Thank you, AutumnLeaves, for starting this thread. I would love to share my knowledge and stories from my 10 years of culinary work.
After highschool, I decided that I didn’t want to go to college, so I spent a year making $7 an hour managing a Dairy Queen and living in my mom’s basement (that sounds so cliche, but it was true!). After a year of that, I stunned my mother by announcing that I was going to Culinary School in Portland, OR. She wasn’t stunned because I finally decided to do something with my life, but because she barely knew how to cook, and never expected me to pick that as a career.
So I moved 12 hours away to live with my father (though not in his basement… he didn’t have one) while I went to school. For spending money, I took a job at an Elmer’s (Denny’s-like joint). So while learning about tournes, béchamel and forcemeats, I was flipping eggs and microwaving prime-rib dinners. Looking back on that time, I think I learned more from the turn-n-burn atmosphere of the chain restaurant kitchen, then I did from the zero-pressure-kitchen-classroom.
I took a 6-week externship at a northern Idaho resort as the final test of culinary school, and I came out of it with a job offer from their “fine dining restaurant,” though Idaho’s culinary standards are about a decade behind the rest of the country. I moved up the ranks from pantry, to grill, to saute, to chef de tournant, before I finally decided to leave.
I moved to Colorado for more job opportunities and took a job at a real fine dining place in a historic (and haunted) hotel (no, not The Stanley, the other one). This place had the attitude that AutumnLeaves described, though it wasn’t so quiet. We criticized everyone else’s knife cuts, but we did it with a humiliating joke or a running gag. We busted the “new guy’s” chops everyday, until he proved that he knew his shit. We competed over minced shallots and brunoise root veg. We bragged about hitting steak temps to within a degree of “perfect” medium-rare. We prepped everything every other day or three days at most. When I started, the chef told me the system: if you didn’t prep it yesterday, throw it away and do it again. Once again, I worked up from Pantry, to entremetier, to saute, and then I was promoted out of the restaurant to Saucier for the entire hotel. I would have taken the job of chef de tournant (and been groomed to take over the next available chef de cuisine position), but I decided to go to college…
After dropping out of college, The restaurant I worked part-time at (a semi-fine dining bistro) tanked, and reformatted as a family dining place. The owner offered me the well-paying Kitchen Manager job, and I took it. This was night-and-day different from my previous jobs, but I found satisfaction in running the kitchen. It was an adjustment working with line cooks that didn’t know how to blanch vegetables, and didn’t AUTOMATICALLY wash their hands and refill their sanitizer buckets as soon as they came in. It took me some time to understand what they could pull off on the high-volume line. Tuna, scallops, pan sauces… no way, at least, not at first. Of course, we still had the same customers from the bistro, and they wanted the same quality of food, but didn’t want to pay for it. So I found ways to sell some kick-ass, fine dining level food at low prices. We figured out how to microwave risotto and have it taste good. We sold duck breasts by pre-rendering the skin at super-low heat. And we learned how to do pan sauces consistently! All of this alongside hamburgers and frozen fish-n-chips.
So, here I am with 10 years of varied restaurant experience, ready to walk into just about any sous chef job, and maybe even an executive chef job.
But I’ve never seen a single blow job in the walk-in.
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So if I may answer some of the questions from my point of view…
Alpha Twit,
Don’t bother with culinary school unless you want the credentials needed for a high-end joint. Get a job in a successful restaurant or a hotel. A stage is a good way to get in the door, but not necessary, in my opinion. A hotel will have multiple kitchens and a variety of levels of cuisine, and lots of diferent chefs to learn from.
Athena:
My favorite Chef Instructor from my culinary school taught me some tricks about learning how to season your food. Take a small amount of a sauce or soup, or anything, and taste it. then add a tiny bit of salt, and taste it again. then more salt, and taste it again. keep doing this, and you will experience the range of flavor from under-seasoned to properly-seasoned to over-seasoned. Train your mouth recognize these qualities. ANother trick that goes hand in hand with this is to learn the balance of flavor between bitter, salty, sweet and sour. Flavor is a complicated balance of power on your tongue, and the more familiar you are with the effects of each ingredient, the more successfully you can season your food. As for what ingredient to add, it depends on what is already in the dish. generally, you don’t want to ADD bitterness but just balance out the bitterness that is in your ingredients. For example, I recently put roasted Brussels sprouts on a special. They came out boring and bitter (from the charring), but a splash of white balsamic vinegar brightened the flavor. The bitterness took a back seat to the rest of the flavors, and became pleasant and subtle instead of overwhelming. Finally, the last trick is to analyze your recipe’s ingredients for their purpose. Everything should be used for a reason, whether it is for seasoning, texture, aromatics, mouth feel, etc. When you know WHY you are adding each ingredient, you will understand the effect it can have on the overall dish.
salinquid:
If you send something back, we usually toss it and start over. Sometimes, if you only wanted it cooked more, we can do that to save time, but you will still get fresh sides/sauce/garnish. I love to yell at the wait staff for eating off unfinished plates before they clear them at the dish station. Its disgusting, but people are pigs. Even assuming the guest didn’t even touch it, I can’t serve it to someone else… I think there is a health code restriction on that, but I’m not feeling up to digging through the FDA food code to find it.
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WordMan**:
You know those immersion blenders that you can make smoothies and vinaigrettes with? We have bigger ones that shake the walls when you use them. We lovingly call them “boat motors”, and I think you could sail a boat with one! Also, A walk-in cooler would propel any amateur home cook cook to culinary-nerd status. SS gas ranges, dedicated prep sinks, convection ovens and high speed dishwashers have made it into home kitchens, I don’t know why no one has a walk-in.
The kind of people who are only working to afford their next hit simply cannot survive in high-end cuisine. The Food Network syndrome has strongly affected the industry, in my opinion, mostly because people who watch Food TV and then decide they want to be a TV cook and then go to school usually have no idea what kind of world they’re getting themselves into. Said people usually end up working for cupcakes businesses, or the like. All in all, it’s not glamorous work and if you can’t hack it, you’ll be fired, plain and simple.