Word: chefs
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...some level, the very idea of a McDonald's chef sounds preposterous. Burgers, fries, the McRib - is this really the work of a chef? The food at McDonald's tastes partly of nostalgia and partly of marketing; the rest is surely salt...
...turns out there's a chef at the beginning of that pipeline - a cook who trained at the Culinary Institute of America and who once ran the gracious kitchens at the Four Seasons Resort and Club outside Dallas. The Southwest Salad, the Angus burgers, the Snack Wrap - they all emerged from the food laboratory of Daniel Coudreaut, 44, whose business card reads "Director of Culinary Innovation, Menu Management" but who likes to go by Chef Dan. (See the top 10 bad beverage ideas...
...feel full (at which point you would have been better off ordering one Big Mac). But I wanted to know about the man behind it, this guy who thinks he can tinker with a paragon of Americana as durable as the Big Mac. Coudreaut might call himself Chef Dan, but isn't he just a p.r. stunt, a suit masquerading in chef's whites...
...five, Coudreaut grew up in Ossining, N.Y., not far from New York City. From around age 7, he was his mom's helper at mealtimes and kept a written inventory of ingredients in the pantry. At 14, he got a job washing dishes at a diner where the chef-owner let him look over his shoulder at the stoves. For a while, Coudreaut thought he might want to be in show business, and as a kid he got small roles in TV commercials and an off-Broadway play. He also went to business school, but all the while he kept...
That's a highly corporate way to think about food - celery root is certainly real, so real that it's covered in dirt when you buy it at the supermarket - but McDonald's is, after all, a corporation. Coudreaut may be a chef, but his employer is no restaurant. McDonald's Corp. is largely a holding company, a middleman that works between restaurant owners and food suppliers. It provides franchisees with inexpensive, processed ingredients and - this is where Coudreaut's team and other development people come in - a guarantee that new menu items have been tested and tweaked and retested...