Repent!

…the end is near. In less than two months time my course will be over. I feel like it was just yesterday that I inquired about it and next thing I knew I was enrolled for the following week. I’ve been looking for my first paid job in the kitchen and needless to say that it is a bit intimidating. After working for so many years in an office, which was not satisfying but was comfortingly familiar, I am once again venturing into unexplored territory. Looking for a job is different from looking for an intership; there is much more at stake in the former than in the latter, for obvious reasons. To begin with, my internships have been very short, so no matter how unpleasant the experience, I knew it was temporary and it made the present more bearable. Also there was less pressure since I was not a paid employee; the chefs were mostly cool and flexible with me on many accounts, from schedules to responsibilities.
For my next and last internship, I picked a little restaurant downtown where the chef works alone. The place is open just for lunch and it’s more simple fare than my previous three restaurants. Nevertheless, I like the daily menus and the fact that the chef advertises his home-made foie-gras; that’s the kind of stuff that speaks to me (even if we eat mostly quinoah and fat-free yogurt with agave nectar at home). The chef showed me around today and the kitchen is actually not that small, there is plenty of room for two. There are also two big windows which I was delighted to see… natural light in the workplace is important to me (and possibly one of the many factors that eventually led me to resign from my last job at 580 Madison Avenue). Also, and this will be a big change for me, the chef doesn’t wear a chef’s coat! He told me I was free to wear one if I chose to but that he was comfortable in a tee-shirt.

Just a little story on the importance of a chef’s coat: the other day in class we had to bake about two hundred little palmiers (sugary puff pastries) and since we only had two ovens it was taking a long time, so while I was waiting for them to cook, I removed my chef’s coat and put on my civilian top (which for the record was not a mid-riff, lord have mercy). I proceeded to take the pastries out and put the racks on the counter. At one point I reached over a hot rack and it seared my belly (which was led bare as a result of my leaning over the counter), leaving a deep purplish mark across it ... A painful reminder that I should never be in the kitchen without the proper attire!

The piano

So in the kitchen there is the piano, and it doesn’t make music, thought it does produce delicious food if you know how to play it. I like this lyrical term used to describe something rather heavy, grey and intimidating. The piano is divided by invisible lines than cannot be crossed within the hierarchy of the French kitchen. For instance, during my very first internship, and my second week ever in a professional kitchen, part of my responsibility in the garde-manger was to fill shot glasses with velouté de cèpe or porcini cream, whenever a server announced a new customer. When I heard “deux couverts!” (four-top!) I would have to grab the chinois à piston or siphon with a valve (I don’t know what they are called in English) and reach for the soup which was maintained at the correct temperature in a water bath at the far end of the piano.

Each time I would do this my arms would burn as I would stretch them over the hottest part of the huge rectangle of fire to fill my siphon. So I asked my chef de partie if I could move the water bath closer and he said no, because the meat/fish guys needed the space. So that whole week I burned the hairs off my forearms because the hotline owned the piano… we in the garde-manger were just squatting it.
Another example comes to mind at my second internship, during my first week at the pastry station. The pastry chef placed a huge vat of cocoa and water to boil for icing, if I remember correctly, over the piano at the fish station (in this kitchen there was a separate one for fish and for meat). Though the pastry station owns the pastry ovens, we only had a little induction pad which we could not use for larger amounts since we did not have the appropriate pots. So we used piano at the fish station (why not the meat station, I am not sure, but maybe to stay out of the sous-chef’s way). Now the chef de partie for the fish reminded me of the sous-chef at my first restaurant (it turns out, they are actually good friends): young, perfectionist, fit, arrogant, talented, and very very hot-blooded. You could see how proud he was of his station and always kept it sparkling clean through a reign of terror and intimidation. So back at the pastry station we had a long list of, well, pastries to bake, when all of a sudden I see the fish chef screamed the pastry chef’s name and barged through our station, through an emergency exit onto an outdoor patio I didn’t know existed. I thought he was just taking a break until I found out that the chocolate mixture had overflowed all over the shining piano down to the floor. Without a word the pastry chef started cleaning up… I think the only reason she didn’t get beat up was because she was a woman. They didn’t speak to each other for the rest of the week, and next time we need to heat something, we went over to the meat station.

Meta-graduation

I got my exam grades two weeks ago and it turns out I passed, so now all I need for my diploma is one last internship. It’s been unexpectedly bittersweet to get my results; though of course I hoped and believed that I passed, in the last six months I had a goal to work toward, and now that I have reached it, well I need to face the reality of working in a kitchen for real and not as an intern, as soon as this summer. Of course I am thinking of starting my own business, but I don’t feel like I’m ready at all; the restaurant business is so vast and there’s still so much to learn, and the more experience I gain the more I realize this.
In the meantime, I am searching for one last place to work as an intern. I sent an email to Le Petit Nice, which is the only three Michelin star restaurant in the area (the next one would be Alain Ducasse’s Louis XV in Monaco). I haven’t heard back from them so I am taking it as a sign to go elsewhere. Basically the chef’s reputation is amongst the worst I’ve heard of… he spends his time yelling insults at his cooks and gratuitously humiliating them. Why, do you ask, would I ever want to work with someone like that? For starters, the writer in me is fascinated by the caricature and simply witnessing him in action. How could I not want to work with him!
On the other hand, having spent two miserable weeks at my last restaurant, which almost completely sapped me of my desire to work in a kitchen, so I’m thinking perhaps that would be the wrong thing to do at the moment. My advisor also told me that I should do something I enjoy, as a present for myself, in French, “fais-toi plaisir” which literally means, “pleasure yourself” (you’ve got to love the French for this- I couldn’t imagine an American advisor giving me this kind of advice). Not to mention that I was reading the blog zencancook.com yesterday and there was an entry on spending a day at Eric Ripert’s le Bernardin in New York City. The author said that “I’ve been in quite a few fancy kitchens over the years and this one strikes me as one of the most kind, human and civilized i’ve seen so far. This is a culinary school of the highest level where everyone is given a chance no matter their background.” This means that you don’t have to be mean to be a great chef! As such, the search goes on, Le Petit Nice will not have the honor of working with me after all…

Of chives and risotto

My research for the next kitchen to intern in has brought me to a restaurant downtown. I had noticed the window several times before but it was always closed, so I set a date with my girlfriend to check it out for lunch. The owner is a Swiss lady and the kitchen seemed small but promising. When we got there we were greeted by the server and seated in the spacious, luminous room. I immediately liked the vibe of the place. I ordered ribs and my girlfriend a risotto with figatelli, a Corsican sausage. We were served rapidly and as soon as I got my plate I winced. There was pork (not ribs, by belly), sweet potatoes and leeks. Though it did not look like what I expected, that was fine. What stood out for me were the chives sprinkled over the plate: they were chopped irregularly, meaning to say some were longer than others. After spending hours over the last few months perfecting my chive and shallot-chopping, I had a moment of indignation, for lack of a better word (it was not revulsion, nor bitterness), followed by a resignation that my view of food served in restaurants (as opposed to homes) was forever altered. Those tiny green bits were like so many mini-Proustian madeleines for me, bringing back hours of concentrated effort in various kitchens spread across Marseille.
The rest of my food was fine, I finished it all, but would never serve such a plate in my own restaurant, no matter how modest the place. As for my girlfriend’s order… What was placed before her was a dish of rice (not Arborio) mixed with a bunch of vegetables and rawish sausage. Simply put, it was not good. Now she and I have had several discussions regarding risotto in the past, starting with my dismay at the French habit of adding cream to it (unlike the Italian way where the starch from the rice combined with the stock and wine is what produces the unctuousness). So when the server asked us how our food was, I refrained from saying that my chives were chopped irregularly, but my friend ventured to say that her food was good (lie) but that it was not a risotto. The server immediately headed to the open kitchen to tell the chef, a skinny woman with a huge head of frizzy hair, at which point we heard some loud voices saying that the food was how it was meant to be or something to that effect. It appeared that the chef was miffed by our feedback and screamed at our waiter who from then on ignored us completely. Welcome to the food industry in France, where the chef is always right…

Where I got paired up with the kitchen jerk

Not only did GG (see Kitchen drama, February 17, 2011 entry) not get fired that day but he stayed on, and I was assigned to work with him. The lesson here is that next time a chef tells you you’ll be working at the fish station, don’t believe him.
I’ve seen cooks scream and yell, but GG is in a whole different category. I knew it from the moment I met him and five minutes later he was telling me – telling, not asking – for my contact info so he could help me find a job – this guy was special, and not in a good way. He also told me that the restaurant was “merde” and that he couldn’t wait to leave, again, within my first few minutes of starting there.
He doesn’t have a foul mouth like the other chefs, no, he’s far too educated for that. He’s super smart (and reminds us every day), but his eldest kid is even smarter. He’s so good at everything he does… which explains why he is stuck at his station and not a chef of his own right at age forty-one and after six years of excelling in the kitchen (not!). I thought of telling the chef several times that I could not work with him, but though he almost did fire him, he’s still my hierarchical superior and the chef is on his side. I can tell that is so overworked and spread thin that it’s a matter of time till he cracks. He has three kids and a wife in a different town and works crazy hours. In the meantime he is as arrogant and pompous as can be, and had taken it upon himself to be my mentor, just like another supervisor I worked with at the United Nations…while we were both new to the office for some reason I was paired with him, and he too just kept doling out career advice on me, as if I wanted to resemble him… what makes these people believe that I want to be anything remotely associated with them? Who told them that when people are friendly it means “please teach me to be a jerk like you”?
Anyway, even though I told the chef at my interview that I didn’t want to be in the pastry shop, it so happened that during my first two weeks, one pastry cook resigned and the other was fired, leaving the pastry chef alone. Given that plus the fact that I was not getting along with my supervisor or Chef de Partie, I told the chef that I was ready to go sweet (I gave him a look that said “anywhere but with that lunatic you paired me with” but I’m not sure he got my subtle message).

So I spent my third and last week at the pastry station and it was like heaven. The chef was communicative and patient, sharing all his knowledge with me about melting points and oven ventilations and what not. He also made me do pretty much everything, so by the end of the week I was able to assemble and send out every single dessert on the menu, not the mention the after dinner sweets or “mignardises” (every French fine dining restaurant serves these at the end of the meal, after dessert). On my last day he let me bake a Fraisier (a lighter version of strawberry shortcake made with genoise, strawberries and cream filling), because I had mentioned to him that I liked it… I was truly sad to leave him.

The lost star

Monday morning I went to see chef Frerard at my previous restaurant (Les Trois Forts at Sofitel) to get him to sign some papers, and when I told him where I was interning he told me they must be really upset… that’s when I found out that Michelin’s list of restaurants for 2011 had just come out and that le Peron had lost their only star.
I couldn’t start to imagine how the chefs (there are two) must have felt like. Michelin stars are a huge deal in the restaurant world, and losing one can be devastating. I was in shock for the rest of the day, glad that I wasn’t working to witness the effect it might have on the staff. On the other hand, they probably must have had some idea that this would happen. I overheard a conversation about losing the star last week; talk about it was in the air. There are many reasons one might lose a star, and everyone has their idea. Someone mentioned not changing the menu often enough, someone else, that the tables were too close together... I also have my idea.
So yesterday when I came in, it seemed like business as usual, with only the pastry chef asking me if I heard the news. There was only one chef out of the two present, and he didn’t mention a word about it all day. All in all, there was no hysteria or bitterness or even sadness, the staff seemed blaze about the whole deal, some joked about it. Somehow, we had noticeably less clients than the week before.