OUR FCI CLASS PICTURE

Minutes after completing our final exam we entered the dining room at L'Ecole where we were given champagne glasses and our picture was taken. It was the quiet after the storm and we were all much relieved-- elated after 10 months to finally be done. It was a happy moment. In the halls of the French Culinary Institute class pictures line the walls, including one that I often saw downstairs near the kitchens, which showed Bobby Flay looking at one of his classmates, apparently laughing or goofing off. Having taken the final and gone through the schoolyear, we can understand the looks on everyones' faces a little better.

Today our FCI class picture arrived. While I don't miss dreading the final, I do miss the thrice-weekly ritual of going to school and being with my classmates. We were a good group.


Names put to faces on the jump...

From left to right, front row: Dan Haar, Pat Kerrigan, Jung-Min Kim, Philip Clary, Zoe Brickley.
From left to right, second row: Me, Chad Hapshe, Time Klin, Lisandra, Sampurna Satpathy, Christine, Kenny Hubschman, Bora Yoon.
From left to right, third row: Jessica Moore, Meg Griffin, Alex Rosende, Sarah Blair, Tiasha Ballard, Jane Crocker, Marguerite Sharkey, Gary Comstock.
Fourth row: the judges.
From left to right, back row: Chef Greg Bear, Chef Roger Powell, Chef Janet, Chef Alain, Chef Nick, and Chef Candy.

I'll have to return to school to see where our picture is.

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A NEW JOB: PEARL OYSTER BAR

Back in early August I applied for a job at Pearl Oyster Bar. I didn't hear back and shortly after that I joined my classmate Tim Kline where he was working in the pastry department at the Water Club. I completed a 200-hour unpaid internship at the Water Club. A few weeks ago I got an email from Pearl saying that a position opened in the Garde Manger station at the restaurant and that they would be interested in having me come in and trail.

More on my new job on the jump...

My responsibilities at Pearl are to man the Garde Manger station. Someone is welcome to correct me if I'm wrong, but technically, in French, Garde Manger means, the guard of eating! Actually, Garde Manger is the station in the restaurant where the cold buffet dishes are prepared.

I man the restaurant's raw bar, shucking and plating little-neck clams and Malpec oysters on the half shell. Garde Manger responsibilities entail prepping combination appetizers (clams, oysters, lobster tail, claw, and shrimp with cocktail sauce), shrimp cocktails (also known in The Times as five firm fellows) and half chilled Maine lobster. This is also where salads are made, a caesar and a mixed greens with Fourme D'ambert (a traditional, French blue cheese). Some other dishes which are finished in the kitchen are also started on this station: the crab cake and salt-crusted shrimp plates. In addition, I prepare the desserts: chocolate mousse, apple pie, butterscotch praline parfait and ice cream sundae.

I alternate working days and nights every week, switching off with my Garde Manger colleague, Jorge. A week working day shifts start at 8 a.m. and end at about 3:30 or 4 p.m., Monday through Friday, but include working a Saturday night. During weeks that I work nights I come in at 3:30 p.m. and depending on late stragglers, get out anywhere from 11:30 p.m. to 12:30 a.m. During these weeks I don't work on the weekend (that's a great perk in this business).

The morning person works lunch which while busy isn't anywhere as crazy as the night-side, so he's also largely responsible for prepping the station for the night shift. So you've heard what dishes I prepare but what do I actually make? Well, I don't make the pies or the mousse-- nor do I make the caesar dressing (which is held secret). But I do make the tartar sauce, celeriac root slaw, vinaigrette and crab cakes from scratch. We also make the cocktail sauce, the green bean salad for the salty plate and the mignognette.

For someone like me with little front of house experience, the great thing about working the Garde Manger station at Pearl is it's placement in the restaurant. While unfortunately I don't get to see food getting cooked in the main kitchen, there are other perks. Garde Manger is situated so that I don't see customers enter but I do have a view of part of the bar and almost all of the tables in the restaurant. I get to see the customers get seated, the waitstaff take their orders, relay them to the kitchen, see how orders are expedited by the chef (then of course I help prepare the food!), and then see the food taken out to the tables. It's a good opportunity for me to understand the building blocks of how a restaurant works that are second nature to experienced waitstaff and cooks: how tables are numbered, customers are served, tables are turned. I also get to see customers reacting to food, waitstaff reacting to tips, chefs interacting with kitchen staff, waitstaff and customers, human sacrifice, dogs and cats, living together...mass hysteria!

There are no tickets with orders written down for me to easily check on so I've got to remember the list of things being ordered or ask the expediter what I owe "all day," if I lose track. When the second turn comes, desserts are going out for the first turn at the same time that I'm making salads and shucking oysters. On a Friday or Saturday things can get a little hairy, but depending on who is wokring and how they're gabbing, even under pressure with six things to make and trying to keep the station clean as customers walk by, it's definately a lot more fun than staring at a computer screen all day.

I can only imagine what the summer is like when the cold weather that inspires people to order chowder, steamers and mussles, is turned on it's head and doezens of oysters are going out one after another!

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END OF MY INTERNSHIP AT THE WATER CLUB

In August I joined my friend Tim Kline, taking an internship at The Water Club, a two-floor restaurant and banquet hall off the FDR Drive at about 33rd Street. Tim had been suggesting I join him for about a month but I initially resisted...

There were a few reasons. For one, I'd recently left my job at The Times and for once in 5 years I was enjoying not going to work! I also had my hands full with school and knew I'd be gearing up for my final project and my final and didn't want to overextend myself (at left, cheesecake ready for service at the pastry station as demonstrated to me when I first arrived in August).

I also had reservations about taking a job with friends. Another classmate, Jane Crocker, also worked there and unfortunately, we hadn't been getting along at the time. The idea of working for free wasn't endearing but there were some gaping holes on my resume where restaurant experience should have been. I felt I would have more confidence after graduating if I'd gotten some other work experience. Previous to FCI I'd worked at Burger King the summer after my senior year in high school and years later I'd made cappucinos, cut cakes and waited tables at a dessert cafe in Rockville Center during time off from Georgetown). I still had some cash from unused vacation pay from The Times so I still had a little money to get by (above right, strawberry shortcake).

Ultimately, it seemed wise to take a 200-hour unpaid internship at The Water Club in order to get some restaurant experience outside my school restuarant, L'Ecole. From August 11th through October 3rd I worked on average three nights a week, most often Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, from 2 p.m. to midnight. Most often I worked at the pastry station at the front of the restaurant. Thursdays and Saturdays were my busiest nights, with anywhere from 100 to 235 covers a night (creme brule, right).

The Water Club is a two floor restaurant with a roof-top bar and outside dining. Part of the restaurant is a large boat and during bad weather you can feel the barge move slightly underneath. You wouldn't just walk by The Water Club and decide to stop in for dinner. You could, technically, because it's right on the water along a sidewalk that follows the river where people go running, but it's unlikely. The restaurant practically has it's own exit on the FDR drive. It's also next to a helipad and isn't terribly far from the water taxi dock. One of the bartenders at the restaurant claims that one of the scenes in Cocktail was filmed at the Water Club's decently long bar. There's a lot of bridge and tunnel, weddings and a lot of corporate parties. The restaurant is owned by "Buzzy" O'Keefe, who also owns the River Cafe and the Brooklyn Ice Cream Factory. I heard a few rumors about The Water Club, none of which I can verify of course, about it's heyday and how it was originally started, one quasi-involving JFK-- "do you see any other restaurants like it on the waterfront?" one employee explained to me.

Across from the coffee station near the swinging doors into the dining room, I learned how to increase my efficiency and improve my timing while quickly plating the hot and cold desserts shown in this post. I plated cheesecakes, berry bowls, sorbets, ice creams, chocolate layer cake, ice cream sundaes, banana financier, molten chocolate cake (right) while making raspberry, hazelnut and almond tuiles, biscuits and cornbread for service. The molten chocolate cake, while very tasty took 8 minutes to cook and could be a real tense pain. It had to be cooked at 400 degrees and could break if not made and then handled the right way.

My initial reservations quickly became a thing of the past and I settled in quickly. I rarely worked at the same time as Tim but the idea of it being a bad idea to work with friends became moot by working hard and becoming friendly with just about everyone who worked at the restaurant, even some waiters (at right, Eddie)!

Of course, I didn't become a pastry chef in two months but I did get good basic pastry experience from making things like buttercreams, tarts, ganache (despite some initial setbacks), assembling cakes, tiramisu, brulee base. I learned how to time and plate desserts for weddings and banquets for 250 people, how to mass produce, how to keep up on inventory, and other important things about how a large restaurant works.

After my first month I sometimes felt like I was gaining weight just from inhaling the scent of caramel sauce and buttermilk biscuits and soon, spinning sorbet, making tuile, baking biscuits, turning out cornbread from the iron molds, and managing six tickets with a 20-top on a Saturday night while trading kitchen barbs and talking about women, sparring about the Red Sox with "Big Papi" (at left) and Sindu (on the right), gave me the familiar rush of adrenaline and joy that I remember from my best moments as a journalist. There were many interesting people that worked at the restaurant from the hostesses (one, a nurse-in-training on the lookout for a rich husband) and the Polish banquet waiters and waitresses I could swear were from my neighborhood, Greenpoint, to two charm-gilded gravelly voiced bartenders who worked the busy nights and had intriguing views on the opposite sex.

Between leaving The Times, going to school and working at the restaurant I felt as though I was starring in my own version of Quantum Leap, landing in new situations in different places, inhabiting different aspects of my personality that I hadn't enjoyed for years. Aside from Chef Victoria Love, left, most of my pastry coworkers were almost a decade younger than me.

In fact, Katie, my direct superior (left, prepping Sunday's brunch dessert table) didn't turn 21 until Aug. 26th! Katie was hard-driving, brash, skilled, loud, brilliant at creating improbably tasty quick snack combinations (mashed potatoes, bread and tabasco?) and didn't suffer fools-- she'd kill me for saying this but underneath it all she's a big softy. All the girls, Katie, Sandra and MC, were alot of fun to work with. And amidst the work and the pressure of production and service there was a lot of razzing and a lot of laughing. I was also indoctrinated into the tradition of post-shift drinks, industry discounts and quickly learned what life would have been like had I not returned to finish school.

With Jack FM blaring in the pastry kitchen and Journey's "Wheel in The Sky" a staple of the two-month soundtrack I felt at times like I was living someone else's life, with consequences both good and bad. I learned alot at The Water Club among other things that there's a chemistry to a good kitchen staff. I also gained some personal insight, the best being that I'd made the right choice to leave the golden handcuffs at the paper and that I could have fun again in the workplace, something I'd largely lost towards the end of my time at The Times.

At left, the pastry staff during the end of the summer when I worked there, from left to right: Tim Kline, Chef Victoria Love, me, Katie Backlund, MC, and Sandra. There were still many things I knew I could come away learning at The Water Club but there weren't enough opporunities to work on the production side and at my age, I need to be continuously learning.

When I graduated from school and got the call from Pearl Oyster Bar about an opening I knew it was time to move on to another place, a smaller though very successful restaurant where I could learn something new about the business. I'm sad to leave-- I'll miss the friends I made there but it's time for another leap, into a new adventure.

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