This is the era of celebrity chefs. Mario Batalli, Anthony Bourdain, and Gordon Ramsey are known for their quirky personalities and ruthless tyranny in the kitchen. Rock star status comes to them as much from television and literary achievement as culinary skill. The Iron Chef rules!

Chef Michel LeBorgne is a celebrity chef, too, but only to those who took his classes or cooked in his kitchen. He is known for his brutally exacting standards and good humor. Many a fledgling chef has worked a grueling shift in the kitchen only to be criticized for not having properly shined shoes.

“Remember,” says Michel with a twinkle, “shiny shoes are happy shoes.”

While chefs may establish their reputations on the basis of signature dishes, teaching chefs establish theirs through the successes of those they teach. Photo courtesy of The Public Press

New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier has been both riding and creating the wave of culinary celebrity since the early 1980s. Now, the story of NECI’s early days is told in a warm and funny memoir by its founding chef. No Crying in the Kitchen: The Memoir of a Teaching Chef (The Public Press, 2009) traces Michel LeBorgne’s journey from Brittany in the midst of a Nazi invasion to the verdant hills of Vermont, where two entrepreneurial educators, Fran Voigt and John Dranow, planned to create a culinary school that emphasized the daily, intensive, real-life experience that comes only from the pressure and demands of kitchens and restaurants that are serving the public. Classes would be small and students would learn by doing. “Equipment and buildings don’t teach,” says founder Fran Voigt. “People do.”

Unfortunately, Voigt and Dranow had neither equipment nor buildings. Moreover, neither had any kitchen experience. Enter Chef Michel.

LeBorgne’s career had followed a traditional path: cooking school followed by a series of rigorous apprenticeships in some of the finest restaurant kitchens in Paris where LeBorgne learned all the stations of the kitchen brigade. Opportunities for a young chef, however, were limited in France. Meanwhile, thanks to TV celebs Julia Child and Graham “The Galloping Gourmet” Kerr, Americans were discovering the pleasures of French cuisine. Packing up his kitchen knives, Michel set sail for America, where he quickly found work in the kitchens of New York’s trendiest French restaurants.

After several years he tired of the contentious “back room” and took a position in the food services staff at Yale University, where he brought the economy, flair, and flavor of French cuisine to a massive institution for more than a dozen years.

In 1980 LeBorgne took a new position as the first teaching chef at the newly launched New England Culinary Institute. For the next three decades he devoted himself to the success of the next generation of chefs, his reputation growing in parallel with NECI’s.

While the memoir is an engaging, often funny account of Michel LeBorgne’s career, dotted with tasty morsels of kitchen wisdom and spiced by more than 30 recipes, the Chef’s real legacy is best told by his students.

Chef Peg Checci has had a distinguished career that includes international travel, positions with five-star hotels/ resorts, and an assignment as executive chef for the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta. Her initial meeting with Chef Michel, however, was as memorable as it was formative:

“Fresh out of UVM, having literally run away with the circus, I was at a loss as to what to do with my life. I had cooked in college and liked the ‘rush,’ so thought culinary school might be just off-center enough to intrigue me. When I toured the school in Montpelier, I found myself sitting across from Chef Michel dressed in his perfectly starched white coat and shiny black shoes. I was enchanted by his wonderful voice when he asked me to tell him why I wanted to come to NECI. I came back with the usual student clichés of becoming a famous chef and seeing the world. Oh, I thought I was something special!

“After listening patiently he told me the reasons I shouldn’t go to culinary school. I was a woman. I was American. I was young. I was inexperienced. It was hard work. It was too tough. I probably wouldn’t like the rigor of it all. By the time he was done, I was hooked. How dare he imply I wouldn’t be successful!”

After plying her trade around the world for 20 years Chef Peg has returned to NECI as an instructor, hoping to mold and inspire future chefs as Chef Michel did with her. “In my opinion,” she says “Chef Michel personifies New England Culinary Institute.”

David Hale, the director of Career Services at the college, knows about the chef’s exacting standards. “I have cooked for many celebrities and dignitaries, but Michel LeBorgne is the only one person I get nervous cooking for. His criteria for good food is quite simple, but achieving the proper execution is walking the razor’s edge. Green beans, for example, must be bright green, tender, but not crunchy.” The window for perfectly cooked beans, explains Hale, is only about five seconds. He recalls a day at the NECI- operated Chef’s Table in Montpelier when a student thought he could serve less-than-perfect beans to Chef Michel. “I told him to go for it, but I would take no responsibility for the outcome.” The student ended up bringing three plates to the table until the green beans were acceptable.

“Demanding? Absolutely. Correct? Indeed,” says Hale. “There is only one Michel Le Borgne, and whenever I am in the kitchen, I do everything possible to meet the standards he taught.”

Chef Michel’s instructions are not limited to NECI, but were made available as well to members of Vermont’s burgeoning community of specialty food producers. Allison Hooper, co-founder of Vermont Butter and Cheese Company, and her husband, Don, a founding member of the Montpelier Farmers Market, were operating Vermont’s first commercial bottled goat’s milk dairy when Michel arrived unexpectedly to fetch some farm-fresh goats milk. As Don remembers, “I had just tossed a half-handful of succulent shallots, capers, and chopped jalapenos into what was destined to become a delectable three-egg omelette when Michel came in. Obligingly, I lowered the gas flame and bolted for the milk-house. Two steps into my bolt an aghast Michel stopped me in my tracks with an explosion of mixed English/ French horror … “Mais, non, non, non, Don Don, Don. Tu must nevair abandon tos oeufs sur la stove!” I was treated to a scalding, impromptu but unforgettable tutorial on the fragile art of the omelette.”

LeBorgne’s sense of humor is as sharp as a fileting knife. “When I was working at the Inn at Shelburne Farms,” says Tom Bivins, now the executive chef at NECI, “Chef Michel came in to eat and was seated at a table next to Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. It was a magical evening with the Mozart Festival taking place on the lawn. A few days later I got a nice note from Michel thanking me for his meal, with a P.S. saying, ‘I especially appreciate not being bothered by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward asking for my autograph.’”

The culinary landscape in Vermont has a dramatically different look today than in 1980. It is a mecca of sorts for food entrepreneurs, organic farmers, wild crafters, artisan cheese makers, bakers, chefs, and specialty food producers. While chefs may establish their reputations on the basis of signature dishes, teaching chefs establish theirs through the successes of those they teach. Based on that criteria Ramsey, Bourdain, and Battali can move over. Chef Michel is in the room.

Stephen Morris is the editor/publisher of Green Living Journal: A Practical Journal for Friends of the Environment. Reach him at editor@greenlivingjournal.com.