Bocuse d’Or is on par with the International Culinary Olympics, showcasing the top talent in the food world on perhaps its largest stage. Gitschner was honored with representing the U.S. after competing in and winning regional competitions domestically.

Now that his patriotic obligations are complete, he has returned to the kitchen he created to oversee a bustling staff of culinary students, interns, career cooks and busy sous chefs. A walk through the club’s kitchen hints at Gitschner’s attention to detail and respect for the art of cooking. Every cook wears a pressed apron over a classic white chef’s coat and hound’s tooth (or checked) pants, topped off with a crisp toque on their head. Steam-jacketed kettles, large enough for a person to climb into, simmer with fresh chicken stock and reducing demi glaze. Powerful aromas escape from convection ovens, filling the kitchen with the perfume of a professional kitchen. The smells of fresh-baked breads and cookies mix with roasting ducks and simmering stews. Anyone who has worked as a cook knows the smell of a kitchen. You either love it or hate it, but the essence is unmistakable.

Gitschner’s office sits as the command center of the kitchen. Surrounded by windows, he has an enviable vantage point, being able to see almost everything that goes on. Most chef’s offices are tucked in corners of the kitchen because they are an afterthought. Some are not in the kitchen at all. But, after just a few minutes, one gets the idea that Gitschner had a purpose when he designed his dimly lit office. Plate designs sit on the desk. Large three ring binders fill one wall, overflowing with standardized recipes and photos. Few cookbooks take up space since the chef explains that he uses the internet quite a bit to assist him with recipe searches. Overall, it is a typical chef’s office with one interesting difference. Chef Gitschner’s office doubles as the “Chef’s Table” for eight lucky members who get to sit there and have the master prepare their meal as they observe a night’s diner service. “That became the ’in thing’ at the club, to have the Chef’s Table. But more so it brought people back to the kitchen,” Gitschner said. “I did not realize that most of our members did not even know where the kitchen was. So as I started creating the Chef’s Tables, I kept the kitchen real clean until one day I didn’t get to it and left a chicken stock going. People began congregating around it, like it was something special. I couldn’t believe it. So now I just leave the kitchen operating as it is, and people are very fascinated. But what helped is that they started talking to other members. They educated them as to what we are doing and that really brought more and more members back to the club and we basically have doubled the amount of members who eat at the club since 1991.”

When Gitschner arrived in Houston from the Caribbean, some fourteen years ago, he found a club that was using canned and concentrated soup bases along with some other foods that he quickly eliminated from the kitchen. Installing a culinary program that relied on itself to produce most of the food for the club was not just a transition for the staff. “Making stocks was the hardest thing in this kitchen because they (the cooks) were used to cans. Members, I had to retrain them as well. They didn’t know what real chicken stock tasted like because they were used to the canned stuff with a high sodium content.”
Fortunately for both the staff and members, Gitschner was committed to his vision of being almost completely self reliant. “Ninety nine percent of what we serve here at the club is produced here at the club. From your sausages to your smoked salmon to your bread to your pastries to your sauces, everything is done ‘in house.’ Also some canning and pickling, it’s all done here. I’m not doing that to make it more difficult for the line or to save food cost. I’m doing it because it’s the proper way of preparing food. The guests notice it. They find out all of a sudden that the sauce has a more vibrant flavor. The vegetables really have great color to them and have great texture.”

Along with instituting a fully staffed kitchen that has a butcher, saucier and pastry chef, Gitschner also committed his energy to improving the quality of the food that was being delivered to the back door. He remembers being so disappointed with the quality of fish, that he refused to buy any for the first six months of his tenure. Through hard work and by collaborating with local purveyors, the chef has accomplished his goal of having the freshest and best tasting food in Houston delivered daily. “If you have a tomato that doesn’t taste like a tomato, I don’t care what your culinary skills are, you’re never going to have a great-tasting tomato sauce. So, what I instituted when I came here was that we purchase based on taste and flavor. I don’t care if the tomatoes all look different, so long as they have flavor. That (flavor) is what you’re purchasing. My sous chefs and receiving agent taste all of the vegetables, tomatoes, carrots and melons. Before, people would say that you could not cut into a melon. Well, if I buy a case of melon off you and it doesn’t have any sugar, then it is no good. If I cannot cut into it, then you are not doing business with me.”

With statements like that, it’s easy to see why I was so interested to sit down with this man and discuss food, business and the future of culinary arts. He is very serious about his profession and truly expresses a passion for cooking. I have had the pleasure of meeting two other Certified Master Chefs and have found that they possess an intensity and charisma that fills up the room. Gitschner is no different. Even though I was conducting the interview, he was in control the entire time. He is extremely intelligent and expresses his thoughts on complex levels. Through my experience as a working chef, I was able to scratch the surface on some topics, but I could tell that he was working in a higher gear. I was more than a few steps behind on a couple of topics, but he never made me feel insecure or uncomfortable with the obvious gap in knowledge and experience between us. I left his office feeling that working for him would be both difficult and rewarding. He is the type of teacher that shows you something and then you say to yourself, “That is how I will do it for the rest of my life.” The flip side to that coin is are you talented enough to do it for the rest of your life?

What follows are some simple questions and great answers. Chef Gitschner was kind enough to talk with me about his career and gave me some professional insights. His kitchen was busy on the other side of the office windows, but Gitschner’s calm demeanor never indicated that he had even one concern over the evening’s service. The chef participated in this interview about four hours before serving over eight hundred guests for dinner. . . just an another Saturday at The Houston Country Club.

You have been this club’s executive chef for fourteen years, but in this industry it is common to turn over chefs as often as the menu. What do you attribute your longevity at this club to?
Well, I think it’s a combination of things. There’s three areas that you have to be good at to be successful as a chef. I think that the first areas is of course culinary abilities. Not just your culinary abilities as a cook, but also your ability to teach. It doesn’t matter that I can cook the dish if I can’t find a system to teach my staff. I think the second one is organization. You know a lot of people say that they are a person who strives under stress. Well, stress for me is not stressful. You have one hundred and fifty people in an hour blazing orders and I have fifteen other things popping up, which I have to deal with in a minute, and it really doesn’t matter because I have already planned for that. What I mean by that is that my management style is preventative management rather than emergency management. Today I am working already a month, two months out. If you do not have that organization, then you will not have a lot of time to have a very smooth-running operation. We can have sixty five people here (in the kitchen). I have come to terms with the fact that I have in some ways become the training ground of Houston. I have people working here for a year, maybe two years and then someone hires them as a sous chef or chef. That’s fine with me as long as those people work here and give a hundred and ten percent. That’s why they come here. But, any new person coming in isn’t just walking onto the line and know it. So every time you have a new employee coming in, you are going through the training process, showing them how we do things and why we do things. It doesn’t help to tell somebody to “do it this way” and walk away without telling them why. The third thing to being successful is manpower. How well can you develop a team? For example, when I came here in 1991, there were two kitchens. There was a la carte and there was banquets, and they wouldn’t work together. I stopped that. I designed the whole kitchen to have a la carte and banquets back to back. Now, if we’re busy in banquets, a la carte helps out. If we’re busy in a la carte, then banquets helps out. In terms of production, everything is assigned throughout the various outlets that I have here. We can plate up to a thousand people in twenty minutes. Everyone has to contribute. I have the pastry chef, and if we are platting a large party, they will help. The reason we do that is to have a quality product. I can cook the meats to the temperature I want. The sauce has a nice glossiness to it, the vegetables are perfect. I can have crispy textures to the food. It makes it much more exciting.

Having achieved the level of Certified Master Chef, what is your take on the phenomenon of the “celebrity chef?” What do you think when you see a relatively young chef, who attended culinary school and maybe had two or three high profile jobs, represent your profession to the masses?
Cooking, overall, has become part of entertainment. The media definitely has a great impact on that. Unfortunately it also sends some wrong messages to people who want to get into the industry because out of one hundred thousand, maybe one will become the TV chef. So I see these people more as entertainers than chefs. And all the power to them. I think it depends on the individual if it goes to his head or not because it’s all fluff really.

Recently I had a conversation with a friend and his father, both of whom are trained chef’s, and my friend’s father lamented the fact that very few cooks today learn in a kitchen with a classic brigade system. Meats come in portion controlled so a butcher is no longer required. Vegetables can be purchased peeled or precut. I.Q.F. (Individually Quick Frozen) vegetables and soup or stock bases are more common than their fresh counterparts in today’s commercial kitchen culture. Even the chef’s position is being phased out, replaced with “Kitchen Managers.” How do you feel about that?
You can go too far and have everything convenience food, and that takes out even needing chefs. But the end effect, if you did that in a hotel like a Ritz Carlton, you would end up losing customers. You have to look at you clientele. So I think there is a market where you can use those products, but I would not endorse all of it. Also, you have to look at what skills you have in your operation and then determine from there what you want to use in terms of convenience products. You go into some kitchens today where there is not even a trained cook in there. We have a shortage in our hospitality industry, particularly in foodservice. Throughout the country you will find people constantly looking for people to work in the kitchens. We still do not have enough qualified or trained people to cover the demand.

Very few newcomers to the industry train in an apprenticeship program like you did and many look for sous chef or chef jobs right out of culinary school, bypassing lower-level positions that build fundamentals. How much has that aspect of the industry changed over the years?
We have today, younger culinarians who are much better educated than we were at that age. They are more educated in food, management, nutrition and so on. There are more opportunities than we ever had. It is now a diverse market. You have a web site. Would you ever think twenty years ago that you would have a web site? There is food styling, consulting, nutrition. I think that young culinarians today definitely do not subscribe to the eighty or one hundred hour work week. I don’t subscribe to it either. I used to, but no more. I think that people should have their two days off every week. In a ten to twelve hour day, you should be able to get the job done. If not, then you really have to evaluate the operation, what you are doing and the training program because something isn’t working. You know, when you look at the plate, there’s really no rocket science to it. You have to go back to basics. For example, about two years ago, beef prices just went through the roof. The prices were astronomical. I refused to cut quality. We’re still serving prime beef in all of our restaurants, even tenderloins. But I believe in integrity and truth in menu. If I’m saying that is what I’m going to do, then that is what I’m going to do. You don’t have to cut quality; you have to be creative. We started doing a lot of combination plates. Let’s say that you have a beef tenderloin on you menu and all of a sudden it costs twice as much as it used to, well you can still serve a beef tenderloin (at a smaller portion size), but maybe serve it with a braised short rib. Not only have you infused new flavor profiles and made the dish more interesting, but you have also helped yourself in terms of cost. Why don’t a lot of people do it? There’s an extra step. It means that there’s more work to it.