Let me spill the beans, tell you the dirty secrets that lurks in the back of every successful commercial kitchen .There is a special ingredient in every successful restaurant which is achieved through intense dedication and hardwork. Its not just producing food from raw materials , its not just about having the right ingredients to make the perfect dish, its not about having a huge brigade for service, its not even just about the décor , its about all of this put together with the RIGHT ATTITUDE to ensure that all of this hard work is , with the basic intention of ensuring that the guest enjoys every single moment while in the restaurant and takes with him memories he can relish for a long long time.
Life is not easy as a chef, chefs don’t eat food like normal people do , they don’t have meals, they sip and nibble, lick their spoons, fingers, knifes and shells and sieve and some times each other and then once or twice a day they gorge, they stuff their heads with meats, chillies, sauces, pickles , chocolates and cakes and beers and cigrattes . Thats Fuel ,rest everything else is work .
Chefs taste with a professional fury, their tongues are loss adjusters, bankers, their palates are hit men, even if they are out for dinners to someone else’s restaurant they judging the food trying to figure out what’s that herb , the cardamom is a little too strong, the rice is missing flavor , the meat should have be alittle more tender and so on .
DON’T GET ME WRONG: I love the restaurant business . Hell , I am in the restaurant business, classically trained chef who, an hour from now , would be probably roasting meat in the tandoor or probably making pasta or pizzas or just butchering meat in the kitchen at CAFÉ APPETITE .
I’m not spilling my guts about everything ,I’ve seen , learned and done all this in my career as a dishwasher, commi chef, demi chef , as a sous chef and a chef.
I want professionals who read this to enjoy it for what it is, straight look at a life many of us have lived and breathed for most of our days and nights to the exclusion of normal social interaction. Never having a Saturday or a Sunday off, working on public holidays, being busiest when the rest of the world is just getting out of work, friends at work when u are off, working odd hours, doing nights , mornings , evenings in the same week ,with no clue what’s coming up for the next week .
I’m no superchef taking to you, sure I did graduate from EIT one of the best culinary institutes from NZ, worked with some of the finest Italian chefs, in some of the finest restaurants and wineries too. I’m the guy who has stuck around ,worked my way up ,given everything it takes to reach the position I’ve always longed for.
It’s a tough life as a chef and I’ve seen so many of my collogues drop out, opting for an easier job with a better pay, but for me it never was about money , it was about food , I wanted to learn it all and learn it right .
For me the cooking life has been a long love affair, with moments both sublime and ridiculous, I’ve never regretted that unexpected decision that got me into the restaurant business, I always believed like life , eating out is all about taking risks.
Soon after I graduated I got into the restaurant business with no clue what I was getting into, I was hard working and I guess that’s what kept me going, though I had a good Team of chefs and managers to run my restaurant I had no clue where I was heading , soon I realized it wasn’t as easy as it seemed , it wasn’t just about sitting at the counter ,attending guests , serving good food , there was more to it. Staff was a very big problem , chefs wouldn’t turn up to work with no prior indications ,and life got difficult.
I learnt my first lesson, kitchen is the heart of a restaurant, if u want to do well you should know whats happening behind those closed doors that lead to a noisy, hot, fuming kitchen, and I decide that’s my place to be, over were the good old days, when I used to relax in the restaurant watching beauties come and go, chats with my guests and still earn money and thought life couldn’t be better.
We used to serve Indian, Chinese and Tandoori fare and I had some amazing chefs who were just perfect at their job. I was as experienced as a newly wed bride, but I was determined and ready to conquer this new world of well paid professionals who probably would have worked their ranks up from dishwashers to chefs. It wasn’t an easy job ,what most people don’t get about professional cooking is that it is not about the best recipe, the most innovative presentation, the most creative marriage of ingredients, flavours, or texture, the real business of preparing the food you eat is about CONSISTENCY, is about having to perform the same series of task again and again and getting it exactly the way it should be. The last thing a chef wants in an innovator, somebody with ideas of his own who would mess up the chefs recipe . A chef requires blind, near fanatical loyalty, some one who would execute the orders consistently in a battle-field like conditions.
I learnt my second lesson, FOOD HAS POWER, it can inspire, astonish, shock, excite , delight and impress , It has the power to please me and others, this was valuable information.
My life as a cook and as a chef had begun , there was no turning back now, the genie was out of the bottle .
I started working with the cooks ,spending days, and hours and minutes with them learning every recipe, every ingredient that was tossed in those creamy buttery gravies , trying my hand at the tandoor, baking breads and naans and checking out the marinations , tasting meat, fish veges , sauces, gravies, stuffing myself with the leftovers so as to get a hang of the every product, ingredient that was being used in my kitchen.
With 6 months of intense hardwork and scars and water-filled blisters and red welts from grill marks, I knew this stuff in my bones, I was cooking like a pro, on the front line with my chefs ensuring every order was at its best , and I was loving it , every moment of it, was getting busier day by day, afternoons were nothing less that any battlefield, guest pouring in , tickets after tickets , one on top of the other, waiters screaming tables of ten, tables of six, more and more of them coming, just a relentless incoming , nerve –shattering gang rush of orders , and I was at my best handling the pass, and executing orders and feeling on top of the world.
That was it , I was confident , I could handle the kitchen .It didn’t bother me if someone who wakes up with a scratchy throat and a slight fever and thinks its ok to call in sick and have a day off, though that’s what I wasn’t expecting from any of my staff. You want loyalty from your staff especially your cooks, while its necessary for cooks to take pride in their work , it’s a good idea to let a good cook stretch a little once in a while though ultimately, I want a SALUTE and a YES SIR! , coz im the BOSS and the boss is always right .
