Hi, people! It's me! I'm alive! I know how to make pasta now! I wasn't side-eyed to death by a score of men in white uniforms my first week on the job. We haven't officially opened yet but let me tell you, this world is a new one. I have learned so incredibly much...because here's the thing: basically all of my skill and time spent cooking up till now seems a little, well, useless. I know it's not actually useless in the long run - I've got some great intuition and head-knowledge built up from years spent in the presence of cooking. But the way things are done among the pros renders the homemade way I've done it forever just wrong enough to knock me off my game and leave me feeling like a newbie. Thankfully, the people I'm working with are great teachers. They're patient. They're kind. They cuss cheerfully and swipe the third tray of macarons that hasn't baked properly into the compost and tell me it's the fault of the terrible oven, not me, and that it's getting replaced next week. I think what has stumped me most of all is less about the food we're making and more about the totally different equipment, terms, quantities and methods we're using. I wish I'd read Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential before I started work here. I feel like I would've been much better prepared for the details of work in a professional kitchen. But hey - I didn't have any idea that I was going to soon be working in a fine dining restaurant, did I? This week has shown me that for those who want to learn, there is always opportunity. I do want to learn. And I have. And I will. And that's what makes me so excited for this job and this place.

All the same, I do wish I'd known more about the world I was entering - it would have saved me from so many embarrassing episodes born out of blatant ignorance. Needless to say, I've now Amazon Prime'd Anthony Bourdain's renowned book about working in restaurants. For now, I keep my mouth closed and my ears open. Read on to educate yourself - information saves pride. Haha...ha....

“Whachoo want, white boy? Burn cream? A Band-Aid? Then he raised his own enormous palms to me, brought them up real close so I could see them properly; the hideous constellation of water-filled blisters, angry red welts from grill marks, the old scars, the raw flesh where steam or hot fat had made the skin simply roll off. They looked like the claws of some monstrous science-fiction crustacean, knobby and calloused under wounds old and new. I watched, transfixed, as Tyrone - his eyes never leaving mine - reached slowly under the broiler and, with one naked hand, picked up a glowing-hot sizzle-platter, moved it over to the cutting board, and set it down in front of me. He never flinched.” 

- Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

In the restaurant world, a dishwasher is not the appliance that sits in most home kitchens with racks that sag under the weight of a full dinner's worth of dishes. In a professional kitchen, dishwashers are not even machines that do the business of washing dishes for you. "Around these parts," Chef said with a wry smile after I mistook a comment about a dishwasher to mean the appliance, "A machine that washes dishes is called a 'dish machine' while a 'dishwasher' is typically a Mexican." Okay...duly noted. We have neither, yet. We wash our own dishes, taking turns doing so which apparently is not the way most kitchens work. It's kind of nice, the idea that somebody else would wash all your dishes for you on command. Nice, but not as fast as seeing a spoon, wanting the spoon, washing the spoon yourself, and now having the spoon. I don't mind washing dishes by hand. It gives me a second to immerse my hands in soap suds and clean off some of the inches of flour encrusting my body.
Your kitchen scale will become your security blanket. From the first day when Chef rattled off a formula at me and I tried to use a community-use kitchen scale which mysteriously only measured in kilograms, I have been deeply attached to my own little pale blue $10 scale from Amazon. I use it constantly. I occasionally let other people borrow it. A kitchen scale is something I had already begun to incorporate into my cooking and baking habits. I'm so glad I did - a week at the restaurant has taught me the incomparable worth of weighing things rather than having to measure them out - far fewer dishes, far more accurate measurements, far more scale-able. The method of creating a recipe in percentages still escapes me but I've got to hand it to the formula-style of ingredients: it makes changing the size of the recipe terribly easy.


Here lies the Ghost of your Lame Upper Arm Strength. Okay, so I'm not strong yet, but I'm going to be. I'm communing with fifty pound bags of flour. I'm hefting kindergartner-sized mixer bowls full to the brim with biscuit dough off chest-high counter tops to the pastry station. I'm rolling pasta. I'm running up and down basement stairs. I'm washing heavy sauciers and stock pots and lifting them over my head to dry on hanging hooks. I find myself part of a community of individuals who are, like our petite Asian sous chef, the kind of people who see a massive industrial fridge and think, "I could lift that," or are able to effortlessly pick up a twenty-pound skillet (filled with sauteeing vegetables) and toss them like rose petals with a completely peaceful face. I'm going to get strong and I'm going to do it soon. Forget bar-bells. I've got ten gallon batches of peach jam and people to keep up with.

Here's something everyone does: curse. I knew cooks swear a lot, but I didn't really account for the fact that in the restaurant world, strong language holds the same weight as adjectives. Flounder is "f---ing delicious." Pasta is "f---ing amazing." The oven is "f---ing terrible." The French top is "f---ing hot." Towel service is "f---ing expensive." So far I've been sworn at cheerfully...I'm waiting to be sworn at by someone who is massively, sizzling-hot angry. I know that if I'm not able to keep up, at some point I'll be told I'm "too f---ing slow" and I think I'd like to get that part over with. A positive of language being scattered around like Espelette, though, is that they aren't going to mean as much by it as I would; though I miss typical adjectives, if I'm told to f--- off I'm not going to take it too much to heart. I might throw a thesaurus in reply, though.
Family meal is the meal that the kitchen staff eats together before service begins. It can be a disgusting mash up of all the leftovers ever in the history of the world, amen, or it can be some delicious thing that puts us in a food coma. Happily for us, Chef is highly skilled at making delicious food out of almost nothing. Family meal has been one of my favorite parts. There's nothing like trotting plates out into the dusk for the bartender and the owners, then climbing into a cardboard box with a coworker to eat plates heaped with fried eggplant, prosciutto and smoky goat cheese. I love my fellow cooks so far- they are motivated, dedicated, and extremely talented in their own right. These meals are building a little work family and I love the feeling that we're beginning to belong together, not just individually.

“Bigfoot understood — as I came to understand — that character is far more important than skills or employment history.”

-Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential