CONVERSATIONS WITH A HEAD HUNTER
The headhunter is talking to Rarotonga. It’s his first call of the day, and he keeps glancing at his wristwatch. “Of course, I know what kind of person belongs there,” he says soothingly into the phone as his fingers nervously click a ballpoint pen. The business day is almost over in other parts of the world, and there are more calls to be made. His eyes look worried. He’s just gotten an order for an executive chef, and filling it won’t be easy.
As a headhunter, Benoit Gateau-Cumin recruits and relocates stars of the restaurant and hotel industry. In his desktop computer are 4,200 resumes, which he updates every month. The data are so precious that he keeps a duplicate copy in a safe deposit box.
For the past three and a half years, Gateau-Cumin has been operating his small, specialized agency out of a tidy office in Santa Monica, but his clients range from the Ritz in Paris and the Regent of Bangkok to Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute in Utah. Locally, he’s recruited for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Schatzi on Main, Merv Griffin’s Beverly Hilton, and Remi in Santa Monica. He also recruits private chefs for famous clients who want to remain anonymous.
Today his mission is to find a qualified chef willing to travel to a tiny tropical island. This is tougher than it sounds. The chef will need experience cooking in a Third World country because it’s extremely difficult to get delivery of fresh food into the Cook Islands. He must also be able to invent lots of dishes using bananas, taro, arrowroot and other locally grown ingredients. Even more important, the chef must be single. On tropical islands, chances are a married man will cheat on his wife. “It’s a macho kind of reasoning,” Gateau-Cumin says matter-of-factly, “but probably true. There are an incredible number of incredibly beautiful women there.”
Not all of Gateau-Cumin’s clients have such exotic requests. The Hershey Hotel in Pennsylvania commissioned him to scout around for a chef. Upjohn Laboratories in Kalamazoo, Mich., wants him to find someone to feed its staff of 11,000. And he is in the process of filling key positions at a major Southern California hotel.
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Clearly, this kind of headhunting can be lucrative. For his services, Gateau-Cumin is paid a fee equivalent to 25% of the first year’s salary of the person he places. In return, he guarantees his candidate will stay six months. Even with the recession, Gateau-Cumin earned $120,000 last year. This year, he expects to make even more. “All I sell is hot air,” he says. “In the ‘80s it was easy money. Today I work a lot harder.”
Gateau-Cumin, 43, came into this business through the back door. In the 1970s he was a French law student hitchhiking across America; to support himself, he took a job as a busboy at a summer resort in Michigan. Upon his return to France, Gateau-Cumin wrote the owner thanking him. He also brashly offered a few suggestions for improving the resort’s wine sales. The owner’s response was to invite Gateau-Cumin back the next summer to implement his plan . . . for the grand pay of $2.25 an hour plus 10% of all wine sales.
At the time, the resort restaurant was selling five or six bottles of wine a night, so the owner wasn’t being especially generous in his offer of a percentage of the sales. But the first night, wearing a tuxedo borrowed from his father, Gateau-Cumin sold 90 bottles. “I was running around in that dining room like you wouldn’t believe,” he says. “I ran out of everything. That summer I made more money than I had made in my life.”
Entranced, Gateau-Cumin came back the next summer. This time he ran the restaurant. At the end of the season, he went back to France to get his law degree, then promptly registered in the hotel and restaurant program at Cornell University. His new career in hotel management took him all over the world--to Chicago, Jamaica, Istanbul, Hawaii, Washington, New York and California. Between hotel stints, he owned--and closed--two restaurants. Tired of management and the politics that go with it, Gateau-Cumin decided to become a headhunter instead.
“I love the hotel and restaurant business, and this way I am still part of it,” he says. “It’s a lot of telephone calls, a lot of Christmas cards, a lot of reading the paper. But if I weren’t in this business, I’d still want to know where everyone is.”
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His first headhunting job was at a firm with offices in New York and Florida. He moved to Santa Monica in 1990 to go into a partnership, and then opened the Benoit Gateau-Cumin agency.
At one time, restaurant and hotel headhunting was big business. But as the economy worsened, most of Gateau-Cumin’s competitors gradually disappeared. In Los Angeles there are only four headhunting firms specializing in restaurant placements, including the Prospection Group, run by his former partner, Louis Ercout.
Gateau-Cumin’s phone rings often and the dialogue is friendly. In fact, many of his clients are former classmates and colleagues. But just mention the phrase “celebrity chef” and Gateau-Cumin frowns. “There is nothing wrong with being a celebrity chef as long as you are reasonable ,” he says, “but the prima donna crap is over. At one time, Jonathan Waxman was as important in this town as Wolfgang Puck. He stopped working intelligently 10 years ago.”
What do chefs think about all this? Mention headhunting to Thomas Keller and he sighs. “I had headhunters calling me right after I left Checkers,” says Keller, who was lured away from the trendy Rakel in New York by a Boston headhunter to take over as executive chef at Checkers. It is the only job he’s ever gotten through a recruiter. “A lot of these guys will call up and say, ‘I have this great opportunity just for you,’ and they don’t even know you. It takes a long time to build up a relationship with these people.”
Keller compares headhunters to stockbrokers. “When you get right down to it, they both trade in a commodity,” he says. “If you do bad on your stock, you are going to drop your broker.”
“When Tom was hired at Checkers, he was hired by reasonable people,” says Gateau-Cumin. “People like Bill Wilkinson and Patrick Willis are not your run-of-the-mill hotel operators. Checkers was a boutique hotel. Now it is part of a large chain. Imagine. It is an investment that doesn’t make sense. The result is we haven’t heard anything about Checkers since Tom left.”
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Shortly after the hotel changed management in 1992, Keller left. Last month he bought the French Laundry in Yountville, a restaurant known for its unique wine cellar. During his time off, Keller worked on a cookbook and a line of olive oil.
“If there are a bunch of Tom Kellers out there not working,” Gateau-Cumin says, “that certainly lowers the salary scales.” The average starting salary of an executive chef in Los Angeles is down 15% from three years ago; it now falls between $45,000 and $52,000 a year.
Even so, restaurants have to be careful. If the chef considers his salary inadequate, he will find the money elsewhere, even in the form of kickbacks from suppliers.
“There are a couple of chefs in this town known as Mr. Five Percent,” says Gateau-Cumin. Although extracting cash from purveyors for the privilege of doing business is unethical (and illegal), some hotel managers and restaurateurs look the other way. “What they have to remember,” says Gateau-Cumin, “is that the purveyor isn’t going to take the money out of his pocket. Instead, he will raise his prices.”
But money isn’t the only reason chefs are unhappy. When Jean-Pierre Bosc left the dying Fennel in Santa Monica to cook at the new, hot Le Comptoir in New York, he lasted six weeks. “All of a sudden he had to work his ass off,” says Gateau-Cumin, who got Bosc the job. “In New York you don’t have designed kitchens like you do in Santa Monica. No big windows, No sunshine. You are in a basement and there is grease dripping. It was too much of a cultural shock for him.”
“I think I made the right choice,” says Bosc, who is currently cooking at Lunaria in Century City. “I did a good job for the restaurant, but I didn’t like New York.”
“Jean-Pierre was my first failure,” says Gateau-Cumin, “but I still think he is a heck of a chef.”
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While Gateau-Cumin’s business is steadily growing--he’s become bi-continental recently, opening another office in Lyon--his current challenge is finding enough good Italian chefs. Italian food is still very hot in the United States. In the Far East, it’s all they want. “Italians never stay in one place very long,” says the headhunter. “A person that has a never-ending source of Italian chefs would probably become very wealthy very quickly.”
Here in America, says Gateau-Cumin, the best recruiting ground is the “School of Puck.” It’s because Wolfgang Puck trains his people well. “If you are hired by Wolfgang Puck, you might start out as the butcher, but you are not going to be the butcher forever. And since his food happens to be extremely creative and good, and since his restaurants are always so busy, everybody works that much harder and learns that much faster.”
So why isn’t it the same for those who work at Joachim Splichal’s busy, top-rated Patina? “You work at Spago one year and you become somebody,” says Gateau-Cumin. “But Joachim is always paranoid that someone is going to steal his thunder.”
From Puck’s perspective, the matter is clear-cut. If one of his people wants to move on, or gets a great offer to open his own restaurant, he is happy. He’s even going to send them customers. “If somebody leaves,” says Puck, “it doesn’t mean that they become your enemy.”
Puck, who came to California from Monte Carlo via Indianapolis--”I was a big fan of auto racing and I thought Indianapolis was like Monte Carlo”--has never used a headhunter. “I don’t need to, here in California, especially in this economy,” he says, “but if you have a restaurant in Nebraska or Wyoming or somewhere in the middle of nowhere, it might be necessary.”
And if your restaurant is on Rarotonga, a headhunter is a must. Last month Gateau-Cumin finally found someone qualified, and willing, to go there. He was thrilled--and then he discovered that another headhunter had already filled the job.
A few days later, Gateau-Cumin got another call: The Rarotongan resort hotel was being sold. “I got a fax from the general manager,” says Gateau-Cumin. “He asked me to find him a job.”
COUNTER INTELLIGENCE IS ON VACATION
