Tuesday, December 13, 2011
Welcome to the First Post!!!
So... Here we are. 4 years of cooking professionally, two years of planning, one year and 5 successful dinner services later, here it is:
Dinner @ Willie's - A Secret East Van Supper Club.
This here is the blog detailing my cooking exploits and the food I love alongside the upcoming menus and dates for dinner sevice. Here you will find stories of my current exploits and foodie adventures alongside the story of how I became a cook and why as well as tons of information about cooking with some of my favorite recipes and restaurants... but for now...
Let us digress.
***
When I was 18 I moved into East Vancouver to live above a butcher-shop on Kingsway in an illegal converted office space. Having just graduated High School I fled the ignorance of the suburbs, my thuggish brother and freshly divorced parents to the relative freedom of an apartment that smelled of equal parts sour stained rug, pot smoke, and the sweet decay of the dumpster for the aforementioned butcher shop that during the summer would emmenate a smell sickly visible in the heat waves that rose lazily over it's chipped rusty blue exterior. I took a job as a dishwasher at The Sands Best Western Hotel overlooking English Bay to pay my measly share of the rent. The place was a Hell-hole - both my apartment and the kitchen at The Sands. Neither had seen any sort of complete cleaning since the mid 1980's and a layer of grime coated counters and floors alike. The "apartment" featured a large hole in the bathroom roof that went all the way through to the roof so during the torrential rains of January and February sitting on the toilet was an endurance challenge as water streamed through the hole and created a "natural" water feature at my feet. Soothing, but filthy and cold.
Feeling down? Self loathing and despair centred in the soul of your being? Dog just died and girlfriend left you? Well, at least you aren't a dishwasher... Dish washing is a thankless fucking job. It's like being in a shitty army and you are on the bottom tier. You are the kitchen's bitch and abuse may or may not be heaped upon you depending on whether your Sous Chef is having a bad day or taking shit from the Exec Chef or maybe he's just been up for 3 days on coke and can't make rent. (You are a dishwasher and can't afford coke so don't even think about it...) The job is up to 12 hours a day in a moist wet trench of hot steam and sharp objects. Pot handles that have been left over open flames threaten to scorch prune-fingers on which the flesh is soft from near constant immersion in gloves and/or water. The threat of broken and chipped glass is constant and given my 18 year old proclivities I wasn't always in a state of mind that WCB nor my employers would consider safe sober and responsible. It is however mindless work that can be done by a trained monkey with a functional crack addiction and I excelled at it being neither ape nor addict yet. When not cleaning dishes I was killing fruit flies - which were, and still are, plentiful in all kitchens (except from December until February when they seem to head South for the winter -smart little fucks). When I wasn't killing fruit flies I was prepping.
Prep work --> If there isn't a machine to do it there are dishwashers. Or if the machine is too expensive - there are dishwashers. If the machine is broken - there are dishwashers. If the machine is complex and dangerous or fragile... well, dishwashers. If you aren't dish washing you are getting busy prepping. Prep is pretty much the most basic element of a restaurants menu. However, this makes it necessary and imperative to cooking. What prep also does is, whether you know it or not, teach one how to cook.
Now, it doesn't make you a good cook- that takes time, passion, talent and genetics (but more on that later), what it does though is teach you about ingredients, portioning, basic cooking techniques and most importantly: Knife Skills.
You can probably cook a great meal with shitty knife skills. Millions of people do it everyday and are none the wiser. However, they work slow, cut themselves often and can't chiffonade, matchstick, or dice to save their lives.I guess this doesn't really matter if you are making food for your family but if you are prepping a dinner for 60 people or sending out service for hundreds in a night the line can't be slowed by blood jetting from your finger which now lacks a thumb tip, or worse inconsistent food that is improperly prepared. (I love that a severed thumb is less important to me that shitty food, or maybe it's just that no one wants my blood in their food.)
So... I began to learn to cut ingredients without cutting myself, which led to turning said ingredients into food.
***
Stick around for the next post as I delve deeper into the psychology of a young dishwasher, learning about the threat that the Front of House plays and maybe something about food too.
Eat well,
Willie
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment