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- My Culinary Memory
There was a class at culinary school called "Quantity Food Prep". This "class" was a thinly veiled excuse to get students to work for free in the university dining hall, cooking for and serving its students. This class required us to be at school at 9:00 AM for three days, then 2:00 PM for three days, then 4:00 AM for three days. It was a hellish, quick, rotating schedule that had you feeling jet-lagged for nine days. Before throwing us into the kitchen each morning or afternoon they had the nerve to sit us in a classroom for 35 minutes to have a "lecture". We would then have a "debriefing" type lecture at the end of "class".
All in all it was a pretty stupid class but if you wanted a degree you had to do it. Who could argue with that?
One day the chef instructor (who looked a lot like Mike Judge's character in Office Space) told me to make roasted potatoes for lunch. I had worked in a kitchen for a few years so I was more than capable of doing this, but having working in the kitchen I found these instructions to be a little vague. So I asked for clarification. "Chef, what would you like on those potatoes?"
"Anything you want," he answered.
"Anything?" I asked. I had learned that it was always best to get a confirmation of any direct order from a chef.
"Yes, anything you want," he said, then walked away.
I had previously worked at a restaurant and I figured I would make my roasted potatoes the same way we made them there, as they were pretty delicious and our customers really enjoyed them. So I got together some garlic, rosemary, salt and pepper and tossed the potatoes in a little oil before putting them into the roasting pan.
While I was pouring them into the pan the kitchen sous chef, Butch, came by. Butch was the grumpiest person I may have ever met in my life. He was a short, stocky guy with droopy eyes that seemed to hate life and everyone in his way. Butch was a senior at the school who must've made some wrong decisions or shaken the wrong hands and had somehow landed himself in the regretful position as the sous chef of quantity food preparations for student dining. He wasn't thrilled about it and I didn't blame him.
"What are you doing?" Butch asked.
"I'm making roasted potatoes," I explained.
He stuck his pudgy sausage fingers into the potatoes and picked a potato up to examine it. "Who told you to put rosemary in the potatoes?"
"No one," I said.
"Then why did you do it?" He asked.
"Because the chef told me I could put anything I wanted into them."
"Even rosemary?"
"Well, I assumed that rosemary fell under the classification of 'everything'," I told him.
Butch threw the potato into the pan, gave me the hairy eyeball and then left. I continued to ready the potatoes when Butch returned with the chef.
"What are you doing?" The chef asked, Butch lurking behind him like some sort of loyal dog.
"I'm making roasted potatoes," I answered, again, beginning to get sick of their questions.
"Why did you put rosemary in them?" The chef asked.
"Because you said to put whatever I wanted in them," I told him.
The chef shook his head. "Not rosemary, okay? Rosemary is no good for roasted potatoes. The little pieces get really hard. It's like eating toothpicks."
"Yeah," Butch echoed behind him. "Tooth picks."
"Ahh, I see." I didn't see. "I'm sorry. It won't happen again."
"Okay," the chef said. "Just don't let it happen again."
"I won't, chef. You can count on that."
That story, in my humble opinion, sums up the foodservice industry better than anything else. Better than the reality TV show The Restaurant, better than a tell-all book by Anthony Bourdain. That story is what working in the foodservice industry -- and a lot of other industries I'm sure -- is like. If the guys in my class weren't ready for the industry before that class, they certainly were after that.
Dealing with one knuckleheaded, wishy-washy chef after another is an every day affair in the foodservice industry. I'm just afraid that now I'm the knucklehead.
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