notes of a journeyman line cook

[lowdaddy]

alright.  ima give this thing a shot.  but i hate writing long posts so it may or may not come off.  today i have a little time but most of my days, lately, have i've been real busy.  so here we go.

i've been working as a professional line cook, off and on, for the last 12 years.  i quit for awhile (about a year) and then picked it back up about six months ago.  i've been living in jackson, ms for the last year and a half.  the restaurant i've been cooking at is one of the best, if not the best, restaurant in jackson.  and it is mediocre at best.  in fact, i moved back to jackson because i knew i was done cooking for the foreseeable future.  now that i have begun cooking again i cannot stay there.  i need to be in a real city with a real culinary culture.  with real cooks, chefs, restaurants.  so i'm on a roadtrip.  i left jackson last monday and arrived here in philadelphia last tuesday nite.  let me give a brief overview of what the trip is all about.  my intention is to spend about a month travelling to and staging (more on this in a moment) in three cities - philly, boston, and chicago.  a stage is where you go work in a restaurant unpaid.  you just hang out, work, and see a bunch of cool shit.  you get a feel for the restaurant, the food, the staff, the vibe.  i've been staging at an outstanding restaurant (i prefer not to name the restaurants i'm staging at on this board.  i dunno if yall have noticed but there are one or two freaks around here.) here in philly for the last week.  i'm taking today off, working one more day tomorrow, then heading for boston over the weekend.  i've never been to any of these cities before so this is a pretty cool experience for me.  my idea is to find a city/restaurant that i really dig.  and where the people dig me.  to find a good fit.  ideally, one of these restaurants would knock my socks off in a town that i dig with a chef that really digs me.  that's the ideal.  at the very least i want to find a city i feel comfortable in.  a city i can see myself being happy in.  i lived in nyc for ten months once and that experience really taught me a lot.  namely, don't move somewhere if you don't like the city.  i fucking hate new york and i wouldn't wish that shithole on my worst enemy.  so that part is non-negotiable for me.  if i don't dig the city i ain't going.  that said, i kinda like philly.  it's not what i expected.  nice people.  not overwhelmingly large.  you can park without getting ticketed or towed all the time. (that's a huge one)  so that's what this trip is about.

philly - i had nothing set up when i came on this trip.  hadn't talked to the chefs i was interested in staging for.  nothing.  so last thursday i walked into the restaurant here in philly that i really wanted to stage at and handed the hostess my resume and a letter of reccommendation from my chef in mississippi.  i told her that i had come a really long way to stage at this restaurant (it is often a hostesses job to take the resume and say the chef is busy or they're not hiring, etc.)  so she took the stuff to the back and a little while later one of the sous chefs came out.  he told me they weren't hiring but that their sister restaurant was hiring.  i told him i wasn't actually looking for work but was just trying to get a stage.  i'd like to come in and help them out.  for a week maybe.  he said shit yeah.  come on in tomorrow.  we can always use an extra hand.  that's about what i expected.  or what i hoped for anyway.  if somebody hands you a resume with loads of experience on it and offers to come help you in the kitchen for free, you'd be a bit silly to not let them come in, at least for a day.  just to see if they're competent.  so that's what happened.  i've been staging there for the last 6 days.  about 12-13 hours a day.  good stuff.  i fucking love the food.  rustic, but beautifully executed, italian food.  i've cooked a variety of cuisines over the years.  in a variety of restaurants.  new american, cajun/creole, french, italian, upscale southern.  my love in the past has always been french food but over recent years i've definitely swayed more toward the italian.  though i still dig the french too.  i think my culinary sensibility stands rooted in both of those traditions now.  the italian and the french.  i've been in some really intense french kitchens in the past.  so intense, in fact, that it led to stress levels that really made me question whether i wanted to continue cooking or not.  it's all or nothing for me when it comes to food.  i want to cook at a very high level or not at all.  so i got real miserable, real stressed, and finally quit altogether.  now that i'm cooking again i still want to do it at  a really high level but i don't want fucking ulcers.  cooking well for large numbers of people is inherently stressful.  a certain level of stress is acceptable for me.  this place i'm staging is outstanding, professional as hell, and serious business.  but they also like to have a good time.  they're friends.  they  realize that we're all in this thing together and help one another out.  that's nice to see.  i could definitely be happy here.  and learn a ton.  and continue to GET BETTER.  the pastas are all made in house.  i think there are eight pastas on the menu right now.  all made daily right there in the kitchen.  even the dry pastas.  they have an extruder (machine used to make round pastas like spaghetti, macaroni, rigatoni, bucatini, etc...which are then dried.  round pastas are dried.  flat and filled pastas are frozen and pulled out of the freezer for service.) to make dried pastas.  lots of kick-ass charcuterie (salumi, sausages, terrines, etc...)  all the bread is baked in house daily.  amazing butchering.  lots of cool ass shit.  the sous chef that i met first, the guy who told me to come back on friday ended up offering me his couch to crash on.  super nice of him.  so i'm crashing on this couch in this house that five people live in.  they're all in their twenties.  younger than me.  but they've been real cool and real nice.  i'll explain later why, at this late date (i'm thirty seven years old, after all),  i'm still staging around looking for a line cook job instead of running my own kitchen.  hint - truckloads of liquor and drugs were involved.  that's all ima write for now.  more later.  here's a few pics.  more of these later as well.  i apologize for my shitty-ass camera.

[lowdaddy]

the pics will have to wait.  my laptop is acting crazy.

[VOLVO)))]

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[I,Galactus]

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[GodShifter]

Good stuff. I read every word.

[Lumpy]

Good times.

[lowdaddy]

making pasta



old school polenta.  that's a suckling pig on the rotisserie.



veal saddle with belly attached

[RAGER]

dude I read that when I got home last night but was just too tired to comment on it as I was just getting home from a 9 hour stint in the kitchen at the place where I'm the head chef/kitchen manager.  Sounds like you've got mucho experience and a passion for it.  Much respect man.  It sounds like you're doing something very cool.  I've read some food blogs where some people have said that Minneapolis is a great place to be a chef.  Not everyone is expected to pull 15 hour days.  ( hours is a short day for me lately but we have only been open for just 2 weeks.  I'm already getting a handle on things and will hopefully have a static schedule so I can look a head a month and know who'll be doing what.

Looking forward to more of your stories.

[Jor el]

Awesome.

And good luck.

[deleted account]

great blog cabin, solid foundation

[RAGER]

hey man my blog is 6 pages and has a shitstorm with a little mystery and intrigue thrown in

[deleted account]

oh, intrigue aplenty!  your cabin is amazing in that it's still standing despite its spit/ bird feces construction.  and the shitsquall with liberalfaps was top-notch.  if you're gonna 86 somebody, that's how you do it

[lowdaddy]

I'll update yall in the next couple of days.  With lots more pics.

[Dunedin]

That you love what you're doing really comes across in your blog lowdaddy. Good luck to ya!

[MadJohnShaft]

Keep going

[lowdaddy]

hello hello hello from boston.  got here last night after spending a few hours in manhattan yesterday.  getting my knives sharpened at korin.  then i got the fuck off that island.  but back to philly for now.  i ended up staging for 7 days.  with 1 day off sprinkled in.  i didn't spend much time working a station on the line during this stage (though i did spend a little).  reason being, i was leaving.  there's just no upside for the restaurant in getting me on the line and training me on a station.  after 4 days i asked the executive sous if i could please get in there and toss some pans around and he said absolutely.  what station did i want to work?  i chose pasta because it's extremely busy and extremely challenging.  it's a 4 station line.  pizza station, grill station, middle/saute, and pasta.  i felt like i could have the grill station down in a couple of days.  i've logged about 7,000,000 hours on grill stations and i felt like it would have been relatively unchallenging.  saute would have been somewhat of a challenge.  but not as much of a challenge as pasta.  i've never worked a straight pasta station and i could see that it was a challenging task.  pizza would have been impossible.  these are real deal neopolitan pizzas.  dough formed and built to order.  on a busy night that station might have 10 or 12 pizzas working at busy points in the night.  there's no fucking way.  it would take me some serious hours to get up to speed on that station.  months.  it's a completely different skill set.  if you've got experience on a line that experience will transfer from one station to another.  from one restaurant to another.  over the years all the skills, technique, knowledge, and tricks you learn amass to make you a pretty formidable cook (if you're driven and skilled).  but all of that hits a serious bump in the road when the major technique used on a station is something you've never spent any real time doing.  i'm talking about forming pizzas to order.  rolling out dough, if you will.  though there's no roller involved.  it's all done with the hands.  and i have no experience with it.  the great majority of cooks don't.  i felt like a retarded 12 year old with a broken arm the couple of times i attempted it last week.  but there's this guy jorge.  mexican dude who's been working that station for five years.  he's a fucking machine.  he can have 12 going at a time.  unreal.  so, anyway, i told them i wanted to get in there on pasta.  and i did for a couple of nights.  they got me in there and trained me a bit while it was slow to moderate then i got out of their way when they started rocking.  it's definitely challenging with the numbers they do.  we did at least 200 covers 6 of the 7 nights i was there.  290 last saturday.  it's rustic food but it's outstanding food and to do 290 covers of outstanding food is no simple task.  those guys are rollers.  like me.  i came up, early in my career, working in kitchens where we did 250 or 300 on a regular basis.  though not quite this quality.  still very good though.  it's war all the time to do those numbers.  anyway pasta was fun but it would take me at least a couple of weeks to really start jamming on that station.  whenever you go to a new restaurant you have to adapt yourself to their system.  to their way of doing things.  and that takes a little while.  it's not just about learning what goes into each dish on your station - recipes.  although that too takes time.  it's about little nuances in the way the cooks communicate with one another.  different language used in the calling of tickets.  it's about muscle memory.  and this one is huge.  muscle memory - getting to a point where you're hands and feet are going where they need to be going without even thinking about it.  when you start on a new station you don't have that.  you're body has to start to learn where everything is.  your mind has to be thinking 8 moves ahead but it can't when you first start on a station because it's trying to remember where the fucking chanterelles are.  later, when you become more comfortable in the station, your mind won't have to worry about where the fucking chanterelles are because your hands will already be going after them.  anyway, mostly i just helped the line cooks out getting their prep done before service and, during service i just watched, did little things to help guys out, and did stuff "on the fly" if it needed doing.  "on the fly" means we need it yesterday.  grill guy's running out of diced yukons for the octopus?  i dice ten yukons real quick.  pizza station needs basil leaves picked.  i got it.  shit like that.  i got my hands in on a little pasta making but that shit would also take some serious hours just to get adequate.  i helped out baking bread one morning.  old school rustic loaves.  charred, chewy crust.  seriously fucking good.  the focaccia was by far the best i've ever had.  i had no idea focaccia could be that good.  overall i'm really happy about my experience there.  i talked with the chef and executive sous before leaving friday night.  i wanted to feel them out on the possibility of getting hired if i decide to move to philly.  they were very positive.  they liked me and liked the way i work.  i like them.  i love what they do there.  especially the pasta making, bread baking, and charcuterie.  the upshot is that i'm pretty sure they would find a place for me if i decided to move to philly.  now ima check out boston.  then chicago.  more later.  here's some pics.

[lowdaddy]

trying to post pics.  having laptop issues.

[lowdaddy]

roasted suckling pig



pot of octopus



the line during service

[lowdaddy]

focaccia fresh out of the oven.  those crystals on top are maldon salt.



making pasta



grinding pork shoulder for sausage



gelato!!



porchetta

[Jor el]

Sweet Baby Jesus on the Cross

[lowdaddy]

breaking down a veal saddle

[RAGER]

Sweet fancy Moses I sholey likes dis photos

[MadJohnShaft]

Yeah!

[I,Galactus]

Awesome, awesome stuff.  Keep up the good work.

[yeezuz]

folllowing.

this is immense, what a great way to feel out new places to live. one day, i hope to do something similar. keep it up. i mean the good work.