For those of you who have never worked in restaurants, the fantastic benefit of being a waiter working for beans/whoring for tips, or a cook working for beans/whoring for your chef, is that you get to eat for free. Unless you work in a chain (Sorry, Carl).
Oh and a quick aside, at Blu Sushi Lounge we scavenge your food. Because sushi is usually served in bite sized pieces, any food left on a plate is generally untouched and free game. I don't know if it's because we're all really poor at Blu, but if we see guests slowing down with plenty of food on the plate, we are hoping you say "No, we won't take it home." That shit gets hawked down immediately. It's kind of unprofessional, but some of us will drop what we're doing, sneak back to the kitchen and scavenge the goodies as quickly as possible and get back to work. Sushi is an expensive and luxurious cuisine, alright? We like to enjoy it too.
Behold the wonder that is the family meal. Formally I guess it's a staff meal or an employee meal, but really restaurant staffers usually form close bonds so the term "family meal" is very appropriate. It's usually comprised of scraps and can be sub-par. A wise restaurant owner will not spend too much on their employees, it is the kitchen's responsibility to turn what would be waste in to food. But a delicious family meal really does wonders for morale, and is greatly appreciated by poor restaurant workers. Whenever Sergio, the pastry chef, has to make family meal he makes three trays of thin crust pizza with some fantastic toppings. Mozzarella cheese over a garlic-ricotta sauce, fontina cheese over spinach, sausage and tomato sauce, smoked mozzarella over grilled squash/zucchini and a tomato/jalapeno sauce. My favorite day of the week.
Every week at Va Pensiero when the schedule comes out the chef will kind of randomly highlight names for every day of the week. Those highlighted will make the family meal for that day. I noticed that so far I've been selected to make family meal every Sunday. I then noticed that that is the chef's day off. I guess he has no interest or faith in my ability to make a decent meal. Then I thought about it some more and realized that although I am developing very specific kitchen skills, my ability to create a whole meal is somewhat untested.
My fellow Mexican cooks also share the same opinion as Le Chef. The first week I was supposed to make family meal they went ahead and made a meal without me. They joked about it, assuming I didn't have the balls to make something. I was pretty hurt, I had devoted my whole train ride to thinking what we could use and what I could make. We eat a ton of pasta with tomato-based sauces, so I was going to play it safe in that direction, but still! C'mon! Give me a shot!
The next week wasn't much better. It was a super busy Sunday and I kind of forgot family meal needs to be pretty punctual at 4:30 PM. Our sous chef reminds me at about 4:05 and he's like, "Eric! Did you start family meal?" At which point I nearly shit my pants. SHIT-FUCK-DAMN! I run to the walk-in, grab onions, red bell peppers, mushrooms, garlic, and tomato remnants and start roughly chopping everything in sight. At the very least I impress people with my vastly improved knife skills. It was a decent meal.
During the week I also am occasionally responsible for making the salads that go along with the meal. The person working the cold station has to take whatever raw vegetables that are turning south in terms of freshness and make a decent salad out of them. I never paid attention to how Maestro makes the dressings for these salads, but they're usually quite decent and based on some sort of fruit. I take a page out of The French Laundry Cookbook and make Thomas Keller's standard family meal salad dressing.
Shallots
Sherry vinegar
1 egg yolk
1 clove of garlic
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
You throw it in a blender and emulsify it slowly with the oil, by drizzling it in during the process. The finished product is creamy and off-white, which I was not expecting at all. This is unlike any salad dressing I've come across (to be fair I'm very accustomed to Hidden Valley Ranch and maybe a balsamic vinaigrette). But the taste is quite good! A nice acidic note to counter the creaminess of the egg yolk/oil, and the gentle onion perfume of the shallots with the sharpness of garlic to accent it. Pretty tasty! Perhaps a bit too much garlic, but otherwise solid all around. I throw a bag of mixed greens in a bowl, toss in a handful of arugula, julienne some Granny Smith apples, red onion and empty out the dregs from a can of pistachios for some textural contrast. Hey that's a pretty good salad! I know I'm using exclamation points a lot, but seriously! I'm proud of myself! But I make the mistake of perhaps adding a bit too much dressing, allowing the greens to get a little soggy as opposed to crisp and fresh.
Alright so salads go pretty well, but any monkey with a bowl and some reasonably fresh vegetables can make a salad. How about a real family meal? Well here we are, Sunday the 20th. The wonderful thing about cooking family meal on a Sunday is that there are a plethora of ingredients to use. It's the end of our week and there's plenty of leftovers to go around. Unused chickens, leftover pork belly from an appetizer we didn't sell as much of as we had hoped, some cuts of pork and beef, and any vegetables are fair game because we get fresh ones on Tuesday. The Mexicans again snicker and offer assistance, not thinking I can pull this off. Well ... challenge accepted, you buttholes. (That's right I said buttholes .. 3rd grade, what up)
I go in to the walk-in and notice a big box of chicken wings leftover from butchering. The light goes off in my head. Ding! Perhaps my favorite thing in the world are buffalo wings. I need some starch too so I decide to make a pasta alongside it. This isn't going to be the most cohesive meal, but it will be tasty, damn it. I make another childhood favorite, pasta alfredo.
Making hot wing sauce from scratch is trickier, so I use Frank's Red Hot as a base. I know, I know I'm a cop out, whatever. Still these turned out friggin' great.
Frank's Red Hot Sauce
Ketchup (Heinz baby, represent Rob)
Splash of Tabasco
Splash of Valentina (a Mexican hot sauce .. we go through like one bottle a week)
Squeeze of lime juice
Melted butter with a touch of honey whisked in
Garlic paste (You mince cloves of garlic extremely fine, and then using kosher salt as an abrasive you mash it in to a fine paste)
I cook the wings at low temperature first and then blast them hot in the convection oven to crisp the skin. Ideally I would deep-fry those bad boys, but alas we don't have a fryer.
And then for my linguini Alfredo. We happen to have taken our linguini dish off the menu, so that pasta is fair game. We get all our parmigiano-reggiano from a ginormous wheel (we toss pasta in it tableside), so when we take the wheel apart we are left with the waxy rinds. I grate all the rinds to get every scrap of cheese, and add some pecorino as well. I make a blond roux (equal parts butter and flour) and start whisking in milk, effectively what's called a bechamel sauce. The roux is a thickener and I start whisking in the cheese. Now I have a thick, white, cheesey sauce. Essentially alfredo sauce. I saute julienned red bell peppers, mushrooms (shitakes and criminis leftover from our mushroom tagliatelle dish), onion and garlic (yeah I use it a lot). Toss everything together, hit it with some chopped parsley, and voila! Pasta!
All the food is put out and I look at what we have. It's a veritable feast. Luis has heated up some leftover pork tenderloin and made a 12-egg omelet (which he flipped very successfully in a pan... it was awesome). Mr. Cruz, the manager, has brought in a pepperoni pizza he got for free somewhere and Maestro has made a salad with leftover gorgonzola cheese for the dressing. This is one hell of a fatty meal. Then Chuy tells me he's kind of lactose intolerant, Luis tells me he just ate pasta at Bravo!, his other restaurant that he works at, so he's eating the omelet with Chuy. It just so happens our only two American waiters are working, so they go for pizza and salad, the girl staying away from my creamy, fatty pasta. And Mr. Cruz generally opts for a tomato salad or some bread usually, not interested in our family meal. So the pasta goes largely untouched. Then they tell me I need to go home because a 4-top and a 5-top have canceled, and they no longer need me. Thanks a lot guys. See you on Wednesday. ... Buttholes.
Those wings were fucking delicious though.
EP #6
PS - Thank you Eva and Paul for pointing out one of my errors. Buttholes.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Hanging in There
So some of you may think I am dead. Or at least have gone missing. Both are somewhat true. I am dying slowly, getting chewed up in the inferno of a professional kitchen.
A little more than two weeks have passed with me being a professional cook now, and frankly the work is harder than I could have anticipated. Even though I interned as a stage for quite some time, cooking for 5-6 days a week with 10-12 hour days thrown in are very tiring. As I look at my hands while typing this I notice the true mark of a novice line cook.
I have angry burns from splattered oil dotting the backs of my hand. I have a nice big cut on my right index finger from cleaning the deli slicer. On the other side of my index finger is a gnarled blister from using a knife for so many hours a day. A callus is proudly beginning to form. My cuticles are mangled, and the grime from cleaning 40 pounds of mushrooms remains difficult to cleanse. I could really use another manicure.
Err...
Anyhow, the point is that the work is hard. I do enjoy it though and the catharsis a 14 hour day of cooking offers is reward enough in itself. I am genuinely excited for my first paycheck so that I can experience my first compensation for working with food (also I just lost 3 rounds of credit card roulette on a random night of Monday drinking). As of now the work is not consistently 12 hours or more, but the weekends do require us to race, which has lead me to experience a few new things. The constant battle against the clock that is a cook's life, and the war-like camaraderie developed with your fellow cooks in that struggle.
Now I have responsibilities allocated just for me. I am currently acting as a swing cook between pasta and cold stations, setting up one or the other every day. I am frustrated by my lack of precision and speed. If I try to work too fast, the quality of my work begins to suffer, but if I work too slow I might not make it in time for service. The other cooks have been endlessly patient with me and I thank them for that. But I am personally very disappointed that I am not doing better. Right now I have been a supplementary factor to the line, an extra hand who always has a veteran guardian angel to pick up my slack. But starting this week I am going to command my own station, my chef hoping that I can pull my weight on the line.
I guess it is to be expected. Your first job is always a little difficult, but I am annoyed that I don't pick up cooking as easily. Cello was never hard for me to learn, I learned ultimate in a fairly relaxed manner, I can't afford to let this learning curve dominate me. But dominate me it must.
A few Saturdays ago, Le Chef lets me try out the beginning of service on the hot line as a pasta cook. We're picking up a wedding reception of 100 in an hour and we need to turn these first tables ASAP (to turn a table is the time it takes for guests to finish a table so that we can get them out the door, clean and reset the table for the next round of guests, restaurants will typically do 2-3 turns depending on the size and business of the dining room a night). I am getting hammered with orders getting called in waves of 2 or 3.
"Ordering one tagliatelle split, two ravioli and a pasta penne!"
Ordering means that I should start working on heating up the sauce, getting the taste and ingredients to the right point, and have it ready for the pick up. Once the order is picked up I then just heat the pasta in water, throw it in to the sauce, toss it and plate to maximize efficiency. So after this first order I need to saute a bunch of mushrooms, tomatoes and herbs in butter, add mushroom stock and begin to reduce it, prepare two pans of browned butter and sage, and heat up arrabiata sauce and add chicken for the penne. Adjust the seasoning on everything and keep it warm.
"Pick up tagliatelle! Fire table 23!"
The tagliatelle is getting picked up separately alongside the rest of the orders. I begin to heat up all my pasta, Luis starts double checking my sauces. I throw all the pasta in to the sauces and begin tossing, Luis has set up all the plates on the board for me. I plate, being careful to mound the pasta, adding cheese, wiping plates. Luis helps me to finish the plating.
Whew, first order done with marginal success!
"Ordering 2 tagliatelle, 2 pasta onion, penne appetizer! Pick up pork belly and cheese tart!"
I am also responsible for a few appetizers, those being the Braised Pork Belly with Crispy Onions and a Cranberry/Pomegranate Juice reduction and the Mediterranean Goat Cheese Tart with Arugula Oil and Tomato Vinaigrette.
I begin to slow down. My caramelized onion sauce begins to scorch slightly, I'm taking too long and the orders don't stop.
Le Chef looks at Luis and then at me.
"Eric, go help Maestro with picking up the salads for the wedding."
I've been benched. I am crushed. I don't know if I should have expected myself to handle a busy Saturday a week in, but I am disappointed nonetheless.
I have a lot to learn.
I am so upset because I care. I want to be a good cook, I want a solid foundation of cooking technique before I even begin to explore the idea of my own cuisine. A line cook's life is all about being able to express the big dog/chef's personal cuisine. It's not up to you to be creative, it's up to you to be precise and efficient.
Grant Achatz, who I consistently go on about because I kind of love him a lot, at age 23 was Thomas Keller's best line cook at The French Laundry, as it began its climb to the best restaurant in America. I knew he was uniquely artistic and endlessly creative, but I always sort of assumed that was his main asset, that his cooking technique was only slightly better-than-average.
How wrong I was. As I learn more about the enigma that is Grant Achatz I find that he most certainly earned the devotion and loyalty of his staff through his skills as a line cook. When he was the executive chef at Trio, it was often said that if you started slacking on the line he just came in and worked your station better, faster, harder, stronger than you ever could on your best day while expediting.
Fuck.
I really do have quite a bit to learn.
Wish me luck, give me strength.
EP #6
A little more than two weeks have passed with me being a professional cook now, and frankly the work is harder than I could have anticipated. Even though I interned as a stage for quite some time, cooking for 5-6 days a week with 10-12 hour days thrown in are very tiring. As I look at my hands while typing this I notice the true mark of a novice line cook.
I have angry burns from splattered oil dotting the backs of my hand. I have a nice big cut on my right index finger from cleaning the deli slicer. On the other side of my index finger is a gnarled blister from using a knife for so many hours a day. A callus is proudly beginning to form. My cuticles are mangled, and the grime from cleaning 40 pounds of mushrooms remains difficult to cleanse. I could really use another manicure.
Err...
Anyhow, the point is that the work is hard. I do enjoy it though and the catharsis a 14 hour day of cooking offers is reward enough in itself. I am genuinely excited for my first paycheck so that I can experience my first compensation for working with food (also I just lost 3 rounds of credit card roulette on a random night of Monday drinking). As of now the work is not consistently 12 hours or more, but the weekends do require us to race, which has lead me to experience a few new things. The constant battle against the clock that is a cook's life, and the war-like camaraderie developed with your fellow cooks in that struggle.
Now I have responsibilities allocated just for me. I am currently acting as a swing cook between pasta and cold stations, setting up one or the other every day. I am frustrated by my lack of precision and speed. If I try to work too fast, the quality of my work begins to suffer, but if I work too slow I might not make it in time for service. The other cooks have been endlessly patient with me and I thank them for that. But I am personally very disappointed that I am not doing better. Right now I have been a supplementary factor to the line, an extra hand who always has a veteran guardian angel to pick up my slack. But starting this week I am going to command my own station, my chef hoping that I can pull my weight on the line.
I guess it is to be expected. Your first job is always a little difficult, but I am annoyed that I don't pick up cooking as easily. Cello was never hard for me to learn, I learned ultimate in a fairly relaxed manner, I can't afford to let this learning curve dominate me. But dominate me it must.
A few Saturdays ago, Le Chef lets me try out the beginning of service on the hot line as a pasta cook. We're picking up a wedding reception of 100 in an hour and we need to turn these first tables ASAP (to turn a table is the time it takes for guests to finish a table so that we can get them out the door, clean and reset the table for the next round of guests, restaurants will typically do 2-3 turns depending on the size and business of the dining room a night). I am getting hammered with orders getting called in waves of 2 or 3.
"Ordering one tagliatelle split, two ravioli and a pasta penne!"
Ordering means that I should start working on heating up the sauce, getting the taste and ingredients to the right point, and have it ready for the pick up. Once the order is picked up I then just heat the pasta in water, throw it in to the sauce, toss it and plate to maximize efficiency. So after this first order I need to saute a bunch of mushrooms, tomatoes and herbs in butter, add mushroom stock and begin to reduce it, prepare two pans of browned butter and sage, and heat up arrabiata sauce and add chicken for the penne. Adjust the seasoning on everything and keep it warm.
"Pick up tagliatelle! Fire table 23!"
The tagliatelle is getting picked up separately alongside the rest of the orders. I begin to heat up all my pasta, Luis starts double checking my sauces. I throw all the pasta in to the sauces and begin tossing, Luis has set up all the plates on the board for me. I plate, being careful to mound the pasta, adding cheese, wiping plates. Luis helps me to finish the plating.
Whew, first order done with marginal success!
"Ordering 2 tagliatelle, 2 pasta onion, penne appetizer! Pick up pork belly and cheese tart!"
I am also responsible for a few appetizers, those being the Braised Pork Belly with Crispy Onions and a Cranberry/Pomegranate Juice reduction and the Mediterranean Goat Cheese Tart with Arugula Oil and Tomato Vinaigrette.
I begin to slow down. My caramelized onion sauce begins to scorch slightly, I'm taking too long and the orders don't stop.
Le Chef looks at Luis and then at me.
"Eric, go help Maestro with picking up the salads for the wedding."
I've been benched. I am crushed. I don't know if I should have expected myself to handle a busy Saturday a week in, but I am disappointed nonetheless.
I have a lot to learn.
I am so upset because I care. I want to be a good cook, I want a solid foundation of cooking technique before I even begin to explore the idea of my own cuisine. A line cook's life is all about being able to express the big dog/chef's personal cuisine. It's not up to you to be creative, it's up to you to be precise and efficient.
Grant Achatz, who I consistently go on about because I kind of love him a lot, at age 23 was Thomas Keller's best line cook at The French Laundry, as it began its climb to the best restaurant in America. I knew he was uniquely artistic and endlessly creative, but I always sort of assumed that was his main asset, that his cooking technique was only slightly better-than-average.
How wrong I was. As I learn more about the enigma that is Grant Achatz I find that he most certainly earned the devotion and loyalty of his staff through his skills as a line cook. When he was the executive chef at Trio, it was often said that if you started slacking on the line he just came in and worked your station better, faster, harder, stronger than you ever could on your best day while expediting.
Fuck.
I really do have quite a bit to learn.
Wish me luck, give me strength.
EP #6
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