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Safe and sound
17-05-08
So everything's all migrated
over to the new dudes, and nothing seems terribly broken or misplaced (aside
from my quirky email issues, which continue to plague me). My
FrontPage Extensions aren't properly installed, but at least I can still FTP
my way into updating stuff. Everyone still laughs at me for using
FrontPage, but I don't have the time or inclination to use or learn anything
else. Too much crap going on otherwise, y'know? Bottom line: the
website works, though it might not be as pretty as I want it to be.
Life continues to churn at
Nell's, though the lustre has long, long since worn off. I'm
frustrated for a lot of reasons, really.
One, I wound up getting into
something that I wasn't ready for. I thought my experience would be
able to carry me enough to earn the spot of sous, but I was wrong.
Fine dining is a comPLETEly different beast than casual dining, and those
that have cooked in fine dining know stuff that's totally foreign to me.
It's more than just being a skilled technician (which is a requirement, of
course), but knowing the pace of the courses, knowing what'll hold for
longer than two minutes, and how to handle four-pan pickups for an
appetizer. This isn't like Ray's, where stuff is ready to go, and you
just sell pretty plates with almost-awesome food. Everything in fine
dining is a la minute, and very few things will have been cooked and held
for longer than five minutes before the food is on the plate to you.
It's like if you went to Mickey D's and ordered a burger, and not only are
they cooking the meat, but the ketchup is reducing on the stove, the onions
are being sliced to order and the bun was baked less than two hours ago.
And all of this has to come together in about ten minutes.
Two, I'm not getting as much
time with Chef Phil as I'd hoped. One of the bigger reasons that I
left Mulleady's was to learn new stuff and grow. Instead, I'm doing my
best to keep from drowning, even though I'm five feet from the shore.
I understand that Phil is both the chef and owner of the restaurant, and I
know that he's pulled in a lot of different directions. But it's hard
to try and guess what he's gonna do from day to day, which is kind of one of
the job requirements. I didn't get nettles in for this weekend (we
have plenty for the regular menu), but I should have gotten more in because
he wants to add it to a risotto on the tasting menu. Likewise for
red-fleshed baby potatoes. All it would take is a, "Hey Trace, I'm
thinking of doing (x) on the tasting this weekend. Can you order
some?" "You bet, Chef. I'm on it." Three seconds of our
lives. The running gag in the kitchen when stuff like the above
happens is, "Dude....c'mon. You forgot your ESP hat again. Get
with the program." Basically, I get to accept all the blame for stuff
going wrong (as a sous would), but I don't get the authority to DO anything
to change what's going wrong.
And three, I'm kind of
surrounded by folks who, for one reason or another, just don't give a shit
about what goes on there. One dude's leaving in a couple months, one
dude's waiting to inherit his family's ranch and the last one doesn't want
anything to do with leadership in the kitchen. Which leaves me to try
and shoulder the load and keep everyone productive when their ennui towards
Phil is a mighty mountain. I love my pantry cook to death (much more
than I should) because she's always staying busy and looking down the road,
in spite of her stated goal of *never* wanting to get out of pantry.
The other cats are harder to keep wrangled, and one of them flat-out won't
listen to me. Nevertheless, I get scolded if stuff doesn't get done.
Even worse, I'm in so far over my head that when some other station starts
to get in the weeds, I'm expected to help dig them out at the cost of me
totally borking what I'm doing.
It's just not coming
together. At every other place I've ever worked at, everything snapped
in place at some point. Not so at Nell's, and I fear for the same
should I land the job at Quinn's. Chef Scott equated Quinn's to a
nightmare where you can never, ever get all the tickets off the board until
you're closed. He said, "You know how you're trying to just get by,
waiting for that day where you can finally catch up? That's pretty
much every day here. There *are* no days to catch up. You just
gotta keep crankin'."
So here we are. I'm at
the crossroads. I can try to find a job that'll pay me well and
provide me with no new challenges or learning opportunities and pretty much
say, "Screw it, I'm a marginal cook." Or I can make the leap forward
and see exactly how good I am. Chef Jared said that Quinn's makes
"good cooks better and average cooks run away." I want to say that I'm
a good cook. Even if I never, ever do fine dining again, I want to be
able to do it should the need arise.
So to the five or six of you
out there who actually read the shit I spout out here in the rant, send me a
bit of luck, would ya? To think that I'm gonna be able to get by on
hard work alone is stupid. I need to be perfect at what I do, and I'm
going to need an insane amount of luck to make this happen. I'll pay
you back in spades, I promise.
 Old rants |
Pic and link of the
update
Big ups to Kara over at
Conscrew for turning me on to this
dude and his crazy reviews via the
Zero Punctuation platform.
The rest of the website is
pretty farking awesome, too! |
THE OBLIGATORY RANT