For most, Harvard fall brings to mind midterms and e-Recruiting. For at least one student of the past, however, autumn was the time to pick up a fresh pheasant at Savenor’s, carry it to Adams House, and roast it whole in the House masters’ kitchen.
This practice may have medieval feast written all over it, but the pheasant roaster was the modern-day Michael Pavloff ’88, one of the handful of former and current Harvardians who view food as a potentially full-time endeavor.
A former champion of amateur cooking, Pavloff says that pheasant remains his favorite dish to this day. “It has a lot of fond memories of Harvard associated with it,” he says.
Although he began cooking while living at home, Pavloff delved into French cuisine after he enrolled in college. He cooked his way through books of nouvelle cuisine, paving the way for a series of victories in French cooking contests that culminated in a fourth-place finish in the 1987 Trophée des Amateurs Gourmands in Lyon, France.
“The contest itself was secondary to having a good time with food and wine for a week,” Pavloff says of his adventure abroad. “It was this week of sloth and debauchery.” Pavloff moonlighted as a chef in Boston during his senior year, but didn’t pursue the culinary arts as a profession. Now an engineer, he has put French debauchery aside and cooks mostly for himself and his family.
For Joanne B. Chang ’91, cooking was a hobby that morphed into a profession. After graduating with a degree in applied math and economics, she began working as a consultant for Monitor Company. Now, she is the pastry chef at Flour Bakery and Cafe in Boston.
“I loved consulting!” Chang insists. “I met a lot of cool people.” But after almost two years at Monitor, Chang was ready for a change. “Many of my colleagues left to go to business school,” she recalls. “The ones who stayed with Monitor began maneuvering to get better positions. I didn’t want to stay in Monitor Company because of these levels of hierarchy—I wasn’t interested in continuing that growth.”
Chang did not take the easy way out. The life of a chef can be as stressful and challenging as the life of a consultant or engineer, and even the best colleges in the country arguably provide little preparation.
Katherine A. Paur, resident mathematics tutor in Pforzheimer House, spent a year following her college graduation from MIT as an apprentice for a pastry chef in France. “People talk about culture shock when you go to another country, but the culture shock between the U.S. and France is nothing compared to the shock between MIT and a restaurant,” she says.
Indeed, few students must deal with the level of abuse that chefs often endure from their superiors. “Have you ever seen ‘Hell’s Kitchen’?” asks Pavloff, referring to the reality TV show in which contestants try to impress the profane Chef Ramsay with their culinary prowess. According to Pavloff, Ramsay is not an anomaly.
But Ramsays and their ilk did not deter Paur from making the most of her apprenticeship. In fact, she found that cooking gave her a boost in confidence. “I realized that I could actually make money by being a pastry chef,” she says.
If Pavloff, Chang, and Paur are any indication, perhaps more Harvard students will consider the transition from coffee-slave to sous-chef. Just think of the pheasant.
