Food author Michael Ruhlman (The Soul of a Chef and The Making of a Chef) got his first taste of the blogging world with a guest stint on Megnut.com. He’s a natural so we asked if he would contribute something here in advance of the roundtable discussion he’s hosting next week at the 92nd Street Y. He gave us a full plate.

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On Monday the 23rd, I’ll take the stage here with two of New York’s best chefs, and one of its most famous chef-writers, respectively: Gabrielle Hamilton, Eric Ripert and Tony Bourdain. A festive gathering, and, assuming Bourdain is coherent, one that promises to be illuminating, because it concerns a subject that is deceptively rich: How I Learned To Cook. Now the reason for this occasion is to promote the new book of that title, a substantial compendium of cooking epiphanies from chefs as diverse as Ferran Adria, Michelle Bernstein (funny story about a major blunder at the Beard House under Palladin), Michel Roux and Ming Tsai, among many many others. Hamilton’s story about opening Prune will continue to establish her as one of the best chef-writers still cooking.

How I Learned To Cook is an important question because it conveys why cooking is about more than food, which is why for me the subject is so endlessly interesting to write about. The best of the essays might better be called What I Learned by Learning to Cook. Some people find the sport of boxing fascinating because it represents man’s atavistic existential struggle in this world, one human being alone, slugging it out for his life. For me cooking at the professional level, cooking on the line, represents this same kind of struggle. Yes, there’s that thing called the dance and it is a team effort, each night’s service, but ultimately, for the cook, for you, if it’s you, it’s a matter of whether you measure up, are you good enough. Nothing worse in the world for a cook to be told he or she is not good enough.

I think it’s in Mamet’s American Buffalo: “It all comes down to whether or not you know what the fuck you’re talking about.” That’s what cooking’s like.

You can’t lie in the kitchen; it’s a brutal beautiful world. There are very few professions where it’s impossible to lie to yourself. But in a really good kitchen, it quickly becomes obvious if you are. And there are fewer humiliations as deep as not measuring up on the line, and few glories more satisfying than the private understanding of exactly how well you performed on this night.

I’ll be asking how three chefs not only learned to cook, but why? That’s more to point as far as I’m concerned. Why does one do this work that is both tedious and enormously stressful, this work that requires hellishly long hours, including weekends, mother’s days, Christmas Eves and Christmas Days, Passovers and Yom Kippurs and Thanksgivings, in physically uncomfortable circumstances, but, for poverty-level wages?

Really, it boggles the mind. People in Cleveland ask me if I ever thought of or think of opening a restaurant. When I say, as I invariably do, “Are you CRAZY?” they’re actually surprised.

Why did I learn to cook? It wasn’t because of some twinkle-toes love of the beurre blanc and foie gras, I can tell you that. It was anger. I learned to cook out of anger.

I was a journalist dressed as a student at the Culinary Institute of America, there to write a book about how this school trained others how to be a chef. But the chef instructor told me that we—meaning me versus him and the rest of the students—were cut from a different cloth. I wasn’t good enough to be a chef. I didn’t have it.

I seethed. I learned to cook out of anger.

I think people learn to cook for a variety of reasons, but why they stay in the kitchen, that’s a whole other question. I can’t wait to talk to these chefs, whose experiences and temperaments and styles are so widely varying. I’m especially curious to talk to Hamilton, a wickedly good writer, as I’ve said. She’s deeply skeptical of me, for good reason, no doubt. Then there’s Bourdain, who basically makes up stories about me and publishes them as the truth (a sympathetic neighbor here in Cleveland, walking her dog down our leafy street, paused to chat with my wife out of concern, whispering confidentially to her: “I didn’t know Michael had a drinking and gambling problem..."—swear to god, this actually happened, what I have to put up with for hanging out with Bourdain, a mixed blessing to be sure). And Eric, a friend, and incredibly talented chef and leader, he’ll be worried I’ll bring up his loafers again. It ought to be an interesting night.
—Michael Ruhlman

Related: Food events and classes at the Y and Makor
Earlier: Interview with Eater.com’s Ben Leventhal and Tony Bourdain