Today we’d like to introduce you to Patrick Mitchell.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Patrick. So, let’s start at the beginning and we can move on from there.
My story of mentoring & competition started back toward the end of 1978 when I took what I thought was a transitional job to carry me over for less than a year until I headed off to culinary school. I had already decided I wanted to be a chef and been accepted to the Culinary Institute of America. About eight months before classes were to start, the country club I was working at closed and I needed to find a job to carry me over until I started school. I found was so much more than just a job, in that job was a chef that would show me a whole new side of the industry.
Chef Arthur Dupré was that chef who quietly, slowly and patiently mentored me and taught me things I would use for my entire career. He taught me how to carve ice, how to compete in Culinary Salons and how to work with attention to detail in your day to day job. Most importantly though he taught me how to mentor people. This mentoring part I would not realize until much later in my career but he planted the seeds that would sprout long after he was gone.
The work this man did in those few short months, positioned me to arrive at the CIA with a greater level of intensity for learning than I ever had before. Remember, I had already decided this is what I wanted to do as a career, but I was just kind of moving down that path before I met Chef Artie! He is the one who opened my eyes to the possibilities this industry has to offer. By the time I entered school I was fully engaged and excited to soak in every bit of knowledge available.
Getting me involved in those first competitions started me on a journey that spanned four decades of competition taking me around the world and gave me experiences I could have never imagined. 3 International Culinary Olympics, Culinary World Cup, 3 International Sculpture championships, winning USA National Chef of the Year in 2016 and then representing the USA as a top 20 finalist in the world to compete in the Global Chefs Challenge in 2018 where I finished 8th in the world. That young student had no idea the gifts his mentor was giving him back then, nor any idea where it would take him.
My journey has now brought me to the point where I spend my time mentoring the next generation and watching them chase their dreams and find their successes. I gain a tremendous amount of satisfaction in this mentoring, at least as much as when I was competing. I was able to take a young culinarian with me, as my apprentice, cooking with me in the Global competition in Kuala Lumpur. To share that experience with a young man who is just starting his career is a tribute to Chef Artie as I pay it forward on his behalf.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Smooth roads don’t usually lead to unfound treasures. It’s the path you forge through uncharted territory that leads you to discover the golden nuggets that add value to one’s life or career. I pushed hard to compete in just about any competition I came across. I watched some of the greats and asked plenty of questions. When it came time for the critique of my work after a competition, I was more interested in what areas I fell short in and where I could improve. I saw the work Chef Artie put into his competition entries and realized the importance of staying current while also trying new ideas. Some of those ideas were great and some not so much, but you keep trying! Maybe that idea that didn’t work out would provide you with one little component that could help make another idea successful. There is something to be learned in every venture, sometimes it’s learning how NOT to do something.
There is a saying “The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you will bleed in battle”. This is probably the most valuable thing that comes out of competition. In competitions you work at a very high level of intensity for an extended period of time. Competing at that level of intensity will have an impact on how you work in your day to day job. These habits you develop in competition will carry over to your daily job and also carry over to your fellow employees as they watch the example you set. When the pressure is on during a busy dinner service, you need to keep your composure. The pressure from all those competitions pays off big time in those moments.
When deciding to compete, you are adding to an already hectic schedule, balancing the job and family life and now squeeze in preparing for a competition. It’s hard to also find time to help along the younger competitors in the kitchen. They would see me compete which in turn would spark their desire to compete. I felt an obligation to help them along and realized then how difficult it was for Chef Artie to help; me all the while doing his own entries.
We’d love to hear more about your work.
I currently work for Ben E Keith Foods where I am an Executive Chef for the DFW Division. I am a resource for our customers and act as a Culinary Consultant. I am available to help customers in any number of areas with food cost issues, menu ideas, recipe development, production and organizational challenges or cost control to name a few. I also act as a liaison for the Chefs Association and Club Managers Associations.
Through this work, I am asked by local chefs to help them achieve personal goals in their own careers as well. Helping them achieve their certification levels, helping navigate the journey to become a fellow of the American Academy of Chefs or working through their first competition and understand the greatest fear of competing is getting past that first competition while managing the fear of the unknown. Brian Dodge told me one time, and I share it with competitors all the time “there is nothing wrong with being nervous, it just means that it’s important to you, you just need to manage the nerves and work through them”.
I am proud to be a resource and someone people can reach out to for help. I am equally proud to work for such a great company as Ben E Keith who understands the value of helping people become successful and achieve personal goals in their professional life. As a company, we host two chef competitions every year; one for professionals in the spring and one for culinary college students in the fall. This is a huge undertaking that my division does purely for the benefit of the chef community to create an outlet to hone their personal skills. We also support the High School culinary programs through involvement with the National Restaurant Associations ProStart High School competitions. We are proud to have the National Championship Teams in both Culinary and Front of the house come from Texas this past year!
I think the thing that makes me most proud is when I hear people say they could not have achieved a specific goal without the work I had done with them. How patient I was and supportive to get them prepared for the task at hand or how I helped them achieve a life long dream. These were the things that Chef Artie did for me and its in these moments I realize how he is still working his magic, all these years later!
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Attention to detail and uncompromising standards have to be some of the most important attributes that carry over into the way you approach everything. This is where you make the determination that you will not take a short cut, reduce a standard or compromise in quality. It’s tough at times and I have been in situations where that decision meant the difference of getting sleep that night or being up all night.
We were in Luxembourg for the Culinary World Cup and plating the entre plate of my cold food entry (static display coated in aspic and preset). I was almost done with this plate and only had one more course to do before we would be able to get to the room for an hour or two of sleep that night. I realized one component was missing on the plate. One that should have been the first on the plate and everything else built around it. A mistake that can easily happen after 23 hours straight in the kitchen. I thought about how I could squeeze it into another area on the plate doing a different presentation.
I kept thinking if I disassemble this plate and start over, it will mean the whole team will get zero rest and will be well into day 2 before we get any sleep which was a difficult thing to ask of people. I then remembered the reality of how far we had come for this, we didn’t prepare for over a year and come halfway across the world to compromise. I looked at the team and said: sorry, but it looks like we won’t get any sleep tonight”. Starting over and rebuilding that plate the correct way resulted in a Gold Medal! It’s always worth it in the end!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.benekeith.com
- Instagram: chefpdmitchell
- Facebook: ben e. keith foods
Image Credit:
Ryan Mitchell Media @RyanMMedia
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