A New Kitchen

Kind of like "A New Hope" but minus the space smugglers and whiny bitch protagonists.

Boy, we're already starting this one off on a nerdy note.

Anyway, don't let the title fool you. I haven't gotten a new job yet. But I did asked to brave the crucible known as the "stage" (pronounced stAHge, since people keep asking).

Sometimes a stage is much like the kind I did at Oceanique and Va Pensiero. An extended period of employment in which it is understood that you work unpaid in exchange for an education. I worked part-time at Oceanique for about 6 months. I worked part-time at Va Pensiero for about 4 months before I got a job.

Sometimes people consider a stage a short tryout that lasts maybe 1-3 days, and the intent is that it is an unpaid trial period that is meant to assess your viability as an employee. It's a trail where you hang around a kitchen, work and hope for a job. That is what we'll be talking about today.

A stage is part athletic tryout, part audition. You work longer and harder than the rest of the staff, you do everything they don't want to do themselves, you have to prove you're fast and competent, and that you're a personable enough human being that the brigade would enjoy being around you 10-12 hours a day. It's unpaid, punishing and doesn't bear any tangible rewards over the course of the day. That is, unless you get the job. (Well they were kind enough to treat me to as many PBRs I could want. Which is not that many.)

I've only worked in a few kitchens, and they all have followed a fairly similar pattern. You do your prep on the line with a few cooks, dry goods in the back, perishables in the big walk-in cooler, maybe some soft music in the background for morale purposes and a little fun (more often than not, traditional Mexican folk music and polka).

So I was pretty shocked when I was thrown in to the kitchen at Lula. I was introduced to the sous-chef, a wiry guy with patchy facial hair and a Southern twang on his voice, who gave me the grand tour. He's a very nice guy, he clearly gets stages fairly often and has a rehearsed means of crash-coursing them on the kitchen. He leads me downstairs and my brain is having issues taking everything in and processing it. Like many city kitchens, the line and the prep kitchen are separate. All the prep is done in the basement where there are an array of stainless steel tables, and then prepped produce is brought upstairs to be cooked during service. He leads me to the locker room to get me suited up and on the way I pass a whole variety of faces. There's Modest Mouse blasting off an iPod dock and I can barely hear people's names as they introduce themselves, and there are people running around everywhere with ice, vacuum packed goodies, and big pots of braised pork. It is alive, this kitchen is buzzing and I know I'm about to HALO-jump onto a breakneck, no-stop prep train. (In this instance I don't mean the video game Halo, I mean a High Altitude Low Open parachute jump that is used in the military to quickly and quietly insert yourself into a situation from the air. See, I'm not always a nerd.)

So Hunter (the sous-chef) leads me to the locker room (did I mention that the basement kitchen is just about 6'1" high, meaning I bump in to every ceiling fixture along the way? Yeah, way to make myself look clumsy already) and points,

"Jackets, pants, put your shit down where there's space, grab a knife, suit up, get rollin'."

And I do exactly that. Except I probably take 10 min. too long to get dressed. Why? A couple of reasons.

1) I have yet to need to use my own knives in a kitchen, so it takes me a while to decide what I should take, and get them ready to slice and dice. I decide on a chef's knife and a paring knife. Guns up, let's do this.

2) On the way in to the kitchen I acknowledge that for the first time I will be working with women. A lot of small women. Every jacket I seem to find is a tiny garb that would barely cover my thigh in chef whites. Without a mirror, I am self-conscious that my rippling biceps are probably too accentuated by the small jacket. But I risk looking awesome for service and get down to business.

And away we go! Prep time. Whatcha need, chef? Let's do this!

I look over at the white board and I am struck with both awe and fear. It's a beautifully organized board with print-out templates checking prep statuses of items between lunch and dinner, every cook's to-do list, any 86'd items. Everything is accounted for. And I even have a cute little section dedicated to me. Under the word "Stage" is a laundry list of to-do items that I know are going to suck. The words "Shell green almonds" and "Clean stinging nettles" pop out at me. Oh, balls.

Green almonds are under-ripe almonds. They come in compact, fuzzy green shells and need to be cut away with a paring knife, but be careful to not damage the tender nut (actually stone fruit seed) inside. They need a quart of them. I see two sheet trays (big, rectangular metal trays that probably measure about 36x24) in the walk-in loaded with green almonds. Well this should be fun. Too bad I drank a hipster cup of coffee and am jittery with caffeine and nicotine. Coupled with my slightly rusty knife skills, I murder a handful of green almonds before I start shelling them cleanly. Oh what I would do to cut some onions.

And then stinging nettles. Without going to Wikipedia, what I know about stinging nettles is that they are a North American plant that does exactly what its name implies. Sting you. It's covered in hairs and irritating oils that give you a painful case of the minor burn-sies and powerfully itchies. You need to double up on latex gloves to clean them. But once they are washed and cooked, the poison is inoculated and they are a hearty, tasty green vegetable. But staring at a giant box of them, and the possibility of a wicked case of hives, I am a little disheartened.

But prep work is refreshing. It's been awhile since working with food. The basement is hot, there's a huge staff of young, fun-loving restaurant workers joking around, but getting down to business (culinarily). The sous-chef is taunting people with a butchered lamb's head. A 5 foot Mexican woman is tending to a most delicious pot of braised pork shoulder, and is making quesadillas for staff meal. The very attractive intern from culinary school is making chef's whites look good (I guess a fairly passive action), and sharing the workload with me. And a whole slew of cooks are bustling around, and I am shaking hands and smiling a lot, dodging hot pots of stock, and banging my head on the fridge door.

It's good to be back. Back in a kitchen, experiencing new things, talking, learning, thinking about nothing except expertly extracting an almond from its furry pod (alliterations, high school English!). Being in a place where the clock blurs away, and the application of manual labor releases stress. Focusing on nothing except trying to absorb every smell, taste, sound, and sight of the kitchen.

Yes, it's good and what a wonderful kitchen to experience! Two staff meals a day. A staff meal, as I've described before, is usually an amalgamation of scraps and a meaningful application of economy, but here it just seems so good! Quesadillas with pork trimmings, black beans and rice with cilantro. For after-service meal some leftover BLTs, turkey sandwiches, guacamole and a fantastic chicken and black eyed pea soup, and a mediocre potato salad made by yours truly. There's PBR cases stacked to the ceiling, staff enjoying a smoke and a drink after scrubbing down the kitchen. This place has a reputation as being a place cooks love to cook in, and I can see why. It's foreign for me to work with people my age, speak English, to work with women (only kind of distracting), in a casual environment that really puts out great food. It only reinforces my desires to open casual restaurants, places minus pretension but plus great food, great wine.

It is an eye opening experience. Even if I don't get the job I think I need to start setting aside my weekends to work in kitchens again. I forgot how much I missed it. Perhaps I can spend my time doing just that. Being a mercenary cook whose price tag is just a little education, a chance to work, a chance to practice. Maybe it's possible to do a little time in a lot of restaurants, collecting experience and compiling an education from the whole city of Chicago.

So what did I learn? The importance of staff. The universally integral, absolutely essential importance of having good staff and treating them well. I could go on and on, but basically if you have good staff, you treat them well, you hold on to them, they are more valuable than anything else your restaurant has. And if they love to show up to work, if they have the energy and passion to put in their best day after day, then that is the hallmark of a great restaurant, a great chef. Someone who can lead, create an environment both welcoming and challenging.

It's also nice to have plenty of beer on hand.

Even if it's dirty hipster wine.

Sorry, Brendo, no offense.

Mua haha!

EP6

Refinement

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

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.

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

Routine

I'm not gonna lie. I'm kind of stumped. Kind of blocked. Intellectually constipated.

It's been two weeks since I've posted anything and all I have to show for it are 3 half-finished posts I find unsatisfactory. I'm not necessarily an anal-retentive perfectionist with my writing (though with some things I am, and these things include the cleanliness of my room and my stove burners). I think these are 3 potentially good topics to talk about. Sustainable seafood, my ascension in the ranks to chef de tournant, an analogy of music and cooking. But for some reason they are fleshed out poorly, and I think I have the banality of a post-college lifestyle to blame.

It is said that the human perception of time accelerates as you age. This is due to the fact that there are less major changes to your overall conception of a year, less changes to your daily routine. And routine is exactly what work is all about. Doing the same damn thing over and over again. What we doin'? Makin' money, what chu doin'? Makin' money.

But that's a part of current human society, it's unavoidable and not necessarily unwelcome (how many negatives?). Some people really like routine and enjoy having a stable rhythm dictate peace throughout their lives. Others prefer to throw off the saddle that a domestic lifestyle can bring, others constantly seek to break the reins. Now the last sentence aside I consider myself something in the middle. I don't enjoy a vagabond lifestyle without structure, but I am easily bored as well. I think this is why cooking is such a good fit for me. It is an intuitive balance between routine and growth that can keep my attention long enough to promote a good pace for improvement (does that sentence even make sense?).

Let me simplify. Cooking is actually completely about routine. Doing something so much, so often, so accurately that eventually after years, maybe a lifetime, you attain mastery. Excluding the rarest, most prodigious talents the human race has to offer, it takes decades to truly "master" something. So you would think the monotony of cutting mushrooms, of cleaning shrimp, of blanching tomatoes would be unable to entrance someone who gets distracted by the Victoria's Secret billboards downtown to the point he wanders 9 blocks off course. Not that that's ever happened. (I thought I was walking east, alright? Turns out it was south). Moving on...

But in fact all those rote mechanics, all that monotonous work actually intrigues me. A cook's life is all about speed. How fast can you learn, how fast can you cook, how fast can you achieve success before the lifestyle breaks you? So every time I clean a shrimp, every time I cut a mushroom I try to do it faster and better than the last time. The never ending quest for robotic perfection in the mechanics of cooking actually fuels me every day in the kitchen (we can't all be like you, Christopher Schro-bot).

But I am human. I am fallible. I am prone to break down upon my own ethos. There is such a thing as comfort and humans enjoy it above almost everything. And I fear I am reaching a comfortable point.

I am generally doing very well on pasta station. I haven't had a complaint about undercooked ravioli or underseasoned sauces for weeks. My chef has stopped making fun of me for being slow, and yelling at me to hurry up on Saturday night. I have earned a degree of respect on that station (saute, grill ... not so much, but that's another story). I work saute and grill once a week and am improving at a noticeable rate, but not an impressive rate. I feel I have gotten complacent and it is slowing down that constant alertness, that cutting edge focus that I was once used to harnessing. The routine of the daily working life is dragging me down despite the everyday challenges of the kitchen.

So that's where the other part of the equation comes in. As a cook you can focus on improvement everyday, use the everyday mechanics as a means of interest and personal betterment. It can keep your attention, fuel your drive. But eventually some people slow down, lose sight of the goal. I don't know what it is. An existential crisis? The natural complacency that confidence (and then overconfidence) can bring?

There are two rules of three I like to adhere life to. One by Malcolm Gladwell and one by Elvis Presley.

Malcolm Gladwell has a rule of three for job satisfaction. You need,

1) Autonomy - meaning you have some control over what you do, you are not a peon who is being slave-driven.

2) Complexity - something that doesn't numb your brain in to submission with it's monotony or simplicity

3) Connection Between Effort and Reward - seeing results from your hard work

Now working in a kitchen satisfies a lot of these criteria for me. Granted, I have close to zero autonomy right now because I am a minor peon in the Va Pensiero kitchen. Sometimes when I'm feeling rebellious I make chicken stock my way by starting with cold water, adding aromatics late in to the process and using a bouquet garni and making sure it never boils. Taste it, Chef. But eventually the goal is to ascend to the rank of sous chef somewhere, then maybe executive chef, until finally I am ready to own my own restaurant and call all the shots. To build an empire of my own is a foreseeable goal and any minor assertions of my independence can satisfy me until I can reach that point.

Aaaand complexity. Seeing as how much of a novice I can be at cooking, complexity and being challenged daily are not an issue. Before I said I was getting comfortable, not that it was becoming easy. I work a Friday night well because I'm on my toes every second until we get the "all in" call to denote we are done. Everyday is an exercise in efficiency. There's no such thing as too much free time. It's the way I imagine a runner would feel as they shave seconds off their mile time from week to week. Everyday just before employee meal if I can take the time to have coffee and a cigarette, then I have succeeded in managing my time well. But sometimes, and often times, I will have a very quick coffee and a cigarette and FREAK THE FUCK OUT that I'm going to run short of something during service. You learn and get better, or at least you hope, every day.

The connection between effort and results is an easy thing for cooks to see. Well, kind of. But it is what drew me to the profession in the first place. Every plate you put out can be perfect, but only the best can produce that every time on command. Sometimes I know things aren't right. The plate is dirty, the ravioli might only be 98% cooked, there's a slightly overcooked edge on the salmon. You have 15 other orders to take care of, you regret it inwardly, but alas mistakes happen and you can't fix them then and there. But there is such a thing as "the zone" for cooks. Some nights, and thankfully they are becoming more frequent, every plate I put out looks good, some look perfect. I know the seasoning is on point, the balance between sharp parmigiano-reggiano and luscious emulsified butter is perfect, the plate is clean, the pasta is a beautiful mountain of silken starchiness sitting reflected in a sheen of reduced chicken stock (What up, similes). When you prepare every component to a dish, when that took you hours of work and focus, and when you're crushed in the middle of an 8:00 dinner rush and you put out a perfect plate of onion pasta? THAT'S a fucking sense of accomplishment. Nothing gets me more jacked up when I put up a hot plate in the window that I know someone is really going to enjoy, and then I get to working on the next thing to make it that much better. Well almost nothing...

Again there is a foreseeable goal in the future. Cooks never get to see when guests are really enjoying something. Generally they only see when they hate something. A plate gets sent back, your whole dish gets shoveled in the garbage, a bloody piece of meat is staring you in the face because it's way undercooked, your chef is yelling at you to fix it, you dumbass. But as a chef, a restaurateur you get to go out there and talk to people, see the smiles on their faces, the pure enjoyment they are having from food your staff is putting out. That is something to definitely look forward to. That is a dream worth having for me.

So there is job satisfaction to be had, so why all the existential crises?

Maybe it has to do with Elvis' rule of three, which is far more simple and something that really boils life down to its basics. What do you need in this life?

"I believe the key to happiness is: someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to."

Maybe I've lost sight of that as spring shines on Chicago, and I'm stuck in a kitchen. Maybe I'm starting to realize that I've barely begun to sacrifice for my career, and the biggest sacrifices are yet to come. Maybe I'm scared that I don't have what it takes.

Greatness is a matter of ambition. I think personal ability makes it easier, sets you apart for a little while, but in the end what separates the cream from the milk is the passion, the desire. Journalism, business, science, whatever the hell you want to do in life, but especially cooking. Everybody can cook, it's not like there's some kid out there who is the next Lebron James of the kitchen. Everybody can understand the tenets of food and the intricacies of the restaurant biz. It's all about how bad you want it. It's inspiring because that means there is no ceiling except the one you build for yourself.

But many do indeed build a ceiling for themselves. This is not an easy lifestyle. Maybe you can find a balance, but many sacrifice friends, families, relationships along the way, and at some point they say "Stop, I can't sacrifice anymore." They accept and are hopefully content with what peak they could reach, and then they try to work it out from there.

I've never been an exceptionally hard working person and I admit that to my chagrin. I have underachieved all throughout life and I blame it in retrospect on having not found my true calling in life. I never was going to be a 9-5 person I tell myself, I never was actually going to be a cellist even if I could have, I tell myself. I've concluded that it's possible this is a positive quality I have, a stubbornness to do nothing but what is right for me, and a passion ignited when set to the right flame. But is that really so? Sure, I go to work everyday, I enjoy it, but something about this routine bothers me. Bothers me to the point that I've actually written a Jiwon-esque emo-rant about it in public (Sorry buddy, you know it's true).

So maybe it's time for a change. I love Va Pensiero, I've come to love the cooks, the chef, the staff, the opportunities it is giving me. But maybe what I really need is an injection of something new, something substantial to give me back the edge, give me another glimpse of the dream.

Maybe it's time to end this scatterbrained post, because I feel a lot better. Maybe it's time to put up or shut up. Anyway, my time at Va Pensiero is limited. My unofficial contract is nearing it's end. I should enjoy it while it lasts because another unknown reality looms on the horizon.

Someone to love ... hmmmm. Something to do .... okay. Something to look forward to ... let's go.

EP6

Bad Habits

Everyone has bad habits. How much these habits affect your life is a whole 'nother matter. I've never really worked an office job so I can't say how your corporate habits will present themselves, but in a job that requires a lot of physical efficiency of motion, bad habits can kill. Even a minor inefficiency in a golf swing could have untold effects on a tournament. How else do you explain Tiger Woods and Kobe Bryant, veritable masters of their sport, retooling their bread & butter motions every so often? In cooking you could get by with bad habits, but you may never excel. At best you will last long enough in good restaurants to graduate to a point where you no longer need to work on the line. At worst, you could kill someone. Okay, maybe a bit melodramatic as that is quite unlikely, but you could seriously hurt someone, starting with yourself. You are most likely to hurt yourself, and if anyone has seen my forearms recently you would know that I haven't developed a heroin habit, I've just been burning and cutting myself a lot.

I think a lot of the appeal of being a professional cook is that there is a bit of danger to it, isn't there? Not only is there the adrenaline bomb of service, but there's fire and knives everywhere and at any moment you could maim something. You're just hoping it's already dead and had an organic diet of natural whole-grains. I went to a cooking exhibition by Grant Achatz and he had his assistant, then sous-chef, demonstrate how they prepare their "Sweet Potato Pie" dish. It's kind of complicated by normal food standards, but fits right in with the current molecular movement at Alinea. Imagine a cinnamon stick used as a skewer of some sorts. On the skewer are three cubed components. A cube of creamed sweet potato, a cube of brown sugar candy, and a cube of gelatinized bourbon whiskey. These 3 cubes are bunched together and battered in tempura. Now the only way to fry it is for a cook to hold the cinnamon stick between his fingers and dip the business end in to hot oil. And since the cooks at Alinea will often need to make several of these at once, the most seasoned fry guys will hold up to 7 or 8 Sweet Potato Pie skewers between their fingers just inches above a pot of hot-hot oil. The finished product is served in the unique "spider" service ware that Chef Achatz developed (imagine a many-pronged antenna with the prongs all reaching towards the sky), and the cinnamon stick is lit on fire, so when the dish is brought to your table your nose is enticed by a hint of smoldering cinnamon.

Needless to say the oil sputters and pops and burns are commonplace. Chef Achatz went on to say, "Yeah ... all cooks like to think they are street warriors. We usually put the rookies through the Sweet Potato fry test to test their mettle."

Anyway the point of this tangential anecdote was to illustrate that yes; cooks do like to think of themselves as something of badasses. You move fast, your profession moves fast, there is the possibility of danger at every turn. In a kitchen, bad habits can seriously hinder you when you are trying to prep as quick as possible. I am not without my own fair share of bad habits, and though I try to fix them, they remain difficult problems to solve.

I have issues with finding things. I don't know if it's because I'm blind or I give up easily on searches, but whenever I need to look for some ingredient and it's not exactly where it should be, I either take a long time or I come back with news that I couldn't find it. At that point one of the cooks will immediately storm back to the cooler or the dry goods area, immediately find what I was looking for, grunt and make me carry it back. This grunt is usually followed with the question, "Necesitas lentes? ... Pinchi Eric" (You need glasses? ... fuckin' Eric). To be fair, they've been working there for years, many of them for a decade plus. They know where to look for things that have been misplaced slightly. But still, I'm kind of Magoo-esque with my inability to find anything. I don't know why this is the case, perhaps it's a lack of persistence. But I get the feeling this might be what I am remembered for by the Mexican cooks. They always talk shit about the last sous-chef, also Eric, who used to leave his stirring spoons everywhere. Or this other gringo named Dave who they always used to call a bitch for being a hapless suburbanite from Des Plaines, IL. I hope I won't become "Asian Eric Who Couldn't Find Shit." I'm hoping more for "Asian Eric Who Made Good Family Meals."

Another bad habit I have is actually the lack of practicing a certain good habit. Whenever you walk behind someone in a kitchen you have to say "Behind you" or in Spanish, "Atras." This is to notify someone you are right behind them so that they don't turn around with that giant pot of hot stock, or don't turn around with that case of potatoes, or they don't turn around with that knife facing out. The Mexican cooks have all been conditioned to say this literally every time they pass behind someone. Usually it's unnecessary but it's a good habit for them to practice. They tell me sometimes when they go out and while they are sidling through the masses to get to the bar they are constantly telling strangers, "Atras, guey!" I just don't think it's necessary most of the time and I don't like to bark it out like they do every time. I'm generally very quiet in the kitchen so I guess that silence remains in most situations. In American kitchens they seem to have even more verbal signals to alert everyone, like "Coming down the line!" to tell the cooks you are coming through with something, or "Reaching!" to tell them you are stretching out behind someone, or the ubiquitous "Hot!" to tell someone ... something is ... you know, hot. I try to say it more but I forget or say it too quietly most of the time, so when a cook bumps in to me they get kind of annoyed. This has kind of lead to an unfortunate nickname. Chuy was once walking behind me and he let "Behind you, Pikachu!" slip for some reason. I then decided it'd be a good idea to tell them that I was kind of obsessed with Pokemon as a child. Pikachu is starting to stick. FML.

Because professional cooking requires so much efficiency of your usage of time, standing around doing nothing is a no-no. Even in the extremely unlikely situation that there is literally nothing for you to do, don't look like that's the case. So that means no sitting, no leaning. Ever. No exceptions. Leaning makes you look lazy and ranks high on most chef's shitlist of pet peeves. Sitting would be even worse as I've heard being caught sitting gets you a nasty nickname or a hard time for the rest of your duration at that job. So I tend to lean sometimes. I don't do it out of laziness, it's just I don't like standing so much (does that make sense?). I mean I started playing cello because it required sitting, whereas violin would have required standing occasionally. The choice was obvious. But I actually am quite a busy body in the kitchen. Because of my borderline OCD-nervosa I am constantly wiping down my station, my burners, sweeping off crumbs, sweeping the floors, wiping containers. Because I am one of the few native English speakers I often label all the sauces and stocks in the walk-in. I hate, hate, hate messy kitchens and unlabeled stocks. But of course it's human nature that your constant good habits go unnoticed, but one instance of an infraction will brand you forever. I hate people.

But those are pretty obvious habits, right? I'm sure Lebron, Kobe, Peyton Manning, Tiger Woods, have spent hours upon hours of watching tape to figure out the small inefficiencies in their respective playing motions. To fix them probably took even more hard work and study. Unfortunately I don't have hours of tape available to me. I have about one hour of footage that doesn't even capture my stove. Unfortunately I don't have a dedicated trainer studying my every move. I have a few cooks and one chef who occasionally give me pointers. But it is said the best cooks are ones that are composed and make the fewest, smoothest motions. Though it looks like the busy, perpetually moving, twitchy guy on the line may be a faster cook, they are often messier, less efficient and in the long run, slower (not to mention they disrupt the line with their helter-skelter playing style). Good cooks don't move fast, they move smoothly and intelligently.

So with that as my guideline, the best I can do is watch myself. Just scratched your hair or touched your face? Immediately wash your hands. My hands are becoming raw and chapped from washing so much (given my itchy nature, you can imagine how much of a problem this is becoming). My chef constantly tells me not to wipe plates if I make them messy. Let the runner do it, your dirty side towel will just grease up the plate. I do it anyway though because of that OCD-nervosa I was talking about. I am trying to break that habit and I'm trying to just put out cleaner plates. Less spins of the tongs to make a perfect pasta mountain, less flips of the pan to saute mushrooms, no more spilling mushrooms out the sides. Cutting vegetables faster, cleaner. Making less trips to the walk-in cooler or the bakery. All these little time saving elements that are a product of a constantly efficient mindset will save you hours over a week, and years over a lifetime. You will do everything stronger, better, faster, and any kitchen would love to have you because you are so clean, so quick, so goddamned efficient.

I learned this lesson especially with learning how to ladle a sauce. You'd think that ladling a liquid on to a plate required a little practice, not anything too complicated. I was schooled pretty hard in sauce ladling by my chef.

You hold a ladle like you hold a pencil at about 2/3 up from the bowl. When you collect sauce you don't scoop sideways, digging at the liquid. You dip the ladle in vertically, you don't fill it completely and you let the bottom 1/3 rest in the liquid for half a second. For some reason I could probably divine after thinking about it for a minute, the liquid then does not drip from the ladle as you are trying to sauce a plate.

As simple a motion as ladling a sauce could be refined to perfect efficiency so long as you took the time to think about it and execute it as a habit.

Shit. Lot to learn.

EP6

My Future in Food

As I sit on my swiss-ball-turned-desk-chair facing my bookshelf-turned-desk listening to my kind-of-gay-but-fantastic track of "Total Eclipse of the Heart" by Bonnie Tyler I wonder what the future holds for me. In the words of Thomas Keller, this "may be the most exciting time ever to be a cook and a chef in America." Things are moving really fast and I've been taking time to recenter myself lately and the obvious question arises; What next?

The current plan is to work at Va Pensiero through Northwestern graduation, which would make my total time there amount to about a year. So many chefs suggest staying at a place for at least a year because that is the minimum amount of time required to pay back the restaurant's investment in you. When you get hired as a cook, especially when you're a rookie cook like myself, you need to be trained, to be taught, to be fed, and after 5-6 months you start becoming an efficient part of the team. You hopefully become someone who is dependable and skillful enough to contribute to the restaurant, to execute the restaurant's vision. So for the risk and time that my Chef has taken upon me, I think I owe him at the very least a year. Young cooks are moving faster these days, too fast as many will complain. They will stay 5 months, learn everything they can and move on. Old school chefs might have stayed 1.5-2 years, but I think there simply isn't time for that anymore in this day and age. One year strikes a balance I can work with.

And then I will take a hiatus to learn some things before culinary school, chill out, play ultimate and enjoy the Chicago summer. I think the most important things I could learn are better knife skills, prep efficiency and the process of 4-star standards. I'd like to take an internship at a butcher shop and get better at taking apart animals. I'd like to know what it's like to prep in a restaurant consistently doing a 150+ covers a day while maintaining 4-star standards. That requires not only efficient prep but perfect prep, and to combine those is a difficult skill to learn. Those are things I could take with me to school so that I have an easier time showing those bitches whats up.

Ah but there comes the dangerous pitfall. Arrogance. It doesn't seem to serve any purpose in my opinion, other than to ameliorate the symptoms of insecurity. But that can be solved with just plain ole' confidence. Confidence is the key, and it takes years to develop, every stage leading up to that one being as awkward as puberty. Arrogance doesn't get you anywhere in the cooking world because you will immediately be put in your place. There is someone always doing it better than you are. Usually.

The industry is growing at an alarming rate. I've mentioned this before, but this generation of young adults, more than any other, are discovering cooking as a viable profession. It is gaining considerable respect and it's a good alternative for those shunning office jobs or dealing with a personal existential crisis. Good food is becoming more and more important as the onset of America's obesity epidemic threatens to close its fist. Being a cook, a chef, a restaurateur seems like a potential path to celebrity (those with those intentions in mind are in for an unpleasant surprise though). The food world is no longer something you were forced in to and couldn't get out of. It's a respectable and decent career choice.

And for that very reason the competition is going to be ferocious. This is good for diners, foodies and people all over America. You'll be getting the best of the best. But this is difficult for all those hopeful chefs. It is going to be a a more crowded pond to survive in. You could give it your all, be exceptionally creative and talented and things just might not work out. You could fail even though you have not failed yourself. That's the nature of the business. You have to accept a few ignorant bastards on yelp.com could ruin your business because your waiter had a bad day. You have to accept that there's a hip new restaurant with models-serving-food drawing all your clientele down the street. You have to accept that to survive is to do so unconditionally, regardless of circumstances.

So there are many of me out there. Young, energetic, somewhat sharp of mind and ambitious cooks who are seeking glory out there in the dining halls. There are many who have had infinite more experience than me, have that Midas touch where all food turns delicious under their hands, or have had better training than me. I don't know what to expect when I get to culinary school, I will only expect to humbled. If I find out otherwise I will be pleasantly surprised, but I have to prepare for the fact that there are talented people out there ready to push me out of the way if I can't keep up.

All I've ever known of cooks have been Mexican cooks. Indefatigable, persistent survivors who used the colorblindness of the kitchen to succeed in this country. My sous chef Chuy doesn't know why force-feeding ducks makes foie gras taste so good (force feeding carbohydrates causes them to be broken down and accumulated as natural sugars and fat in an engorged liver... kind of like what most of Americans do to themselves), but he sure as hell knows how to saute it to crisp perfection in the shortest time possible. They are efficient cooks and even if they lack the "passion" or language skills to deeply pursue culinary knowledge, they know how to get shit done.

So I'm curious what kind of cooks I will encounter out there. These young American cooks who combine great passion with encyclopedic knowledge and proficient technique. I kind of fear them, but that's the kind of cook I think I can be. If I just have more time and I focus better on my training. I tell myself every week that I have to do better than the last. More uniform dices, cleaner plates, more efficient motions ... you have to tell yourself as a cook that there is no such thing as convenience, you have to do it the hard way because that makes things taste better.

I'm nervous now much like the way I used to be on the ultimate field. I would withdraw, be fearful, nervous of doing anything out of my limited comfort zone, not have fun. But I am comfortable now to be myself out there, to be bold and do things out of faith rather than knowing. Can I reach this point in cooking? My brain tells me certainly, my heart tells me maybe. There's still so much I don't know.

But the nice thing about being a cook is that there are always a few ways to gauge your progress. Your chef, if they are a good chef, will be riding your ass in to the ground. The less they bitch, the better you are doing. The chef used to taste every single pasta dish I put out as quality control. He no longer does that. There is no such thing as soaring praise in professional kitchens, it is just the absence of criticism you must take comfort in. And then there are your customers. Capricious, difficult and endowed with a sense of entitlement bordering on blue-blooded obnoxiousness, they will give you a very real calibration of how you are doing.

Generally, I don't get many complaints. It took me a few days to work out cooking ravioli to perfect doneness, the corners were a bit hard. Sometimes I make the ravioli when I get there at 2 PM and they are relatively fresh and cook quickly. Sometimes they are made a few days beforehand by the prep cook, it all depends on how busy we are. Then they are frozen en masse and take longer to cook. So knowing the order time, cooking time, ravioli condition, water temperature and bringing it all together at the right juncture of all four took some trial and error. I've gotten it down now for the most part. People love the potato-garlic ravioli infused with black truffle (to be fair the Chef has made the sauce for the past few weeks ... porcini-madeira glaze one week, chianti braised lamb ragu the next).

But I think there's an even better gauge than your chef (they can be temperamental, let's be honest), or your customers (even more temperamental).

Clean plates.

On slower nights I can watch the dishes go to the dishwasher. If I see plates minus the food they went out with, I know something is being done right. If I see clean, clean plates, plates that have been wiped dry with crusts of our rosemary-foccacia bread, then I know I'm definitely doing something right. And on the flipside, watching a waiter shovel half an uneaten dish in to the garbage? Bad news bears, friend.

So yes, clean plates. As a cook you must always ask yourself this; is it delicious? Are people unable to control their appetites with your food? Good. Drug those sons of bitches with the robust, natural flavors you develop. If you can make something so good it can't be left unfinished, then that is a truly successful dish.

The same goes for employee meal. I love making employee meal. I would make it everyday if I had the time to do so. One of Thomas Keller's first cooking jobs was being in charge of employee meals every day for a yacht club. Apparently they have those in country clubs and hotels where there are small armies of cooks and bakers. I would love that job. What a wonderful way to practice. There isn't the crushing pressure of failing a customer, and in turn your chef. You get to experiment and learn to economize upon the food scraps of the kitchen. But he also noted how meticulous he was and what he learned from this experience. He goes on to say,

"Can you be passionate about cooking at this level? Staff meal. Only the staff sees it. If you can make great food for these people, create that habit, have that drive, that sincerity, and keep that with you and take it to another level in the staff meal, then someday you'll be a great chef. Maybe."

I don't want to jump to any conclusions, but I sure as hell love making family meal and making it right. To their credit, the Mexicans focus on economy. They were taught to waste as little resource and money as possible for the benefit of the restaurant. So we get a lot of pasta with tomato sauce, a lot of old sauteed vegetables, and a lot of strange stews made with fish scraps. I kind of take a small liberty and try and go the extra step with family meal. I make jalapeno mac and cheese, I make filet mignon tacos (I might be the reason we need to order a lot more paprika/chili powder, but these are excellent when we have the scraps to make them), red onion quiche and tarragon chicken fricasee. Those have so far been my most popular dishes, and there's nothing more rewarding than seeing people coming back for seconds (especially the hot Romanian hostess ... I figure eventually I'll go up to her and be like, "You know ... I made those tacos. No big deal, just doin' my job" and she'll fall madly in love with me. Or something). And I will plan ahead to use some valuable scraps. The night before I was inspired to make the fricasee we roasted about 20 half chickens for a party. We had about 7 leftover and a whole sheet tray of juices and chicken fat, or what I like to call culinary gold. I poured them off into a container and let them sit covered in the fridge overnight. The next day I was greeted by about 4 cups of flavorful chicken juice and an inch of solidified chicken fat. Yum. The coolest thing is that the juices will gelatinize so I get a big block of delicious chicken jello. Then it went something like this.

First I pulled off the meat from the leftover chickens by hand, saved the skin and bones and made a quick stock with them (Sometimes I will make faux-chicharonnes with the chicken skin by patting them dry and frying them in hot, hot oil ... kind of time consuming though)

Heat up the chicken fat, heavily brown onions, mushrooms, garlic (onions are free game we get so many, and we had some mushrooms for our tagliatelle dish that were going south)

Deglaze with white wine (we use a standard 2007 pinot grigio for all cooking purposes, and we run through like a bottle a day... I used about half to deglaze), and cook off the alcohol

Throw in your big block of chicken jello and small diced potatoes and let them stew for a bit (we also had some leftover dried herbs which I added at this point, and I added a little bit of my quick stock to have enough liquid to properly stew ... you could use water, but an actual chicken stock would be best)

After those are stewed for a bit the starches from the potatoes have thickened up the liquid a little and flavors are beginning to meld nicely, I add a touch of heavy cream to smooth out the flavors and add richness, and then a few squeezes of lemon juice to brighten them

Then I add the pulled chicken meat and sliced tarragon (The chicken was already cooked so I didn't want it to overcook in the stew, more reheat it .. and the tarragon, which is quite an expensive herb, was leftover from Valentines Day and couldn't possibly go to waste)

And then adjust the seasonings with salt and pepper, adjust the acidity with lemon juice, and adjust the richness with butter or cream ... mine needed a bit more pop so I added a handful of cracked peppercorns, the kind you freshly crack with a saute pan.

Overall it was a success. It went wonderfully with Tabasco sauce (which is the no. 1 condiment in our kitchen, next to Valentina Hot Sauce) and I was not offended at all by its use. The hot acidity of the Tabasco was wonderfully complementary. As I saw waiters walk by and swipe a crust of bread through the dregs of the stew, I knew I had hit it on the money. The anise perfume of tarragon is just irresistible.

So will I be a great chef one day? I don't know, maybe. There are certainly many out there trying to do the same, if not better. I do know I love the smile on employee's faces when they get to eat something new, something that isn't leftover linguini with weak tomato sauce. The rest will have to fall in to place as we go.

Orale.

EP6