A labor of love gone #$%*&@# crazy.
I arrive at Perry's SFO at 9am. Currently, my car is receiving a brake job, so I've been forced to take BART each day, adding an hour to my commute time. For those of you scoring at home, I leave at about 7 am. In and of itself, leaving the house at 7, getting up at 6 is no big deal, until you consider my school schedule. At any rate, if anyone out there was doubting my dedication, look no further, you disbelieving, ungrateful bastards. From Perry's I head directly to school, which traps me into BORING lecture classes until 11pm. I get home around midnight, to bed by 1 or 2, then do it all again.
The gig at Perry's is awesome. I won't have a chance to learn much about extravagant sauces or presentations, but I'm learning the ops of the kitchen in a furiously paced environment.
There have been a number of times when I have felt that my CCA education was not giving me the skills I would really need. Sure, I can cut, I can saute, I know the basics and I know them well. But I was, on occasion, feeling that I still had no idea how to perate in the culture of a busy professional kitchen. That said:
My first realisation came in the form of knife skills, as I was cutting circles around the other prep cooks, both in technique and speed. Then, today, the chef gave the four prep cooks, myself included, and order for 60 to-go salads that needed to be ready and out the door immediately. The other three prep cooks looked at me, and I simply took over. I assigned jobs to everyone, demonstrated the cuts of the various greens, vegetables and proteins, and surveyed the progress while doing my part. We had 60 to-go salads done in about 30 minutes. An hour later, chef told me I was being moved on to the line, as I was, in his opinion, a waste as just a prep cook.
Interesting side note, all the other prep cooks and even a few of the line cooks thought I was one of the sous chefs, and I had to continuously tell them I was not, that they should just call me Mike instead of chef. In my professional career, wherever I have applied myself, i have ended up in leadership roles, but this is ridiculous. I'd been working in a professional kitchen for 4 days and people were coming to me with questions on the menu and the food that I could answer (though I did not - I sent anyone asking something other than the most rudimentary question to the chef and sous chefs).
CCA really has trained me. I found I was able to stock in product and develop prep lists with little if any instruction. I was clearly seeing the theory of the flow of food in an establishment in living color, and I was, am, doing fine. Better than fine - I got a promotion and a raise in 4 days. Not bad.
Apparently I really do have some skills to go along with my enormous ego. Here's the capper:
Mom's pasta sauce, which is really a bolognese, was briefly the house sauce at Perry's, after chef asked me to whip one up on the fly for family meal. Everyone in the place raved about the sauce, front of house and back. Today, however, some modifications were made, making it less Mom's sauce, but still at root an interpolation of same. The important thing is I was able to wing something as complex and subjective as pasta sauce, and floor the whole room with it. And when it came to the salads, I wasn't letting anyone just pile product into a to-go container. We were presenting them, making composed salads. No one in the airport was complaining about these $7 salads, I guarantee it. All fresh ingredients, appeallingly arranged - these were special. And it was fun coming up with ways to present a composed Cobb salad in a plastic bowl that made it look like more than airport food.
So as to not leave the impression that I think I'm perfectly above it all, I do manage little fuck-ups each day. Things like forgetting to spray the grill with non-stick spray and consequently having to peel a half dozen chicken breasts off in chunks. Things like accidentally dumping about a pound of uncooked ziti into the range, missing the pot of boiling water entirely. I make mistakes, but they are forgivable rookie mistakes the generally don't get much more than a laugh from the chefs.
This really is the most fun I have ever had at work, to the point that it doesn't feel like work until after I'm off the clock. From the time I punch in to the time I leave the airport, I am all energy, absorbing all I can, taking in everything. Once I am back on BART and heading for school, fatigue sets in with all the subtlety of a safe being dropped on my head from 10 stories above. At school, I'm a zombie. Once we are back in the kitchen at school, and I've had a chance to adjust to the grind, I'll be fine. Better than fine.
Oh, and the post about school matters.
Boring.
Elitist wine snobs make me sick.
French wines are crap about half the time.
CCA can't teach me anything about business management.
Tomorrow will be my first full day on the line, Perry's first full day open to the traveling public. Sure, I'm a little nervous. But more than that, I'm excited.
I arrive at Perry's SFO at 9am. Currently, my car is receiving a brake job, so I've been forced to take BART each day, adding an hour to my commute time. For those of you scoring at home, I leave at about 7 am. In and of itself, leaving the house at 7, getting up at 6 is no big deal, until you consider my school schedule. At any rate, if anyone out there was doubting my dedication, look no further, you disbelieving, ungrateful bastards. From Perry's I head directly to school, which traps me into BORING lecture classes until 11pm. I get home around midnight, to bed by 1 or 2, then do it all again.
The gig at Perry's is awesome. I won't have a chance to learn much about extravagant sauces or presentations, but I'm learning the ops of the kitchen in a furiously paced environment.
There have been a number of times when I have felt that my CCA education was not giving me the skills I would really need. Sure, I can cut, I can saute, I know the basics and I know them well. But I was, on occasion, feeling that I still had no idea how to perate in the culture of a busy professional kitchen. That said:
My first realisation came in the form of knife skills, as I was cutting circles around the other prep cooks, both in technique and speed. Then, today, the chef gave the four prep cooks, myself included, and order for 60 to-go salads that needed to be ready and out the door immediately. The other three prep cooks looked at me, and I simply took over. I assigned jobs to everyone, demonstrated the cuts of the various greens, vegetables and proteins, and surveyed the progress while doing my part. We had 60 to-go salads done in about 30 minutes. An hour later, chef told me I was being moved on to the line, as I was, in his opinion, a waste as just a prep cook.
Interesting side note, all the other prep cooks and even a few of the line cooks thought I was one of the sous chefs, and I had to continuously tell them I was not, that they should just call me Mike instead of chef. In my professional career, wherever I have applied myself, i have ended up in leadership roles, but this is ridiculous. I'd been working in a professional kitchen for 4 days and people were coming to me with questions on the menu and the food that I could answer (though I did not - I sent anyone asking something other than the most rudimentary question to the chef and sous chefs).
CCA really has trained me. I found I was able to stock in product and develop prep lists with little if any instruction. I was clearly seeing the theory of the flow of food in an establishment in living color, and I was, am, doing fine. Better than fine - I got a promotion and a raise in 4 days. Not bad.
Apparently I really do have some skills to go along with my enormous ego. Here's the capper:
Mom's pasta sauce, which is really a bolognese, was briefly the house sauce at Perry's, after chef asked me to whip one up on the fly for family meal. Everyone in the place raved about the sauce, front of house and back. Today, however, some modifications were made, making it less Mom's sauce, but still at root an interpolation of same. The important thing is I was able to wing something as complex and subjective as pasta sauce, and floor the whole room with it. And when it came to the salads, I wasn't letting anyone just pile product into a to-go container. We were presenting them, making composed salads. No one in the airport was complaining about these $7 salads, I guarantee it. All fresh ingredients, appeallingly arranged - these were special. And it was fun coming up with ways to present a composed Cobb salad in a plastic bowl that made it look like more than airport food.
So as to not leave the impression that I think I'm perfectly above it all, I do manage little fuck-ups each day. Things like forgetting to spray the grill with non-stick spray and consequently having to peel a half dozen chicken breasts off in chunks. Things like accidentally dumping about a pound of uncooked ziti into the range, missing the pot of boiling water entirely. I make mistakes, but they are forgivable rookie mistakes the generally don't get much more than a laugh from the chefs.
This really is the most fun I have ever had at work, to the point that it doesn't feel like work until after I'm off the clock. From the time I punch in to the time I leave the airport, I am all energy, absorbing all I can, taking in everything. Once I am back on BART and heading for school, fatigue sets in with all the subtlety of a safe being dropped on my head from 10 stories above. At school, I'm a zombie. Once we are back in the kitchen at school, and I've had a chance to adjust to the grind, I'll be fine. Better than fine.
Oh, and the post about school matters.
Boring.
Elitist wine snobs make me sick.
French wines are crap about half the time.
CCA can't teach me anything about business management.
Tomorrow will be my first full day on the line, Perry's first full day open to the traveling public. Sure, I'm a little nervous. But more than that, I'm excited.
