eggbeater

can i get all these at one job: more guidance, more responsibility, more learning & more money?

It takes a long time of working in kitchens to develop a knowing over-the-shoulder glance at what the wake of your boat means. Like reading tea leaves, one has to drink a lot of tea before one notices patterns at the bottom of their saucer.

How long should you stay with a chef, in a kitchen, for a company, in a city? These questions can only be answered by you, or your mentor.

As you move towards your various goals, you should be collecting people who know from whence you came, where you're at, and where you'd like to go. You should be part of someone's collection to. As we say, stick with the winners. Wherever I work, I notice people who should be noticed, and I add them to my basket. You never know who will be your next boss, or hire.

A woman wrote to me recently and asked:

"How do I go about finding the right chef and getting a position with them? Who do I contact about getting jobs in certain kitchens? Is it uncouth to contact chefs directly? How do I make my desire for knowledge known to certain individuals?

To which I answered:

• You should be trailing as much as you can. Not necessarily for a job, but for the experience. There are few chefs who will turn down a free worker for the day.
• Aim high. go through zagat and mark down every fine dining place. those houses have pastry chefs and teams. eat those people's desserts. every day you should be going out. if you can't afford dinner, call ahead and see if you can get desserts at the bar. THIS is your research. if you like what you eat, ask for the pastry chef's name and send your resume -- by SNAIL MAIL. say you ate their food and you want to work for them.
• be prepared to move cities. if what you want to be is a chocolatier get as much experience with america's best. do you know Sahagun / Elizabeth Montes in Portland, Oregon? her chocolate is amazing, but very different than the frenchies. if you're with your future spouse I can't imagine that person will die if you move elsewhere for a year for your education/career. of course I don't *know* your situation, but this industry can offer so much more if you're able to travel.
• Stage with Chef Migoya at Hudson Chocolates once a month if you can't get hired right away. THAT'S AN INCREDIBLE OPPORTUNITY and you would be a fool to pass it up. Seriously. Not only is he brilliant, but he KNOWS EVERYONE AND EVERYONE KNOWS HIM!
• send me your resume. I'll pass it on to some people I know.
• when you trail a place, talk to the other pastry assistants. get a read on the kitchen. are the dishwashers happy? is the kitchen clean? does the boh respect the foh? are people staying for a long time? when you're trailing a kitchen you should be PAYING VERY CLOSE ATTENTION to the WHOLE KITCHEN.
• do as much research on your future kitchen/chef/pastry chef as you can. {I can't tell you how many cooks are ridiculously lazy about this! now with google no one has any excuses not to look someone up.}
• stop working for people you don't admire.
• pick jobs where you are completely over your head. run to catch up. and eat as much as you can all over nyc - every borough! travel/explore/use this city.

Then she wrote to me again. She said she couldn't move cities. She said she really needed to start making some real money. She said she needed health insurance. She said she wanted to habve kids soon. She said she thought she was ready to be a pastry sous chef. She sent me her resume. I had already guessed where she was working. I was right.

In her words:

"I am at a point in my experience, and in my desire to go all in, over my head, where I am more than ready to take on the role of sous chef. Not only will it challenge me as I wish to be, it will (hopefully, most likely) also provide me with a salary commensurate with my skills, and add the bonus of medical insurance, possibly. I am no perfect chef, not by a long shot, nor do I know more than any number of pastry cooks out there, BUT, I have such a strong desire and will to lead, teach, give, and share what I do know. The core necessity here is money, but the inclination toward teaching and leadership is strong too."

My response:

On the subject of money and saving for your future:

• there are few jobs in this industry that pay well. even when you become chef/enter management, what you get paid, divided by the labor needed, comes out to little more than rent, transportation and the odd night out.
• take out a calculator and enter in a series of numbers and you'll see what I mean. ie: if you make $40k as a pastry sous that's $769 weekly gross. divide 769 by 60 hours = $12.82 an hour, gross, which is about $9 an hour after taxes... Increase the yearly by $10k and then divide it by 70, 80 and 90 hour weeks.
• if you want to make a lot of money, go to the hotels, or union houses like The Four Seasons.
• but know this: IT'S EXTREMELY HARD to go back to A. an independently owned/non-union wage house, and/or B. a non-management position, once you've gone after the title &/or the $.
• it's also hard to get "learning" positions after you've gone after jobs just for the title &/or the $.
• What I mean by all that: it's easier to learn the right way the first time around, than get your bad habits beaten out of you by someone who *does* know what they're doing. *think of it this way: if you were me/or someone else you respect, would you hire You at the place you're at, to be their sous chef?*
• Just because you're "already" in a position of teaching etc., does not necessarily mean you're ready for a promotion to management. ALL assistants and cooks should be teaching/showing/leading/practicing! I was an assistant to many many pastry chefs before I was promoted. 
• Once you take a sous position, the minimum commitment is two years. Are you ready to make that commitment to your chef & the house? if you are, you must think very carefully about whom you choose to give that promise to.
• Maybe you think you're ready to be a pastry sous chef because of who your chef is right now. You might not think so if you were working on a bigger team, in a more established house, with a badass pastry chef... Some things to consider.
• There are loads of chefs out there who aren't ready to lead. Leadership skills are but one fraction of the  skills that great sous/chefs posess. There are also a lot of chefs who think/believe they're ready/want to lead, but they didn't have enough or very good teachers/mentors, and when they're in charge of a real kitchen with real rules and real bottom lines and real cooks with real problems, they implode.
• You're not the first cook to choose money so soon in their career. I've seen loads of cooks get promoted to sous long before they were ready. Many people get promoted just because the chef needs someone to work more than 40 hours. IF YOU ARE TO BE IN CONTROL OF YOUR LEARNING, YOU HAVE TO BE CRITICAL OF YOUR SKILLS. If you're not capable of being critical about your skill set/level, chefs and restaurateurs will seduce you into roles you're not ready for. That's a promise.
• There are plenty of chefs out there who chose/choose making a family over working crazy hours for little pay. This is as good a reason as any to change kitchens/chefs. The only prize you should be keeping your eyes on is YOURS. If you know what YOU Need, go after it.

I added some footnotes~

You should be trailing at at least one kitchen a week on one of your days off. never get too comfortable. There's no such thing as a trail being a waste of time. The worst trail is better than the best first date. Even if you see a dirty, disorganized, lazy kitchen with shoemaker cooks and inedible food, you'll know what not to do/where not to work/who to work under, in the rest of your career.

As your resume reads right now I would say you need at least two, but preferably three more years of working for badass pastry chefs, on amazing teams, in solid houses, under your belt, before venturing out as a sous chef. If you don't feel like you can afford to work like this, go immediately to a house where you can grow into that position fast. Houses that come to mind: Locanda Verde, The Four Seasons (resto not hotel), Marea, Del Posto, Gramercy Tavern, Lafayette, Buddakan, Daniel, Jean Georges, to name a few. I can send your resume to all these pastry chefs, but the rest will be up to you.

Lastly I added specific feedback about her resume.

Cooks resumes these days are at an all time low. Some of the errors are egregious! Whetever happened to spelling well, not mixing tenses, and leaving off jobs we worked at for less than a year? Final word of wisdom: get real critique/feedback about your resume before you send it to a chef you respect/admire...

...which brings me to -

I'm starting a new service:

Send me your resume & $25, and I'll critique it before your next job interview. Seriously, yo, your resume is you. Most chefs I know these days, including me, erase ten times more job queries than schedule interviews. If you want to cook professionally, and get better and better jobs in great kitchens, with serious chefs, you must represent yourself better! And it starts with that word document...

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Stagiaire Advice.

Pastry Chef at Large.

Happy September. The city's summer quiet comes to a close this weekend, as if tying off a scarf one began in April.

So much has happened since I wrote on eggbeater last. I'm sorry to have been away for so long, but oftentimes what is going on for me in a given kitchen, on a job, is not mine to tell, wholly, and I can't always figure out how to tell it diplomatically. I'm sure you understand.

Also, to be fully transparent, I've been cheating on you. Since April.

I've been taking my words elsewhere. Sharing them with others. My sentences are being edited by Charlotte Druckman. I couldn't be luckier, more honored, and more grateful. Behind every great writer is a keen, tough, grammatically correct editor.

My new paramour is Medium.com and the room we do it in is called The Egg Beat. I'm profiling pastry chefs. The idea is to give press to pastry chefs directly, without the middle man of their employer's website. Most pastry chefs aren't even named on their dessert menus, or acknowledged by print media journalists, or credited for their recipes in cookbooks! Most pastry chefs have no "name" until someone "discovers" them.

I think that's ridiculous, and I aims to change the playing field.

Let's face it, most professional cooks don't have the time, (or desire), to self-promote, or they don't really know how to use the-social-media-platform-of-the-moment. Twitter is about as much as anyone can bear, and there's a lot of katchka dreck to contend with, making it impossible to find the pastry chefs who aren't on TV.

So this bi-monthly column is a way to recognize the people behind the pastry. Maybe introduce you to an intuitive baker, a punk rock chef, a pastry chef making chocolate dirt or a chocolatier setting up shop in an old bookbindery factory. I'm writing about modern and old school pastry chefs alike. I could be writing about a pastry chef near you, or one halfway around the world.

At the end of this month I'll be participating in the Star Chefs International Chefs Congress in a few different ways. On the Sunday (if all goes according to plan) I will be one of the "Floor Judges" for the Pastry Competition, and the next day I will collaborate with my good friend Amanda Cook making baked goods to highlight heritage grains* from New York State. We will have a table as part of the eat@ICC "food court," if you will. Look for "A Bite of the Big Apple."

*I have recently begun a "conversation" with GrowNYC's Strategic Developer June Russell, who is working with various farmers growing grain, milling it into flour, in conjunction with the Heritage Grain Conservancy. I am most excited about working with Emmer and Einkorn varieties, which I am told have very different flavor and structure than the "standard wheat" we have all grown accustomed to.

And lastly, the most exciting idea to come across my desk is Mealku. I'll report back as soon as I know, and can explain more.

If you're wondering where I'm working these days, I'm At Large. It's like being On The Lam, but different.

 

 

 

leaving without saying goodbye.

I like to say my g_d has a sense of humor. A notoriously tricky one, I dare say. Not exactly sinister, but definingly dry and definitively abrupt, like the person who pulls a tablecloth out from under the table settings, practiced or not, at the art of subtlety, grace or confidence.

Some friends of mine and I like to say, "sometimes g_d is doing for me what I can not do for myself."

Sometimes you're the tablecloth and sometimes you're the hands and sometimes you're the grip and sometimes you're the smile about to break and sometimes you're the dishes that tremor but do not shatter and sometimes you're the surprise and sometimes you are the glass that cracks but does not fall and sometimes you're the idea to do such a thing at all
         and sometimes you're taken by complete surprise.

Challenges will always arise. It's how we react, rise, reach to/with/into them that transforms us.

I'm not saying these tricks don't ambush.  We navigate as best we can with tools we continue to sharpen or wish we did not own or wish we did.

Reacting and responding are not the same.

Sometimes we turn a corner we didn't know we were turning until we glance back and can no longer see from whence we came. We may try to reach back to say farewell to those we loved and appreciated and wanted to learn more from, but the door closes on the chapter and, to honor the memory they wish to become, we walk forward.

We put one foot in front of the other.

We have faith the ground beneath us will remain solid or we borrow faith from people we love and trust who have extra to lend.

Sometimes we can say goodbye with intention, sometimes we can not.

Strangely I feel grateful for having once experienced a grief so great, so large, so dark that I came to know its attributes, its tides, and can now, sometimes gracefully, sometimes awkwardly, stand in it's course and let it wash over/pass through me, understanding that hope, that light-a comprehension of the incomprehensible; an untangling of confusion and answerless questions, is possible and not out of reach.

One day at a time.

For all loss is loss, no matter it's timing, no matter its reasons, no matter its warnings.

If we are interested in re-defining success we must also define failure differently.
If we are interested in re-defining success, we must discontinue to draw ink lines where permeable ones would delineate more accurately.

The snake swallows its tail. There are no endings, only beginnings. Success is not virgin birth.

I know one certainty: the only thing you can rely on is change.

I proceed, as Peels recedes.
I am proud of all I conceived, built, produced, organized, systemized, learned, celebrated, conjured, inspired, taught, realized.
I built a bakery.
Whether the owners/investors re-shape or remove it, or do what they need to do to insure the space makes them the monies they need to reconcile their bottom line, I remain proud of that which I bore from nothing more than a hope, a wish, desire, a love of baking so strong I have no words to describe it.
On the day before the first day of Spring, the owners and I bid farewell, shook hands and thanked each other for the opportunities we gave and received. More than anything I'm happy for what they gave me. Wood and linen. Staples. A canvas to stretch on my own. Freedom & belief. 

Au revoir, to see again; to leave without saying goodbye. For Good. No home is permanent, excepting the one residing inside.

Be not sad for me. The life-force of a restaurant is the same as a person-it adds, expands, subtracts, grows and shifts; feathers shed; wings are clipped and grow back again; going for as long as it goes, rarely staying the same, or wanting to! The bottom line of a spreadsheet is the outcome of a list of percentages that are ingredients: a recipe for a healthy enterprise-one which not only feeds, but nourishes.

Wondering what's next? I've had some ideas on the side, shelved, proofing in the oven, on hold, hibernating, waiting, restless. I've been placating them with excuses for a long time now. "Not now, I'm opening a restaurant." "Not yet, I'm hiring a team." "Soon, I promise." 

Remember how I said my g_d has a dastardly sense of humor? G_d is nudging me to keep my promise...

Thank you a zillion times thank you to everyone who came in brought friends & family & introduced yourself & ate & tasted & worked & staged with me and for Peels pastry department & everyone who allowed me to make your birthday cake & wedding cakes/pies & photographed & wrote about what I was doing & interviewed & surprised me & gave me critical feedback & made suggestions & put me on the radio & tv & took notice of what my bakery was trying to achieve & came to the Ice Cream Social & ordered your Thanksgiving pies from us & I really do hope to see and feed you all again wherever I land with my whisk and Baby Offset Spatula next. I won't soon forget you, {as I hope you won't, me} Your support has meant so much to me and that which I am attempting to speak through my baking.

au revoir.

The James Beard Award for Outstanding Pastry Chef. {*please consider this post a call to action}

 

The James Beard Foundation has just published their extensive list of semifinalists for 2012. There are dozens of names listed in every category. My name was on that list last year. It was a cause for great excitement and anticipation. While I didn't make the nomination list, being a semifinalist is enough to put on a resume and feel proud of. To be noticed and recognized by the James Beard Foundation is a wonderful thing. And none to easy for a pastry chef, for which only 1, in all of the USA, is chosen per year.

What are the JBF awards? From their website:

Excellence. Passion. Achievement. Success.
The James Beard Foundation Awards shine a spotlight on the best and brightest talent in the food and beverage industry.

Covering all aspects of the industry—from chefs and restaurateurs to cookbook authors and food journalists to restaurant designers and architects and more—the Beard Awards are the highest honor for food and beverage professionals working in North America.

Why do they matter? In The United States of America a James Beard award is considered the highest honor for a chef.

Cook. Baker. Chef. Pastry Chef. Commis. Sous Chef. Saucier. Prep. Dishwasher. Restaurant Owner. It's mostly a thankless job, despite what the media screams at you. It's hard work, day after day, hour after relentless hour, year after vacationless year. Month after month of the same chaos, sometimes reigned, mostly flood.

And then, bam! Once a year a list comes out. The names on it are ones we know, ones we've hard before; some we're surpised by, many we're bored of hearing about. When we read the winners, we're happy there are so many of them it takes a minute to realize there are so very few in the categories of Pastry Chef, Baker, Chocolatier. It takes you another minute to realize there's only 1 award for Pastry Chef Baker Chocolatier. 1.

One James Beard Foundation Outstanding Pastry Chef a year.

In all of the United States of America. A small country, I'll admit, but still. Really? 1?!

How are the awards determined? There's general, legalese information on the James Beard Foundation website under the title "Policies & Procedures." And then there's the critique by Josh Ozersky in Time Magazine. But for the "real deal" see what a JBF Judge says about the process, the criteria, for voting on and choosing "the one," out of hundreds of thousands.

How can one award once a year, define us? It can't, of course.

     being a chef is part pirate, part whore, part punk rock,    part cop,   part junkyard dog, part priest, part cog-in-the-wheel, part junkie, part celebrity,       part sell-out, part pawn, part athlete, part mother, part judge & jailer & lawyer,        part diplomat, part lunatic,    part model, part artist, part factory drone, part convict, part philoopher, part conductor,    part jock and stoner both, part   prat, part citizen, part murderer, part numbers-cruncher, part mayor, part      politician, part polyanna, part bad guy & good girl both, part craftsman, part jailer,   part tornado,         part scoundrel, part construction   worker, part radical,    part accountant, part do-gooder, part thief,    part doctor,

part indefinable.

Chef. A recipe with a list of unattainable ingredients. Incompatible parts.
And there are so many of us.

But because the James Beard Foundation yearly awards are where it's at, I beg you to write them requesting a Regional Outstanding Pastry Chef Award, as they do for savory chefs.

One such person has already written and set forth such a letter. Jenny McCoy, my good friend and colleague, most recently pastry chef of Craft in NYC, set down brave and eloquent words, sending them to Susan Ungaro, President of the James Beard Foundation. Jenny's words, as she is in person, are strong, educated, positive, proactive and utterly brave.

Very lucky for me, and all of you, she has agreed to let me publish her letter.

July 26, 2011           

Susan Ungaro
President
James Beard Foundation
167 West 12th Street
New York, NY 10011

Dear Ms. Ungaro,

   The James Beard Foundation has repeatedly wowed me over the years with their commitment to honoring culinary professionals of all kinds in the United States—not only are the crème de la crème of the industry acknowledged by the JBF, but also professionals who are just beginning their careers; professionals who use food as a way of giving back to their communities; professionals who write about food, photograph food, and even design spaces where food is served. Professionals, who just like the JBF, set the standard for the nation’s industry.

   My first introduction to the James Beard Foundation was in 1999. I was finishing a program in pastry arts at Kendall College, 19 years old, and embarking on my career as a pastry professional in Chicago.  My chef, and former JB Nominee, Don Yamauchi and pastry chef Celeste Zecola of Gordon were asked to cook the last two courses for a “Friends of the Beard House” dinner at Crofton on Wells; I was invited along to assist.  It was at that dinner, in the company of amazing chefs and former James Beard Award winners such as Charlie Trotter, Norman Van Aken and Carrie Nahabedian, that I decided, I, too, wanted to become a friend of the Beard House.  I, too, wanted to strive to win an award, as Pastry Chef of the Year. I still have the menu from that evening; it serves as a reminder of my goal, and as a reminder of my respect for the James Beard Foundation’s endeavors.

   Fast forward twelve years, and many James Beard dinners, benefits, award ceremonies later and while I still dream of an award, my dreams have broadened slightly.  Now I dream to make a lasting impact – an impact that will garner recognition for more of my peers and for the pastry profession as a whole.   I found myself sitting in the auditorium at Lincoln Center last spring thinking, “One pastry chef award a year just isn’t enough to honor all the hard work and expertise of pastry chefs nationwide.”  Just as the cuisine of savory chefs varies throughout the country by region and season, the desserts of the country’s finest pastry chefs do as well. 

   The baking and pastry industry has flourished in recent years. Television shows like Top Chef: Just Desserts have top ratings; schools are being dedicated solely to the art of baking and pastry; films like Kings of Pastry, chronicling the World Pastry Cup competition are in theatres nationwide; pastry chefs have celebrity status and are becoming household names; restaurants are highlighting their pastry chefs nearly as much as their head chefs; enrollment in pastry-based culinary programs has increased by 50-75% in the last handful of years.  With the field of baking and pastry growing at the rate it is, wouldn’t it be wonderful to see the James Beard Foundation rise along with it?

   And so my question to the James Beard Foundation, its Board of Trustees, and its National Advisory Board is this: Would the James Beard Foundation consider honoring pastry chefs within regions just like they do savory chefs?  In just the last few months, I have mentioned the idea of award expansion to several of my pastry and savory chef colleagues across the country, chefs who are both former JB Award nominees and winners, and every single one of them agrees—awarding more than one pastry chef a year would be a tremendous acknowledgement to the pastry profession from the organization that the pastry profession respects most.

   Many thanks for your time and consideration. I look forward to working with you soon.

 

Sincerely,

Jenny McCoy
Pastry Chef
Craft

Jenny's blog, Seasonal Sweets, also has a copy of her letter published, and another plea to write to The James Beard Foundation.

Please honor Jenny's gift, Jenny's bravery, Jenny's letter with a letter of your own!

Consider this post a call to action.

Please send a letter-- especially if you are a cooking for a living. Please write a letter if you [or someone you know, know of, respect, love and or admire, are inspired by] are now, or want to be: a Chef, a James Beard Award Winner, a Pastry Chef, Pastry Cook. Or believe Pastry Chefs should get the same recognition as Savory Chefs.

Thank you.

happy first day of spring. to you~ joy.

professional cook blues.

One busy Saturday night service, many years ago, my station partner and I looked down the line, at one of the meat cooks, and knew something was amiss. There had been an exchange between him and our expediting sous chef that none of us were paying much attention to until our sous raised his voice and squelched that meat cook's words. My partner and I looked down the line and saw that cook just standing there. His knife bag was on his cutting board and he was looking at it.

This might not sound so odd, but in the final minutes before service begins and your ticket machine starts chinkity click clink clinking into it's sputter of endless tickets, time both condenses and elongates like nod sentences on slow motion. You can't stop moving, you can't stop doing,

you are never ready.

You never have time to stand stock still. And your knife bag is no where to be seen. You've been using your tools for hours and they won't find the dark resting place of that knife roll until well past the violet hour.

Service begins. We are at the ready to serve 500+ people 4 star food with 10 cooks on the line not including the expeditor. We have 3 dining rooms, six menus and there's no room for error.

We are about 45 minutes into service when this meat line cook says, "I gotta go."

The air leaves the kitchen and every cook freezes, for a nanosecond. None of us dare to look up. Our sous yells at the line cook. Screams. Rails. All front of house is concrete. Cooks keep cooking. Sous and Line Cook sit under a theater spot light and meat cooks gives in. He starts cooking again. We exhale. Carefully.

8 o'clock hits. The board is full. Captains, back waiters, 3 dishwashers, runners full throttle ahead.

And it's right about then I feel the air in the room shift. Tilt. Electricity ankle high. I am working two ovens, sauteeing and quenelling 25 ice creams my board is full my partner has plates out we're garnishing like mad I'm yelling for runners and plates are getting wiped as they're lifted off the pass

and

I see in my peripheral vision

that that meat cook has turned his back to his grill and is packing up his knives. He has long curly hair and it's obscuring his flattened face. He shows no emotion. He is a quiet artisan, slowly taking care of his tools. The rush of service, the cacaphony of kitchen, the orders barked and directed and a kitchen orchestrated is madness, all around him.

The sous says little. We dare not speak. We watch

in complete disbelief.

The line steps one step closer to stoves to let him pass when he walks out.

He walks out in the middle of service. On Saturday night. In one of New York's best, most popular restaurants.

The ticket machine doesn't notice. The diners don't give a shit. They want their four star food. Now.

It's surreal, and we all know. We all hope

that that is never us.

But what we don't know, what we don't want to believe, what we will fight tooth and nail to forget, to stay in denial with, to shelve, to subjugate, to keep at arms' length, or better yet-- as far away as we can, is that

One day that will be us.

      Sooner than we think.

There was a running joke in that kitchen ever after that night. When we were in the weeds, which was always, but right before service when our nerves were on high alert and we watched the clock banging out its last seconds before the ticket machine would go from sleeping to fourth gear, one of us might say, "I gotta go." laughing in that easy way you can never laugh like again

after it's you.

After it's the you that has got to go. No matter what the fuck is happing in the kitchen. No matter what your leaving does to your fellow cooks and chef and those clueless diners happily perusing the menu.

-----

We have a few pieces of advice concerning 'life outside the kitchen getting in the way of work/cooking" for cooks in this brutal business of professional cooking:

Leave it at the door.
Use your job to avoid your life.
Workaholism is the best forgetting drug.
You can cry, but you gotta keep working.
You can hide in the walk in, but you won't be alone.
There's no part-time in the kitchen.
If you can't come with 1000%, don't come at all.
Preoccupation causes bodily injury. To yourself and others.
Never call in sick unless you're dead.

--------

But what about when you can't leave it at the door?

What about the day I got a long distance call on the internal kitchen phone line at the French Laundry telling me one of my cousins died in a car crash that morning?

What about the day I worked lunch service shaking & hallucinating-- stone cold sober, because of an internal organ failure?

What about the day you bury the most important person in your life?

What about the day you come home to find your partner with someone else?

What about the day you wake up to terrorist attacks? And the days and weeks that follow waiting for word from people you know who were working in the Twin Towers that day? What about the day you get that phone call you didn't want to get, but knew you were going to, telling you that your worst fears were confirmed?

What about the day you hear from your beloved that she has an incurable illness?

What about the day you go home to find your husband gone & divorce papers on the kitchen table?

What about the day you find a lump in your breast?

What about the day you realize your addiction is, finally, something that needs to be addressed. Now. ?

What about the day you learn one of your best friends' has taken her own life?

What about the day you get a call from the school that your child has been hurt?

Then what?

Can you go into the the kitchen that day, that week, those months, and leave it at the door? Cry in the walk- in? Can you go into work and grill or saute or reduce stocks or brunoise meaningless cubes out of vegetables no one is ever going to taste, let alone see your perfect knife skills?

How do you go on?

How do you continue to care about, be inspired by, want to teach, be interested in learning, this exhausting craft, this hungry thirsty insatiable beast of an industry?

Those phone calls, those life altering moments, need to be seen to.

I took time off from cooking to help someone die. I took years off from getting into my chef's coat when I knew I could not give 1000%. I worked in catering when I could not give all of me to a restaurant. I worked in another industry altogether when my grief was so profound I could not sleep or eat or read or speak.

But there are more options than 2.

If you can work through the experience. If you can focus on one hour at a time, one day at a time, one moment at a time, one service at a time, you can accumulate a few hours, a few days, a few months, working through the pain, the anguish.

When you can collect a few of life's breathtaking heartbreaks, and you can get through them, and get to the to the other side, where there is light, you collect hope. Hope doesn't go bad. It collects interest in your bank.

And every time you walk through the coals, you can remember that you once did, you twice did, that before.

Because cooking and baking are verbs, they heal as they work you. Working with your hands, seeing immediate results for your toils, heals. Being in a kitchen with other cooks, many of whom have had serious struggles of their own, humbles us and we can be carried by them, if we allow ourselves to be vulnerable.

Kitchen cooks are pirates. We are survivors even if we're not always the fittest. We romp and we meander. We're train jumpers and responsible citizens alike.

Show me someone in my uniform everyday who does not struggle with the craft, the industry, the grace. That person does not exist. You can use work to avoid life, yes, but what about when work is life? Managing life inside and outside of the kitchen is tricky business.

If there's one thing I know it's this. Cooking and baking and writing about it buoys me. Has set me on course even when I couldn't see land through tears. Has brought me back down to earth when I could see my body floating away from self.

But there are times in a cooks life when saying, "I gotta go." is what needs to be said. Only that cook can know when. And why.

I beg of you this, cooks with the blues, attempt to stick it out. Use the kitchen to heal yourself through the pain. Kitchens steady. Kitchens support. Kitchens weather. Kitchens give perspective, consistency. Kitchens heal.

Memorializing the Living. or, celebrating people before they're dead.

For a few years now I've had an idea. I've thought about how terrible it is for the dead to miss their own obituaries. I've often wondered if a person's quality of life might be bettered if she/he knew how appreciated they were. I've had the idea to memorialize the living, not merely the deceased.

I've seen newspaper writers vie to be the ones who set down those words describing those lives as past tense. And I've witnessed thin, hungry and absent obituaries. Unattended memorials. Wordless friends, affection starved grief. 

I've read final books, written in someone's last years, and memoirs written in what we call someone's mid-life. We're really lucky if people we love and admire set down words, create art and leave us with something to hear them by, after they die. But it doesn't mean we should wait until they're gone to celebrate them, and what they mean to us, while they are still alive and meandering, imperfectly along, weaving in, like knitted yarn, through their lives and ours.

It can really embarass someone to tell them how much you appreciate their presence in your life. I have friends and colleagues for whom these words would make their skin crawl with disgust. I work for and with and have working for me, people for whom words like this would make them run screaming.

The person who thinks they are the best is the same narcissist who thinks they are the worst.

Some of us are very hard on ourselves. And positive or negative words from those we admire feel the same: like a lie.

I used to work with someone who would have never let you finish a sentence of sappyness. Macho. Or macha, as sex-specific romance language goes. Compliments and criticisms went to the same place with her: on the floor. She wasn't having any of it. Just get the work done. And have a drink after work. Or six. But then one morning, on a day everyone in my generation will remember, she died. Destroyed, evaporated, murdered. Few words left behind. To write any felt impossibly difficult and necessary both.

The difficult and the necessary.

What eggbeater is about. As you know, I sometimes say what no one wants to hear. I sometimes speak for those who can not. I hope to speak from the heart of my industry. {all is fair in love & war} I write words free of sponsored agenda. I work inside real kitchens with real people and real issues, personal and political, domestic and international, human and historical.

I want my idea to become real. I'm going to start writing Living Memorials.

Some of them might be formal, some of them all-inclusive, some of people you have already heard of, some I'm sure don't even know who I am, some of people I've known my whole life.

They will be about people whose lives I find wondrous, complicated, inspiring, joyful, radical, humble, tough, sharp, mysterious, generous, sexy, intense, quixotic, adventurous, frightening, enviable, quiet, colorful and more or less, depending on how you see and experience them yourself.

And I would like you to join me.

If you take up space online, please consider this an open invitation to write a Living Meme too.

There are no rules, none that I'm going to make, at any rate. I just want to see more celebratory words set down about people who are alive and actively living, doing, being. Foibles and all.

{you know you're}opening a restaurant{when you}

you know you're opening a restaurant when you

wake up every morning at 7 am regardless of how late/early you went to bed
wake up shaky even though you haven't touched caffeine in weeks
forget to eat until dinner time
don't know what day, date, season it is
forget what you forgot
start erasing more emails than you read, write or answer put together
start paying someone to do your laundry
think that the morning of today happened during a different week
interview and offer jobs in the same hour
make prep lists the size of your first knitted scarf you couldn't figure out how to bind off on
stop seeing your bank account drop in funds
start emptying your home fridge into the trash
stop buying food for your house
stop answering personal calls
stop getting personal calls
discontinue to commute/walk/ride anywhere that's not in your restaurant's vicinity
stop knowing what's happening in the world/your city
forget what 'news' is
forget what daytime looks like
stop eating meals and begin eating tests
forget that you own, or have ever worn, any other clothes but your whites
start looking at 'normal' people like they're zoo animals
realize normal people are looking at you funny
don't notice people looking at anything
don't notice anything

you know you're opening a restaurant when you
start missing yourself.

new york city summer adventures, meandering, explorations, revisitations & deliciousnesses

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 

Want to Cook in New York City?

The world is your oyster. Right now. As spring turns into summer. Before the holidays and after late winter's lull.

Restaurants have seasons they like to open in. They follow the moon, in a crazy sort of way.

And right now, the moon is very full, pregnant, in fact, with imminent births.

If you want to cook New York City, may I suggest you check in with Craigslist today? Whether it be in San Francisco, somewhere in the delicious deep South, or right here in the Big Apple, a city for which sleep is not needed, you might see a posting you want to answer.

 

New York is your oyster. Whether you swallow or chew, spurn or hoard, relish or retch, eat traif or not, come and get it while the gettin' is good.

{see you soon?}

opening a restaurant. again.

I haven't disappeared.
but maybe I have.
it depends on how you look at it.
many people will tell you I'm more present than ever.
many of these last days have not been spent in the kitchen.
but soon that's the only place I'll be.

These days I'm shaking hands with a lot of guys who sell big machines.
They say things to me like, "Why are you being so fucking polite?! We don't trust you if you're too nice..." {Not gonna lie-- It's a strange acclamation to go from London to NYC.}

Excel has become a great friend of mine. 

I've built a database in fact.
One wouldn't think a pastry chef could do such a thing.
The database does all sorts of mathematical tricks.
And all the pages talk to each other.  
VLOOKUP and Dropdown Menus, yo.
So few restaurants, and less chefs {who are not hotel/corporate trained, which I am not} understand the power of internal, back-end organization.
The Excel document is a list of all raw product, a compilation of recipes, a break down of all product to show price per gram, a relay of price per gram embedded in each recipe to cost out each recipe, and, as we move through costing out each product, we can add these "working products" to our "list of ingredients."
So if you want to know the cost of butterscotch ice cream you take the cost of ice cream as a recipe and add to it the cost of butterscotch, a working product, by the gram amount you need.

If this sounds too nerdy for you, or if this doesn't sound like cheffing as you know it, think about it this way:  for every skill you add to your resume you become that much more valuable, can garner a higher wage and you might even be able to keep your job when the economy tanks.

This is the second restaurant database I've written, and if we all use it to its potential it will also help us with inventory, ordering, wholesale/catering, and price tracking.

Or think about it this way: It's easier to work in your business than on it.

When you think, "I want to be a chef when I grow up," remember that just being a great cook is not enough.

What else am I doing? 
Test baking,
measuring my station and the equipment I've ordered,
having lots and lots and lots of menu meetings,
talking to future staff about the possibility of working with me, with us, 
visiting the future home of the restaurant in all its stages: raw, midrare etc. {we are going to inhabit a building that basically needed to be gutted & rebuilt from the inside-out},
tracking down an ice cream machine,
attempting to navigate the farmers market and taking notes on which farmers have what produce during which weeks/months/seasons,
organizing recipes & recipe notes,
finding hard to find product through available purveyors and looking under rocks for the rest,
going on field trips to places I won't be able to once we open the doors to the public,
and spending as much time with my family and friends as I and they can and have time for.

Opening a restaurant is like nothing else. Joanne Chang of Boston's incredible, incomparible Flour bakery put it best,

"There's a lot of 'hurry up and wait.' You have all this time to organize yourself, your time and the project. But you wait. A lot. And then when the restaurant is going to open any minute you have a thousand things to do and no time to do them!"

I know you want to know more about the project. Where it is, who its with, what my menu will be like, when we'll open. I promise you'll know, as soon as I can tell. 

Until then, eggbeater is taking suggestions for posts &/or 'bids' for guest authoring. Know anyone?

Pastry Chef Musings. on complacency, competition, worry & innovation.

In lieu of my recent restaurant departure I've come to have a few thoughts about how there are a lot of different kinds of pastry chefs, and how "comparing one's inside's to another's outsides," can lead to dangerous territory.

By this I mean-- competition and self doubt and keeping up with the Joneses and all those icky feelings that crop up when we're worried about who we are and what we do, and instead of just being who we are and doing what we do, we stop, and peer around the edge nervously, spying on our counterparts, and reading each others press, and worrying.

We worry that we have the wrong desserts and we employ the wrong methods.

We worry about how we might be too boring, or not boring enough.

We worry we're too old fashioned or not sticking to the Classics.

We worry about how closely we're sticking to the seasons and if any Eat Localvores are going to arrest us for putting strawberries on our menu one day too soon.

We worry our menu is not approachable enough for the clientele we are serving. We worry our chef will keep making her/his portions bigger and bigger and keep complaining that dessert sales are too low to keep us on. We worry our desserts are better than our chef's savoury food & one day he'll notice and fire us for some bogus reason.

We worry.

We worry even when we're drunk or asleep or lounging easily on the bar or flirting with waiters or yelling at our cooks or trying to fix our Kitchen-Aid with masking tape or hiding our chinois in our lockers or doing our endless laundry or on a date or walking around nonchalantly as if we've not got a care in the world, on our one day off.

Sometimes the worry takes a vacation and ends up in a place it gets stuck because a volcano has decided to erupt or an earthquake has taken over the newsreels or someone in our family has died and

for a minute

we can breathe, worry-free.

But then it starts again.

We pick up a food magazine and see yet another recipe for a stupid dessert or a cliched pairing or the name of a pastry chef who's been getting press since dinosaurs opened ice cream parlours

and then the worry begins again.

 

Of course I'm being a little silly.

Not all pastry chefs worry around the clock. There are a few cool, calm & collected ones. A few Clark Kents who are just as wonderful even before they do a quick-change in a diminutive telephone booth. A few who know exactly who they are, where they came from and make desserts from their heart, their heartland.

But I do think a little worry is alright.

Because a lot of complacency is what I see on most dessert menus, wherever I eat, wherever I work, whenever I travel.

It's all too easy to make dessert cliches. It's all too easy to easy to conform. It's all too easy to become the undead pastry chef. It's all too easy to do only what you were taught in school. It's all too easy to perpetrate crimes against plated desserts, pastries, sweet thangs.

Because the masses want same. Sameness sells. Lowest common denominator flies off the shelf. Boring rules. The bottom line is infatuated with mass production.

Sugar is a siren.
The population is its ship.
Sugar spins web of deception.
The blind lead the stupid lead the lemmings.
All to their creative death.
And so it goes, round and round.

Because sugar, or the taste of sweetness, harkens back to our childhoods so strongly, and nostalgia is at the root of most classical dessert creations, it's difficult for people to allow pastry chefs to take chances with flavours/ingredients/pairings they love and hold close dearly.

Perhaps so close they suffocate pastry chefs!

So I beg of you this:

stop worrying and----->

start thinking outside the pink box.
start coming up with some slightly new flavor pairings.
stop only ordering from your purveyors and begin going to health food stores and online sources for some of your ingredients.
start reading of-the-moment chef blogs and start looking more closely at food photos and buy some food magazines & cookbooks not written in your native tongue and get your mind out there-- even if you can't afford to travel your body on that culinary airplane.
delve deeper into the ingredients you think you know-- try different animal eggs, animal fats, animal & grain & nut milks, various flours with and without gluten contents. toast your flours, taste new salts, experiment with as many kinds of sugars as you can find-- jaggeries, muscovados, raw/turbinado/demerarra, coconut sugar. taste honeys from all over the world. taste all strengths of Manuka honey. attempt using miso in replacement of salt, or even sugar.
substitute labne or Greek yogurt or sheep's milk yogurt for creme fraiche. substitute fromage frais for ricotta. or better yet-- make your own ricotta!
if you always use mascarpone, look into Crescenza or other triple cream wonders. try goat butter for your next batch of shortbread.
challenge yourself to a week of vegan baking. gluten-free baking. nut-free baking.
if you've never used fresh herbs in your muffins, cakes, cookies, buttercream, try it today. buy small batches of Organic non-irradiated ground spices and see what a difference they make compared to what your dry goods supplier is sending you. think they're too expensive? you only need 1/4 of the ginger root powder if it actually tastes like itself.
go to restaurants just for dessert.
get yourself out of your personal cave of dessert making and try someone else's creations. for all you know they're on twitter or facebook too and if you have questions imagine how happy they'll be to learn that you, another fellow pastry chef, came to eat their food & now has questions about some of their plates!
do something besides sleep on your next day off.
try getting inspiration from not just other food related sources. go to a gallery, a museum, get on a rollercoaster, take someone's kid to the zoo, or lay in the moss under some redwood trees and look high up into their canopy for perspective.

what are some other things you do to clear your head when your chef or the owner or your customers want you to make the same boring desserts they

remember from their childhood
had their last pastry chef make
know how to pronounce/eat/serve
think they know how to make themselves
eat year round whether those ingredients are in season or not
are oppressing you with only boring dusty 1980's (or earlier!) ideas

?

Enquiring pastry Chefs want to know.

Remember this:

the first chef who made something which strayed from his tradition/culture/local ingredient list/ etc. had to work hard to convince others of his and its merit.

the comfortable spot you've cornered yourself into keeps you and me and other chefs and future diners dumb.

guerilla acts of change are necessary to facilitate education, growth, change and to open one's mind one might sometimes need a crowbar as well as a spatula.