TASTE OF THE MET
By Julliana Bravo
For the past 15 years, Executive Chef Geo Lanez at the Patterson Club has been working toward one goal: becoming a Certified Master Chef (CMC). Back in December, a clock even sat on his desk counting down the days until the certification exam – a rigorous culinary test completed over several days. He says preparing for the certification has completely changed his life. He exercises more, eats healthier, and has stopped drinking. The idea of competition didn’t stress him out anymore. In fact, it fired him up.
“He’s a perfectionist,” The Patterson Club General Manager, Thomas Bartek, says.
That perfectionism is probably what helped him avoid disaster, as the combination of recovering from an illness and a broken heating system at the Airbnb he was staying at for the exam made him sick once again.
“I was at my lowest,” he recalls, running on very few hours of sleep and feeling anxious.
But Lanez knew he could rely on his support system. Eight of his closest mentors, friends, and colleagues had traveled to the exam to support him, while The Patterson Club staff back home led his team while he was away.
This was all a result of Chef Lanez making a promise to himself fifteen years ago to become the best chef he could. In high school, he decided to go to Providence to attend Johnson and Wales, a school known for its culinary arts and hospitality program. But before culinary school, Lanez had never used a knife before. Coming to school was one of those moments where you could either run or face the unknown. Chef Lanez not only faced the unknown but conquered it.
During the summer entering his junior year, he participated in the the world’s largest culinary arts competition, featuring over 1,000 chefs from around the world. He was enamored by the glamour and status of those chefs and wanted to know what it took to get there. Chef Matarazzo gave it to him straight, a long career path that would involve years of sacrifice and struggle.
He signed up, without hesitation.
Chef Lanez spent seven years at the Somerset Club in Boston, then decided it was time for a change. Wanting to be closer to his family in New Jersey and looking for more space to grow a family, he moved to Fairfield to become Executive Chef at The Patterson Club.
For him, it was a reality check. They’ve had to build the program from the ground up, not only hiring new staff but also creating a mentorship program for young chefs to be mentored through competitions. For Chef Lanez, being able to see someone grow, learn, and ultimately succeed in their own career has been the best part of his job. Such mentorship was given to him when he started out, and now he feels it's his duty to do the same.
When it comes to competition and testing, Chef Lanez not only thrives in it, but uses it as a learning opportunity to perfect his skills in a short amount of time. Where some chefs take years to learn a certain skill, it takes Chef Lanez just a few months due to constant repetition. It’s that repetition he believes saved him during the certification exam. Not being able to think straight wasn’t an issue since he was so used to the movements of making these specialized dishes.
When it came to the final days of the exam, Chef Lanez experienced a range of feelings. His fever was running high, he wasn’t getting much sleep, and the mental challenges of it all took a toll on him. But he walked into the second to last day with a different perspective.
“I didn’t care what anyone in that room was going to say, I was going to be me,” he recalls.
He took the market basket portion of the exam and moving on to the final day of the competition, where he would retake the classical portion of the certification. The final day he used a recipe that he had never tested before but was crafted by his friends and colleagues at The Patterson Club.
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