An extended tour of the weeds.
Which is not to say I can't handle myself on a line - I can and I do. But when an 8 top comes in and everyone orders something that comes off my line, getting the complete order out in 10 minutes is a little challenging. There are some drastic differences between 17 and the Cafe. First, much of my mis en place is cut and prepped to order as opposed to Cafe life in which my entire mis en place was ready to go before the first order came in. Endive salad? Great. 30 seconds and it's dressed and plated, off my station. Here at 17, an endive salad requires me running an apple through a mandolin, saving two nice slices, a fine julienne of the remains, then pulling two nice leaves off an endive, fine chopping the rest, then combining the ingredients and plating it up. 2 minutes, minimum. I'll get it down to 90 seconds soon enough, but if I have to do 4 of them in a shot, then another 2 or 3 neatly stacked crab and grapefruit salads plus a pate plate on the same order, things can get a little hairy.
This elaborate plating gig is occasionally unnerving. Chef has a very specific vision of how each plate should look leaving the kitchen. Everyone has a specific vision, but none of them are exactly same. Everyone has an opinion on plating, and those opinions are offered on most of the plates I produce.
Aside from different directions on the perfect plate, the kitchen chemistry here is amazing. Chef has assembled a bunch of monkeys - talented monkeys - to do his dirty work. One of my sous chefs, Dax, loses his keys half a dozen times each day, leading to his wandering around asking everyone if they either have or have seen his keys. Sam, our lead pastry guy and really an all-around stud in the kitchen, also a total cut-up and clown, pointed to a table and said, oh, I think I saw them over there. Dax wanders over to a prep table to see that Sam has placed Dax's keys in a set bowl of gelatin. Nice.
I'm not sold on the city of Houston. It's a strange place. The downtown area is big and high, a mix of old west and metropolitan, but harbors a population that ain't exactly sophisticates when it comes to big city livin'. You can take the redneck out of the redneck away but you can't take the redneck out of the rednecks. I actually wanted out of San Francisco, was tired of it. Houston may not have been the best of new options. No music scene. Everyone here in my age group is out of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, if seen through a funhouse mirror, and the downtown area is a long series of hooch dance clubs, asshole jocks and yuppies. Meanwhile, get a little outside downtown and you have old time Texans, predictably republican and waiting patiently for Bush to carpet bomb another sovereign nation over the next convenient exuse.
So, I work, I go home. This is externship.
Which is not to say I can't handle myself on a line - I can and I do. But when an 8 top comes in and everyone orders something that comes off my line, getting the complete order out in 10 minutes is a little challenging. There are some drastic differences between 17 and the Cafe. First, much of my mis en place is cut and prepped to order as opposed to Cafe life in which my entire mis en place was ready to go before the first order came in. Endive salad? Great. 30 seconds and it's dressed and plated, off my station. Here at 17, an endive salad requires me running an apple through a mandolin, saving two nice slices, a fine julienne of the remains, then pulling two nice leaves off an endive, fine chopping the rest, then combining the ingredients and plating it up. 2 minutes, minimum. I'll get it down to 90 seconds soon enough, but if I have to do 4 of them in a shot, then another 2 or 3 neatly stacked crab and grapefruit salads plus a pate plate on the same order, things can get a little hairy.
This elaborate plating gig is occasionally unnerving. Chef has a very specific vision of how each plate should look leaving the kitchen. Everyone has a specific vision, but none of them are exactly same. Everyone has an opinion on plating, and those opinions are offered on most of the plates I produce.
Aside from different directions on the perfect plate, the kitchen chemistry here is amazing. Chef has assembled a bunch of monkeys - talented monkeys - to do his dirty work. One of my sous chefs, Dax, loses his keys half a dozen times each day, leading to his wandering around asking everyone if they either have or have seen his keys. Sam, our lead pastry guy and really an all-around stud in the kitchen, also a total cut-up and clown, pointed to a table and said, oh, I think I saw them over there. Dax wanders over to a prep table to see that Sam has placed Dax's keys in a set bowl of gelatin. Nice.
I'm not sold on the city of Houston. It's a strange place. The downtown area is big and high, a mix of old west and metropolitan, but harbors a population that ain't exactly sophisticates when it comes to big city livin'. You can take the redneck out of the redneck away but you can't take the redneck out of the rednecks. I actually wanted out of San Francisco, was tired of it. Houston may not have been the best of new options. No music scene. Everyone here in my age group is out of the Abercrombie & Fitch catalog, if seen through a funhouse mirror, and the downtown area is a long series of hooch dance clubs, asshole jocks and yuppies. Meanwhile, get a little outside downtown and you have old time Texans, predictably republican and waiting patiently for Bush to carpet bomb another sovereign nation over the next convenient exuse.
So, I work, I go home. This is externship.
