Toque Tradition Is Anything but Uniform With Chefs

Patrick O’Connell, chef-owner of The Inn at Little Washington, Va., finds he is helpless without his toque blanche. “I can’t cook a thing without it on,” he says.

But to Jean-Louis Palladin of Jean-Louis at the Watergate in Washington, the traditional high, white chef’s hat is more an annoyance than an inspiration. “I’m tall, and I can’t go under the hood in my kitchen” without knocking the hat off, Palladin says.

The white ( blanche ) hat (toque) that has long been the symbol of the professional chef now is stirring up a storm of controversy in the culinary world. Replete with its 100 pleats (said to represent the 100 different ways a good cook should be able to prepare an egg), the toque blanche today seems to elicit more mad hatters than culinary masterpieces.

Take Bob Kinkead, chef-owner of Twenty-One Federal in Washington, who minces no words when asked about chef hats. “I think they are really stupid,” he says. “They are extremely impractical; they fall off, get dirty real easily,” continues Kinkead, who usually doesn’t wear a hat in his kitchen.

But if he does, it’s a baseball cap. “To be perfectly blunt, the people who are more concerned about the (white) hat generally are not concerned about the quality of the food they put out,” Kinkead adds.

Kinkead, 38, is among many of the nation’s younger, trend-setting chefs who adamantly refuse to don the profession’s traditional headgear.

“What do you think this is, the military?” asks Mark Miller, chef-owner of the Coyote Cafe in Santa Fe, N.M. “Basically there is an anti-(toque blanche) sentiment by the new American chefs,” says Miller, who wears a hat only for public events. Then it’s a cowboy hat.

Mary Sue Milliken, who with Susan Feniger is co-chef and owner of both City Restaurant and Border Grill in Los Angeles, trained in the “ ‘Old-World tradition and wore a hat for years when working in a French restaurant.”

Generally, she says, she believes a chef’s uniform is well designed for the job. “There is a good reason for the double-breasted jacket; when one side gets dirty, you switch and have a clean one. The black-and-white checked baggy pants can lift away from your skin. And they don’t show dirt very much.”

But when it comes to the hat, that’s a different story. “When I got to California, no one was wearing hats, and everyone was wearing tennis shoes. That swayed me to getting away from white hats.” With short hair, Milliken doesn’t wear any hat in her kitchens. But the staffers wear light cotton hats, like the kind you find “in a burger joint.”

Among other things, chefs complain that the toque is uncomfortable and hot. Wolfgang Puck likes to joke to reporters that he is afraid that the heat under the hat will make his hair fall out, but in a more serious vein he admits that his signature baseball cap is every bit as hot as a toque. “I just started wearing a baseball cap because I wanted to make things less formal,” he says.

And as Jasper White, chef-owner of Jasper’s in Boston, notes, “If you have any amount of hair at all, at the end of the day you end up looking like Bozo. There is a ring around the part of the hair that is under the hat, and the rest of the hair puffs out.” White doesn’t wear a hat in his kitchen.

This new toque-less society is upsetting to the tradition-minded chefs who have grown up with the toque blanche and have come to regard it as an important symbol of their profession. One such chef last summer wrote an irate letter to the two-year-old Food Arts magazine to complain about the many hatless chefs featured in previous issues.

“I just can’t get it into my head that you display chefs without their hats, or do they just not care to wear them?” wrote retired chef Rudy Soeder, now editor of the Cleveland Chefs newsletter. “I have been a chef for over 25 years, and for me not to wear a hat when in the kitchen or having my picture taken was unheard of. What is it now with the new breed, guys and women alike, that they want to be chefs but don’t want to look the part? . . . Funny, the little doughboy always has his hat on.”

Soeder’s letter created what Food Arts called a “toque tempest” that is still simmering in the culinary community. Just mention the words toque blanche, and emotions quickly bubble to the surface.

“If you are proud of the profession, you should dress like it,” says White House pastry chef Roland Mesnier. “Either you are a chef or you’re not. It’s like a general on the field. He wouldn’t be without a uniform. If you become a chef, you should wear a toque blanche. If you want to wear a baseball hat, then you should be a baseball player.”

O’Connell, 46, is one of the few young chefs who agrees with Mesnier. The hat, he says, “is a sacred trust. When you put it on, you take certain responsibilities into your hands--feeding and taking care of people.”

O’Connell says he came to that conclusion after researching the toque’s origin. Although many theories abound, most culinary historians believe the chef’s toque began in one of two ways:

Either, the toque grew out of the Middle Ages, when artists and philosophers--who were also cooks--were persecuted. For safety, they fled to Greek Orthodox monasteries and took on monks’ clothing, including the high, puffy hats worn by the priests. But to distinguish themselves from the monks, the refugees wore white instead of black.

Or toques were developed in ancient Assyria, where the kings were in constant danger of poisoning. The kings picked their chefs carefully (usually more for loyalty than for culinary ability) and then, as a sign of trust, let them wear a crown-shaped hat like the kings’. Only instead of gold and jewels, the hat was made of cloth.

Either way, O’Connell says, the toque blanche is “symbolic of the philosophy that a chef has a responsibility for taking care of people. We’re vestigial priests; we handle people’s happiness and welfare--their well-being, both physical and mental.”

But O’Connell appears in the growing minority, according to officials at Bragard Inc. U.S.A., an American branch of the French company that makes chef uniforms.

While orders for chefs jackets have been increasing steadily, requests for toques blanches have remained flat. “In view of that, the toque blanche appears to be a tradition that is stagnant or slowly declining,” says Peter Isom, manager of Bragard’s American operations.

Yet, in turning tradition on its head, so to speak, younger chefs are giving up one of their rights. Traditionally, the rule was that the top chef wore the highest toque in the kitchen. Today, however, in many kitchens--even where the toque blanche is required for most employees--the top chef wears no hat at all.

That’s the case at The Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, where top chef Dean Fearing (a self-described member of the “chef brat pack”) doesn’t wear a hat. Neither do the two chefs immediately under him.

But the rest of the 46 chefs must wear the traditional white hat. “I always told myself I wouldn’t wear one when I got my own kitchen. That’s the luxury of being at the helm. But I run a tight kitchen, and the hats help keep everyone on the straight and narrow.”