First shift at Millennium restaurant...
Monday, January 22
Well, after a long flight to San Francisco with many delays due to winter storms in the US, thus causing many delays to my flight pattern, I arrived at my hotel in San Francisco around 4 am local time. Although the locals will complain about the cold here, I just laugh and am enjoying the warmer temperatures... around 16 degrees C during the day and 5 degrees C at night. Though, I didn't get to enjoy this much as after a few hours of sleep I headed to my first shift at Millennium restaurant. I was nervous and excited about working for such a great restaurant and chef. Well, I absolutely loved my shift there and all my previous internships and culinary training had prepared me well!! I worked with the head chef Eric for most of the day prepping a number of recipes. He actually gave me some recipes to work on such as a pineapple pickle (like a chutney), a sauce for a soup they serve and a marinade for their brussel sprouts, and I scrounged and stumbled as I looked for things and tried to pull them together, but did ok. Chef Eric is know for his creativity in developing unique dishes all the time, his ability to blend a multitude of flavours, textures and colours in one dish to make it delicious and interesting, and the use of organic local supplies and vegan products (no dairy or eggs) in his cooking. The restaurant is quite large. I had visited it once but didn't realize how large it is. The main dining room is spacious and seats about 150 people, including a large bar, and there is the large hot kitchen upstairs that is in view of the guests, and a side cold kitchen for cold dishes and desserts, again in full view of the guests. Then, in the basement there is a large full kitchen, fully equipped again, where mostly all the food is prepped for the day/evening. This area also includes three large walk-in fridges, and a number of smaller fridges and freezers, areas for dry storage, change rooms, full dishwashing equipment area, offices, etc. So, you can see why it's quite the challenge when you are preparing a dish and have to find x ingredient and don't want to ask where every single ingredient is when everyone is super busy and when the chef gives you a quick tour of the kitchen of where generally things are kept. Ok, this tour was about 5 minutes max but you're supposed to remember where most things are. Memory is a key thing in this business as I'm quickly learning, and it's strange after having the ability before to use sticky notes, paper or the computer to capture thoughts and lists, in order to remember them. Just before service, they put me on the cold station to "trail" the cold station chef and I was to watch carefully what he was doing. However, I didn't realize after making a few things that he would ask me to replicate them exactly for guests while he did other things. It was stressful but fun to remember ingredient by ingredient what goes into things. And because Eric creates complicated dishes and likes to serve the freshest of ingredients, each dish is not a simple salad with dressing only and a lot is prepared a la minute. For example, plating a dish called the "rawvoli" (raw dish) involves putting together beautiful beet slices around plate, then the filling, more beet slices on top, then a special sauce (nothing is labeled and I soon learned from trial and error which dressing is what from the 10 or so squirt bottles), then another small tapenade on top on each beet creation, then you have to make a salad to accompany this with freshly cut fruit, salad, and oils, then curdles of beet on top, and then the last seasoning. So there were about 10 or so of these type of salads and 10 or so desserts like this too that he would show me once and expect me to replicate exactly without much asking of questions or errors. Well, as to be expected, I did make errors (dropped a few hot molten chocolate cupcakes as I was transfering them from the oven to the plates, used the wrong dressing, put too much sauce on a plate) but there were no major errors, and I had a lot of fun. The chef at the station was very nice and patient and that helped as well. Most of crew there are young and have been very nice, including a few graduates from our school. During service, it was amazing to watch the hot station with about 20 burners lit on high, numerous oven on, and the two to three chefs (sometimes Chef Eric would come in when there was a rush, which seemed like a large part of the evening) cooking for guests with their numerous frying pans, pots and baking trays, creating beautiful dishes like a concert in action. At one point, Chef Eric would point to me and ask me to run down for something or make up something for him, like cutting some raw carrots in batonnets for a client (1/4 x 2 inches). So, like Top Chef, I would run downstairs and do this as quickly as I could and run back upstairs to hand it to the chef. I succeeded most times but finding things was the challenge. Once, he asked for something and tried to explain where it was downstairs over the noise and craziness of the kitchen, and I tried to follow his instructions but failed and he came down to find it for me. It was hard to go through the large walk-ins and try to find a box, that is often not labelled and hard to see clearly. It's hard not to know everything and to fail at times, but I guess that's part of this work that is so reliant on learning quickly from taking risks and making mistakes. So, at the end of the shift, the chefs put out dishes of everything that is left over (they start fresh every day), so I got to fill up a box of delicious dishes... yum! Also, the cold chef packaged up a box with my dessert "mistakes", like the chocolate molten cake that had fallen in the oven while I was transporting it to the dish. Now, you've got to like a business where you get to eat your mistakes and they taste delicious!
www.millenniumrestaurant.com
Well, after a long flight to San Francisco with many delays due to winter storms in the US, thus causing many delays to my flight pattern, I arrived at my hotel in San Francisco around 4 am local time. Although the locals will complain about the cold here, I just laugh and am enjoying the warmer temperatures... around 16 degrees C during the day and 5 degrees C at night. Though, I didn't get to enjoy this much as after a few hours of sleep I headed to my first shift at Millennium restaurant. I was nervous and excited about working for such a great restaurant and chef. Well, I absolutely loved my shift there and all my previous internships and culinary training had prepared me well!! I worked with the head chef Eric for most of the day prepping a number of recipes. He actually gave me some recipes to work on such as a pineapple pickle (like a chutney), a sauce for a soup they serve and a marinade for their brussel sprouts, and I scrounged and stumbled as I looked for things and tried to pull them together, but did ok. Chef Eric is know for his creativity in developing unique dishes all the time, his ability to blend a multitude of flavours, textures and colours in one dish to make it delicious and interesting, and the use of organic local supplies and vegan products (no dairy or eggs) in his cooking. The restaurant is quite large. I had visited it once but didn't realize how large it is. The main dining room is spacious and seats about 150 people, including a large bar, and there is the large hot kitchen upstairs that is in view of the guests, and a side cold kitchen for cold dishes and desserts, again in full view of the guests. Then, in the basement there is a large full kitchen, fully equipped again, where mostly all the food is prepped for the day/evening. This area also includes three large walk-in fridges, and a number of smaller fridges and freezers, areas for dry storage, change rooms, full dishwashing equipment area, offices, etc. So, you can see why it's quite the challenge when you are preparing a dish and have to find x ingredient and don't want to ask where every single ingredient is when everyone is super busy and when the chef gives you a quick tour of the kitchen of where generally things are kept. Ok, this tour was about 5 minutes max but you're supposed to remember where most things are. Memory is a key thing in this business as I'm quickly learning, and it's strange after having the ability before to use sticky notes, paper or the computer to capture thoughts and lists, in order to remember them. Just before service, they put me on the cold station to "trail" the cold station chef and I was to watch carefully what he was doing. However, I didn't realize after making a few things that he would ask me to replicate them exactly for guests while he did other things. It was stressful but fun to remember ingredient by ingredient what goes into things. And because Eric creates complicated dishes and likes to serve the freshest of ingredients, each dish is not a simple salad with dressing only and a lot is prepared a la minute. For example, plating a dish called the "rawvoli" (raw dish) involves putting together beautiful beet slices around plate, then the filling, more beet slices on top, then a special sauce (nothing is labeled and I soon learned from trial and error which dressing is what from the 10 or so squirt bottles), then another small tapenade on top on each beet creation, then you have to make a salad to accompany this with freshly cut fruit, salad, and oils, then curdles of beet on top, and then the last seasoning. So there were about 10 or so of these type of salads and 10 or so desserts like this too that he would show me once and expect me to replicate exactly without much asking of questions or errors. Well, as to be expected, I did make errors (dropped a few hot molten chocolate cupcakes as I was transfering them from the oven to the plates, used the wrong dressing, put too much sauce on a plate) but there were no major errors, and I had a lot of fun. The chef at the station was very nice and patient and that helped as well. Most of crew there are young and have been very nice, including a few graduates from our school. During service, it was amazing to watch the hot station with about 20 burners lit on high, numerous oven on, and the two to three chefs (sometimes Chef Eric would come in when there was a rush, which seemed like a large part of the evening) cooking for guests with their numerous frying pans, pots and baking trays, creating beautiful dishes like a concert in action. At one point, Chef Eric would point to me and ask me to run down for something or make up something for him, like cutting some raw carrots in batonnets for a client (1/4 x 2 inches). So, like Top Chef, I would run downstairs and do this as quickly as I could and run back upstairs to hand it to the chef. I succeeded most times but finding things was the challenge. Once, he asked for something and tried to explain where it was downstairs over the noise and craziness of the kitchen, and I tried to follow his instructions but failed and he came down to find it for me. It was hard to go through the large walk-ins and try to find a box, that is often not labelled and hard to see clearly. It's hard not to know everything and to fail at times, but I guess that's part of this work that is so reliant on learning quickly from taking risks and making mistakes. So, at the end of the shift, the chefs put out dishes of everything that is left over (they start fresh every day), so I got to fill up a box of delicious dishes... yum! Also, the cold chef packaged up a box with my dessert "mistakes", like the chocolate molten cake that had fallen in the oven while I was transporting it to the dish. Now, you've got to like a business where you get to eat your mistakes and they taste delicious!
www.millenniumrestaurant.com
posted by Caroline at 9:01 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home