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.