If you haven’t guessed from my always talking about it, I work in a kitchen at a moderately swanky restaurant. The local football coach does all his recruiting here and we generally get all the big awards from newspapers. I’m essentially a cook, as my primary job is working with pizza, followed by salads and desserts, then fried goods. But I’m a bit more than a cook, too; I have complete creative control over the pizza menu, meaning I can invent my own specials, and I’m also in charge of the main nightly special whenever the head chef isn’t in, meaning that essentially I’m head chef twice a week without the managerial responsibilities.
I’m thinking something like “assistant chef”, but I know kitchens have all sorts of complicated French lingo–the salad boy likes to call himself “garde manger”, but we just call him “salad bitch”–and I’m thinking that might open up the possibilities to realms of bullshit never before dreamed of.
Sounds like you’re a senior chef. Some of your duties are sous-chef like, but since you don’t really manage the kitchen, aside from the menu, that’s not really it. If you’re really the #2 man, though, then it wouldn’t be wrong, either.
The “fancy lingo” to which you refer is the nomenclature of the “brigade de cuisine,” brainchild of the late great Georges Auguste Escoffier, who ran huge kitchens. None of the titles will be an exact fit in any other type of kitchen, but you might take a look here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brigade_de_cuisine
Incidentally, your salad boy ain’t no “garde manger”; that’s a more senior position, supervising the preparation of cold foods; if he’s just being ironic, though, that’s cool.
Ooh, senior chef sounds great. It’s sounds good, which is really all I care about, and it’s probably pretty accurate. Plus it looks great on a resume to go from line cook to Senior Chef at one of the best places in town in eight months with no previous experience.
I think he brought it up like one of your buddies might decide his new nickname is going to be “Longrod Sexypants.” If it works, great, if not, hey, you weren’t really all that serious anyway. I think it’s mostly just to keep up the ego in an environment that teases him and asks if he has permission to be using that knife or if he has to use one of those plastic salad knives from Target. That one really gets him
