How it started
I saw this and got to thinking...
Part 1
1The year was 1992 and I had graduated culinary school and taken a job as a prep cook at a casual Italian restaurant in Evanston. My main jobs were to make gallons of tomato sauce and bread everything under the sun, or at least it seemed like it at the time. Chicken parm, eggplant parm, veal parm, stuffed and breaded artichokes, almost every day I pounded out mounds of chicken breasts and veal and set up a breading station. My hand would get coated in breading too, and it would look like I had a swollen cartoon hand, one time another cook dared me to stick my hand in the deep fryer, which of course I didn’t but did ponder it a few times. I figured this was just how it was, this is the type of thing you do in order to get experience, it’s all part of the process no matter how brain-numbing. I learned how to do other things, I made stocks, learned how to organize a cooler, receive deliveries, roll pizza dough, but to be honest, it was a very busy restaurant, I was buried in prep day in and day out, but I felt I wasn’t learning as much as I could. I was hungry to work on the hotline even though it did scare the shit out of me. I worked nights sometimes and saw how the cooks would just get destroyed on the weekends, they usually would scream at me to help replenish mise en place. There were times I didn’t have that much time to actually prep anything, I just ran up and down the stairs restocking the line. Sometimes the restaurant would pass 600 covers and that’s when the wheels would usually fly off the bus and the cooks would get pummeled so badly they would come to the prep kitchen downstairs and just hide in the cooler for a few minutes, sometimes screaming “Fuck!” inside the cooler, just to vent a little. I saw this and it really filled me with apprehension and dread, stepping on that line seemed terrifying.
I began to look around for another job, this was before Craigslist, I looked in the Reader and the Tribune want ads. At that time there weren’t a lot of jobs, but I just kept looking, every Sunday the Tribune would post thousands of ads and I would go through them looking for a position in a fine dining restaurant, which there weren’t that many at the time, only a handful. Eventually, I found an ad for line cooks at Spiaggia, which was a place I could never afford to dine at, but knew they had a reputation as a first-class restaurant. I had met a cook who worked there when I was in cooking school and he told me what it was like and it sounded like the coolest place ever. So one morning before work I filled out an application and hoped for the best, saying a silent prayer to St Jude to help me out. ( 12 years of Catholic education showing itself)
Much to my surprise they called me and asked me to come in for an interview. I was shocked, and then afraid, I tend to not do well in interviews, I get really nervous sometimes, and either clam up or talk way too much. I barely remember the interview, but it wasn’t with a chef, it was an HR person. We talked and they told me that they would like for me to schedule a stage, which I had never heard of before. She explained that I would come in and work service with the other cooks to get an idea if it might be a good fit for me or for them. She said that there were three other people up for the job and they were all going to be there on the same day, which led me to further believe I had no chance at this job. Everywhere I had gone up to this point asked about prior experience, and most wanted hotline experience, I had none. Thinking back I probably could have massaged the truth a bit but I felt it was asking for trouble.
I took the bus there, getting off in front of the Drake Hotel on Michigan Avenue. As a kid from Bridgeport, this area was not one I ventured into, it was for rich people. Going up the escalator to the second floor of the building where Spiaggia was located I probably seemed like a tourist or simpleton, I kept craning my neck to take everything in, it all looked so opulent, a word I wouldn’t normally use in everyday conversation. Once inside I was directed to the chef’s office and met one of the sous chefs who gave me a chef coat and a tour of the place, it was so big and so many cooks worked there, I was very intimidated. The prep kitchen was such a flurry of activity, there were cases of artichokes being peeled, salmon getting butchered, gelato spinning, and the sound of Spanish and English mixing in the background. It scared the shit out of me. I just felt so green and inexperienced, all these cooks seemed to really know what they were doing.
The sous chef took me to the hotline and introduced me to the line cooks, who all looked beaten up, angry, and tired. I was assigned to help the pizza station cook, which was the easiest station to work, and my first task was to peel 20 pounds of cipollini onions, which I had never heard of in my life. The cook showed me how to peel them by first placing them in cold water for a bit to help soften the skins, then peel them with a paring knife, it was very time-consuming work, cippolini onions are very small, a bit bigger than pearl onions but much smaller than a Spanish onion. As I peeled I watched the cooks go about their jobs, and was struck by the choreography of it all, they seemed to have an innate sense of what was happening around them, and no one bumped into each other, although at times I thought it was unavoidable.
Service was very different than what I was used to, it was intense just in a different way. Where I worked the food had to get out of the kitchen as fast as humanly possible, the sous chef would mix and match whatever came in the window until he got a complete table, the cooks many times got so lost they just cooked a lot of stuff and hoped for the best. At Spiaggia, it was much more controlled, much smoother, and the food was timed to come out together, if it didn’t, the cooks replated everything or made it over again. I had never seen anything like this, even though a couple of times a couple of cooks got very busy, it was still very calm and seemed to flow well. At the end of the night, the sous chef asked me what I thought, which I don’t remember what I said other than I thought it was very cool. He asked me to come and stage another day if possible, this time I was going to cook something, and they would watch me in action. I said sure, but the thought of working in that kitchen frightened me, I was nowhere near as skilled as the cooks I saw that night. The other thing he mentioned was that the other stages had left before service, I was the only one left. That was foreboding to me but figured I had to see this through.
On the bus ride home, I was dreading having to actually cook something in front of the chefs, my stomach was in knots. But on the other hand, I was excited that they asked me back and the idea of actually working in a place like that would change the course of my career, I knew that even then. I knew that this was the type of place I wanted to be, with people who were serious about food, people that cared, people, I could learn from, because I felt like I knew nothing at the time. ( I didn’t.) The sous chef had told me to get there at 3 pm but I figured I would go in at 2 pm, I figured it would send the message about how serious I was about learning, even though my nerves were getting the better of me and I had a hard time sleeping.
The next day I drank a whole pot of coffee got there early as I planned and the sous chef brought me into the locker room and introduced me to an older cook, who was changing. When I sous chef said I was going to work with him all day I remember him muttering “oh great” underneath his breath. He looked me up and down and asked me where I had worked before, and what I did there. When I told him, he sort of snickered and said “good luck”. He walked me through the kitchen and showed me where the towels and aprons were, told me to grab a few extra and that he would hide them, which at the time I thought was odd, later I would find out almost every cook in the world has a secret towel stash, you just never know when you’ll need an extra. He got me a menu and told me which dishes we were picking up, and when we started to get orders, he would show me how to cook and plate the dishes. This sent my nerves into overdrive, I think my hands were shaking I was so nervous. We spent the rest of the time setting up the station and he told me the chef was out of town, so I could relax a bit, the sous chefs weren’t as demanding.
Once service began I noticed the same sort of methodical moves by the cooks but I became super focused on my station, the garde manger station, which usually means cold appetizers but here we did them all, hot and cold. There were ingredients I had never seen before, which I was prompted to taste constantly, 100-year-old balsamic vinegar portioned with an eyedropper, extra virgin olive oil that tasted like pepper and grass, salt-cured anchovies, porcini mushrooms, langoustines, and diver caught scallops. In fact, the cooks started bringing me little tastes of things all night, it was glorious, I had a few gnocchi, some quail, a couple of pieces of duck breast, and beef ribeye. I had never had food that was so rich tasting before, I was starting to think that if I couldn’t work here I would be bitterly disappointed.
After the rush was over the sous chef to me and asked me if there was anything I saw that night that I would like to try cooking for them and I immediately said the foie gras. I had never eaten foie gras, but had read about it in cookbooks, and seen it on old-school French menus, and was really curious about what it tasted like. I had helped prepare a few orders that night but the cook wouldn’t allow me to actually cook the foie gras, he said it was too expensive to let a new guy play with it. But the sous chef seemed to not care and told me to make an order and we would all try it together. I know now that I had little to no idea what I was doing but somehow I cooked the fat slice of foie gras correctly, I just did it the way I saw the other cook do it, and plated it without incident. When I tasted it, I was shocked at the minerally richness, it melted in my mouth, and I closed my eyes for a second to try and make the flavor last a bit longer. Later I would learn how to make that dish from top to bottom, and the sauce was made by very slowly caramelizing a 50-pound bag of onions that were sliced super thin, cooked slowly in an oven overnight with butter and bay leaves, until very dark brown. Then it was pureed with a few knobs of cold butter, that was the sauce. It was garnished with tiny fried onion rings and 100 year old balsamic. Yes, it was rich but delicious.
After that, the sous chef took me back to the chef’s office and asked me if I’d like to work there. I was so crazy excited, this was the kind of place I had dreamed of working at, the kind of place that served foie gras, truffles, fresh pasta made daily, real Parmigiano Reggiano, it was a dream. There were three kinds of finishing olive oils! I was tired of chicken parm and meatballs. So of course I said yes but it was then he told me how much I’d be making, I think it was 50 cents more than minimum wage, less than my current job. I took it anyway, I knew it would lead to something, I just had to suffer for a time, that’s all. He told me to come in tomorrow and I could start then and they would pay me for the two days I staged which I felt was very fair.
Later on the bus ride home, I started going over finances in my head and I knew that I couldn’t afford to work there, but I felt careerwise I couldn’t afford not to, this was my shot, so I looked at it as an investment in my future, at least that’s the story I told myself. My dream was to open my own restaurant, to do that I had to learn to be a chef first and I felt that place would be a huge learning opportunity. I would just have to figure out the money situation.
The next day on the bus ride there, I was so nervous I kept rocking back and forth in my seat, holding my stomach because it was in knots. I was anxious, nervous, and downright scared, I knew that I knew next to nothing about working in a kitchen. I knew the chefs were going to be hard on me. I knew the other cooks were going to give me a hard time. I had never met the executive chef but some of the cooks had told me stories and I was terrified of him. I also didn’t want to blow my chance, becoming a chef was the most important thing to me at the time, nothing else came close.
Walking through the doors the next day, the locker room was empty, so I walked into the chef’s office and the two sous chefs were there talking and laughing, when they saw me they waved me in and told me to sit down for a bit. I filled out paperwork and they gave me an apron, a paper toque, and two towels, and showed me where the uniforms were kept. They told me to write my name in my toque, and that I had to do this every day which I thought was odd but later found out why. (next newsletter). I put on a chef coat, apron, and toque, tucked the towels into my apron, and followed the sous chefs into the kitchen, I was so nervous my stomach felt like it was turning over on itself but I knew it was the start of something better.
Nice writing, dude. Looks like that Twitter link at the top is deleted BTW. What was the gist of it?