When I first started work at the restaurant, Molly, the pastry cook, briefed me on the politics and rundown of characters.
“It’s a hard kitchen,” she said, herself a recent culinary school graduate. “Trust me. You will think you’re doing your best, and they will be watching you, saying ‘That’s not good enough; you’re not fast [read more ...]
Roy isn’t a jerk; not really. He just has some jerk-like tendencies. Leanings. To accurately describe his character, I’ll have to use the word “fuck” a lot and probably make my mother cry, but he isn’t a jerk. Not really.
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My first impression of him was cemented at the end of my first day at the [read more ...]
On Friday night before service really picked up at the restaurant, I was wiping down my counter for the umpteenth time when Tyler called my name quietly. I looked up. He was standing over a piece of tilefish on the plancha, and he just cocked his head, calling me over wordlessly.
Oh my god, I thought. [read more ...]
When Roy pulled me into the walk-in last Friday and began yelling at me, I leaned against the cranberry beans and let my eyes glaze over.
A few minutes earlier, Tobias had sent me to work in the basement prep area while he manned our station during service. Roy was, apparently, extremely displeased with this turn [read more ...]
The first thing you should know about Carl is that he does not like his fake name. “Oh, it’s so gay,” he said upon reading about it. “I know only like, two Carls, and one of them is a gay hairdresser. It is so not cool.” He would prefer his pseudonym to be something more [read more ...]
One of the first things Tobias said directly to me, on our second day of working together, was: “You all call everything ‘guys’ here, don’t you?”
I stopped what I was doing to think about that (Carl glared at me, and I quickly resumed cutting leeks into squares). Did we call everything guys? I guess I [read more ...]
I certainly don’t want to paint an unfair picture of my coworkers, as I’m afraid the last piece might’ve. I am, of course, encountered with an unhealthy amount of skepticism and eye-rolls regarding my abilities, but then again, I make an unhealthy amount of errors on the job. I’ve said it before: as a stage, [read more ...]
Tobias started working at the restaurant two days ago. He comes from within the industry – unlike me, who, my coworkers are convinced, comes straight from a Hello Kitty warehouse. On his second day, we were paired together on the garde manger station for Friday dinner service. It was an intense rush, with two hard [read more ...]
For my last night on patissier this Saturday, I wanted to go out with a bang. We had a little free time before service, so I made a pumpkin pie ice cream. Boy, was it good! The recipe is as follows – it’s very easy, but if you don’t have access to a machine, you [read more ...]
I can’t tell you how many times in the past two days I’ve been given links to this article in the Atlantic. It’s a relatively quick read, so I recommend you do, but a quick summary is that people are beginning, “in these lean times” to question whether aspiring cooks are better off just interning [read more ...]
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