Les Trois Forts

I am already half-way through my second internship, and it is going quite well, in spite of the arctic temperatures felt in the area which combines the pastry station and Garde-manger, where, as with my first internship, I am spending my first and second weeks. The restaurant is twice the size of the previous one and belongs to a luxury hotel overlooking the port and ten minutes away from where I live. I’ve always wondered what it would be like to work for such a hotel, and now I know that it is not for me. It’s definitely not like staying as a guest, to say the least. Though the food is very refined, the quantities are huge and makes the work very repetitive. For example, instead of making two dozen tuiles (a thin wafer usually made with slivered almonds) as I would have at Une Table au Sud, I had to make eighty; same with the meringues and everything else.
As with my previous internship, I was relieved to exit the pastry station, and get away from all that sugar and head to the garde-manger this week.What goes on in there is more interesting than in my previous restaurant, probably for two reasons: a wider selection of foods I like , and also a young chef who entrusts me with a lot of different tasks and responsibilities. On the other hand, yesterday he had me call out dishes (aboyer in French, which literally means “to bark”) in the main kitchen to the fish station which made me uncomfortable, since it involved pretty much yelling a sentence over the noise of the main kitchen, which is vast, to a crew of (mostly) grown men who are pretty much strangers. Thank God he didn’t make me do that today.
As before, the kitchen staff or brigade are mostly young men, so the conversation is limited to video games, food (including techniques and cooking instruments such as knives) and sex, with the latter amounting to about ninety percent of the total. I have gotten used to it by now, especially since they are mostly respectful of me, probably due to the fact that I could technically be their mother!
The chef is a jovial looking fellow, sort of like a Santa without the beard and curls. He calls me madame, which is funny, but I think it’s because he doesn’t remember my name more than anything else. He favors Indian spices and less traditionally French items on his menu such as quinoah and matcha, ingredients which I both love. Certain items seem to appear on all the fancy restaurants menus, such as topinambours or Jerusalem artichokes, and Pastis, the anis-flavored liquor from Marseille which appears in the marshmallows here and was in a peanut flan as an amuse-bouche in my previous restaurant.
Next week, hopefully, working the hot line with the chef…

Holiday season

As suggested by a friend, I started drafting a list of top fifty things I miss most about NYC. I hesitated a bit, as when I left four months ago, I was determined to look ahead and not back, as a means of self-preservation, and so as not to turn into a pillar of fleur de sel. However, given that it is nearly the end of the year, a time for looking back, and that I have not over-indulged in this activity thus far, I started listing away in my tiny moleskin, but only came up with about 25, which has led me to believe that more and more I am learning to appreciate what I have… but more of that later.

In the meantime, I am sure everyone is dying to find out what the holiday season is like in Marseille. Well, the cold certainly is here, and the wind, can rival any NYC gust (funny how I my love of views on bodies of water always leads me to the windiest place in town; my daughter would say it’s because I am Windy). There are a couple decorations downtown and in shops, Christmas trees on sale, even a menorah on the Vieux Port. Overall it is very low-key, which I appreciate, though I must admit enjoying sneaking a peek on Fifth Avenue near 57th to check out the windows at Bergdorf, looking annoyed at the flocks of stalling tourists while taking in the display from the corner of my eye. What I cannot stand, I now realize clearly, are the “Marché de Noel” type of affairs. They are basically like street fairs in NYC, where you see the same vendors over and over. How many gelatin candles with dried flowers can one person buy? So here it’s pretty much the same thing, except that there are stalls and stalls of santons, which are little figurines depicting villagers and peasants in their usual occupations. I think it started out with the nativity scene, where there were just a couple of people (namely, Mary, Joseph, the three kings, the angel, a coupe animals and finally, on the twenty-fifth, baby Jesus). People got carried away and started making these elaborate nativity scenes with thousands of little guys. All this to say that the center of town is filled with merchants selling these things.

I put up a tiny Christmas tree in my apartment, mostly because my daughter asked for it, and after all it proved to be a fun week end project. I call it the flamenco tree because instead of a star or angel we topped it with a big black satin flower and decorated it with some of my dangling earrings. I like it.

Half day off... and a little sunshine after plenty of rain

Recently I’ve had to step back and reassess what it is I am doing here. The fact that literally two weeks after touching down I ended up in a 9 month course just hit me a few days ago. Though I like the spontaneity of it all, I had no idea what I was getting into… first of all gastronomy in France is not taken lightly. It has a history and rules, both written and tacit. It is governed by hierarchy and bureaucracy and tradition (and lavish amounts of cream, as already mentioned). There is such a thing as a national exam that prospective cooks take, much like doctors or lawyers elsewhere… like I said, it’s serious stuff.
Back in the States, I never heard of all these different diplomas and degrees relative to working in the kitchen. Here is France, it’s a hot topic in the kitchen, with different statuses for interns, apprentices, chefs, sous-chefs, and the rest. What’s more, there seems to be a tight-knit old boy network linking the top tables like an invisible web…
So today I decided to take a break from the kitchen, from the classroom and from government offices and enjoy the city. After class this morning (How to Attempt to Navigate the French Bureaucracy 101) I suggested to one of my classmates that we grab a big salad for lunch (I haven’t had a salad in days, as it won’t be in the “board” exam). So we walked to Cours Julien, which is a neighborhood with lots of cool restaurants and bars, and had a nice lunch. Afterwards we headed to Noailles market where I wanted to get fresh produce. On the way we stumbled upon the Asian grocery store, and lo and behold, they had Filipino products! I got dried shitake and bean thread noodles and picked up sweet potatoes at the market. Then we headed to Empereur (http://www.empereur.fr/), one of my favorite stores in the city, which sells cooking ware of the highest quality and presents a dazzling choice. I was a model of self-restraint and left with only a spatula (you get your ass kicked in class and in the kitchen if you don’t use one to empty the contents of one container to another). Finally we settled at one of my favorite places, Green Bear Coffee (http://www.greenbearcoffee.com), where I had my soy latte and completed my assignment, a cross-word puzzle with vocabulary from the French labor system.
Tomorrow’s program: a hike in the Calanques, which are the charming little beaches which dot the Riviera coastline… hopefully there will be no mistral!