What’s Tall and White and Starched All Over? The Nearly Extinct Toque

Ken Frank always wears a toque, at least when he’s having his picture taken. He is, after all, the chef and owner of West Hollywood’s La Toque. But does he wear a toque in the kitchen?

“No, rarely,” he admits. “I used to, but it’s more comfortable not to. The kitchen’s already hot enough and it makes your hair look stupid when you take it off--you wear it all day and end up with a ring around your head.

“But,” he insists, “if I were to wear a hat, I wouldn’t be caught dead wearing a baseball cap. Wolfgang (Puck) is the only chef I know who can pull it off. I think you’ll find that most classically trained, truly good French chefs will feel pretty much the same way about the caps.”

Champagne’s Patrick Healy sides with Frank. “Maybe it’s good for slinging pizzas,” he says, “but I don’t feel comfortable making sauces with a baseball cap on.”

Still, Healy says, “toques are really out. They’re a symbol of the kind of old-style, old-fashioned cooking people have been trying to get away from.

“Even in Europe you don’t see the toque in the kitchen as often,” Healy says. “I worked at some of the finest restaurants in France--with Roger Verge, the Troisgros brothers, Michel Guerard--and the only place I had to wear a toque was at Troisgros. That was because the kitchen had a big exposed picture window and all the customers could look in from the parking lot. It made a spectacular sight. The problem is they’re always falling off or going crooked--toques are really too much of a hassle to keep up tradition.”

It used to be that the head chef in every kitchen wore a toque. It was a symbol of respect and a sign of authority. And in the era before women started taking the top slots in kitchens, it was the symbol of the stud-chef.

In those days it wasn’t enough to wear a toque; you had to wear the right kind of toque.

A paper toque, for instance, the kind still used mostly in hotel kitchens, just doesn’t cut it with the big chefs. “They’re, well, unattractive,” Healy says.

“And there are two kinds of cloth toques,” Frank says. “There’s the soft kind that’s not starched and flops all round--that’s worn by your putz. And then there’s the kind worn by a true chef with three pounds of starch in it, stronger than exterior plywood. It feels like you’re wearing a wood plank on your head, but it looks great. And it focuses attention on the boss.” Toque hierarchy.

There’s also the problem of toque upkeep. “I have several nice toques, which I enjoy wearing on occasion,” Healy says. “But they need to be starched and pressed and impeccably white or they look awful.”

“I have a toque from France that I’ve had since I was 16 years old,” Frank says. “It’s made of an extra-thick material that holds just loads of starch. It takes about 20 minutes to iron the pleats right.”

But nothing will top Frank’s first toque experience.

“Oh, it was goose bump time,” he says. “When you’re young and impressionable you think, ‘All right, I’m a chef! I get to wear a hat!’ ”