Everybody’s Crush, Chef Pol
Chef Pol was the pastry teacher at the French culinary school I attended last fall. Everybody had a crush on Chef Pol. With silver hair, blue eyes, and eyebrows permanently lowered as though facing some slight inconvenience, he was the definition of a French silver fox. Now that I’m trying to remember, I’m not entirely sure his hair was that color. Maybe it was still dark, with white streaks meandering through, but that’s not important. What’s important is that he gave off the energy of someone with close-cut, silver hair. Indeed, everybody’s obsession was really with the aura Chef Pol exuded, that of a French thirty-something so fantastic he could roll pâte sablée to a geometrically perfect circle with his toned right hand while deftly performing a croissant double-turn with his left.
Often intimidating, sometimes scary, and always mysterious, his presence was a magnet for our thoughts. Rarely did he utter a word about his private life. We did find out that he was married, though, as these older, authority-figure objects of crushes unfortunately, or fortunately, tend to be. When I say everybody had a crush on him, I mean everybody– the Indonesian auntie, the burly Brazilian guy, the Irish galette maker. There were a couple of people who vehemently claimed their immunity to the Chef Pol Effect, but I can tell you that they were secretly his biggest fans.
Nobody knew what happened when he left school in his shiny red car. Where did he go? The beach, like us students? That seemed improbable. The idea of Chef Pol sprawled on the scorching sand was ridiculous. The only way “Chef Pol at the beach” could make sense would be a secret dusk visit. He would stand a distance away from the shore, alone, gazing toward the horizon with those permanently lowered eyebrows. He would linger there for a while, contemplating, before gliding back silently. He would most definitely be wearing his chef’s jacket.
The chef’s jacket was a crucial part of the image. After school, he would change out of his kitchen clothes into normal clothes. One day, my roommate urgently informed me that he was wearing half-length denim shorts. Chef Pol in half-length, denim shorts. In other words, an absolutely mind-boggling sight. This was not Chef Pol– this was Pol, no, not even, this was Paul, just a Paul, Paul the middle-aged Midwestern farmer dude who might be found collecting hay with a pitchfork. How could we reconcile Paul with the mysterious pastry chef? It was just too confusing, these two incompatible images; after that experience, we always took great care to avoid getting an accidental glimpse of out-of-uniform Chef Pol, and never mentioned the sighting again.
That culinary program ended last December, and now everybody from that class is dispersed once again around the globe. And I assure you, as they read these sentences, they will nod vigorously as the eternal image of Chef Pol is reconjured. I guess that’s what a crush is– an image. Maybe his hair was black and his eyes were purple, but in the minds of the lucky students in that pastry class, Chef Pol was, and will forever remain, a silver haired, blue eyed, thirty-something with eyebrows permanently lowered as though facing some slight inconvenience.
I’ll end with an agnostic prayer that Chef Pol never finds out about this article.
A watercolor of Chef Pol that we painted. For the giggles.