Last summer I worked two, occasionally three days a week and made anywhere between $450 to $600-ish in less than 20 hours a week.
This summer between school and my internship I work 6 days a week and make ZERO dollars in just under 50 hours a week (generally).
Last summer I strolled the city streets, watched lots of movies, read a ton of books, and spent many long weekends out of town, where I'd usually "rush" back into town on Tuesday, just in time to start my grueling schedule of Tuesday and Wednesday night.
This summer I get a monthly Metrocard, and I make it my bitch.
It's generic the difference a year makes...
Last summer I was also a lost miserable soul (career wise) looking for anything outside of the restaurant industry to believe in.
I found that something, strangely enough, further in the restaurant industry, specifically in the kitchen of the restaurant industry, where my "calling" was waiting quietly for me to put down the wine key and pick up a knife.
Even with the long hours, no pay and mind-numbing amount of accrued debt, I still feel a billion times better about myself now than I did around this time last year.
So I apologize (again) for my seeming lack of recent effort on the blog, but when I say I've been really busy, I mean I've been really busy...
So to keep those of you who care up to speed on my life developments I offer you this, my one free hour this week, in which I'll try and describe the many changes happening internally and (externally if you count cuts, and new weird callouses on my hands)...
First school:
School has been going great.
In addition to the new friends and new recipes I've been making and learning respectively, I've actually been getting good grades and (thus far anyways) perfect attendance. 98 on my last evaluation, which is pretty good considering I feel that I still have a lot of areas I can improve in (mostly cleanliness, and efficiency, my flavors and techniques are pretty solid for the still-pretty-new-in-the-game stuff that we're learning).
So while there are certainly frustrations and feelings of being held back by the curriculum and the level of skill in some of (but by no means the majority of) my classmates, I've realized that I have to keep my eye on the prize and concentrate on doing a good job now, but definitely looking forward to the more advanced levels.
If I get around to it, I'll throw in a couple of pictures of some of the better looking things I've made in class...
here:
This is a trio of Spanish Tapas served "American" Style (admittedly the plates used for our "plating lesson" left more than a little something to be desired).
It's a Flounder fillet flash-cooked in a salamander and dressed with a garlic and guindillas pepper oil with a splash of sherry vinegar- Catalan-style spinach with apples, raisins, and toasted pine nuts- and Patatas Bravas...
Part Two: My foray into the back of the house.
The bigger and more back-pain-causing news is that I started interning at a really great restaurant last week.
I honestly figured that the low pay of, along with the impression of "not needing to be highly intelligent in order to fulfill the job requirements of" a line cook, combined with my connection to the restaurant would land me a sweet $8-$9 an hour job somewhere, just by "wanting to".
Several phone calls and exactly as many "no, sorry's" as friends I have in the industry really opened my eyes the the complete bafflement of how hard it really is to get a job in a good kitchen.
Despite the embarrassingly low pay, and the intolerably long hours, a "lowly" line cook job requires a lot of skill and knowledge that people in good restaurants won't give to someone with little or no experience.
So after many more inquiries and phone calls, I finally got two opportunities to come in and do a kitchen trail for "entry level line cook" positions. Turns out "entry level" means "less than three years, but more than one."
Awesome, I have zero.
So cutting to the old proverbial chase (one of my favorite chases to cut), let's just say that I was offered an opportunity to do an internship at a restaurant with a great pedigree, thus giving me my first official "job" in a kitchen!
It's a funny thing going from the front of the house to the back of the house. As a waiter we viewed the line cooks basically as monkeys in the zoo. They were fuck ups that were too lazy to do anything else with their lives, and that's why they were working 100 hours a week for peanuts, while us big bad, awesome waiters were making 10X as much as them in a third of the time.
We would even laugh at them when they complained about it.
We thought their job was so easy and basic that we would dream of the simplicity that working the line seemed to entail.
Chefs were to be respected, but cooks were lower than bussers in terms of how restaurant hierarchy went.
However, about 8 years ago my opinions of bussers, and therefore line cooks, changed forever, and I vowed to never think I was better than anybody else because I was a waiter and they were "just" a busboy or runner (or dishwasher, or porter, or host, or manager, or anything).
I was put in my place by a busser who was working a lot of double shifts at a restaurant I was working at because he needed to fix a pump that had broken in the pool of his house in Venice, Italy.
Yes, that Venice, Italy...and yes I said pool.
Turns out this "just busser" was living and working in New York for a few years to party and hang out before he went back to his insanely wealthy family in Italy. I've also worked with bussers that were doctors or lawyers in their home countries. Most of them send money home to their families and will retire and live great lives in a few short years, while I have nothing to show for my many years of making twice as much as them except a huge beer gut and an impressive music collection.
So I never underestimated line cooks after that, nor did I disrespect their life choice, but I never really got how impressive it was either.
Let's be clear here and know that I'm not talking about all line cooks in all places but really good line cooks in really good kitchens in really good restaurants.
They do a lot more skilled work than anything I've ever done as a waiter.
As a waiter, we complained about setup or sidework that took 20-30 minutes.
Cooks come in 4-5 hours before the dinner shift starts to set up the food for their stations.
The "entry level" position in the hot line of a kitchen is garde manger. A garde manger basically does salads and cold apps. What that means is that one cook has to come in and cook every single vegetable and tear every piece of lettuce, not to mention make whatever sort of whatever that the restaurant has for appetizers on the menu.
It's not "rocket" science (lettuce joke!), but it is a lot of work that has to be done in a short amount of time so that he or she can go up and start "really" working making all the salads and cold apps for every person that comes into the restaurant that night.
200-300 covers later, that ends up being a lot of "just salads and appetizers."
It's impressive.
It's difficult.
It's repeated in every station up and down the line depending upon how big the restaurant is.
So my job as an intern has been to be everybody's bitch. If someone needs beets cut for the beet app, I'm cuttin' 'em. Someone needs baked potatoes peeled and cut in to little "rustic sized" pieces? I'm peeling baked potatoes with a knife and breaking them into rustic little bite sized pieces.
It's grueling, it's rewarding, it's educational, and above all else it's tedious. I call my job as an intern tedium ad nauseam.
In addition to helping every single cook there that needs help with exciting things like filling two quart containers with picked thyme (that's thyme leaves with no stem, and two quarts takes at least a couple hours to fill). Or there have been gallons of tripe stew that needed to be portioned off into exactly 230 gram servings (where I have to be sure that each one gets about the same amount of carrots, tripe, and sauce). As time consuming as these are, I've also been getting fun little "projects" from the sous chefs like peeling the skin off of hundreds of roasted peppers and then cutting them into not too big, but not too small pieces. Or my new personal nemesis; cases of tomatoes that need to be cored, scored, boiled and then shocked, peeled, cut in half, scoop the seeds out with a fish scaler and then arranged on a sheet pan...
It takes hours.
Mind you this is in addition to all of the things I'm doing to help the other cooks for service, so this usually turns my scheduled 10 hour day into a 12 hour plus day...
Also, remember I'm doing this for free.
Now you might think that I'm telling you this to garner sympathy or to complain and say that it isn't fair. But I assure that I am not.
I knew exactly what I was getting into, and as tired and sore as I may be, I love every second of it.
As much fun as school has been, I've always known that the real education was going to come from the mountains of potatoes (or tomatoes in my case) that I'd be peeling and the thousands of tiny cuts I'd be getting on my calloused-in-weird-new-places hands.
This is where chefs are formed.
This is where you learn that your knife can make cuts that you didn't know it, much less you, could make.
This is where the scars and burn marks start collecting that say "I am a cook, you may not respect that, but everyone else with these scars and burn marks does, and those are the only other people whose respect I care about."
I may not be getting paid while I intern, but I'm gaining knowledge that I'll have for the rest of my life, and when I do finally transition into that glorious world of being paid slightly above minimum wage, I'll have a slew of "when I was an intern" stories that every cook loves to tell when sitting around a (cheap) bar after work trying to drink away the pain of standing over a tiny area prepping their stations all day because the new intern isn't even close to as good as they were when they were an intern...
It's great to be a part of one of those traditions that will never die.
Hakuna matata, mother fuckers, circle of life and all that...
n*
