These Are Dark Times..

When I discovered I wanted to be a cook and eventually a chef, I told myself I probably wouldn't do catering. It seemed too hard to produce quality food on such a massive scale or not in your own kitchen. I get too easily annoyed by the little things you have to chalk up to "catering mishaps." You just have to accept that things will not go exactly according to plan and you're going to be in foreign territory. You have to accept that perfection will be even more impossible than usual. I don't like that. Being a cook I think is all about the pursuit of perfection; the pursuit of making a dish consistently perfect, or creating a perfect dish that is delicately balanced and perfectly executed. You just can't really hope for that when you've moved your operation to say, a multi-million dollar house in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago.

Yeah ... this house was damn nice. I've been in some very nice houses catering with my mom's restaurant, but this was definitely up there. I'm not even sure why these silly white people wanted an Italian restaurant to cater the damn thing. A big part of the menu was fancied up American food; grilled chicken sliders, BBQ brisket, bratwurst. The only remotely Italian things we made were grilled pesto shrimp with Sardinian couscous and heirloom tomato caprese salad. The food was dumbed down in my opinion, but they seemed to love it. Which brings me to my next point that this was my first time on the cooking side of the catering operation. In the past I usually served and came along with my mom to be paraded around to her customers. They liked seeing it was a family operation. Now that I was cooking for catering it has become even less charming, though not without its benefits.

If you have a restaurant, catering can be a lucrative prospect. You're paying for staff you'd already have to pay for, maybe an extra server or two, and it's a complete bonus on top of your dining room. So you're looking at food costs, which as you can see is often very cheap. Our Chef is turning a big profit on it. But boy is it a pain in the ass. I go in early on Friday to start prepping, cutting and pre-cooking a lot of things, wrapping 'em up and loading them in to bus tubs. It's pretty fast paced because we have to be out of there, locked and loaded by 4 PM. And we have to pretty much bring everything. Serving plates, tongs, towels, some pans, food, seasoning, serving utensils, etc. To further my kitchen/battlefield analogy, catering kind of feels like some kind of raiding party. The Chef runs through the check list, double checking we have everything, everything is GO-GO-GO! and we assembly line out the back door, ammo check and guns blazing. And then we get there and start familiarizing to the domestic kitchen, making amends and cooking. But then once service starts, it's quite boring. It's all hurry-hurry and then a lot of waiting. Generally, I don't like it.

But it is relaxed once it's all over with. You're sittin' around looking pretty once the cooking is done, enjoying a nice house kitchen and full-blast AC. You can get too relaxed. In a moment of questionable judgment, the Chef brings out the pineapple tarte tatin. I ask what the pastry is and he goes "tarte tatin" and I'm like "oh okay" and he's all like "Do you know what a tarte tatin is?" and I'm all like "Bitch please, don't be testin' my Food Network watching skeelz .. it's an upside down pie essentially, invented in France by the Tatin sisters who claim they ran out of time to make an actual pie." At which point I cross my hands and give him the international sign to "SUCK IT!" Anyway, the pie is in upside down form with the crust on top on a sheet tray. He wants to get the filling side up. He looks at the cutting board, he looks at the pie, he looks at me, and it's almost in that moment we connect as bros (read: lazy, stupid guys) and know what we must do. He flips the sheet tray in to the air, it rotates 180 degrees and lands perfectly on the cutting board with the crust now down. I can't resist, I immediately put my hand up in the air and go "Fuck yeah!" He lets out a sigh and goes "That was fucking retarded. I am awesome."

We break down the party, clean everything up and load up the van to return to Va P. We are greeted warmly as the boys at home are finishing up a pretty busy night (100 covers), poking fun at each other for them having to do some real work and us enjoying a big ole' house. Then the reason for my post title shows up through the door.

The knife guy comes in. He picks up our knives and gets them sharpened for the restaurant and he does this for just about every restaurant in the North Shore area. He knows all the gossip, how other restaurants are doing and Chef is curious. Turns out, things are bad. The rumors may not all be true but Wildfire Steakhouse is seeing some dark times, which Chef finds to be unbelievable because they are owned by Lettuce Entertain You, a massive restaurant company based in Chicago. It's one of those places that just has mass appeal and does tons of covers, almost like a higher scale Olive Garden. Michael's in Winnetka and Campagnola of Evanston are floundering, and the place where it all began for me, Oceanique, is also not doing so hot. They've all cut down to 5 days of service as opposed to 6, which Chef thinks is a questionable strategy. It's like in Harry Potter 7 where they hear about people getting offed by Death Eaters in the news, or people getting locked up in Azakban. Yeah, exactly like that. You're like curious yet kind of horrified to hear the news of people going under.

I don't know a damned thing about economics and I am woefully uninformed of our current crisis, but I guess it's really hitting us food industry people hard. My mom thankfully is doing quite well, Va P is holding up, I guess I was unaware of how bad it really is for people out there. It's scary. Hopefully the industry will rebound, but when you come back from a multi-million dollar house to go back to a kitchen with a gloomy future, it can be kind of depressing. As Chewie was saying, "We keep our heads down and are just thankful for having work for 5 days a week." Sometimes work can be harsh, but what do you do when it's gone all of a sudden? Be thankful to be busy, hopefully we'll clear this mess soon enough.

So I am thankful for getting a job at Blu as a server (Thanks, Lauren!), and finally making some money. Hopefully once I smooth out the schedule between there and Va P I'll get a real solid rhythm going. Maybe I'll learn some more about sushi (even though I know quite a bit, taste it, Tee). Then I just gotta move to Chicago. I hate moving.

EP #6