Lessons From Someone In The Know

Well, Cho didn't show up today, but Sara did, and it was clear that yesterday's absence was due to illness -- she looked a little green around the gills, but she was a trooper, and stuck it out. And Chef Glenn assigned Fitz to us for the day. "You just tell me what to do, and I'll do it," is his attitude.

Speaking of attitude... Chef Glenn has sensed some, and he's not shy about verbalizing his feelings. He's called Alex on it a couple of times: "your body language says you're not taking this seriously," "I see you smiling but this is not funny." Alex is one of the few students who's been employed in a restaurant kitchen, full-time for the last several years (and he's just coming up on his 21st birthday), and so he does have a lot of experience with the way things work in the Real World. And I think he's tired (like the rest of us) of some of the "pretend" aspects of being in school, and he'd just rather blow them off. But Chef Glenn will have none of it.

I had the fryer station today, and though I immediately needed to cleanse my face when I got home, after standing over the deep fryer for two hours, I love having a big vat of hot-enough oil to cook in. One of the real challenges with home frying is reaching and maintaining the heat. A constant temperature of about 360° is what this unit is putting out, and stuff cooks evenly and quickly.

Too quickly, as it turns out. After I fired my third batch of Crab Rangoons, and delivered them to "the rail" (a shelf covered by heat lamps, where the servers pick up the food), Alex came over from his station and stood in front of me. "I'm not meaning this to be in any way negative, but you need to pay attention to what else is ordered on the same ticket with your food. You just put an appetizer under the heat lamp and mine isn't gonna be done for two minutes. That would never happen in my restaurant. The goal should be for all the cooks to deliver their part of the order to the rail at the same time." Hey, it makes sense to me. I thanked him for his feedback and told him I appreciated the instruction, since I'd never worked in a restaurant before. "I know," he said, "and that's the problem that I have with some parts of this program. They're not teaching us some of the really basic things that make a restaurant run smoothly."

I paid attention to the entire orders then, as Camille called them out, and I made it a point to delay firing when necessary, in order to deliver my dishes at the same time that the rest of the appetizers were ready.

Now that we've gotten used to our menus and our stations, it's all gonna change. Tomorrow, we contribute to the Grand Buffet, with carving stations and in other ways which are not yet clear to us. And on Monday, we start working on a whole new menu, and each group will change positions in the kitchen, with different equipment and areas of specialization.