Life after the line
So my father sent this to me the other day:
Oddly enough, one of my focuses in university was creative writing ...
But for me it does bring up the question ... what are my choices for life after the line? This question is only brought further into focus after a chef I work with talked with me about how working in a kitchen is like playing game of chess. You're never thinking about what you're doing now ... you're thinking three, four steps ahead.
For me, I still don't know what that goal is five years down the road. Normally, for someone like me that would be sous-chef in a fabulous kitchen ... and that is a viable goal. Another five years after that, you're looking at being the executive chef (whose job consists more of paperwork rather than cooking). Honestly, I know that I don't want to be on the line forever, and I love learning new things, diving into them and totally immersing myself in them, so I know that being an exec might not be the best choice for me.
So what does that leave?
- Food Critic (I love to break things down)
- Getting a job at FoodTV (not as a host, but somewhere in it)
- Becoming a food writer (love of writing)
- Working at a restaurant launch/consulting firm (a nice way to use my detail oriented side)
- Food scientist (given my geeky leanings, this has some promise)
- Restaurant manager
And that's all I can think of. I confess to having a certain lack of imagination when it comes to this and I'm interested in what other people would say.
Kitchen Speed
I worked my first shift on the line on Sunday. Sunday brunch. I was responsible for the crab benedict, poached eggs, omelet of the day, and the scramble.
I got my ass handed to me.
We did 100 covers and I was mainly responsible for about 25% of them ... at most I would have 4 tickets in the window at once, and when I did, I was just utterly lost, but I wanted to dig myself out of my hole on my own. The trick is picking up the rhythm of the orders. A ticket comes in.
- OMELET
- CRAB BENEDICT
- EGGS ANY poached, wheat
- SCRAMBLE
1) Pull out plates in the window for the dishes
2) Take the pan for the scramble, throw it on the flame, with some oil in the pan. Put in seranno ham, shallots, zucchini. Season with salt and pepper.
3) Take a pan for the benny. Throw in some clarified butter, spinach, crab and red onions. Season with salt and pepper.
4) Take a pan for the omelet. Throw in some clarified butter, then pour in the eggs. Season with salt and pepper.
5) Take a pan for the omelet fillings. Throw them in over heat, then cut some brie for the omelets cheese.
6) Walk over to the saute station. Throw some potatoes in the pan and bring it back to the grill station. Put it on the back burners, where there's no heat, but they'll stay warm.
7) Cut the bread for the benny. Throw it on the grill.
8) Toss the fillings, flip the omelet. Flip the bread for the benny.
9) Crack the eggs for the poach and put them into the poaching liquid. Pull the bread for the benny and put it in the window.
10) Pour eggs, herbs and salt and pepper into the scramble. By now the benny filling and the omelet filling should be done cooking. Pull them off the flame and place them by the warm part of the grill.
11) Scramble the eggs in the scramble.
12) Pull the omelet and place the pan on the counter.
13) Put cheve in the scramble.
14) Pull the poached eggs and place them in ramekins.
15) Pull the scramble off of the heat.
16) Plate potatoes on the omelet, scramble and poach plates. Assemble the omelet in the pan, then plate. Garnish with herbs.
17) Plate the scramble onto the the potatoes on the scramble plate. Garnish with herbs.
18) Place the benny filling on the toast. Place poached eggs onto the filling. Put a few sliced tomatoes on the plate, season with salt, then pour hollandaise over the benny. Garnish with herbs.
19) Call out the server's name on the ticket.
20) Look and see what else is on the board (but you should have been doing this all along).
All of that happens in the course of about 7 minutes. And that's not even that bad. Me? Well, I had no idea that this was the rhythm that I was supposed to use, so I was just going along and figuring it out. It was trial by fire. I did alright and held my own, but to be honest, multitasking is not one of my best strengths ... This is forcing me to do it and I'm applying it in other aspects of my life (organizing dancing events, being the Treasurer of my co-op, and trying to live my life, along with working). But I can tell that it's going to be a difficult process. And the dining season is going to start picking up in the next month.
Chef vs Cook
Anybody in the business that works the line wants to be called a cook, not a chef. Why's that?
I think it has to do with the connotation of the word chef, rather than cook. Looking the words up in the dictionary, both have pretty much the same meaning, the guy who sits around and prepares the food. But if you look at the context, you get a much more revealing view. In the hiearachy of the kitchen, at its most basic levels, there are four positions:
- Executive Chef
- Sous Chef
- Line Cook
- Pantry Cook
Notice the two lowest rungs on the ladder are cooks, the two highest are chefs. What comes along with going higher up on that ladder? You become further and further removed from the food. In the end, anyone who is a chef or a cook is most at home being on the line, cooking good food, and ejoying the banter of his fellow cooks.
In the end the restaurant industry is a blue collar business and the people in it take pride in that. Besides, when you make food you don't chef. You cook.
Anthony Bourdain
As you read this blog, you'll constantly see me referring to Tony Bourdain. So who is this guy?
It's simple. He's the cook's cook.
His first book that I read was called
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly. Part autobiography, part expose, he wrote the definitive modern culinary memoir. From his first taste of an oyster to his advice on what to order in a restaurant - never order fish on a Monday (to which I'll add never order a fish based soup or chowder) - he wrote with the brash swagger of the modern cook that hooked me from the moment I read it.
He has other books. Some non-fiction:
A Cook's Tour (a non-fiction cuilnary travel memoir) and
Typhoid Mary (a history of the said lady who was, of course, a cook) and some fiction:
Bone in the Throat,
Gone Bamboo, and
The Bobby Gold Stories. But in the end it all comes back to
Kitchen Confidential.
A reviewer once called him a Jack Kerouac of the kitchen. Very appropriate
I think about Bourdain and I find myself laughing because some of the topics he talks about in his books are topics that I want to blog about. Not a word for word transcription, but I've found myself walking down the same paths, noticing the same things, and find myself thinking the exact same things. The fact that I want to be a cook, not a chef. That I'm developing the hands of a cook. That there are things that you just don't want to know about that go on in a kitchen. I'm in good company.
I once met him at his restaurant, Les Halles, in NYC. I was in town for a business trip and I was sitting at the bar, reading a book that he had reviewed for the New York Times. He was sitting at a table near the bar, waiting for some friends to come in for dinner, and, getting bored of waiting, he came up to the bar to have a smoke. We had a short conversation and he commented on the fact that I was reading a book he had reviewed (only about half as dorky as it would have been to have been reading one of his own books). All I really remember is that I was about halfway from being a total idiot with him. After all, I had recently finished
Kitchen Confidential and I was developing my plan to go to culinary school. I was a bit starstruck.
More bluntly, I was about as idiotic as a teenage groupie.
Tony, if you ever happen to read this and remember meeting a young, tongue-tied guy who was reading
The Making of a Chef and eating the charcutierie appetizer, please, laugh at my expense.
Shoemaking does have its places
Mind you, not all shoemaking is bad ... I know I came off harsh in my previous
post about shoemakers, but shoemaking does have its places.
Today we have a very finicky couple of guests in the restaurant, and, after sending out their very special salads (the ticket had a lot of subs and "see me's" on it), the server (he's a fabulous bleach blonde, so let's call him Whitey, even if it's just for my own amusement) came back to me and said, "They want thousand island dressing."
I just looked at him dumbfounded. I jumped through a bunch of hoops for these gals in making their salads, their ticket was covered with subs and yet it still wasn't what they wanted. They wanted one of the most vile substances that ever came from a bottle.
Obviously we didn't have any. Time to shoemake.
Thousand island dressing is basically two things: tartar sauce and ketchup. I grabbed a small bowl, took some ketchup out of the dispenser and then went to the grill station, took some tartar sauce out of one of the nine pans, threw it in, and mixed with a spoon.
Shoemaker's thousand island.
I put it into a small cream pitcher, handed it to Whitey and told him, "When you go back, make sure you ask them if they want Catalina, too."
Eggs
So, you know what a chef's toque is, right? It's one of those chef hats that goes straight up and has a number of pleats on it. Traditionally that toque is supposed to have 101 pleats on it.
Why?
Because that's the number of ways a French master chef is supposed to be able to cook an egg.
The other day I got schooled in what I didn't know. Egg cookery. I can make the perfect scrambled eggs, omelettes, hard boiled, sunny side up, and fried, but beyond that things start to get a little more dicey. At a French cooking school, we were more concerned with sauces than doing eggs.
And thus I meet my current nemesis: over easy.
On Sunday morning during the quiet periods on the line, I stood in front of the saute station and worked on my over easy.
Step 1, get a non-stick pan over medium heat.
Step 2, put a small amount of oil in it.
Step 3, crack two eggs and place in pan.
Step 4, wait until the whites have set.
Step 5, using a gentle forward and back motion, flip the eggs.
Step 6, let cook for a little bit, then plate.
Step 5 kills me every time. Sometimes the eggs yolks break. Sometimes the eggs simply fold over themselves and simply refuse to flip. Other times there was too much oil in the pan and the eggs separate. Out of a dozen attempts, I maybe got it to work twice.
For all of my fancy training, I still can't get an egg to come out perfect every time.
So now every morning when I get into work, I make myself two eggs over easy. Nemesis be damned, I'm going to get it right.
Of shoemakers and chefs
shoe·mak·er (shū'mā'ker) n.
1. One that makes or repairs shoes.
2. A cook who doesn't use recipes and always does everything half-assed. Shoemakers are typically dirty workers, waste a lot of product, and are more focused on speed and getting things done rather than doing things right.
I hate shoemakers.
Well, most of the time. Sometimes you come across a shoemaker that's an idiot savant, that produces great food without even having to think about it. But then again they're also about as rare as an idiot savant.
The hallmark of a well run kitchen is consistency. There is one way to do things, the chef's way. The chef has drilled that consistency into all of his charges, so that anybody can be called on to make any dish and it will be made in the exact same way. A friend of mine has a favorite story about a French chef who was asked how he was able to ensure consistency across his many restaurants. After all, he couldn't possibly be everywhere. "Ahh, but I am in every one of my kitchens," he replied, which in a sense, is true. Some chefs do this through force of personality. Others, like Thomas Keller, who runs the French Laundry (Napa Valley) and Per Se (New York), use real time video connections and plasma screen displays to see what's going on in their other locations. However they do it, it doesn't matter. The result is the same: in a well run kitchen, there is only one way to do things. The right way. The chef's way.
For shoemakers, there is no right way. Instead, it's a little bit of this, some of that, throw it on the fire, and
volia! You've got ... well, something. Maybe it's not the same as the last time they made it, but it looks close enough to what's on the menu and so they sell it. A shoemaker isn't there because of the love of the food. A shoemaker is there because cooking is a relatively easy way to earn a decent amount of money. So they continue to sling food out the window day after day after day.
Yes, a good cook can do things by eye, and yes, a good cook doesn't need recipes, but it's not the same. A shoemaker is a loose cannon in the kitchen. You'll never know what you'll get. When a chef is trying to execute their vision in the kitchen, a shoemaker's lack of consistency will be a constant source of annoyance. Eventually the shoemaker will need to shape up or they're out.
One shoemaker in a kitchen is an aberration. More than one is a sign to start worrying. It means that the chef isn't looking out for the kitchen. The chef isn't spot checking the final dishes. That means that when you go out to eat, there's no guarantee that the person cooking your duck on Thursday is the same person that cooked it last Tuesday. Different cooks, different duck (surprise, the guy whose name is on the menu isn't cooking your meal ... in some places it's even doubtful that he's on the premises).
When the chef tolerates shoemakers in the kitchen, you know on some level the chef has given up on the food, and that's a depressing thing. When I was job hunting in Seattle I met professional chefs that have given up. One even confessed to me that all they ever ate at home any more was hard boiled eggs, toast, and the occasional peanut butter sandwich. Although they tried to laugh it off, you could see the resignation, the hollowness. You could see that they have no more passion for the business, yet it's something they've been doing their entire professional lives and they knew nothing else. How do you give up something that you've lost your passion for when it's the only way you know to earn a living?
Simple. Let the shoemakers cobble something together.
Iron Chef America
I've been a big fan of the original Iron Chef series ever since it went onto FoodTV. I stopped watching it though, as the chefs I was introduced to on the show (Sakai, Chen, Morimoto) were replaced by other Iron Chefs. However, Iron Chef America is fun because it keeps the best elements of the old show, but plays it straight. The attempted version that they had on UPN was way too campy with Shatner as the chairman.
Now you've got Alton Brown as the commentator, some more intelligent food critics judging the food, two chefs I really respect, Batali and Morimoto, and one that I absolutely hate, Flay. It's odd, but my hatred of Flay actually increases the enjoyment of the show. When Batali and Morimoto are on, I root for them but every battle with Bobby Flay I am rooting for the challenger. I want to see Flay go down in flames.
In fact, it seems like the unifying feature of the restaurant business is one: We hate Bobby Flay.
Why should you hate this guy? He's met with success in the restaurant business at an early age and he's had a series of successful TV shows on FoodTV. There's a lot to learn there, and yes I will concede that point. But there are still reasons to dislike him. First, I'm not a fan of his food. He does this odd Tex-Mex world fusion that, in my opinion, doesn't produce coherent dishes. He seems to just put flavors together because he can, which doesn't impress me. If I want to look for authentic Mexican regional flavors I'll look to chefs like Rick Bayless that have a real respect for their food and where it comes from. Maybe if I catch Flay making an actual mole sauce, I'd respect him a little more.
Second, have you ever actually watched the guy on his TV shows? In the one which he was traveling across America, he would sometime display either utter boredom or contempt for the people he was visiting. And then there was his show where he has a co-host and live audience. Sometimes he would put-down an audience member or make a snide comment to his co-host. You could see that he wasn't comfortable in the show and didn't enjoy the people around him.
But the ultimate moment of disrespect was on an Iron Chef special with Morimoto. At the end of the cooking, Flay jumped up onto his cutting board and started celebrating. WTF! Not only was that unsanitary, it was just flat out arrogant and idiotic. Morimoto went off on Flay in an interview later in the show, saying he wasn't a real chef and how it was disrespectful to the entire craft of cooking to dishonor the cutting board, where you place your knives (the most sacred object to any chef). So not only did you have that moment of brazen disrespect, any true foodie who watched this battle thought it was rigged. Morimoto came out with much more original presentations and produced much better food. He won, but it seemed like someone was out to get him because the rematch, I believe, was rigged in Flay's favor. I think that sealed his fate. Morimoto is beloved in the industry.
One of these days, Flay's arrogance is going to come back and bite him in the ass, making him go down in flames.
I'll be there, ready to toast some marshmallows.
