For those keeping track, I graduate from the French Culinary Institute in exactly two weeks – that is, presuming I pass my final exam. Two weeks is not a very long time, especially in comparison to the nine months I’ve spent chopping, sautéing and braising. Last night, as I hacked off squab heads in the [read more ...]
First, read this.
Now, read the following. This is what it felt like everyday when I cooked at the restaurant (I understand that cooking professionally isn’t like this for everyone. But when you’re the type to tape your knives pink and rely on a smile to pull you out of the weeds, things become exponentially stickier.)
Okay. [read more ...]
Meanwhile, in a kitchen across town, I was contemplating murder.
Four lobsters crawled lazily across my cutting board, their claws held together by thick rubber bands. I gripped a large knife and winced. I’d butchered dozens of animals before – even a rabbit! – but had somehow managed to squeak through culinary school without actually killing [read more ...]
One time, when I was portioning pork belly, Carl crept up behind me. “See this piece?” he asked, picking up a square and shoving it into my line of vision.
“Uh-huh,” I said, with the slightest tinge of annoyance in my voice.
“This piece is good. Make every piece just like this one.”
“Uh-huh.” I kept cutting.
He wasn’t [read more ...]
At 7 o’clock, Roy hands me a pot of beige liquid. “Tile foam,” he says. “There’s THREE orders in there, so don’t use it all.” Only one plate of tilefish is going out, so I buzz the foam with the immersion blender and pour a third of it into a serving vessel. I give the [read more ...]
Ramón is my favorite dishwasher at the restaurant. Ramón is his real name, though I didn’t know that for weeks. I went about my business, interacting only to hand him pots and plead, in broken Spanish, “Puedes lavar … esta? este? … para mí?” He’d look at me like I was speaking some weird dialect [read more ...]
I’ve always thought that too much of a good thing makes for a particularly bad morning. Not that that stops me from partaking in over-consumption of very good things. My Friday night last week consisted of many, many glasses of wine, and ended at 6 in the morning with fresh squeezed orange juice … and [read more ...]
Inside their cage, two bright-eyed rabbits were sniffing the air. Twitch, twitch, twitch: I watched their whiskers wiggle and took a small sip of my sparkling wine.
“Wanna see the garden? It’s rad,” Krista said, setting down her glass and beginning the ascend up a sturdy-looking ladder.
I followed her up, kicking off my heels as I [read more ...]
“Before you leaving,” Sixto said to me in lilting English the other day, “be very sure that is what you want to do.” He paused, continued. “Because you have a -how you say?- family here at the restaurant.”
When I told my mother this on the phone, she laughed and laughed. “Oh, a family! A family!” [read more ...]
I’ve worked with Tobias more than anyone else at the restaurant. We shared the duties of garde manger station for a month, prompting our coworkers to give us a Brangelina-type nickname that combined ours. (I was just slightly annoyed that my name contributed only one letter.) Because we worked so closely, it followed that we [read more ...]
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