Kitchen characters II

This week I met another kid, at the hotel’s café, where the chef sent me to help out. The café is in the lobby and has its own kitchen, except without an oven. It has a full view of the old port with its magnificent forts (which give their name to the hotel’s main restaurant). Kevin was alone when I found him – or rather when he found me waiting for him - and looked very surprised to see me; as a matter of fact he immediately called the chef who confirmed to him that I would spend the day there. I joked that I was sent to keep an eye on him… It turned that we had a very good day together, though I did more mise-en-place (that is, preparing the ingredients for the dishes) than actual cooking. I don’t mind – actually I relish any job I am given, since I consider any task a learning experience. I often think of Helene Darroze, a top chef in Paris and chef to my former sous-chef – whom Alain Ducasse sent to “sort salad” for six months in Monaco, though she comes from a lineage of famous French chefs.
Kevin is one year older than Petit Jean, and has worked in the kitchen since he was sixteen. He told me about his work at the fish station in Avignon and how much he loved it. When I asked him why he left, he told me the hours were too long and he and his girlfriend wanted a change of scenery. So while he was hired by the Trois Forts’ chef, he was sent to the Carré. He missed the hot line and the fish. Apparently he had a similar disappointing experience in Lausanne, where he applied at the hotel Beau Rivage where Anne-Sophie Pic, the most famous female French chef, held court. He was so excited to be working with her, but when he reported to duty he was sent to the café, and had the frustrating experience of making salads and club sandwiches while watching the chef work her magic on the other side of the glass in the main kitchen. He told me he would have stayed on had he found housing.I think these kids would do great in the States... they are so young but already so knowledgeable about classical French cuisine and techniques. I really need to catch up!

Kitchen characters

Working in the kitchen, you meet a whole different type of profile than at the UN, but somehow, people’s stories and lives are just as interesting. As previously mentioned, the average age encoutnered is roughly twenty years old, without counting the chef of course (thank god they are older than me, at least so far). As such, I have met two very interesting eighteen year olds, whose stories, for their young age, really captivated me. First was this little kid in the garde-manger, and when I mean little, he is shorter than me and they actually nickname him “petit” Jean (not his real name). I met him while I was still working in the pastry station, which is adjacent to his station. He flattered me by saying that he was convinced I was his age (yeah right), and then made me wonder about his life when he said he spent Christmas with his cat eating McDonald’s take-out. I thought it that was strange, for a kid his age, from here, to be spending the holidays like that. I got to know him a bit more during my second week which we shared at the same station. When he came in late last Monday the chef de partie (boss of the garde-manger) was worried because he was not picking up his cell phone. Later that day he showed up with bandages and scratches on his face; he was in a car accident, his friend was driving him home when a car collided with them head on; the driver was drunk and was driving in the wrong lane without his headlights; Jean’s friend did not survive the crash. Jean told me it was the fourteenth person he had lost over a period of two years. I could not imagine how at eighteen years old you could lose so many people, except of course in a war or disaster situation. I wanted to know more but of course left him alone.
It turned out that Petit Jean was my neighbor. He lived alone with his cat in an apartment close to the hotel where he had been working for over a year as an apprentice. When he first started he was working the hot line, the meat station to be more precise. One day he was cooking next to the sous-chef and there was a huge vat of hot oil on the stove for potatoes. As the kitchen got busier, the oil started to smoke, and so petit Jean picked it up to carry it away somewhere out of danger. As he was going through a doorway and shouted “chaud devant” which is what you do to warn someone to get out of your way in the kitchen, another cook didn’t hear and showed up in front of him. Petit Jean froze, and the burning oil made one slow wave which covered the pot’s handles and his hands which were holding them. As he let go of the pot in shock, the skin from his hands stuck onto the handles. He had to be treated for four months for burns at the hospital, and cannot tolerate being near heat anymore…

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!

Week three: the hot line

Yes, I spent a week with the chef at the hot line, and I am still alive! As a matter of fact I had an amazing week, what with my mom visiting and my daughter on school break... the weather was fine in spite of a few showers, the food was amazing, and I still have all my fingers attached. The icing on the cake was when Sara and my mom came over for lunch last Friday, I didn't want to make a big deal of it but felt I had to tell the chef, so the excitement was felt throughout the kitchen, and the chef graciously offered them the meal complete with champagne! I also got a voicemail from my counselor telling me she spoke to the chef and the pastry chef who were both pleased with my performance... I couldn't believe it, I've been feeling like such a klutz, getting aioli all over the chopping boards, confusing the hare juice with the venison juice (they look exactly alike if you ask me), using the wrong pans, the wrong instruments... what an incredible surprise and relief.
The sous-chef was also extremely supportive, patient and giving me a chance to try new things... although I got told twice that it was no place for a woman!

Garde manger

After a week in the pastry station (all in all six ten-hour days), I was sent to the garde-manger, where amuse-bouches, first courses, vegetables and cold dishes are prepared. I had no idea what a treat the pastry station had been, with its relative autonomy, it's micro-experimentation and innovative approach. So if that was heaven, then garde-manger is purgatory, a taste of what is to come next week (ie day after next) at the heat ("chaud" as they call it in French), where the chef reigns as sole master, flanked by the sous-chef (or "second" as he is referred to here).
As opposed to the pastry station, where there is time to anticipate orders as clients pour in, garde-manger is first in line since it produces the first plates to be served. One could say it sets the rythm for the rest of the meal, and at these prices, guests expect extremely prompt, if not immediate, service. So the week was busy, with little room for error and even less for creativity. Meanwhile the pastry chef kept surpassing himself with day after day of amazing creations, which have reconciled me with sugar, for what seems like an undetermined length of time. I also ended up burned and cut, nails tapenade-blackened, quite the kitchen mess...I wonder what next week has in store!