Chef Michael Salzinski is currently a chef instructor at National Louis University’s Kendall College. He did not grow up with a burning desire to be a chef.
A serendipitous choice
He grew up in Evanston, attended Dewey Elementary and Nichols Middle School and graduated from ETHS in 1990. After ETHS, he enrolled at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, graduating as an English major with a minor in history. He was thinking about becoming an elementary school teacher and looking for a job. Good timing and serendipity found him working in the retail section of a private catering business.
“Eventually then I was able to kind of finagle my way back into the kitchen to start working as a prep cook. It was at that point in time that I was also then interested in enrolling in culinary school. I had a roommate at the time that was a student at a place called the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago. He seemed like he was enjoying it and having fun. So I signed up and started attending culinary school while I was working as a prep cook in the kitchen of this catering place, and things just kind of spiraled from there.”
Each morning, he’d go to the catering business in Wilmette to work. Every afternoon he’d take the train into Chicago to go to culinary school. He graduated in 1996. Eventually he moved away from the catering business and got jobs in Chicago working for restaurant kitchens and cooking professionally.
By 2001 Salzinski was working at Foodstuffs on Central Street as a butcher and fish purveyor. He did this for about a year. Salzinski thought he’d eventually have his own restaurant.
Teaching future chefs
Salzinski did become a teacher, just not in the way he expected.
The Career Education Corporation acquired the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago in February 2000 and by June of that year adopted the Le Cordon Bleu name and program. Eventually the school became Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Chicago. In 2002 they were looking for culinary instructors. Salzinski interviewed and got the job, eventually becoming a full-time faculty member until the school closed in 2017.
As the school was nearing closure, contacts at Kendall College told him about a culinary instructor position at Kendall. Salzinski met with the executive chef. The next step required taking a “grueling” practical exam. The final requirement was to cook a three-course meal for all full-time faculty at Kendall. The outcome would determine whether he received a job offer.
A cooking audition
“I had to prepare a three-course meal that made sense, and I had to prepare four plates of each of those three courses, and present all of those plates within a 10-minute window. Interestingly, the exam itself was what you refer to as a black box exam. I had no idea what kind of products I was going to be able to work with until I got there. I set up my station in the kitchen that they were allowing me to cook in, and one of the chefs wheeled in a cart with all these products that they had gathered to give me to use for the exam. I had to just really quickly figure out what the menu was going to be.”
The point of the exam was to see how he reacted to the situation and to observe his cooking skills. It also demonstrated his creativity. He prepared a soup for the first course, a fish dish for the second course and a chicken dish for the third course. Salzinski said, “It just flowed. It went really well.” He got the job. He’s been there ever since.
At Kendall, he teaches all of the courses in the two-year associate’s degree program. Topics like knife skills, sanitation practices and foundational cooking techniques are fundamental courses all designed to help students get solid jobs in a professional kitchen. Additionally, students work for a semester at the Dining Room at Kendall College, both in the back cooking and at the front of the house dealing with paying customers. Every student also participates in a three-month internship in a professional kitchen prior to graduation.
Being part of The Bear
In February 2023, Salzinski was in the large professional kitchen at Kendall teaching. Michael Storer, director of The Bear, and his film crew were scouting locations for a cooking school scene for Season 2 and entered to observe the class. Salzinski had no idea who they were. He was calling out instructions to his students to give them a sense of what a real restaurant would be like, saying things like “Fire this plate!” or “I need this now!” and “Pick this up.”
The film folks found it so realistic that they wrote episodes to include a cooking instructor character. They invited Salzinski to audition, which he did over Zoom, and he booked the gig. He’s in Season 2, Episode 2 (Pasta) and Episode 5 (Pop) where he has a few lines.
Chef Michael Salzinski with Liza Colón-Zayas (Tina) and Edwin Lee Gibson (Ebraheim). Credit: Michael Salzinski
Filming
“It was February when they came and completely took over the seventh floor with hundreds of people and all this equipment. It was really funny to me to think about what it looked like, seeing all the equipment and then what it looked like on screen. You have no idea what’s actually going on behind the camera. Luckily, I kind of bumbled my way through it, and we did four takes of each of my lines. I guess they found the one that they wanted to use, and that was that.”
How did he feel as he waited to deliver his lines?
“Terrified. To have all those people staring at me right before they call action … it was a unique and memorable moment in my life.”
Tensions in the kitchen
The Bear shows how stressful professional kitchens can be and the toxic behavior of certain staff members. It’s not far from reality: Chefs like Mario Batali lost jobs because of toxic behavior. Does Salzinski address those issues in class?
Salzinski said they do talk about it. All students take an online sexual harassment awareness course. In his classes he tries to emphasize “a culture of collaboration and teamwork” and the value of traits like patience, caring, inclusion and mentorship.
Sara and Michael Salzinski at the Friends of Evanston Farmers Market booth during a recent Chef’s Demo.
When he’s not teaching, Salzinski likes to bike, read and listen to music, especially jazz. His wife, Sara, is also in the hospitality business. She currently works as curriculum creator/coodinator at The Chopping Block cooking school in the Lincoln Square neighborhood in Chicago. Mutual friends introduced them in 1999. They live in Evanston, are parents to two teens, and enjoy collaborating and sharing the cooking tasks at home. He wrote in an email, “We especially love making international-inspired dishes from the Indian, Southeast Asian, Italian, and Mexican cuisine collections.” And if he can grill a dish on his Weber kettle grill, he’ll do it.
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