Slow Sunday Service

Today started out with a (not-so-welcome) surprise for me. Since I was on a restaurant shift again, I assumed I would be working pastry again, then plating apps, starters, and veg during service. I was wrong. When I got there at 11:30a.m., I was put to work with the chef on prepping starters, which was not the usual person prepping starters, as he was off today, but the chef that gave me a hard time yesterday. Great! My last day on restaurant service for awhile, and I am set to work in an unfamiliar station with an all too familiar chef.

Of course he had to give me directions of what to do one task at a time, even if they were simple tasks. Which doesn’t seem too bad if you are working side-by-side, but being sous chef, he disappears and disperses all over the three kitchens often. I began with gathering ingredients, then blanching, peeling, and seeding tomatoes, roasting potatoes, slicing and sweating onions, dicing red peppers, toasting bread – short, easy tasks like that which I already know how to do. The most exciting part was when I was waiting for direction as to what to do next, and the main course chef asked me to help him roll our beetroot pasta. Then chef asked me to pick rabbit for a terrine, and I was really concerned as to what that meant, but luckily he just meant pulling cooked rabbit meat off the bones. Most difficult part of this – the rabbit actually looked and smelled very appetizing. I think I might have had it only once before. I decided to focus on being precise today, and not so much fast, because if chef found so much as one seed in my tomatoes, I would be told off.

Next I had to set up the app, veg, and starch stations for service, as they would be my main responsibility again. I also had to take them down and clean them up after service. Again, I was responsible for a few starters, mostly the crab one again. I was doing up a few plates, but one of them didn’t look great as it had been placed under the heat lamp since the starter station was full, and the basil foam had liquefied. Understandably, chef asked me to redo it. I did. When I turned around to make some veg, I heard him say to another cook that it looked like shit and asked him to redo it. I don’t agree that chefs need to be mean, but if you have a problem with something I did, I would much prefer if you said it to my face rather than behind my back. He had foamed the basil cream before each use, which I had, but he didn’t believe me until he went to do a plate himself, and found the basil cream was not the right consistency, and I was not to blame. We were not so busy tonight, service was slow and more relaxed, and I finished clean-up (which the other chefs seemed to have abandoned) around 10:30.

One starter - a tomato basil terrine, tomato sorbet, and tomato jelly.