Thursday, July 31, 2008

Persistence Pays Off

After being a fairly annoying nuisance in my Senior Director of Restaurant PR's life, she finally caved in and asked how much I charged for freelance work.

Corporate restaurant writing career, here I come!

In The Professional Kitchen, Part Deux

It all went very well Saturday night, without any major glitches except for one where we though we had finished a course with all of the tables and one of the servers slowly saunters up to the service counter and says her 7-top was ready for their salad. I had never wanted to strangle someone more than at that moment, but I held my breath and muttered something akin to, "We're out of salad ingredients because we thought everyone communicated the salads had been served. I'll sub something in, but next time, you need to communicate your table status to us."

Anyway, the Executive Chef worked the crowd and manned a portion of the service, but I did most of the prep in the afternoon and also plated/prepped every course. We did a fine job for a group of mostly nonprofessional volunteers. The food was edible, and given the one unfortunate prosciutto display in a peach salad, it felt good to serve all of those dishes.

*pats self on back*

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

In The Professional Kitchen

One of my recurring dreams these past few years has been to work in a professional kitchen with a real chef. It's finally going to happen this weekend when I work as a line cook for my friends who are putting on a Burning Man fundraiser for their camp.
"Tasty" (http://sf.tasty-music.com/) has been around for a while and although I used to be an active participant in their shenanigans since the inception a couple of years ago when I was still lolling around with the group. Only now, I have become much more of a stranger than I would like to be with this crowd of really interesting and fun 30-somethings.

Good people are hard to come by and I'm a idiot for letting good friends go. My intentions have never been mercurial, but sometimes people change, situations change and more often than not, I change. The intentions to stay in touch, to keep up with friends have always been there. In this sense, I'm not a very good friend. On the other hand, I am always there to fulfill a favor. I will always be there.

So, what started off as a quick request to borrow my roasting pan quickly turned into: "Some people bailed, can you be one of my line cooks this Saturday?"

YES. Yes, I can.