I started working at an Italian restaurant in Evanston while still in cooking school. It was a casual place, a spaghetti & meatball kind of place. It was close to Northwestern, and we were really busy whenever anything was happening on campus which was pretty much all the time. I was hired as a prep cook since I had zero kitchen experience, other than a few months of cooking school, which, let’s be honest, was not really useful in any way. There was a prep kitchen downstairs where I worked. It was cramped and small and sandwiched between two walk-in coolers. It was literally a hallway where they put a prep table, a three-compartment sink, and a steam kettle for making stocks and sauces. All the equipment and containers were upstairs so I had to bring everything downstairs before I could get to work. I was the sole prep cook, which meant I was running around all day, especially since I didn’t have a lot of experience, and wasn’t all that organized. It took me a while to figure out how to do more than one thing at a time, something all cooks need to learn to survive.
It was a struggle at first. The sous chef would give me a long list of prep for the day and I just couldn’t get it all done, I was too slow, too disorganized, and too inexperienced. One of my main jobs was to bread things, eggplant parm, chicken parm, veal parm, breaded artichokes, mozzarella sticks, you name it I had to put breading on it. I always had a three-step breading station set up, and sometimes spent so much time breading stuff one of my hands would become breaded. I use to joke to the other cooks that I was going to deep fry my hand just for shits and giggles, since there was so much breading on it I probably wouldn’t feel it anyway. On the weekends the sous chef would tell me to just bread everything in the cooler. I spent hours slicing eggplant, pounding chicken and veal, and stuffing artichokes. It took me many tries to get the eggplant just right, there was no training manual. mo pictures to look at, nothing, just the sous chef showing me how thick to cut the eggplant. I had to eyeball it, and there were many times I made them too thin or too thick and he would march downstairs and show me how I had screwed up.
“I don’t see what’s so hard. You cut the eggplant, then run it throught 3 step breading, why can’t you get this Mendez?” Maybe I was overthinking it. Maybe I just wasn’t very good. Maybe both. I’ve learned over the years that I learn by doing, and sometimes I have to do something many many times before I really get it. It’s like I need a lot of practice, but once I have it, I have it.
But gradually I began to get the hang of prepping more than one thing at a time. While I was pounding out chicken, I would have tomato sauce simmering, and chicken bones roasting in an oven upstairs for chicken stock. I cut everything before I started cooking anything, tubs of mirepoix, chopped garlic for garlic butter, diced tomatoes for bruschetta, sliced onions for caramelized onion pizza, I cut it all. Then I would just start cooking and not have to stop that much, I learned to be really organized, and soon I was finishing the prep list early.
The sous just kept piling things on me though. He put me in charge of the coolers and receiving deliveries. Every day when I got there I cleaned and organized the walk-in coolers, checked the orders that had come in and put them away, and communicated to the sous chef things we were going to need for tomorrow. The sous chef would bring me upstairs sometimes and have me jump on the line and help the line cooks in small ways, something that terrified me. I was safe in my little basement kitchen, the main line was a really noisy, hot, stressful place, it freaked me out. One time on a Saturday night , the sous chef called me upstairs to help the pizza guy who was horribly weeded, there were so many tickets hanging that there was no more room on the rail, and the orders just kept coming in, it was nuts. I asked him what he needed and he asked me to roll out more dough because he was close to running out. I started throwing pre-made pizza dough into the sheeter to flatten it out as fast as I could. You had to throw the dough through the sheeter twice, to get it flat and round. He started taking them right out of the machine and throwing ingredients as fast as he could but the tickets kept coming. I could see into the pizza oven that there were at least six pizzas working, plus more in the bottom oven I couldn’t see. I remember the look on his face of absolute desperatioin, his eyes had become as big as saucers and sweat was running down his face. I thought to myself at the time “I want no part of this, he look’s awful”.
After about 30 minutes of frenetic pizza making, it started to slow down. I could sense the relief in the cooks’ faces. The pizza guy was squating by his station, head in his hands, it looked like he had just run a marathon. I asked him if he was alright. He looked at me and laughed. He said “It’s cool, Saturdays are like that sometimes.”
This whole thing scared the shit out of me. I had never worked in a professional kitchen before and had no idea what a busy night looked like. I had ideas but no real practical experience. It was horrifying to me and I immediately wondered if I would ever be able to handle the manic chaos as well as these cooks seemed to handle it. Now that the worst was over they were making jokes and hitting each other with their tongs. Soon a slap on the back amde me junp in the air.
“ Hey Mark, good job, thanks for helping out. You can go back to the dungeon now. We will need eggplant parm for tomorrow.”
`Heading back downstairs I realized I knew so little about what actually goes on in restaurants. There was so much to learn and I felt like I was a step behind, I hadn’t started cooking until i was 26 yeas old. What had I gotten myself into? ( This is a common theme, wondering if I did the right thing. I think I have asked myself this question hundreds of times over the past 30 years). I figured it was too late to back out now, I had already paid for cooking school. School wasn’t that bad although I could already tell school had nothing to do with reality. But at the very least I had learned how to make a decent chicken parm and eggplant parm.