MY FIRST TRAIL
Since I quit my job of the past five years at The New York Times to focus on school and Kitchen Toro, I have been living on vacation time that I had banked and some of my savings. But now I'm actively looking for a paying job in a restaurant. Many students end up taking an unpaid internship and working a set number of hours before getting paid. This isn't something that I can really afford to do but I also need to find the right restaurant for me so I have started trailing at restaurants to get some professional kitchen experience outside school.
"Trailing," means going to a restaurant where you want to work to see how things fit. It's a chance for you and the kitchen's staff to size each other up. A classmate from the French Culinary Institute who has been interning twice a week for about three months (for free) at a three-star French restaurant told me that her chef asked if she knew anyone good from class who might be interested in working there. My classmate suggested me and I joined her last Tuesday at 12:15 p.m.
It was sweltering hot outside, 98°F before noon. We changed, putting on the restaurant's chef jackets then I was introduced to two of the sous-chefs who were already there. The kitchens were maze-like (I'm getting a sense that many are) with crowded, narrow hallways, slippery floors, doors half-blocked with huge crates on wheels, and flies hanging around food dumpsters in the hallway outside.
In the downstairs prep area we were instructed to emondee tomatoes, about four or five cardboard trays. The process is to slit the bottom of each tomato with a cross, take the top of the core out and then boil the tomatoes for about 10-15 seconds, icing them immediately to prevent them from getting mushy. The goal was to make tomato 'petals' of the tomato meat after having peeled away the skin, the insides smoothed, seeded and not mangled. My classmate and I worked together. The chef showed us how he wanted it done and away we went.
We finished and the sous chef told us to clean all the seeds from our station. We'd been put at the fish station downstairs at a counter that was about four feet long next to a sin at the left. The sink was filled with ice and fish scraps. Above the station, there were stainless steel cupboards. While we were continously cleaning our boards our hand towels were dirty with seeds and juice and seeds had gotten under our cutting boards. We cleaned the station and the cupboard underneath the countertop. Then the sous chef pointed to the cupboards above the station and told us to scrub them down with disinfectant even though they were two feet above us and they had nothing to do with the work we'd just been doing.
By the time we finished other cooks had started to arrive. As they checked in with the sous chef they came over, shook my hand and introduced themselves. It was all very serious but at least it was somewhat friendly and inviting. One of them was a big guy to whom I basically assigned the rest of the day-- I'll call him Pux. Off the bat he didn't seem thrilled to have me. I can't say he particularly impressed me either, he didn't seem to be in the flow of the place, he was corrected a few times by the sous chef over the course of the night.
We returned upstairs to the main kitchen to start prepping for service. Pux asked me to clean some bok choy, rinsing the leaves several times, drying them and then he showed me how to slice the leaves the way they wanted them, without most of the stalks. When I finished and asked Pux for something to do he gave me some baby asparagus stalks and asked me to start peeling off the little leaves on the stalks and then to gently carve off most of the asparagus buds on the tip to form a little plume.
The stalks were very delicate and the leaves hardly as formed as those in the picture to the left. I peeled the leaves using a paring knife trying not to scrape the stalks then trimmed back the plume. A sous chef asked me if the stalks on the counter to my right were the finished ones.
"Yes," I answered.
"These aren't finished," he said.
"Okay, what needs to be done?"
"You see these bumps?"
"What bumps?"
"These bumps on the stalk," he said pointing to the raised edge where the leaf used to join the stalk.
"Okay."
"These are no good, these bumps need to be removed."
"Okay, you got it."
"Thanks. Work clean."
I didn't see anything dirty about my station which Pux had set up so I assumed he was just giving me a motto to cook by. I continued trimming off the bumps. Soon it became obvious that Pux had set me up at a station where I was going to be in the way of the chefs cooking behind me. The sous chef asked Pux to move me to the side of the kitchen where my classmate was set up. Pux didn't seem to have a good sense of the flow of the kitchen.
But with the bumps go some of the stalk, at least that's how it seemed the sous chef demonstrated. I did as many of the asparagus as I could and then at about 4 p.m. it was time for an hour lunch break. Before we could break we needed to clean the floor. My classmate got the disinfectant, water, scrub brushes and squeegees and splashed the water all over the whole kitchen floor. We scrubbed the floor with the brushes, sweating until we'd pushed most of the water into the drains. Then we squeegeed the water towards drains built into the floor.
Then we took a break for an hour, ate a family meal and traded a few words with some of the cooks who were not the most friendly people I've ever met. My friend told me that until that day, the break had only been a half hour long but that to be compliant with the law they were going to start having an hour-long break. She also told me that the sous chef had reprimanded her for us having left some tomato seeds in the sink downstairs.
Up in the kitchen at 5:30 p.m. Pux told me that he had to throw out my asparagus because they'd been scraped.
"You really have to pay attention when someone tells you something," he said.
"Gee, I'm really sorry."
"It's okay, I just thought you were more experienced."
"Are there some more?"
"No."
"Here peel these."
Pux gave me a container of peas and showed me how to peel them, not shell or shuck, but peel each pea individually: gently tearing the skin of the pea with your finger and thumb and then squeezing the pea out. Pux demonstrated without crushing the contents so that the inside of the pea fell out of the little pea skin in two halves. It's like popping a zit.
About a quarter of the way through the peas Pux came over. I expected him to check that the peas hadn't been mushed-- but this was more philosophical.
"Dude, you've got to stand like you're alive."
I looked at him with a little disbelief. Both my feet were on the ground, my hands were in constant motion and I was standing normally, my weight at that moment on my left leg. I consider myself a good interpreter of body language and my body language portrayed me as a live person peeling peas.
"You have to stand like this," Pux said, demonstrating by squatting a bit, positioning his pelvis in an interesting juxtaposition to the countertop. Pux is a tall guy, about 6 feet five, so in order to use the countertop effectively he needs to squat into the 'proper position,' he was showing me. No chef at school had told me to change the way I was standing and Pux looked like he was about to have sex with the countertop. I looked around the kitchen and didn't see anyone else in a Kama Sutra cooking stance. My classmate to my left was standing with her weight on one leg.
"Thanks," I said and then tried his stance. Nope, didn't work for me. I've got a bad back made worse by skydiving a few years back and a bum left knee from ACL reconstructive surgery in high school so I have to shift my weight in order to work for 10 hours on my feet. In a way it's more conducive to working in a kitchen because I'm better off moving constantly than standing still. No kitchen Kama Sutra for me.
The kitchen was bustling. People were moving, things were cooking on stovetops in pans and orders started to come. Oddly though it didn't seem as though anyone was saying a word. I had noticed since coming upstairs that when I asked someone where something was or what to do next they spoke in a virtual whisper. No wisecracks, no jokes, no back and forth repartee it was all very serious-- but at the same time there wasn't even that much communication going on between people doing different things. I also noticed that in a kitchen of about 9 or 10 people besides my classmate, there was only one girl (a graduate of our school).
Halfway through finishing the peas my classmate told me that she'd been given the same task when she first started at the restaurant. When I finished I asked Pux if there was something else I could help with. Even though he had a bunch of yellow radishes he was turning (paring with a knife to form a shape) and he had more to do he said no.
"Do you have something else I can do?"
"No."
The worst thing that can happen in a kitchen is to have nothing to do. It's verboten.
You need to be in constant motion: fulfilling needs before they occur, keeping surfaces clean, bringing used pots and pans back to the kitchen. You need to anticipate, act and multi-task-- don't do three things at different times that you can do all at once. Here I was, new to the flow of a kitchen, not knowing what needed to be done, not knowing where things were, if or when pans should go back to the dishwasher, what plates were needed for service and nothing to do. I asked the sous chef for something to do.
"Does Pux need anything?"
"He said no."
"You don't have anything for him to do?" the sous chef asked Pux who mumbled back.
"Well you have to give him something to do," said the sous chef. "He can't just stand around. Give him something."
Pux put a container of snow peas somewhat noisily on my cutting board and told me to pull the strings off of them.
"Don't mangle the peas," he said. "Try and keep the ends squared off."
The thing about snow peas, depending on the personality of the snow pea and how fresh it is, the string is going to come off easily or it's not going to come at all. There's an art to the action but there's also a science to the string. Some of them didn't want to be dethreaded and didn't look as pretty as the others. I did my best. The container didn't start out full so this wasn't a task that took very long. I started asking around for other things to do. Soon I started picking up on things, like they needed ice and I knew where to get some.
I began to understand the flow of the dirty pans. The hotel pans at each station were for used pans. They could be taken back to be washed (careful not to slip going back there). I even stepped in on two different lines, once to place rosemary leaves with a pair of tweezers and another time I was spooning brunoise into a metal ring and pushing down on them with a cork (for some reason they were using a spoon too big for the ring making it likely you'd wind up with brunoise on the plate outside the ring which you'd then have to clean).
I wasn't anywhere nearly as quick as the others but I tried to make up for it by taking more and more things back to the dishwasher. As I stepped in somewhere it was as if people were tired of me being in the way before I could get in the way. I made it a point not to stand around and continued to ask people for something to do. By the end of the night I was in constant motion and I was soaked all the way through. Once again we cleaned the floors. I stood for a second to catch my breath and the sous chef asked me if I was tired. What kind of question is that? Everyone was tired. I said no and asked him if there was something else I could do. He had me clean the cupboard doors.
When service was finally over it was about 11 p.m. The chefs said we could leave. I'd been working for about 9 and a half hours on my feet since 12:30 p.m. and it was time to go home. As I walked out I tried to get the attention of one of them to say goodnight. One person of the 10 acknowledged me as I left. No "thanks," no "good job," or "we won't be needing you to come back on Thursday," nothing.
Now I know, I was trailing and I'm a student, but there were some things here that didn't make sense to me.
"I'll be moving up soon and they want someone who can do what I was doing," she explained.
Now don't get me wrong, I think my classmate is wonderful but beyond trailing at a few places, she'd never worked in a kitchen besides school before this. She may know the flow of the kitchen better but I don't buy that she's that much better than me. I think they were looking for another beautiful Brazillian girl to add to a kitchen full of guys in their 20's.
Time to put this figurative rejection slip up on the wall.
"Trailing," means going to a restaurant where you want to work to see how things fit. It's a chance for you and the kitchen's staff to size each other up. A classmate from the French Culinary Institute who has been interning twice a week for about three months (for free) at a three-star French restaurant told me that her chef asked if she knew anyone good from class who might be interested in working there. My classmate suggested me and I joined her last Tuesday at 12:15 p.m.
It was sweltering hot outside, 98°F before noon. We changed, putting on the restaurant's chef jackets then I was introduced to two of the sous-chefs who were already there. The kitchens were maze-like (I'm getting a sense that many are) with crowded, narrow hallways, slippery floors, doors half-blocked with huge crates on wheels, and flies hanging around food dumpsters in the hallway outside.
In the downstairs prep area we were instructed to emondee tomatoes, about four or five cardboard trays. The process is to slit the bottom of each tomato with a cross, take the top of the core out and then boil the tomatoes for about 10-15 seconds, icing them immediately to prevent them from getting mushy. The goal was to make tomato 'petals' of the tomato meat after having peeled away the skin, the insides smoothed, seeded and not mangled. My classmate and I worked together. The chef showed us how he wanted it done and away we went.We finished and the sous chef told us to clean all the seeds from our station. We'd been put at the fish station downstairs at a counter that was about four feet long next to a sin at the left. The sink was filled with ice and fish scraps. Above the station, there were stainless steel cupboards. While we were continously cleaning our boards our hand towels were dirty with seeds and juice and seeds had gotten under our cutting boards. We cleaned the station and the cupboard underneath the countertop. Then the sous chef pointed to the cupboards above the station and told us to scrub them down with disinfectant even though they were two feet above us and they had nothing to do with the work we'd just been doing.
By the time we finished other cooks had started to arrive. As they checked in with the sous chef they came over, shook my hand and introduced themselves. It was all very serious but at least it was somewhat friendly and inviting. One of them was a big guy to whom I basically assigned the rest of the day-- I'll call him Pux. Off the bat he didn't seem thrilled to have me. I can't say he particularly impressed me either, he didn't seem to be in the flow of the place, he was corrected a few times by the sous chef over the course of the night.
We returned upstairs to the main kitchen to start prepping for service. Pux asked me to clean some bok choy, rinsing the leaves several times, drying them and then he showed me how to slice the leaves the way they wanted them, without most of the stalks. When I finished and asked Pux for something to do he gave me some baby asparagus stalks and asked me to start peeling off the little leaves on the stalks and then to gently carve off most of the asparagus buds on the tip to form a little plume.
The stalks were very delicate and the leaves hardly as formed as those in the picture to the left. I peeled the leaves using a paring knife trying not to scrape the stalks then trimmed back the plume. A sous chef asked me if the stalks on the counter to my right were the finished ones."Yes," I answered.
"These aren't finished," he said.
"Okay, what needs to be done?"
"You see these bumps?"
"What bumps?"
"These bumps on the stalk," he said pointing to the raised edge where the leaf used to join the stalk.
"Okay."
"These are no good, these bumps need to be removed."
"Okay, you got it."
"Thanks. Work clean."
I didn't see anything dirty about my station which Pux had set up so I assumed he was just giving me a motto to cook by. I continued trimming off the bumps. Soon it became obvious that Pux had set me up at a station where I was going to be in the way of the chefs cooking behind me. The sous chef asked Pux to move me to the side of the kitchen where my classmate was set up. Pux didn't seem to have a good sense of the flow of the kitchen.
But with the bumps go some of the stalk, at least that's how it seemed the sous chef demonstrated. I did as many of the asparagus as I could and then at about 4 p.m. it was time for an hour lunch break. Before we could break we needed to clean the floor. My classmate got the disinfectant, water, scrub brushes and squeegees and splashed the water all over the whole kitchen floor. We scrubbed the floor with the brushes, sweating until we'd pushed most of the water into the drains. Then we squeegeed the water towards drains built into the floor.
Then we took a break for an hour, ate a family meal and traded a few words with some of the cooks who were not the most friendly people I've ever met. My friend told me that until that day, the break had only been a half hour long but that to be compliant with the law they were going to start having an hour-long break. She also told me that the sous chef had reprimanded her for us having left some tomato seeds in the sink downstairs.
Up in the kitchen at 5:30 p.m. Pux told me that he had to throw out my asparagus because they'd been scraped.
"You really have to pay attention when someone tells you something," he said.
"Gee, I'm really sorry."
"It's okay, I just thought you were more experienced."
"Are there some more?"
"No."
"Here peel these."
Pux gave me a container of peas and showed me how to peel them, not shell or shuck, but peel each pea individually: gently tearing the skin of the pea with your finger and thumb and then squeezing the pea out. Pux demonstrated without crushing the contents so that the inside of the pea fell out of the little pea skin in two halves. It's like popping a zit.About a quarter of the way through the peas Pux came over. I expected him to check that the peas hadn't been mushed-- but this was more philosophical.
"Dude, you've got to stand like you're alive."
I looked at him with a little disbelief. Both my feet were on the ground, my hands were in constant motion and I was standing normally, my weight at that moment on my left leg. I consider myself a good interpreter of body language and my body language portrayed me as a live person peeling peas.
"You have to stand like this," Pux said, demonstrating by squatting a bit, positioning his pelvis in an interesting juxtaposition to the countertop. Pux is a tall guy, about 6 feet five, so in order to use the countertop effectively he needs to squat into the 'proper position,' he was showing me. No chef at school had told me to change the way I was standing and Pux looked like he was about to have sex with the countertop. I looked around the kitchen and didn't see anyone else in a Kama Sutra cooking stance. My classmate to my left was standing with her weight on one leg.
"Thanks," I said and then tried his stance. Nope, didn't work for me. I've got a bad back made worse by skydiving a few years back and a bum left knee from ACL reconstructive surgery in high school so I have to shift my weight in order to work for 10 hours on my feet. In a way it's more conducive to working in a kitchen because I'm better off moving constantly than standing still. No kitchen Kama Sutra for me.
The kitchen was bustling. People were moving, things were cooking on stovetops in pans and orders started to come. Oddly though it didn't seem as though anyone was saying a word. I had noticed since coming upstairs that when I asked someone where something was or what to do next they spoke in a virtual whisper. No wisecracks, no jokes, no back and forth repartee it was all very serious-- but at the same time there wasn't even that much communication going on between people doing different things. I also noticed that in a kitchen of about 9 or 10 people besides my classmate, there was only one girl (a graduate of our school).
Halfway through finishing the peas my classmate told me that she'd been given the same task when she first started at the restaurant. When I finished I asked Pux if there was something else I could help with. Even though he had a bunch of yellow radishes he was turning (paring with a knife to form a shape) and he had more to do he said no.
"Do you have something else I can do?"
"No."
The worst thing that can happen in a kitchen is to have nothing to do. It's verboten.
You need to be in constant motion: fulfilling needs before they occur, keeping surfaces clean, bringing used pots and pans back to the kitchen. You need to anticipate, act and multi-task-- don't do three things at different times that you can do all at once. Here I was, new to the flow of a kitchen, not knowing what needed to be done, not knowing where things were, if or when pans should go back to the dishwasher, what plates were needed for service and nothing to do. I asked the sous chef for something to do.
"Does Pux need anything?"
"He said no."
"You don't have anything for him to do?" the sous chef asked Pux who mumbled back.
"Well you have to give him something to do," said the sous chef. "He can't just stand around. Give him something."
Pux put a container of snow peas somewhat noisily on my cutting board and told me to pull the strings off of them.
"Don't mangle the peas," he said. "Try and keep the ends squared off."
The thing about snow peas, depending on the personality of the snow pea and how fresh it is, the string is going to come off easily or it's not going to come at all. There's an art to the action but there's also a science to the string. Some of them didn't want to be dethreaded and didn't look as pretty as the others. I did my best. The container didn't start out full so this wasn't a task that took very long. I started asking around for other things to do. Soon I started picking up on things, like they needed ice and I knew where to get some.
I began to understand the flow of the dirty pans. The hotel pans at each station were for used pans. They could be taken back to be washed (careful not to slip going back there). I even stepped in on two different lines, once to place rosemary leaves with a pair of tweezers and another time I was spooning brunoise into a metal ring and pushing down on them with a cork (for some reason they were using a spoon too big for the ring making it likely you'd wind up with brunoise on the plate outside the ring which you'd then have to clean).
I wasn't anywhere nearly as quick as the others but I tried to make up for it by taking more and more things back to the dishwasher. As I stepped in somewhere it was as if people were tired of me being in the way before I could get in the way. I made it a point not to stand around and continued to ask people for something to do. By the end of the night I was in constant motion and I was soaked all the way through. Once again we cleaned the floors. I stood for a second to catch my breath and the sous chef asked me if I was tired. What kind of question is that? Everyone was tired. I said no and asked him if there was something else I could do. He had me clean the cupboard doors.
When service was finally over it was about 11 p.m. The chefs said we could leave. I'd been working for about 9 and a half hours on my feet since 12:30 p.m. and it was time to go home. As I walked out I tried to get the attention of one of them to say goodnight. One person of the 10 acknowledged me as I left. No "thanks," no "good job," or "we won't be needing you to come back on Thursday," nothing.
Now I know, I was trailing and I'm a student, but there were some things here that didn't make sense to me.
- PEELED PEAS: I'm glad I learned peas can be peeled. Was it bizarre? Yes. Am I glad I learned that peeling peas is perceived as gourmet? Yes. Does it really improve the taste? I don't buy it. Is it about the aesthetic? Maybe. Is that aesthetic mine? Not sure it's mine.
- BABY ASPARAGUS LEAVES: Again, I'm glad I learned that peeling these unobtrusive leaves off the stalks is an aesthetic that some people appreciate. I'm not sure that I do.
- PAYING ATTENTION: I always pay attention.
- HOW TO STAND: I'm aware that there was a window through which customers could see us working in the kitchen. I'm aware of my own body language and whenever I could, I was working. I'm not going to stand in an uncomfortable or lewd manner because some 28-year-old guy a foot and a half taller than me needs to get into a squat. Do you want me to work or Vogue?
- CLEANING THE FLOORS: I don't mind working hard and I like working clean but I'm not going to culinary school to learn how to squeegee floors.
- AN UNFRIENDLY KITCHEN: Food is a business but that doesn't mean it can't be fun.
- THANK YOU: I thought I did a good job in a new kitchen, maybe you didn't. Either way, I put in the effort and the sweat is enough proof of that. I'm working for free, even if you don't have the class to tell me to my face not to come back, a thank you and a hand-shake is appropriate especially when I'm not getting paid.
"I'll be moving up soon and they want someone who can do what I was doing," she explained.
Now don't get me wrong, I think my classmate is wonderful but beyond trailing at a few places, she'd never worked in a kitchen besides school before this. She may know the flow of the kitchen better but I don't buy that she's that much better than me. I think they were looking for another beautiful Brazillian girl to add to a kitchen full of guys in their 20's.Time to put this figurative rejection slip up on the wall.
posted by Turo at 2:04 PM
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