So now that my back-of-the house shenanigans are temporarily put on hold, I still have got another job and it allows me to practice the other side of the restaurant.
I've written a few posts about front of the house machinations, but as you can imagine it is just as if not more important than having good food. Restaurants, at the end of the day, are about hospitality. About making someone feel good and allowing them to have a great time with the people they love. Although exceptional food will draw people to your restaurant, they are going to eventually turn away if you serve it in an unprofessional or unfriendly manner. Customers can be difficult to please, but a lot of the time they don't ask for a lot, just a little attention to detail. If you give that to them they will love you, but if you neglect to do that it really leaves a sour taste in their mouths no matter how good the food. An important matter I learned from the film Gladiator. Please the mob or Russell Crowe will kill you.
I've been reading Danny Meyer's Setting the Table, which is a part-autobiography, part-business consultation book about the art of hospitality. It's a pretty fascinating read if you enjoy restaurants, and quite entertaining to boot, but the most important thing I've gathered from it is the following description of honest hospitality,
"Within moments of being born, most babies find themselves receiving the first four gifts of life; eye contact, a smile, a hug and some food. We receive many other gifts in our lifetime, but few can ever surpass those first four. That first time may be the purest "hospitality transaction" we'll ever have, and it's not much of a surprise we'll crave those gifts for the rest of our lives."
If you think about it and you take away all the pomp and circumstance around fine dining; all the fancy service rigors, and you just got that at a restaurant; eye contact, a smile, a hug and some food, then you would be pretty happy. (Well I don't know about the hug since there are so many people averse to unfamiliar human contact these days. We're probably talking about a metaphorical hug here. Unless you are an adorable grandmother, do not try to hug your customers. Unless they are regulars, European and/or smell attractive. Or if they seem irresistibly huggable [examples include chubby babies])
Okay, slightly off track. My point is, I've tried to catalog all the behaviors and all the actions that would constitute good service, and I've tried to perform them perfectly throughout a shift waiting tables. But frankly, it seemed difficult and so tiresome, and not necessarily effective. Of course there are some rules you must follow, but my fellow servers at Futami do just fine without any serious interest or training in restaurants.
So my thought now is that if I can relate every action to those first four gifts then I can not only simplify my actions, but also give off a sense of more honest hospitality as well.
The Importance of Hospitality
There are hundreds of little rules that constitute proper service. I feel that my adherence to these rules can make me a little cold and robotic in the dining room, which is a problem many fine dining establishments have. Despite clearing plates perfectly, decanting wine and delivering pitch-perfect menu descriptions, a diner can feel like it's a rehearsal with no soul at best, and pretentious and frigid at worst. I think the days of tuxedo'ed waiters calling everyone madame and monsieur are over. With the popularity of good food growing every day, it is more crucial than ever to eliminate all that snooty highfalutin business and make sure you can garner a wide fan base. If your kitchen puts out honest, good food then your wait staff needs to serve it honestly and goodly (I'm not getting spell checked on that word ... "goodly" is a word?!).
That being said though you still need to do your job. Danny Meyer likes to talk about his "51% Rule." Anybody's job in the restaurant comprises of 49% technical proficiency, and 51% emotional proficiency. The ability to read a customer's desires and make them feel welcome and nurtured is that much more important than being able to carry and serve plates properly. But as you can see, they are nearly even in significance. You still need to do the job right, or you risk leaving a bad impression, and losing an otherwise regular customer. The difference is that emotional proficiency can't really be taught, but technical proficiency can ... more on that later.
I don't really do restaurant reviews because a) I'm too poor to eat anywhere of real significance, and b) I don't feel qualified to properly critique another restaurant. But I do want to mention a few things about a restaurant I recently dined at. I was really looking forward to it, I had heard so many great things, and was about to shell out premium cash in the hopes of liking the food, and maybe getting an unpaid internship there. But a few mistakes have really made the memory of the place bittersweet.
Our server was friendly, a wholesome guy who didn't give off any airs of superiority or anything like that. The whole staff did a good job of seeming real and honest to form. But as soon as we had ordered we encountered a few missteps.
The table next to us was the only confirmation we got that there was a bread course before dinner. Bread courses are important in my opinion, because portions are often modest in high-end dining, so in order to not make your customers feel gipped with hunger, a bread course can help line their stomachs. Plus bread and butter is a simple yet delicious treat. A warm sourdough or baguette with some sweet cream butter, and a glass of red wine is one of my favorite things to eat. And because we were pretty hungry, we were not going to pass up on that. Unfortunately we had to ask for bread. If bread is complimentary then it should be just brought out, why would we have to wait 10 minutes for bread and then finally have to ask for it? If there is some baking fresh, then that is fine, just let us know. Otherwise, just bring it.
So we asked for it and it finally arrives, and it is some of the most disappointing bread I've ever had. Dry, crumbly, cake-like with no chewy gluten-ness or flavor. The butter was clearly straight from the fridge and could not be spread. I mean these are all little things that can do a lot for a diner. Good, warm bread and room temperature butter are not a lot to ask for and yet make a world of difference in flavor, and setting the tone for the food and atmosphere. Strike one, in my book. (There were a few slices of sourdough amongst the pile of Wonder bread that were decent, but it makes you wonder ... why such an oversight on the chef's part?)
Then appetizers come, and they are quite tasty. I will go on to say that I have no real gripes with the food at this restaurant (minus the bread), it was all well done, but the serving of it was not. And there is another, just slight oversight here. At fine-dining restaurants it is almost universally accepted that you can split anything, and the kitchen will split it for you. It is annoying to do in the kitchen, getting several apps fired split can really slip up your rhythm, but it really makes a big difference to your customers. Our waiter didn't ask us at all if we'd like to have our appetizers split, which probably makes him popular with the kitchen, but not so much with the customers. I didn't ask for them to be split, and wasn't even sure I wanted them to be so, but just going the distance to ask makes a big difference in my mind.
Another small thing that some cooks don't understand is the presentation of plates. I'm not talking about how pretty the arrangement of food is on a plate, I'm talking about bringing a plate to a diner. It has to be set down gracefully, the correct dish placed before the diner who ordered it without asking (There is nothing more unprofessional then going up to a table as a waiter and asking, "So who had the chicken?" You have to let a diner know you were paying attention to them), and most importantly, they have to be there when you bring it. The table next to us was a middle-aged couple and the woman got up to use the restroom. The runner came out at an inappropriate time, and instead of returning to the kitchen to wait, he set the plates down anyway.
Now they didn't seem bothered at all, in fact most people wouldn't be. But having a plate put before your eyes for the first time, something that sounded so delicious on the menu, and to have the aromas just barely waft to you as it is put down is a wonderful experience. Why would you deprive a customer of that? If I'm excited for the scallops dish, I want to see it for the first time delivered to me, to see my expectations realized by beautiful plating. I don't want my fellow diner to have to wait to start eating until I get back, I don't want my food to get cold at the table, I don't want it waiting there for me as if it were an afterthought of the staff. All the work the chef has done to make beautiful plating, and to deliver food at just the right temperature is lost. The diner comes back from the restroom and the only thought I can gather is, "Oh here's my food ... thanks for waiting for me."
Then a dangerous pitfall for all restaurants. Time. Too much of it between courses. When you're working on the line, in a hot kitchen, you barely have any perception of how much time is elapsing in the dining room. If you are crushed under the weight of tickets you aren't paying attention to how long a diner is waiting, you are relying on your wait staff and especially your expediter to do that for you. And sometimes dishes just take a while, especially when you're busy. The waiters have to mitigate the damage and try to make a diner feel cared for in the process. But instead we were left waiting without explanation. The restaurant wasn't crazy busy, and all I can wonder is .. what's going on? The waiter was not to be found, and even a passive-aggressive "look around," where diners will search the floor for their waiter clearly signifying a "what the eff?" attitude yielded no results.
When the food did come, we were pleased. I will defend the food, it was very good. Not mind-blowing but definitely 4-star quality. But all I can remember when I think of that restaurant were all the little mistakes they made. A more casual diner may not have noticed, but I do believe the overall experience would have been dampened for them. That is the power of subtlety, something I believe in more than anything else. A collection of minor and subtle events throughout a night will accumulate powerfully, whether positive or negative. Though I will admit that diners tend to notice negatives more than positives, all the more reason to always be on point.
It's the Little Things
I think people who know me well enough would say that I have a fair obsession with details. Little details and subtle actions in all aspects of life both concern and attract me. My room is clean and neat, but it has a purposeful and minor disarray to suggest that I am organized but not a machine. My playing style in ultimate is conservative and detail focused; I try to do all the little things right, and maybe I don't get the glory of the big play, but I know I am helping my team. When I slice a duck breast or ribeye steak to order I like to sprinkle a little sea salt on the bare slices, so that the juices pearl on the surface and the flavors bloom. I think decades of subtly feminizing the Asian male in media has ruined the American perception of them as viable men and mates. I think I could write a novel about the injustices I have perceived as an Asian-American, but to not risk sounding like a conspiracy theorist I'm just going to stick to restaurants...
Anyway, my point is you have to pay attention to the little things in the kitchen and in the dining room, because your care for details will pay big dividends in the long run. A few examples,
You bring all dishes for a particular course at once. You don't bring entrees while there are still appetizers on the table.
You never clear a plate until all diners are finished with that particular course. It's not that it's that awkward, but it does affect the pacing of the diners.
When you clear a plate from a table you never bring the plate above a diner's eye level.
You crumb or clean the table after each course, you bring new silverware and plates. It's definitely important to me to be able to have a clean tablecloth to put my hands on and enjoy coffee with dessert.
That all seems like common sense, that all seems like minor necessities, but this far from comprehensive list goes very far to make diners feel an overall dining experience was cared for. The real difficulty is that even if you did everything perfectly, a diner may not specifically notice. They will most assuredly feel like they had good service, but as I mentioned before it can seem soulless. And as I also mentioned, whereas a collection of positive service will largely go unnoticed, a single negative action will vilify you in the eyes of your diners. But mistakes will happen, you just have to recognize the opportunities to go the extra mile. You have to know when and how to either redeem your restaurant in the eyes of the public, or to make them recognize your heartfelt consideration for their experience.
He's Going the Distance
My favorite anecdote in Setting the Table is Danny Meyer's recounting of one of his first run-ins with a powerful NYC food critic. Through the restaurant grapevine and a little extracurricular research, he discovered that this certain critic disliked white wines that were served too cold. He also knew that this critic preferred Northern Italian wines. So on the night this critic was set to dine in, Mr. Meyer set aside all of his Northern Italian whites in to a malfunctioning wine cooler that kept the bottles a bit on the warmer side. But through some either bad luck or bad information, the critic orders a French wine instead. Knowing that this bottle was likely too chilled for the critic, Meyer runs to the cooler and attempts to incubate the bottle for a few minutes between his legs. As the critic is left wondering where the hell is wine is, and Meyer's loins begin to freeze over, he finally deems it acceptable and sends it to the table. Much to his dismay the critic finds the wine too warm.
Even though his efforts were in vain, you can appreciate the sentiment of a passionate restaurateur. He is going the distance to please his customers, and ultimately that is what restaurants are all about. Every restaurant is different, but every single one relies on a certain number of regulars. More often than not these regulars will either develop or have special needs outright. If you cater to them and meet these needs the first time, they will reward you with a lifetime of patronage. If you neglect them even once, you risk losing that customer's faith forever.
My mother is particularly good at this. For as long as her restaurant has been open the reviews say pretty much the same thing, "The staff's service is completely redeemed by the charming owner, Cathy Huang." I will be the first to admit that our restaurant's servers are less than hospitable. For some reason training Chinese people to smile and build a little personal connection with customers remains difficult. But my mother really goes the distance for her large list of regulars, and to gain the loyalty of first-timers. One of her most frequent and devoted regulars has a daughter who is severely, deathly allergic to a laundry list of ingredients. My mom has a set of woks and pans devoted specifically to her. My mom has the science of catering a condo development party down to a T. Every rich, Jewish real estate development on the North Shore of Long Island has a party catered by her at some point throughout the year. She knows to prepare a ton of easily prepared dim sum and dumplings for her customers during camp visiting weekends, so parents can take some microwavable Chinese food to their kids at sleep-away camp. She not only knows, but loves to nurture people and make them feel welcome. And that is the difference. Doing it is one thing, loving to do it is another. But as I mentioned before, emotional proficiency can't be taught.
You either love it or you don't. Restaurants aren't for everyone, but they can find the most unexpected people. The feeling you get from giving genuine care, and receiving sincere thanks in return is a rewarding one. Even if you are very good at pretending to care about your customers, eventually your disingenuous actions will fail you. That is why an ability to read and be empathetic towards others can't be taught. You have to want to do it, and your customers are keenly aware of the difference.
I'm an easy-going diner. I rarely have specific requirements. But I know some people do. I don't blame them. I sometimes get frustrated when they act like spoiled children, but that's my stubbornness reacting as well. I hope as I mature I will learn to emanate the kind of genuine hospitality my mother can. But until then perhaps I can fume in a kitchen and use my cleaver to take out frustration on some poor dead animal.
EP6
Monday, April 19, 2010
Sunday, April 11, 2010
The End
I don't really believe in happy endings. But generally, if you go to a good school, you worked decently hard, kept organized, it is believed you would eventually find your way to a stable happiness. Life has its ups and downs, the Dalai Lama says it oscillates; no one lives in harmonious satisfaction or miserable depression for long, eventually you come back to a homeostatic point. You get a job, you get married, you have kids, and the story goes on... you reach peace, things work themselves out.
But I don't think that it all necessarily ends up okay. We like to hope so, like to tell ourselves that, but I don't believe it. You have to make your own happy ending, you have to make your own peace with the world.
And as cliche as it is you must always remember, the only thing you can expect is the unexpected.
I had all sorts of things to write about. Lots of exciting things that happened in the kitchen. I was growing quite happy with my job, looking forward to everyday with a contained excitement. There were things to be practiced, new things to learn and improve at, people to chat with, jokes to be made, good food to eat (especially cookies). I felt I had finally transitioned to being a cook on the outside and in my heart. Waiting tables seemed bothersome, now it was all about doing the honest work of cooking.
And I no longer struggled everyday like I had when I first started. That first month, December, was such a busy month. I had so much personal shit going on and having the Chef yell at me for being slow and constantly being behind was killing me. So many times I wanted to break down and quit. I wanted to walk out of the kitchen. I doubted myself thinking I had made a huge mistake, this was not the career for me, I can't handle it. And then an even more depressing thought rose; if I thought I had loved to cook and I can't handle it, now what do I do?
But I tend to be a bit dramatic when acclimating to new environments. By the end of February it had worked itself out. I was enjoying the kitchen, I was starting to get close and enjoy hanging out with the guys. My Spanish was getting better, there were jokes to be had, food to talk about. I breezed through prep, I made great family meals (they discovered I'm really in to curries, and the poor gringos suffered from the spice .. or so I'm told), the weather was starting to be beautiful. That old kitchen with its outdated equipment, warped pots and pans was just fantastic on a nice spring day. The windows were opened, the breeze rolled in to refresh you as you sweated over a hot burner, the radio was going. During employee meal we'd go outside and eat on the terrace. I was starting to get very comfortable. My original exit date of early July seemed not so necessary anymore. Maybe I'll stay a bit longer, learn a bit more. Why not? This is a good job, I'm learning a lot, maybe this is a valuable education to be had.
And then life shuts the door on you.
Easter Sunday 2010 was the last dinner Va Pensiero will have served. After 13 years being owned by Chef Jeffrey Muldrow the doors have been closed. The restaurant was owned and run by Peggy Ryan, now an instructor at Kendall College, for years and years before that. But unfortunately it is no more. The "hidden North Shore jewel" is gone for the foreseeable future.
I don't think it has really hit me yet. When NUT lost at Regionals last year rather abruptly on Saturday I was quite cheerful and optimistic. What a great season I thought, an unfortunate end, but such is life, right? And I kind of feel that way now. I knew the time was going to end, perhaps it came sooner than I thought, no big deal I'll just start my summer plan a few months early. Maybe this is a sign that I was getting too comfortable, a divine nudge to get me going to culinary school and on to the next phase of the plan.
But when it came to do the End of the Year banquet and I got up to give a short speech about what the team meant to me, what the season had meant to me, I found myself choking up and fighting back tears. My briefly prepared speech fell apart, I rambled off something about proper squat form and I sat back down, torn up inside.
It was over. College ultimate, something that meant more to me than almost anything was done. I only got a little more than 2 years out of it, I felt robbed of the time I deserved.
Perhaps I'm still not coming to grips with not being a college ultimate player anymore. The point is it took me a few weeks to realize the gravity of the situation.
It's ... over.
At least with the ultimate team I knew I'd see most of them again at some point. The cooks, the waiters, the chef ... that isn't necessarily the case. No more conversations about getting fat, no more talking about opening a taco stand, no more almost cutting yourself because you were too busy checking out the hostess for the 15 seconds she steps in the kitchen. No more having the cooks laugh their asses off at me because I was actually the only one who cut myself. No more buying band-aids for the first-aid kit.
I've said it before in this blog, but I really don't do goodbyes very well. It hasn't hit me yet, but I imagine it will soon. All the inane conversations I miss so much from doing road trips to ultimate tournaments are what I miss the most. I get the feeling all the silly chatter that goes on in the kitchen, and horsing around on slow nights and joking knife-fights are what I will miss the most also.
But such is the nature of the business. It is cruel and ruthless and perhaps one of the worst sufferers in a down economy. I've seen restaurants close, my mother's own restaurants in fact, and frankly there's nothing you can do. You see the snowball in the distance and you hope it doesn't start accumulating mass, but sometimes it just becomes too big of a mess. You cut your losses and run.
I don't want to divulge too many details, but basically shit got bad. I feel bad for all the employees. I knew my days there were numbered, but the other guys were pretty set on that restaurant for life. My chef devoted 13 years of his life to that restaurant, my sous chef about 10 years, some of the other cooks and waiters came with the building when my chef took it over. This restaurant is ages old and has been a hidden Evanston gem for decades. And it all comes crashing down in an instant. A life's work erased, a kitchen full of one person's vision and hopes and dreams vanishes.
Excuse my penchant for the dramatic but I can't help but feel awful. For all the employees I've come to consider a family, for my chef, and for myself. What an ominous turn of events. What if this happened to me? On the phone it sounds like my chef is taking it like a man. He's gunning up and looking for a job after he's been his own boss for over a decade. But to see something you poured so much of your soul in to disappear? I'm not even taking this very well, I couldn't picture myself being so composed after a life-shattering event like that...
But alas I have a plan and it was a plan I had in motion from a while ago. I knew I would leave Va Pensiero at the end of June, I knew I would take the summer to try new things and get as much diverse experience as possible. It's back to being an intern or a "stage" (pronounced stAHge) in some 4-star restaurants. It's time to take myself up on the challenge of working at a fishmonger, or a butcher shop or a bakery and learning something that I may not be able to learn the same way in culinary school. It's time to go back to Futami and start taking waiting tables pretty seriously because that's my main job as of now.
So there is hope for me yet. And I hope for the best for my once coworkers. But as April brings cold rains and gloomy skies I can't help but notice the downcast nature of this event. It's sad and ironic that just after I write a post about getting it back in gear that suddenly I no longer have a place to practice my craft.
I'll take a week. Do my stupid taxes, get my bank account together, and start formulating a plot. But for now it's time for me to pack my knives and go.
Wish us all luck,
EP6
Edit: http://linecook415.blogspot.com/2010/03/stage-guide.html
One of my favorite blogs, some perfectly timed advice for being a good stage. If you were ever interested in doing that sort of thing. Here's to hoping I have learned enough.
But I don't think that it all necessarily ends up okay. We like to hope so, like to tell ourselves that, but I don't believe it. You have to make your own happy ending, you have to make your own peace with the world.
And as cliche as it is you must always remember, the only thing you can expect is the unexpected.
I had all sorts of things to write about. Lots of exciting things that happened in the kitchen. I was growing quite happy with my job, looking forward to everyday with a contained excitement. There were things to be practiced, new things to learn and improve at, people to chat with, jokes to be made, good food to eat (especially cookies). I felt I had finally transitioned to being a cook on the outside and in my heart. Waiting tables seemed bothersome, now it was all about doing the honest work of cooking.
And I no longer struggled everyday like I had when I first started. That first month, December, was such a busy month. I had so much personal shit going on and having the Chef yell at me for being slow and constantly being behind was killing me. So many times I wanted to break down and quit. I wanted to walk out of the kitchen. I doubted myself thinking I had made a huge mistake, this was not the career for me, I can't handle it. And then an even more depressing thought rose; if I thought I had loved to cook and I can't handle it, now what do I do?
But I tend to be a bit dramatic when acclimating to new environments. By the end of February it had worked itself out. I was enjoying the kitchen, I was starting to get close and enjoy hanging out with the guys. My Spanish was getting better, there were jokes to be had, food to talk about. I breezed through prep, I made great family meals (they discovered I'm really in to curries, and the poor gringos suffered from the spice .. or so I'm told), the weather was starting to be beautiful. That old kitchen with its outdated equipment, warped pots and pans was just fantastic on a nice spring day. The windows were opened, the breeze rolled in to refresh you as you sweated over a hot burner, the radio was going. During employee meal we'd go outside and eat on the terrace. I was starting to get very comfortable. My original exit date of early July seemed not so necessary anymore. Maybe I'll stay a bit longer, learn a bit more. Why not? This is a good job, I'm learning a lot, maybe this is a valuable education to be had.
And then life shuts the door on you.
Easter Sunday 2010 was the last dinner Va Pensiero will have served. After 13 years being owned by Chef Jeffrey Muldrow the doors have been closed. The restaurant was owned and run by Peggy Ryan, now an instructor at Kendall College, for years and years before that. But unfortunately it is no more. The "hidden North Shore jewel" is gone for the foreseeable future.
I don't think it has really hit me yet. When NUT lost at Regionals last year rather abruptly on Saturday I was quite cheerful and optimistic. What a great season I thought, an unfortunate end, but such is life, right? And I kind of feel that way now. I knew the time was going to end, perhaps it came sooner than I thought, no big deal I'll just start my summer plan a few months early. Maybe this is a sign that I was getting too comfortable, a divine nudge to get me going to culinary school and on to the next phase of the plan.
But when it came to do the End of the Year banquet and I got up to give a short speech about what the team meant to me, what the season had meant to me, I found myself choking up and fighting back tears. My briefly prepared speech fell apart, I rambled off something about proper squat form and I sat back down, torn up inside.
It was over. College ultimate, something that meant more to me than almost anything was done. I only got a little more than 2 years out of it, I felt robbed of the time I deserved.
Perhaps I'm still not coming to grips with not being a college ultimate player anymore. The point is it took me a few weeks to realize the gravity of the situation.
It's ... over.
At least with the ultimate team I knew I'd see most of them again at some point. The cooks, the waiters, the chef ... that isn't necessarily the case. No more conversations about getting fat, no more talking about opening a taco stand, no more almost cutting yourself because you were too busy checking out the hostess for the 15 seconds she steps in the kitchen. No more having the cooks laugh their asses off at me because I was actually the only one who cut myself. No more buying band-aids for the first-aid kit.
I've said it before in this blog, but I really don't do goodbyes very well. It hasn't hit me yet, but I imagine it will soon. All the inane conversations I miss so much from doing road trips to ultimate tournaments are what I miss the most. I get the feeling all the silly chatter that goes on in the kitchen, and horsing around on slow nights and joking knife-fights are what I will miss the most also.
But such is the nature of the business. It is cruel and ruthless and perhaps one of the worst sufferers in a down economy. I've seen restaurants close, my mother's own restaurants in fact, and frankly there's nothing you can do. You see the snowball in the distance and you hope it doesn't start accumulating mass, but sometimes it just becomes too big of a mess. You cut your losses and run.
I don't want to divulge too many details, but basically shit got bad. I feel bad for all the employees. I knew my days there were numbered, but the other guys were pretty set on that restaurant for life. My chef devoted 13 years of his life to that restaurant, my sous chef about 10 years, some of the other cooks and waiters came with the building when my chef took it over. This restaurant is ages old and has been a hidden Evanston gem for decades. And it all comes crashing down in an instant. A life's work erased, a kitchen full of one person's vision and hopes and dreams vanishes.
Excuse my penchant for the dramatic but I can't help but feel awful. For all the employees I've come to consider a family, for my chef, and for myself. What an ominous turn of events. What if this happened to me? On the phone it sounds like my chef is taking it like a man. He's gunning up and looking for a job after he's been his own boss for over a decade. But to see something you poured so much of your soul in to disappear? I'm not even taking this very well, I couldn't picture myself being so composed after a life-shattering event like that...
But alas I have a plan and it was a plan I had in motion from a while ago. I knew I would leave Va Pensiero at the end of June, I knew I would take the summer to try new things and get as much diverse experience as possible. It's back to being an intern or a "stage" (pronounced stAHge) in some 4-star restaurants. It's time to take myself up on the challenge of working at a fishmonger, or a butcher shop or a bakery and learning something that I may not be able to learn the same way in culinary school. It's time to go back to Futami and start taking waiting tables pretty seriously because that's my main job as of now.
So there is hope for me yet. And I hope for the best for my once coworkers. But as April brings cold rains and gloomy skies I can't help but notice the downcast nature of this event. It's sad and ironic that just after I write a post about getting it back in gear that suddenly I no longer have a place to practice my craft.
I'll take a week. Do my stupid taxes, get my bank account together, and start formulating a plot. But for now it's time for me to pack my knives and go.
Wish us all luck,
EP6
Edit: http://linecook415.blogspot.com/2010/03/stage-guide.html
One of my favorite blogs, some perfectly timed advice for being a good stage. If you were ever interested in doing that sort of thing. Here's to hoping I have learned enough.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Grilling
I apologize for the lack of posts. March was a crazy month. But the good news is I have so many near-complete posts that I can pretty much Scatter Shot all of them to you in the next few weeks like in Contra (oh boy I just lost most of you). I'm going to blame my lack of writing mainly on my mini vacation, which involved going to Alabama to see Ms. Ali Frederick and Mr. Robert McMenamin get married. Congratulations guys! Love you and the great city of Birmingham.
So I took a brief hiatus from cooking. Being a cellist growing up there was a famous saying by Gregor Piatigorsky that went something like, "If I don't practice for a day, I notice. If I don't practice for 3 days, my wife notices. If I don't practice for a week, my audience notices." I'm not sure if that was actually Piatigorsky (who was a cellist), or if that was a stock phrase all the professors at Juilliard used to force upon us, but the point remains. If I don't cook for a week, what happens exactly? Since I'm not close to mastering anything and my actions depend on focused daily repetition, am I going to go back and suck ass?
Well good thing they let me warm up by putting me on my most familiar station.
Oh wait, they decided to try me out on grill on a Friday. Great.
I've watched grill and felt its presence since day one. It is fucking hot. It is uncomfortable to put your hand a foot away from the flame, it is downright painful to put it within 6 inches. Just being around the grill requires you to hydrate continuously. A piece of meat will get dark, black grill marks in under 15 seconds on our grill. On my first day ever they had me roast red peppers on the thing. I used the extra long tongs because it hurt to reach towards the back of the grill. Now I am a bit more comfortable with the heat, which gives me hope that I'm building a tolerance and the cooks will no longer call me "Manos de Puto" or "Bitch Hands," but the grill remains daunting. I know how all the dishes work, I've worked the station on a slow night, but the chef decided to keep a skeleton crew for Friday and see how it went.
First, a preface .. grilling is sweet. It has long had associations with manliness, facial hair and killing animals. It is essentially the first cooking technique mastered by humans. All you needed was a spear, an open fire, a woman to drag in to your cave for post-gluttony cuddling and you were a happy Cro-Magnon fool. Unfortunately, backyard barbecues are now most common in the suburban homes of the neutered, modern male, but grilling remains a way to reconnect with a man's forgotten primal nature (more adjectives please). Since it is said that 1/12 people on the Asian continent are descended from Genghis Khan, I'm going to pretend and picture myself riding a horse (which would be awesome), chasing ruminants on the steppes (which would be awesome), and raining down hot fire/arrows in the hunt (which would be awesome), and grilling them for a post-pillage feast (which would be awesome ... minus the wake of destruction I leave in peasantry lives).
So you would think I would start growing facial hair almost immediately by working the grill on a fairly busy night, understaffed and unpracticed, right? Unfortunately what little facial hair I do have was singed off as I stepped up to the plate. When I reach in to turn meats and veg I have to squint to ease the heat from searing my eyeballs (on second thought, this may be the evolutionary advantage of tiny, Asian eyes... I've always wondered...). And it isn't long before I'm juggling a ton of dishes and there are things being grilled everywhere. Because the grill is so hot, an expensive piece of meat will become toast if you neglect it. A pasta sauce you can fix at almost any stage of the game if you mess it up. A venison loin that goes beyond medium cannot be salvaged. It is garbage, to be given to a dishwasher to be eaten or thrown out (game like venison are still wild animals and have not been bred to have fatty, marbled meat, so overcooking is even more unforgivable when working with game). So precision is extremely important. There is an understood degree of waste for training a cook, but I wanted to prove that I could combine all that theoretical knowledge I've gathered from reading about food with the limited technical proficiency I have.
I want to mention two dishes in particular that gave me a hard time.
Whole Mediterranean Sea Bass Baked with Salt Crust, Filleted Tableside and served with Grilled Vegetables, and Salsa Verde
Balsamic Marinated Ribeye for Two, Sliced Tableside and served with Confit Shallots and Root Vegetable-Fontina Timbale
These are our two big dishes that are brought out on carts to the table, and served by the chef or a waiter captain. They are really quite tasty and eye catching, as I've heard the aroma and sight of these dishes coming out of the kitchen turns a lot of heads in the dining room. Unfortunately, they are absolute bastards to prepare.
Butchering a small fish like a sea bass isn't difficult, unless you have little to no practice with it. Oh right, that's me. I had to break down 7 whole fish on top of all the other shit I had to do that day and I knew it was going to take a long time. I'm sure I will talk about this at length some time in the future, but know that it is a pain in the ass if you are bad at it. Fish are slippery bastards and require a knife sharpened to mythic ninja sharpness to filet properly. Just keep that in mind the next time you buy or catch a whole fish. Frankly it may just be easier to use your axe to chop the head off, batter and fry the whole bitch. (How's that for culinary integrity!)
The salt crust is a simple thing. It's just egg whites whipped in a stand mixer until they become a meringue essentially. But replace all the sugar with salt. The lecithin and albumen proteins in the egg white form networks around air is it is whipped and gets an almost cloud like texture. Unfortunately it's very easy to mistake for meringue or whipped cream and trying to taste a salt crust is well ... a really unfortunate experience.
Anyway, the process for baking a whole fish goes something like this.
1) You get yourself a "tony" pan, which in our kitchen is a thick, cast-iron, rectangular pan about 10x15, and hose it down in non-stick spray (I have no idea why my chef calls it a tony pan)
2) You put your fish down, you season each filet lightly, you make sure the thyme and lemon it's stuffed with isn't poking out so it burns, but is protected in the fish's cavity and allowed to perfume the whole thing
3) You put the fish in the pan and smear on the salt crust, the goal is that the salt crust protects the flesh of fish (which is delicate and prone to overcooking), and shouldn't transmit an overly salty taste to the fish
4) You throw it in the hot-hot convection oven (runs at about 475 during service) and set the timer to 15 minutes
5) When it's done you take it out (duh) and pour a little water in to the smoking hot pan, this helps the fish separate from the pan so it's like a quick deglaze except we aren't building sauce
Then it's ready to go. That sounds really easy, right? Pretty much a "set it and forget it" kind of deal, right? Well a few things complicates the process.
1) A lot of times the stupid waiters will "order-fire" a whole fish, which means the diners aren't having appetizers and the first thing they will be eating is a whole fish. Get that fucker in the oven and out in to the dining room ASAP. Well despite the stupid waiters telling the stupid customers that it takes a long time, they bitch and complain anyway about how long it takes. Our oven is running pretty much at max temp, there's nothing we can do to make it go faster except maybe increase the atmospheric pressure of the kitchen, so shut the fuck up.
2) Oven real estate is valuable. It's a big fucking oven but the whole kitchen uses it. And almost everything from the grill goes in there at some point. So when you are juggling 3 beef tenderloin entrees, a venison, 2 whole fish, a ribeye, and the pantry is working the apple tarts and the budinos, and the saute is working a few Amish chickens ... things get crowded and everyone is opening the door at a different time and changing the temperature and cooking time. It's hard to hit a perfect medium rare when the door gets opened every minute and there are desserts and proteins stealing heat from your steak. So when a fish should ideally cook in 15 minutes, sometimes it can vary, and it only takes a minute or so to make the difference between perfect, flaky fish and translucent, jello-like fish.
3) Oh and finding space and time in the oven for all your dishes is difficult, but timing all those dishes themselves is also a pain in the ass. The oven has one timer built in and the grill cook keeps one electronic timer near his station. Two timers for having up to 6 dishes working at once is kind of an issue, especially with such heat sensitive foods. Assuming no one messes with your timer for their dishes you'll have 2 reliable clocks and then you'll just have to rely on your internal clock from there. Have I forgotten about some things before? Maybe. But some cuts have better margins for error than others. Just remember to rest your meat for god's sake.
Anyway, the ribeye has similar problems. It takes a long ass time to cook (12-15 minutes depending on temperature) and it needs to rest a lot longer. The timbale that comes with it is also kind of a hassle because it is prepared in a disposable tin ramekin that causes a lot of sticking. Before heating it you have to cut it out, hose it with non-spray stick and hit it with a few pats of butter to make it luscious. Surgically removing a baked food item from its casing and then sending it back in the oven during the crush of service = annoying. Stabbing yourself through a tin cup = extremely possible. Being a big, clumsy Asian with man paws = ...not my fault, I swear...
So accounting for all of that, how did I do? My sous chef, Chuy, had to jump in and help me a little bit because I sold ALL of the whole fish. That is extremely unusual because it's pretty expensive and to sell 7 in one night is rare. Then we realized it was Good Friday and a lot of people weren't eating meat. FML. My hands were a little raw from basking in so much heat, I know some things weren't perfect. I turned out a grilled calamari dish that wasn't perfect, I know it in my heart but unfortunately didn't have time to fix it. Some of the pumpkin polenta may not have been in the perfect ratio of cheese/butter and polenta but ... generally I got not complaints. Chuy likes to make fun of me for being slow and clumsy a lot of the time but at the end of the day he knows I care and he encourages me a lot. He tells me I did very well for my first time. I didn't get any complaints, and only the first fish was slightly undercooked, I had to put it under the broiler for a second. As I was diving in and out of coolers and manning the grill my chef would periodically ask me,
"How do you learn to swim, Eric?"
"Throw me in the deep end, sir!"
And that was that. I'm guessing I'm either lucky or I have a preternatural sense for what medium rare is.
I'm being kind of a girlface and complaining a lot, but actually it was a really fun experience. I think a lot of the appeal of cooking is sometimes getting in the shit and fighting your way out. It requires a level of concentration and efficient movement that can be really exhilarating (if you're into that sort of thing). Time flies, there's heat and pans everywhere, it's fun as shit. And I like learning and practicing this kind of stuff. Curiosity and an insatiable desire to learn are important attributes for a good cook. You are always exploring your boundaries and thinking about how to do something better. Now I know many of you guys scoffed at that saying, "Eric/Panda ... in to learning? Are you kidding me?!" But just because I felt honing my Halo skillz was more important than Introduction to Modern Cosmology doesn't mean I don't like learning. I just like learning about certain things.
And anyway, me and Wilson are the #2 doubles Halo team at Northwestern and I know the escape velocity of earth is 11 km/sec, and the nearest galaxy is Alpha Centauri at 4.37 light years. So I win.
Hah! Taste it.
Except I just admitted that me and Wilson are the #2 doubles Halo team at Northwestern in a public forum.
Damn... I lose.
Back to the routine!
EP6
So I took a brief hiatus from cooking. Being a cellist growing up there was a famous saying by Gregor Piatigorsky that went something like, "If I don't practice for a day, I notice. If I don't practice for 3 days, my wife notices. If I don't practice for a week, my audience notices." I'm not sure if that was actually Piatigorsky (who was a cellist), or if that was a stock phrase all the professors at Juilliard used to force upon us, but the point remains. If I don't cook for a week, what happens exactly? Since I'm not close to mastering anything and my actions depend on focused daily repetition, am I going to go back and suck ass?
Well good thing they let me warm up by putting me on my most familiar station.
Oh wait, they decided to try me out on grill on a Friday. Great.
I've watched grill and felt its presence since day one. It is fucking hot. It is uncomfortable to put your hand a foot away from the flame, it is downright painful to put it within 6 inches. Just being around the grill requires you to hydrate continuously. A piece of meat will get dark, black grill marks in under 15 seconds on our grill. On my first day ever they had me roast red peppers on the thing. I used the extra long tongs because it hurt to reach towards the back of the grill. Now I am a bit more comfortable with the heat, which gives me hope that I'm building a tolerance and the cooks will no longer call me "Manos de Puto" or "Bitch Hands," but the grill remains daunting. I know how all the dishes work, I've worked the station on a slow night, but the chef decided to keep a skeleton crew for Friday and see how it went.
First, a preface .. grilling is sweet. It has long had associations with manliness, facial hair and killing animals. It is essentially the first cooking technique mastered by humans. All you needed was a spear, an open fire, a woman to drag in to your cave for post-gluttony cuddling and you were a happy Cro-Magnon fool. Unfortunately, backyard barbecues are now most common in the suburban homes of the neutered, modern male, but grilling remains a way to reconnect with a man's forgotten primal nature (more adjectives please). Since it is said that 1/12 people on the Asian continent are descended from Genghis Khan, I'm going to pretend and picture myself riding a horse (which would be awesome), chasing ruminants on the steppes (which would be awesome), and raining down hot fire/arrows in the hunt (which would be awesome), and grilling them for a post-pillage feast (which would be awesome ... minus the wake of destruction I leave in peasantry lives).
So you would think I would start growing facial hair almost immediately by working the grill on a fairly busy night, understaffed and unpracticed, right? Unfortunately what little facial hair I do have was singed off as I stepped up to the plate. When I reach in to turn meats and veg I have to squint to ease the heat from searing my eyeballs (on second thought, this may be the evolutionary advantage of tiny, Asian eyes... I've always wondered...). And it isn't long before I'm juggling a ton of dishes and there are things being grilled everywhere. Because the grill is so hot, an expensive piece of meat will become toast if you neglect it. A pasta sauce you can fix at almost any stage of the game if you mess it up. A venison loin that goes beyond medium cannot be salvaged. It is garbage, to be given to a dishwasher to be eaten or thrown out (game like venison are still wild animals and have not been bred to have fatty, marbled meat, so overcooking is even more unforgivable when working with game). So precision is extremely important. There is an understood degree of waste for training a cook, but I wanted to prove that I could combine all that theoretical knowledge I've gathered from reading about food with the limited technical proficiency I have.
I want to mention two dishes in particular that gave me a hard time.
Whole Mediterranean Sea Bass Baked with Salt Crust, Filleted Tableside and served with Grilled Vegetables, and Salsa Verde
Balsamic Marinated Ribeye for Two, Sliced Tableside and served with Confit Shallots and Root Vegetable-Fontina Timbale
These are our two big dishes that are brought out on carts to the table, and served by the chef or a waiter captain. They are really quite tasty and eye catching, as I've heard the aroma and sight of these dishes coming out of the kitchen turns a lot of heads in the dining room. Unfortunately, they are absolute bastards to prepare.
Butchering a small fish like a sea bass isn't difficult, unless you have little to no practice with it. Oh right, that's me. I had to break down 7 whole fish on top of all the other shit I had to do that day and I knew it was going to take a long time. I'm sure I will talk about this at length some time in the future, but know that it is a pain in the ass if you are bad at it. Fish are slippery bastards and require a knife sharpened to mythic ninja sharpness to filet properly. Just keep that in mind the next time you buy or catch a whole fish. Frankly it may just be easier to use your axe to chop the head off, batter and fry the whole bitch. (How's that for culinary integrity!)
The salt crust is a simple thing. It's just egg whites whipped in a stand mixer until they become a meringue essentially. But replace all the sugar with salt. The lecithin and albumen proteins in the egg white form networks around air is it is whipped and gets an almost cloud like texture. Unfortunately it's very easy to mistake for meringue or whipped cream and trying to taste a salt crust is well ... a really unfortunate experience.
Anyway, the process for baking a whole fish goes something like this.
1) You get yourself a "tony" pan, which in our kitchen is a thick, cast-iron, rectangular pan about 10x15, and hose it down in non-stick spray (I have no idea why my chef calls it a tony pan)
2) You put your fish down, you season each filet lightly, you make sure the thyme and lemon it's stuffed with isn't poking out so it burns, but is protected in the fish's cavity and allowed to perfume the whole thing
3) You put the fish in the pan and smear on the salt crust, the goal is that the salt crust protects the flesh of fish (which is delicate and prone to overcooking), and shouldn't transmit an overly salty taste to the fish
4) You throw it in the hot-hot convection oven (runs at about 475 during service) and set the timer to 15 minutes
5) When it's done you take it out (duh) and pour a little water in to the smoking hot pan, this helps the fish separate from the pan so it's like a quick deglaze except we aren't building sauce
Then it's ready to go. That sounds really easy, right? Pretty much a "set it and forget it" kind of deal, right? Well a few things complicates the process.
1) A lot of times the stupid waiters will "order-fire" a whole fish, which means the diners aren't having appetizers and the first thing they will be eating is a whole fish. Get that fucker in the oven and out in to the dining room ASAP. Well despite the stupid waiters telling the stupid customers that it takes a long time, they bitch and complain anyway about how long it takes. Our oven is running pretty much at max temp, there's nothing we can do to make it go faster except maybe increase the atmospheric pressure of the kitchen, so shut the fuck up.
2) Oven real estate is valuable. It's a big fucking oven but the whole kitchen uses it. And almost everything from the grill goes in there at some point. So when you are juggling 3 beef tenderloin entrees, a venison, 2 whole fish, a ribeye, and the pantry is working the apple tarts and the budinos, and the saute is working a few Amish chickens ... things get crowded and everyone is opening the door at a different time and changing the temperature and cooking time. It's hard to hit a perfect medium rare when the door gets opened every minute and there are desserts and proteins stealing heat from your steak. So when a fish should ideally cook in 15 minutes, sometimes it can vary, and it only takes a minute or so to make the difference between perfect, flaky fish and translucent, jello-like fish.
3) Oh and finding space and time in the oven for all your dishes is difficult, but timing all those dishes themselves is also a pain in the ass. The oven has one timer built in and the grill cook keeps one electronic timer near his station. Two timers for having up to 6 dishes working at once is kind of an issue, especially with such heat sensitive foods. Assuming no one messes with your timer for their dishes you'll have 2 reliable clocks and then you'll just have to rely on your internal clock from there. Have I forgotten about some things before? Maybe. But some cuts have better margins for error than others. Just remember to rest your meat for god's sake.
Anyway, the ribeye has similar problems. It takes a long ass time to cook (12-15 minutes depending on temperature) and it needs to rest a lot longer. The timbale that comes with it is also kind of a hassle because it is prepared in a disposable tin ramekin that causes a lot of sticking. Before heating it you have to cut it out, hose it with non-spray stick and hit it with a few pats of butter to make it luscious. Surgically removing a baked food item from its casing and then sending it back in the oven during the crush of service = annoying. Stabbing yourself through a tin cup = extremely possible. Being a big, clumsy Asian with man paws = ...not my fault, I swear...
So accounting for all of that, how did I do? My sous chef, Chuy, had to jump in and help me a little bit because I sold ALL of the whole fish. That is extremely unusual because it's pretty expensive and to sell 7 in one night is rare. Then we realized it was Good Friday and a lot of people weren't eating meat. FML. My hands were a little raw from basking in so much heat, I know some things weren't perfect. I turned out a grilled calamari dish that wasn't perfect, I know it in my heart but unfortunately didn't have time to fix it. Some of the pumpkin polenta may not have been in the perfect ratio of cheese/butter and polenta but ... generally I got not complaints. Chuy likes to make fun of me for being slow and clumsy a lot of the time but at the end of the day he knows I care and he encourages me a lot. He tells me I did very well for my first time. I didn't get any complaints, and only the first fish was slightly undercooked, I had to put it under the broiler for a second. As I was diving in and out of coolers and manning the grill my chef would periodically ask me,
"How do you learn to swim, Eric?"
"Throw me in the deep end, sir!"
And that was that. I'm guessing I'm either lucky or I have a preternatural sense for what medium rare is.
I'm being kind of a girlface and complaining a lot, but actually it was a really fun experience. I think a lot of the appeal of cooking is sometimes getting in the shit and fighting your way out. It requires a level of concentration and efficient movement that can be really exhilarating (if you're into that sort of thing). Time flies, there's heat and pans everywhere, it's fun as shit. And I like learning and practicing this kind of stuff. Curiosity and an insatiable desire to learn are important attributes for a good cook. You are always exploring your boundaries and thinking about how to do something better. Now I know many of you guys scoffed at that saying, "Eric/Panda ... in to learning? Are you kidding me?!" But just because I felt honing my Halo skillz was more important than Introduction to Modern Cosmology doesn't mean I don't like learning. I just like learning about certain things.
And anyway, me and Wilson are the #2 doubles Halo team at Northwestern and I know the escape velocity of earth is 11 km/sec, and the nearest galaxy is Alpha Centauri at 4.37 light years. So I win.
Hah! Taste it.
Except I just admitted that me and Wilson are the #2 doubles Halo team at Northwestern in a public forum.
Damn... I lose.
Back to the routine!
EP6
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