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…