People love fire.
While not a general rule, I don't like people. Whether it's the years I've spent in retail and customer service oriented positions or whatever, I continually see the worst sides of them, and I usually don't like them. No one gets a pass from me. I'm a cynically optimistic man that doesn't allow much in the way of trust for a stranger.
As part of the buffet team, I knew I was eventually going to have to work on the buffet lines of the Careme Room instead of in the kitchen. When I hit the door last night, Chef asked me to set up the flambe station and to train three other buffet team members on flambeing to order for the general populous.
At the station we've got bananas, apples, pears, strawberries, mangos and pineapples, an arsenal of rums and whiskeys, three modular burners, and all the accompaniments one needs to set things ablaze. The Careme was all buffet and garde manger last night, so people would just wander up, ask for whatever, and we'd cook it and send it up in a fire ball for them.
I sighed. Flambeing as people eyeball every move you make? No thanks. At this point in my young culinary career, the idea of working in an open kitchen runs contrary to my experience of swearing, throwing things, yelling. Working a flambe station, you have to be nice, friendly, helpful.
Customers realize they are at a teaching restaurant, so they like to make small talk. Where are you from? How's school? And it seems everyone has a family member that is thinking about going to CCA.
By 7, people started cruising our station, surveying the produce, asking simple questions about the preparations. By 8, we had a line 5 customers deep with three burners going.
But a funny thing happened at the flambe station last night. I found that my years of playing live music combined with my years of customer servive and my new chops with a saute pan turned me into this flashy show-off. And I loved it. I had a blast. People would come up, I'd point them through what we had, make suggestions on what types of alcohol to use, and chat with them throughout. Now and then you'd get someone that wanted an organized demonstration so they could do the same thing at home, and suddenly you were doing a cooking show for half a dozen people, finishing the broadcast with a 6 foot fireball.
Meanwhile, Jason and I tried to out do each other, trying to get a more aggressive flame, until we were both putting 4 and 5 times the amount of alcohol we should have into the pans. You'd ask the customer to step back a moment and boom, atomic. Then we'd trade jabs at one another, calling the other a show off, and the crowd just ate it up, so to speak. Or if another student got only a sad little poof out of their pan, we'd heckle them, and again the crowd would laugh. We all had a blast, student and customer alike.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, was nice to us. No one complained about anything. And every time you lit a pan on fire, there were oohs and aahs from the gathered crowd, and with all the open fire in the corner of the room, of course everyone wanted a flambe of something. We probably cranked out 120 flambe orders between 6 of us.
Sure, it's a dog and pony show, but it was a lot of fun. Much better than standing behind a table of cold cuts pointing out the duck confit, serving salmon gallantines and nodding to the elderly, which I've had to do on a number of occasions.
So Advanced B&P [sic] finished with a bang. Chef John and I traded compliments and went our separate ways. next week is Advanced Garde Manger, but we'll see how advanced that one gets. And there won't be anymore flambe station for us, unless I can sneak my way on.
While not a general rule, I don't like people. Whether it's the years I've spent in retail and customer service oriented positions or whatever, I continually see the worst sides of them, and I usually don't like them. No one gets a pass from me. I'm a cynically optimistic man that doesn't allow much in the way of trust for a stranger.
As part of the buffet team, I knew I was eventually going to have to work on the buffet lines of the Careme Room instead of in the kitchen. When I hit the door last night, Chef asked me to set up the flambe station and to train three other buffet team members on flambeing to order for the general populous.
At the station we've got bananas, apples, pears, strawberries, mangos and pineapples, an arsenal of rums and whiskeys, three modular burners, and all the accompaniments one needs to set things ablaze. The Careme was all buffet and garde manger last night, so people would just wander up, ask for whatever, and we'd cook it and send it up in a fire ball for them.
I sighed. Flambeing as people eyeball every move you make? No thanks. At this point in my young culinary career, the idea of working in an open kitchen runs contrary to my experience of swearing, throwing things, yelling. Working a flambe station, you have to be nice, friendly, helpful.
Customers realize they are at a teaching restaurant, so they like to make small talk. Where are you from? How's school? And it seems everyone has a family member that is thinking about going to CCA.
By 7, people started cruising our station, surveying the produce, asking simple questions about the preparations. By 8, we had a line 5 customers deep with three burners going.
But a funny thing happened at the flambe station last night. I found that my years of playing live music combined with my years of customer servive and my new chops with a saute pan turned me into this flashy show-off. And I loved it. I had a blast. People would come up, I'd point them through what we had, make suggestions on what types of alcohol to use, and chat with them throughout. Now and then you'd get someone that wanted an organized demonstration so they could do the same thing at home, and suddenly you were doing a cooking show for half a dozen people, finishing the broadcast with a 6 foot fireball.
Meanwhile, Jason and I tried to out do each other, trying to get a more aggressive flame, until we were both putting 4 and 5 times the amount of alcohol we should have into the pans. You'd ask the customer to step back a moment and boom, atomic. Then we'd trade jabs at one another, calling the other a show off, and the crowd just ate it up, so to speak. Or if another student got only a sad little poof out of their pan, we'd heckle them, and again the crowd would laugh. We all had a blast, student and customer alike.
Everyone, and I mean everyone, was nice to us. No one complained about anything. And every time you lit a pan on fire, there were oohs and aahs from the gathered crowd, and with all the open fire in the corner of the room, of course everyone wanted a flambe of something. We probably cranked out 120 flambe orders between 6 of us.
Sure, it's a dog and pony show, but it was a lot of fun. Much better than standing behind a table of cold cuts pointing out the duck confit, serving salmon gallantines and nodding to the elderly, which I've had to do on a number of occasions.
So Advanced B&P [sic] finished with a bang. Chef John and I traded compliments and went our separate ways. next week is Advanced Garde Manger, but we'll see how advanced that one gets. And there won't be anymore flambe station for us, unless I can sneak my way on.
