Chefs With Tattoos

Carolynn Spence, executive chef at the Chateau Marmont, rolls her sleeves up to show a lattice of thistles and leaves, a Kikuichi knife, the artichoke logo from a bottle of Cynar and the lyrics to a Beirut song. On her palm are the concentric circles that measure the cupped amount of a tablespoon, a teaspoon and a quarter teaspoon.

"When I was young, I was a hardcore punk rocker," says Spence, who is from New Jersey. "They [cooks] accepted me, blue hair and all."

PHOTO BY AMY SCATTERGOOD

Ludovic LeFebvre, chef-owner, LudoBites

PHOTO BY AMY SCATTERGOOD

Eddie Garcia, sous chef, Nickel Diner

PHOTO BY AMY SCATTERGOOD

Ludovic LeFebvre, chef-owner, LudoBites

PHOTO BY AMY SCATTERGOOD

Steven Fretz, executive chef, XIV

PHOTO BY AMY SCATTERGOOD

Michael Brown, executive chef, Red 0

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More About

• Ludovic Lefebvre
• Michael Voltaggio
• Steven Fretz
• Brendan Collins
• Culinary Arts

Evan Funke, executive chef at Rustic Canyon, has a network of 3s on his arms, two crossed knives (one his mother's, one his first Henkel Santoku), the French words for salt and fire, and his father's signature.

"A lot of my time at Spago was based on superstitions," says Funke about the restaurant where he worked both while in culinary school and afterward. "Hat on correctly. We used to initial all our vinaigrettes in garde manger. Thirty-three is my lucky number."

For many chefs, a tattoo is as much a rite of passage as the burn marks, knife wounds and cultivated insomnia that come with the job.

Brendan Collins, chef-owner of Culver City's newly opened Waterloo & City, got his first tattoo at 17, exactly half his current age. He may have grown up working-class in the north of England, but Collins is classically trained and started out as a pastry chef. You wouldn't know it from his body, which is a lattice of drawings — a huge tree trunk, a dragon, Chinese writing, Da Vinci's Vitruvian Man — much of them hiding a long, thick scar from a brutal rugby injury.

Collins says he doesn't want the food or tools he uses in his profession pictured on his skin ("I could always put a fucking serrated knife down my arm: Look at me with my fucking Wüsthof!"), and that he considers the predilection for tattoos to suit the adrenalin-fueled autocracy of the kitchen.

"We're all degenerates at heart. If I hadn't found cooking, I'd probably be in prison."

Chef Ludovic Lefebvre's body is etched in a network of words and colors: a Buddhist prayer in the chef's native French, a koi fish, a dragon, a Hawaiian hula girl, a cross, his sister's name on his wrist, his wife's name on his chest. And on his elbow, the most recent piece, a rooster that is both the symbol of France and of Lefebvre's traveling restaurant, LudoBites.

"Tattoos are like a drug. You can't finish. It's never the last one," says Lefebvre, who got his first tattoo 13 years ago, shortly after he'd arrived in America.

In France — where Lefebvre was first a teenage apprentice, then a culinary school student, then trained under iconoclastic chef Pierre Gagnaire — tattoos were not accepted the way they are now, in either country.

"At that time in France, it was jail guys" who had the tattoos, not trained chefs, Lefebvre says.

As he worked the line on a recent night, French rap blaring from the playlist, a mise en place cup of white foie gras powder near the work station like the lost contraband from a meth lab, the artwork that fills both of Lefebvre's arms down to his wrists looked in the candlelight like two complete multicolored sleeves. They were, of course. Of his own uniform.