eggbeater

Opening A Restaurant: dessert menu testing.

If only I didn't need any sleep. Then I could tell you everything. Every day I could come home and write and write and tell you about how much I love the sous chefs. They're great. Both of them. Different in complementary ways. Ones is learning and it's great to watch him fill shoes. The other is being stretched and poked and prodded and I like to give him a good squeeze here and there because when I look at his open freckled face I feel better.

Or I could tell you about the pastry team. How we are 5 strong women pushing and getting pushed. When my team is ready to take flight from me I want them to leave 100 times better than they came to me. I want to get the messy ones neat and the frantic ones confident. I want the best of them and I hope to give them my all.

I want to tell you about the way one of our managers was dressed today. The suit he wore was striped and so was his shirt and tie! It took my breath away his handsome-ness. Does someone have a fan?

I could go into great detail about what it feels like to meet new diners and hope to have them as regulars. Or to have a waiter spot people in the industry, chat with them and give them an extra treat to thank them for supporting us in our endeavor. (Today a well known SF pastry chef came in with her sous chef and assistant just because. They were 3 and ordered all 4 desserts!)

I might have time to tell you about a new dessert I plated for the first time today. Or the process it takes to get to the point from tossing and turning and having a notebook by the bed for almost sleeping notes, to today when the food was in mine and my chef's mouth. Us closing our eyes and imagining what else will go on the plate to complete the thought.

It's a gorgeous feeling, I don't mind saying.

Tomorrow another one should come out of my hands. And the oven, freezer, out from under the sharp blade and my imagination.

Who here likes lemon desserts to taste like lemon? Call me a Purist. You wouldn't be the first.

But the truth is I have to sleep.

For those of you looking for the complete dessert menus,

DINNER:

first blush
toasted kataifi, quince,
warmed manouri & strawberry-rose sherbet
9

soft & evocative
poached pear, buckwheat cake &
brown butter crème anglaise
9

icy bright
almond milk gelee, woodleaf peach and blackberry granita, seasonal fruit
8

warm & sumptuous
cocoa cake, baked chocolate, cardamon ice cream
& shuna’s famous dark chocolate sauce
9

autumn arrival
honey-cumin pot de crème, heirloom apple-walnut-white fig salad
8

LUNCH:

soft & evocative
poached pear, buckwheat cake &
brown butter crème anglaise
9

icy bright
almond milk gelee, woodleaf peach and blackberry granita, seasonal fruit
8

crunchy & sumptuous
sesame cake, cocoa nib cream dome,
& shuna’s famous dark chocolate sauce
9

autumn arrival
honey-cumin pot de crème, heirloom apple-walnut-white fig salad
8

See you soon?

7X7 Magazine Chats About Sens Restaurant, SF

As I mentioned, we chefs had a photo shoot a coupla weeks ago. Wonderfully enough we were lucky enough to snag the ever popular restaurant/ food photographer Frankie Frankeny.

After coming to Sens for our Friends & Family meals, one of Frankie's friends, Robin Rinaldi, wrote a leetle tiny tasty tidbit about us on 7X7 magazine'e website, Bits & Bites. Get a sneak peak on some of Frankie's photos of mine and Michael's food, and as well Ms. Rinaldi's piece, by clicking here.

Opening A Restaurant: Glass Houses, and the landscaping around them.

Today, well yesterday now, my day was very interesting, to say the least.

There's one thing you can count on in the restaurant business: no day is exactly the same as the one before or tomorrow. This may be true for the business you're in too, but this is the one I know. Retail? It's a distant memory. Factory work? I remember well, but many days were exactly the same as the one before and the week after.

Now that I know you're all reading every word so closely, I will try my best to explain everything down to the very last detail. Pull up a chair and pull out a pencil. [Yeah, the same one you used to dial a phone, instead of the one you'd use to email me yourself.]

        please put down the stone aimed at the Glass House

1. If I am speaking in a general way please discontinue to assume you know Exactly what/ whom/ where/ {when} I'm talking about. If you have not asked me directly then assume nothing. Please.

2. If you are using this series as a way to spy on my current workplace I will give you a piece of advice: spies try to stay anonymous. And so, I am speaking in code. For example: because I have been cooking professionally for 15 years and making my own living for the last 25, when I talk in the "present tense" there's a good chance that I'm speaking about all of my bosses, me (because remember I am a boss too), you, us and none of the above.

3. Here at Eggbeater I write from my heart. And, like most humans, my heart is fickle and unpredictable and sensitive and locked up and exposed and complicated. I love fiercely and, as I have said to many of my lovers past and present, if you can't handle how I love you should leave now. Bye, nice to have known you, I hope your beige world welcomes you home with mediocre fanfare. As a person who loves as fiercely as I do, as a person with a big, exposed heart, I also admit that my downturns are brutal as well. When I fall I fall hard. In love or in despair.

            I've lived in a Glass House for a long time

4. If there's one thing I know, I know all too well how words are powerful. Although I do not mean to hurt those I love and respect, I sometimes do. So I apologize. I process, I confront, I talk shit out and I do not walk away from my actions and inactions without looking my cyclops in his eyes and take responsibility for all my actions and inactions.

        we made direct amends to such people wherever possible,
    except when to do so would injure them or others

5. I am a person with integrity. I identify as a gentleman and I do not take this lightly. My friendships come first and this means those I sleep with, work for, work with and work under. Ask any of my old bosses whether I slacked on the job or hid my weaknesses. Ask around and find out how many bridges I burned, mended, repaired, or kept up with my own bare hands.

        if you don't know who you are, this will confuse you

Remember that job I was interviewing for from February until I took the job at Sens? Yes, that's right-- the one where I saw the Chef every few week for almost 8 months?

Well one day we were having one of our "getting to know and court you" meetings and he leaned back and said,

"I have talked to everyone you've ever worked for. Half of them tell me it would be a big mistake for me to hire you and the other half tell me you'd be the best thing to happen to my project."

6. I know who I am.

        sometimes bravery is quiet

7. There are few things anyone says to me, about me, that I've not heard already. I know where I'm strong, I know my history, the history of both my parents and just about everyone in my family. Have you ever Googled me? I couldn't hide even if I wanted to. Try living for one day with a name like mine. First and last.

                    triangulation is a powerful tool in manipulation

8. I know a little bit about Unionizing, Union Busting and how governments pit those who would naturally be allied, against one another. I understand a little bit about class wars and community organizing. I have never shirked from advocating and I have a history making allies with people others have pitted me against. Why am I bringing this up here, you might ask.

I work at Sens because I want to. I want to be part of a team like that. Strong, naked, fierce, smart, savvy, educated and willing to take a chance, a gamble. I no longer wanted a pastry chef job where I worked these crazy fucking hours for nothing more than a few more great desserts in the city closest to my home. So what?

I wanted a job worth the challenge. I wanted to learn something new, and not just about butter or flour or eggs. I wanted to make a change, effect a change, teach, be taught, learn, share, advocate. I only wanted to do this again if I could do it a little differently. I wanted to find a home I would not just burn bright in for a minute, I wanted to make a house a home.

        we're not going to talk about the job. it's not the job we need to change. it's you. we need to work on you and how you work.

Was it going to be possible?

Did I leave kitchens for good almost 3 years ago? Was that a choice? Was that "god doing for me what I could not do for myself?" Or did I need a break?

Did someone push me off a moving train or did I jump?

You know what? These might be questions which will never get answered.

When I was given the opportunity to care for the most important person in my life, in her last years, I stepped away from my uniform.

       I want to spend time watering my own garden, the garden which is me

If you call that a choice than you are living without having truly lived yet. If you call that choice than you don't know what I have seen, what I am and have been witness to. And my friends say I am expecting too much from you, dear readers. But you know what? I am going to continue to expect too much from you. I am going to expect too much from me, and those around me.

But I beg of you, do not attempt to silence me.

Because my voice is all I have. And if forced to make a choice,

I choose me.

I have fought too long, too hard, to choose "my job" or "my career" or "your opinion of me" over

my own self.

     

        if you can't stand the heat get out of the fucking kitchen

I will agree with all of you that my situation is complicated. It's a strange and bizarre, modern, complication. If anything happened, negatively, to me professionally, for writing down words here at Eggbeater I would not be the first or the last. The fact that few bloggers know, or will admit, how powerful there words are is a point I have been making emphatically for the past year, if not a bit longer. As bloggers we want to have all the say in the world but then say, "Who Me?!" in the most innocent voice when our words/posts/photos, both positive and negatively affect businesses/people we talk about.

I will speak only for myself when I say it took me far too long to realize how powerful writing on the Internet was. I have only the most basic understanding of how Google and IP addresses and web-traffic and SEO and stats and Google Ranking and Cache and all that stuff works and it's overwhelming.

I try to write more responsibly now that I have made what i call my "Sinead O'Connor Mistakes." We all have to make them. They are the price of not understanding how powerful a new media is. I am the first to admit when I've fucked up.

But I ask you this: why would I write something that would intentionally hurt my Chef, my Team, my restaurant, my friends, my charges, my colleagues? Think about it-- even if I was the most awful person, unless I were writing from a remote location, living alone or with the wolves, it would be against my better interests to fuck everyone over, right?

            It's true I live in a Glass House.

Sometimes I just need to get it out, get it down, write it out, rant, complain, have a temper-tantrum, cry, sleep, think and then I can return to work refreshed. We all have our processes, our vices. Me, I don't have many vices left, unless you can count delicious bedding a vice.

Eggbeater is me, yes, but all the posts were not written in one day, in one state, from one stagnant person.

In the Opening A Restaurant series I am attempting to give you a glimpse into what it feels like, from the inside. My voice is important because the major media has you believing a far different side of my industry than what I do and see and make and feel and and and and and.

            It's true I built the Glass House.

If you want to know, really know, than you are going to have to step up and stop the stupid drama. The 'he said she said' bullshit. Take your mind out of high school and think about all that I have said previously. I've said a lot.

Michael is my friend and my chef. I didn't start cooking yesterday. Saying someone is My Chef means something to me. Working with a friend means that shit goes down, we make up, we process, we evolve. [And we knew this from the very beginning. Yes, we have spoken about it to each other many times.]

Working at a brand new restaurant, one we built with our hands, tears, minds and souls, means that feathers get rumpled, miscommunication occurs, staff gets fired, cooks get buried in the weeds, management turns issues into challenges which make us grow and learn, owners ride the roller coaster with their wallets and hopes and dreams, diners love and they hate, media critiques and celebrates, sleep is not guaranteed and neither is good health, the kitchen bonds, everyone learns new words in Spanish and English, and you know what?

Every day we have to show up to work no matter what. No matter the challenges, infighting, affairs, dashed hopes and the dreams made real.

My business is built on the patience of saints and the vices of pirates.

If you're quick to judge, to place me and my words in a tidy box then you're not ready to hear what I have to say. I'll continue to say things that will confuse, delight, upset, attack, embrace, moon, challenge, question, mystify, include and exclude you. Can you handle it? Are you up for the challenge?

            Welcome, to my Glass House.             Come in, make yourself at                 Home.

Because, like kitchen work as with life, it's worth it. It could be beyond your wildest dreams. The rewards to your open mind could be well worth it.

Come along for the ride if you wish. If you dare.

Take a ride on my roller coaster with me.

Opening A Restaurant: The Microscope.

It came to my attention today that the post I wrote earlier today was under scrutiny by some people in the media concerned about me, but moreover, the restaurant.

-------> Everyone is fine, thanks for your concern.

This is The Microscope.

These are the words that can be spun or misconstrued or be led to rabbit warrens to be dissected and questioned. This is the price of an eency weency spot of fame, a stain which may or may not come out in the wash.

If I said that life in the restaurant business was all roses you wouldn't believe me. And even if you did, this denial or mass acceptance of the lie would not pay off your culinary school loans you signed on the dotted line for. If all I said was that it was horrible and brutal and I dreaded every waking moment, and also the nightmares, you wouldn't believe me either. Or maybe you would and think about how stupid I was to stay in it. Or weak. Or you'd know I was just trying to keep the place all to myself, the way the people in Bolinas do by taking the signpost down so that no one else will find their paradisaical enclave.

{Have you been to Bolinas? It's lovely indeed.}

Opening A Restaurant is both a see-saw and a rollercoaster.

     *if you don't know who you are, this will confuse you

Cooking professionally is about feeding strangers and lovers and friends and family every day your heart and soul. Even if all you care about is the bottom line, you still have to produce something to put in someone's mouth. Something edible, slightly memorable and slightly worth the price you've attached to it.

I think that I address parts of my industry few other bloggers do. I know the good, the bad, the atrocious, the unconscionable, the ugly, the beautiful, the over-joyous, the magic, the scary, the heart-felt, the painful, the pleasurable, the orgasmic, the satisfying, the confusing, the inspirational and the real fucking deal.

       if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen

Chef-blogging is still rare. We are an industry kept secret by our selves. By others. We are the servants who enter through the back door. Our uniforms render us all same. We do not work or play by the average rules of most other professions.

And we want it kept a secret. All the delights and the hardships.

Because if it's a secret, the industry will not change. Or so we think.

        the only thing you can rely on is change

Opening A Restaurant requires days of patience. Hours, minutes, seconds suffocating thousands of seconds, months, and years filled with sleepless days.

Will the public like our food? Will they "get" the menu? Will the local food reviewer be given great service? Will the servers know the menu well enough to describe and sell it? Will the chef stay? Will the owner feel satisfied? Who will be fired? Will I have great cooks in my kitchen? Will the pastry chef be needed? Will we become a destination restaurant? Will we be busy? Thousands of questions, like black ants seeking dry refuge in a rain storm.

The Microscope is always upon us. We are naked under its glass plates.

There are some days when this feels fine, normal almost. When carrying on feels fine and good and easy and practiced. And there are days when this is all a bit harder.

Here, in this series, I am writing it all down. But there are times when I need to write in a general way. When I need to not name names, when I need to gather up all of my 15 years of restaurant experiences and write about different ones in various ways, all in a paragraph, a sentence, so as to protect and respect all those I work with and have ever worked with.

It would never be my intention to hurt anyone, but I do know that it is still possible.

Because we cook and work with our hearts on our sleeves, egos get bruised, words we do and don't mean are exchanged. Menus are written and red pens are taken to them. Diners leave the same component on the plate over and over and we, as chefs, need to listen to all the signs, not just the ones spoken aloud.

In my experience as a pastry chef I have worked with a number of savoury chefs whose styles did not match my own. Or I have had the experience of my menu and my food being more sophisticated than theirs. Or I have been treated like an equal and have been expected to help run the kitchen as a whole because I have been considered to chef of my domain and thus an equal member of the management team.

As front and back of house have a history of not getting along, chefs and pastry chefs have intriguing histories of competition, camaraderie, co-operation, in-fighting, backstabbing and love-affairs. We are both chefs but we are not considered the same. For example, pastry chefs, historically, get paid less than savoury chefs.

So to meet a savoury chef who believes that dessert, and a pastry chef heading his/her own department and menu, is equally as important as themselves is a rare thing. It is not impossible, but it is rare.

Just like every where else, there's a lot of double-speak that goes on in kitchens.

I work at Sens because I want to be there, doing what I'm doing. In the last 2 plus years I have learned what it is to be a pastry chef without one restaurant's name on my jacket. So I don't have to be at a restaurant to be a pastry chef. But I can affect more change with food and pastry cooks and restaurant management and plated desserts when I am calling one house my home.

I work at Sens because Michael says that dessert should not be a question mark at the end of a good meal, but an exclamation point. I work with him and our amazing management team because I wanted to learn how to open a restaurant from the stand-point of being a well respected manager and team player. I wanted my last 15 years of knowledge about the restaurant business to be utilized, not merely smiled at.

I work at Sens because I love that we are making food delicious, slightly re-inventive and not like all the other Mediterranean restaurant in San Francisco. I love that I have a team and that they are all great women who I can have a profound effect on, especially because I am part of a management team that wants me to succeed, not merely bake cookies quietly in the corner. I do not take it at all lightly that I am a manager and a pastry chef in charge of cooks who are looking to learn from me during my time at Sens. I am honored, humbled and grateful.

If you are still reading eggbeater it means that you know:

I don't mince my truth,
I tell a true story,
I am one of a few voices that talk about cooking professionally

with

all its dynamics exposed.

I take my actions and inactions seriously. I admit failure and fault as easily as success. I share knowledge and advice and answer all inquiries and questions thoroughly and with as much respect as I can.

I ask that, when you come to eggbeater, you come with as much of an open heart and mind as you can muster in the moment. I ask that you be an adult and a grown-up and by that I mean I ask that you understand that life and love are complicated. I ask that you understand that I am not always having the best day and there are thousands of reasons for that, only a few of which have anything at all to do with my job.

I beg of you to see that I love my industry but with that love comes a deep-seated knowledge about all its goings on that I cannot turn a blind eye to. Especially when it concerns me and when it concerns others or the/my industry as a whole.

In turn eggbeater will continue to tell its truth unabashedly. Without pointing fingers and naming names just to hurt people, eggbeater will report From The Inside. Eggbeater is the voice of Shuna Fish Lydon and I am but one person in whites in the United States seeing it how I see it.

Thank you for reading. It means a lot to me that you do.

I hope your worry will not silence me.

*This line is from a photography/performance piece I did in college called Tracks. I wrote this sentence on my painted, naked body.

Opening A Restaurant: faith.

**Please read this disclaimer about this post first.**   

    is it possible to cry from gratitude?

how come I don't know where all the tears are coming from?

what is it that keeps us going even when we are frustrated? worn out? wrung dry?

who are we when pushed against a wall?

.

    how come october is full of death and the memory of death?

do the dead visit?

have you been visited by someone gone?

.

    how is respect in another gained?

can you respect someone whose belief in themselves is a mirage for others to see?

can you teach someone to love and respect themselves with your own admiration for them?

how do you tell your fearless leader they are not leading, just having a temper-tantrum?

/

    how do you put on a happy face when you're not?

can patience be taught? encouraged?

.

how come cooks have lost the ability to finesse? take initiative?

        stop telling me no one else but me has my work ethic.

if culinary schools are producing hordes of graduates every few weeks, how come there are no line cooks? where are the line cooks who want to be restaurant chefs one day?

.

    where does inspiration come from? is it concrete or steam?

can inspiration be squashed?

how come it's so {god damned} fickle?

/

    how often does someone feel threatened by you tell you so?

what if there are two menus in one restaurant and their styles don't match? is it a coin toss that decides the fate of one chef over the other?

how often has someone said that you're food is better than theirs and they are looking to you to make theirs better? how often do they mean it? what percentage of humility does it take for someone to admit such a thing?

.

                it was better when I knew nothing. no one. when I worked with no goal except to get the job done. that day, that shift.

I'm lying.

and I'm not.

it's the fence we straddle. the dark that keeps us up at night, images invading our dreams, designed to make us worry over every detail, every spoken sentence, and every sentence stopped by a bitten tongue.

we fret. we smooth out. we rumple and we fight. we argue with unspoken sentences and battle it out with broken, mended and overblown egos.

I know who I am.

but it doesn't make it any easier.

I know who I don't want to be. not anymore, at any rate.

I know where my experience lies, and I am no longer afraid to say it.

/

years ago I was going through a period of time crushingly difficult.
my friend Irene said something plain to me,

"if you need some extra faith I can spare some. feel free to borrow some of mine, if you need it."

            I'm glad it's in the bank.

.

Today marks week 8.
    and my second official day off.

Pastry Chef Am I. Moderne or Old-Fashioned?

I read something about myself today. In truth I've been reading a lot about myself lately, but today I read something specific. Another pastry chef in the Bay Area called me a Minimalist. At first I laughed out loud. Minimalist? As in Nouvelle Cuisine? One taste? One component on one large plate? A caramel swoosh on the rim? One dessert turned into dust or foam or maybe an empty plate with a waiter coming along and explaining what had been the pastry chef's concept? Caloric only in theory?

What does it mean to call me a Minimalist?

Can I use what I think is a more apt word for my work and my plated dessert philosophies? How about

Focused.

Well, at any rate, it got me thinking.

And then I visited Chadzilla, a chef and team of chefs I've never met, but somehow feel allied with. This gaggle of cooks recently went to a cutting edge gastronomic conference in NYC, the Star Chefs International Chef's Congress. (Many a person interested in "molecular gastronomy" went to and did demonstrations  there.)

Perusing through Mr. Chadzilla's photos from the trip and events, I saw many a name I know, either really know-- as in I've worked with and for them, or have been reading about them since they first appeared in  (National/ Local/ International) press. Or chefs who also keep culinary notes in the form of a blog. 

But where was I? In San Francisco toiling away over recipes I was trying to come out the way my mind and mouth wanted them to. In my own Minimalist sort of way. Heh.

Somehow the "molecular gastronomy" thing passed me by. Or, I've watched it come and linger but have looked at it with scant curiosity. Like seeing the '80's come back. Or worse, the '70's. Like many cooks, I have been reading about Ferran Adria and El Bulli since the late 90's. Intriguing yes, but not what has inspired my own food or gastronomic education.

At the Pastry Chef Conference I reached into my old-school mind and pried it open as far as I could manage. I listened to my old boss and friend Elizabeth Falkner demonstrate many a white powder interacting with food substances, and heard Will Goldfarb's convincing dynamic ideas on the subject of these "new" "chemicals."

(Intellectually it was intriguing, no doubt.)
But in the end, when I tasted that food, it did not move me.

And when I put something or someone in my mouth I want to be moved.

The mouth, after all, is a sex organ. It's an intimate place to ask someone to trust your skills enough to allow passage and an open mind, enough to savor, chew and swallow. N'est pas?

I go back and forth with the new edgy techniques and textures and flavor combinations and temperatures and all that these possibilities can unfurl in a culinary setting. I am old enough to know every innovation comes into being alongside skeptical glances or outright denial of worth. Painters denied photography as art. Punk Rock and Hip Hop were supposed to disappear and Jazz wasn't even considered music.

Where I keep getting to when I think about all the new fangled savory and sweet food arranged on fantastical plates and gadgets designed to hold it in place just so like a Cirque du Soleil acrobat, is that basic gastronomy still has a lot of knowledge on me. I still don't know everything there is to know about butter. Or flour. Or the magical egg.

There's still so much to learn about what humans have been doing with edible ingredients for thousands and thousands of years. And so I don't much care to learn what chemicals I'm not sure my body appreciates will do to the foods I like best in their rawest forms.

The smoke and mirrors don't fill me up. They don't still me or make me quiet. They merely make me puzzled.

    Does that make me old-fashioned?

Calling me old-fashioned, I know, is not the same as calling me a Minimalist. What she meant when she said that was this:

My plated desserts say one or two, three at most, statements. I write about my desserts like I would fine art.
Or savory food. Examples below are from my current menu:

    soft & evocative
    poached pear, buckwheat cake &
    brown butter crème anglaise

     "This is a simple, subtle dessert. It is served room temperature to insure that the elusive flavors can be heard. The pear will be served peeled and halved but not cored so that its natural form can be appreciated. Brown butter is one of my favorite flavors. It’s nutty, rich, deep and intensely itself. The brown butter crème anglaise ties in the earthy buckwheat flour. Buckwheat cake is made with grain cold stone ground to order by Anson Mills... Garnish: balsamic caramel (not gastrique). As the dish has a lot of warm, soft, sleepy flavours, it needed a bit of acid/bitterness to pick it up.

    icy bright
    almond milk gelee, melon granita, knoll figs

    This dessert is also about how Sens is opening at the precipice of summer-autumn. Melons, the fruitier siblings of summer and winter squash, are transformed into granita with little to no sugar added! Our almond milk is house-made with whole, raw California almonds. We are sweetening it slightly with raw sugar and setting it gently with gelatin.

    crunchy & sumptuous
    sesame cake, cocoa nib cream dome,
    & shuna’s famous dark chocolate sauce

    A dense sesame-almond cake is served under cocoa nib pannacotta. Pannacotta is eggless custard set only with gelatin. Cocoa nibs are the interior of a cacao pod after its been fermented and roasted. First comes cocoa nibs, then come massive machines, sugar, cocoa butter and vanilla. → This is the “recipe” for chocolate. Cocoa nibs taste like chocolate without the melt-in-your-mouth quality and, of course, the sweetness. Be sure to get a taste from the pastry department if you have never experienced them before. I like that the pannacotta tastes mostly of the good cream and it’s chocolate personality comes not from something as heavy as chocolate or as drying and one-dimensional as cocoa powder, but from chocolate in its ‘raw-est’ state.

    The cake, unbeknownst to the diner, is cut in the shape of a “doughnut” and its “hole” is filled with California Royal Blenheim dried apricot-caramel. (This adds a bit of acid to an otherwise similarly flavored dish.) The bowl is then filled with my famous, addictive, hot fudge sauce, and it’s garnished with what I call, “The Crunchy Layer.”

    “The Crunchy Layer” is a little milk chocolate, a dash of white chocolate, cocoa butter, toasted sesame seeds, crushed cocoa nibs and a pinch of vanilla sea salt. (It’s like a really high-end Nestlé’s Crunch Bar.)

---From the Sens Dessert Descriptions for October 2007.

I think this is what it comes down to:

As a pastry chef I am neither a minimalist nor moderne. I'm not old-fashioned.

I am a Purist in the sense that I am interested in unearthing, celebrating, clearing the way for, paying homage to, finding, tipping my hat to, attempting to understand and presenting others with the

    soul of subtlety.

                        god is in the details

I'm most interested in flavor, even when the flavor is barely imperceptible.

If you consider the person not interested in hitting you over the head with sugar, chocolate, candy, tall tuiles, conceptual plating, squeeze bottle art, disparate flavor combinations, wacky stabilizers, Americana, whipped cream, nouveau chemical applications, the same-ol-same-ol; Minimalist, then I guess I am.

I think I'm modern in that I want you to taste what you're eating in an elegant, reverent way. I like salt but I don't make salty desserts to be in with the In crowd. I am not the It Girl of pastry. Compared to my heros and heroines I know very little. I want my desserts to change the way you think about desserts. I want my desserts to introduce you to the possibility that the pastry chef should not be an extinct profession.

I want my desserts to make you think something less cliched about what flavor combinations work with what you've always liked and eaten before.

I'm interested in textures, but mostly the ones which exist in nature. I enjoy pairing ingredients together which are in season together but may not have been introduced in such ways previously. Cumin Pot de Creme, Warm Pear Soup with White Coffee Foam, Melon & Stone Fruit Gazpacho, doughnuts tossed in coriander-sesame sugar, a vinaigrette sweetened with dramatically reduced apple cider, and grapefruit-milk-chocolate mousse, just to name a few.

I strive for acid-sweet-salt-fat balance like my favorite savoury chefs do. I'm inspired by David Kinch and his perfect vegetable course. There are few dishes I've had the honor to eat which I've thought were perfect but Thomas Keller's Oysters & Pearls might have been the first. And watching it get produced night after night didn't tarnish its exquisiteness one bit.

You know what I think?

I think we're bored. And we have no reason to be! Look up at the stars! Wiggle your toes! Do you understand how these amazing things can occur?

Do you know why the same apple tree year after year produces slightly different apples? Do you know the exact moment when a watermelon goes out of season? Do you know why cornstarch thickens and then it doesn't? Do you know why one 4 oz. portion of fish cooks faster than another same sized portion from the same fillet?

How dare us. How dare us get bored. When there's so much to study! To learn!

    I would rather be humbled than bored.

           god is in the details

In the boredom we seem to have come to, we are looking for new things to keep us up at night. To keep our minds racing. So we can dull them later on with more, better and stronger drugs.

                    OK, enough tangential ranting.

The chefs, bakers, cooks and pastry chefs who inspire me might be considered old-fashioned by today's standards. They are people who made and make it their life's work to learn and share and teach and write, no matter the medium. They knit and photograph and dance and paint and cook and bake.

I would rather be focused than haphazard.

I would rather emulate than copy.

I would rather explore than innovate.

And I feel grateful to be inspired in a way that I have not been since many years ago. I am proof that time takes time. I am proof that I can remain me and strive for what I believe in in a culinary climate preferring the science of now over the science of long ago.

What's lovely is there's room for us all.

autumn

October 1st

Today is our first day.

We open to the public:

All of you. Some of you.

You.

I have my plated dessert component par sheets in Excel.

I am armed with a pastry department schedule which has a vision in mind. For training, production, grooming, teaching, testing, and

even having a day or a night or a morning off soon.

{to do laundry. and see my father off.}

The Chefwear trousers came in. My ramekins arrived. The ice cream machine is in transit. Stainless steel ring-molds are ordered. Our first plated dessert mis en place inventory was made. {On Saturday night, by my crew, after our opening party.}

Open Table sports text/ copy in a voice you might recognize. {!!!!!}

Are we ready?

A resounding yes. Or, a resounding,
"Well we have to be don't we?"

The velvet curtain opens. Aprons are cinched tight.

here we go, yo.

Machines whir. Knives tap cutting boards. Expediters fire tickets. Cooks call back. Saute pans sear and sizzle. Herbs are snipped by razor sharp scissors. Sheet pans glide onto speed racks. Cooks feel frazzled, climb down into the warren hole/ the weeds; then they climb out and feel like heroes.

We bond.

Plates are scraped. Floors are swept. Soap dispensers filled. Art is hung. Lights are tilted like necks on cranes. Bartenders banter. Hosts purr.
Chairs move like choreographed mushrooms in a Chinese dance on the stage of Fantasia.

We are a ballet and a mosh pit.

A platoon and an Olympic team.

Tournament and Be In.

Welcome to my home. Allow me to feed you delectable elixirs
and sublime flavors tinged with evocative perfumes?

H  a  p  p  y           O  c  t  o  b  e r  !

Opening A Restaurant: the menu. the beginnings.

if you want to see the menu, lookie here.

thank you for letting me know about our great press so far. your compliments are a testament to my hard work but also, moreover, the long hours my sous chef and team and the entire management team and all of their crew have put in!

the way I see it is we are all naked. we are all gambling. and we are all savvy. cumulatively we bring over 50 years experience in the industry and we are working as hard as we can to cross all t's and dot all i's. lists get made over and over, items get crossed out and we start again from scratch.

opening a restaurant is building something from nothing.

we are attempting to hone in our vision so that others can sit and eat with us and feel comfortable.

and yes, pretty soon there will be a full, in working order, website of the restaurant. if you can believe it, (don't kill yourself falling out of your chair laughing), I am helping our web and graphic designer to make it clear and easy to navigate!

tomorrow is my day off. I am looking forward to doing a bit of homework for my team and seeing my dad. taking in the new autumn light rustling the leaves, agitating them gently to glide to the ground.

thank you for your good wishes. I hope to see you soon.

Opening A Restaurant: one day at a time

today we will serve more friends and family than we have in the past 3 services.
we are all a bit nervous, but in the best possible way.
last night I knew 98% of the people sitting in the dining room.
it is such pleasure to see my friends and family in my new home.
it's wonderful to feel like this will be my home for a while.

passions are running hot. the through-line is that we are all doing what we love and know best, but sometimes the fire spills over the pot and burns someone else. my hope is that with communication and compassion we can get through. although I have the sens of urgency that is required for restaurant work I know too that ending up in the hospital because of it does no one any good, especially not me.

I will no longer kill myself for an employer. even if the employer is me.

my menu at dinner is 5 strong desserts, and at lunch, 4. my assistants are still a bit rusty around the edges but I am giving them ample support and training so as not to push them out of the nest before their wings are formed. it is so interesting to me all the different personalities. how one person can be so confident and not have the skills to back up the ego and another can have no confidence and take loads of smart initiative.

my first assistant and I mourn the days when we were coming up in this business. back then when your schedule said 2 you showed up at noon, and were considered late. at The French Laundry we had no schedule. if you were working, you showed up in time enough to be set up for service. depending on what you dishes you had coming off your station, that could mean various times of the day.

I could go on. but I have to go to work.

One Day At A Time is such a perfect way to look at the days ahead. I can only do today today, as it comes, right? it's important to have long and short term goals but there's only so much one can actually do day to day.

I think we're doing a great job. no one is perfect but some great work has been accomplished, some great work lies ahead and in the end we have done what we set out to do: open a restaurant in San Francisco. only time can tell the rest of the story.

Opening A Restaurant: the time constraints & the beginnings.

there aren't enough hours in the day.
sleep is necessary but it's mostly composed of thinking about today and tomorrow.
I haven't seen my computer in two days.

yesterday my team and I served 50 (8 of each plate) desserts to the entire front of house staff and I spoke about each one, in a much needed very loud voice, taking questions and asking them. feedback was given and then we moved onto the next. my team scrambled and they congealed. it was a good day: full of energetic stress and teamwork.

for one person on my team this is the very first restaurant she has ever worked at. {no pressure. heh.} it gives me great pleasure to be able to have a team again. I love teaching and I, too, remember my first restaurant jobs. I know what it is to have the responsibility of managing people. it's always a challenge and I love those sorts of challenges.

it's never the same day in restaurant work. never dull.

tonight we serve our first meal: dinner for @ 50 people, all friends and family of the staff and industry.

see you soon?

Opening A Restaurant: the plated food photo shoot.

Tomorrow, well I mean today, we have a photo shoot with Frankie Frankeny, food & restaurant photographer extraordinaire.

The funny thing is that Michael, the chef of Sens, and I have both worked with Frankie at various points in both of our careers. Fifteen years ago, when I worked for Reed Hearon at Lulu, Frankie was a bartender.

I hope My Prince arrives too. We have about 6 ice cream, sherbet and sorbet bases to spin churn...

Opening A Restaurant: the humour.

The funniest thing I said to s friend recently was,

"I think I'm going to send a postcard to myself. It will say,

'Wish You Were Here.' "