What you see here is a young, cocky, 22 year old in his first executive chef job in a restaurant in NYC. This was my office for many years, not the same place but places similar to this is what I call "office"; located in the dungeon, that level underground beneath the beautiful restaurant you walk into... or as I like to call it "where the magic happens". My typical day would start as I'm walking through Times Square at 7am grabbing my coffee, get in to work and find my Irish bartender passed out on the floor from drinking too much the night before, wake him up and remind him he needs to go home and get ready for his shift that starts at 4pm. I then proceed to the kitchen to say hello to my prep cooks which have been working since 6am. I taste a few of the daily soups to make sure the flavor balance is ok. Then I proceed down to the dungeon. Go into the walk-in fridge (think home fridge just a lot bigger) and check my meats, produce, fish and temperature to make sure were ready to go. I spend the next hour in my office comparing my three vendor price lists for the week seeing who can give me the best product at the cheapest price. 11am, the owner walks in and greets me then complains about how much he hates his wife and how everything was better when he was on cocaine (he's a former cocaine addict). Lunch starts, I go up to the expo line (basically the final place food gets checked before its distributed to your table) and we have a decent lunch of 80 people. Lunch is over, uneventful and I continue with dinner preparations. I noticed this morning that I had salmon in the walk-in that is good for another day at best. I need to brainstorm on how to get rid of this salmon by the end of the night. I quickly think of a solution... Just throw it in parchment paper, with a bit of julienne vegetables some white wine garlic and serve it en pappillotte style. I bring the servers in and inform them of the special, let them taste it and tell them that whoever sells the most gets a free bottle of wine by the end of the night. Problem solved. 4pm the monsters arrive. These are no culinary school kids these are the real deal from Mexico. Perfect craftsmen of cooking these guys put any culinary school grad to shame. I go over to Francisco as hes perfectly cleaning a beef tenderloin (removing all the silverskin etc.) Francisco is my sous chef and good at what he does. I see the rest and take a moment to step back, they're like a fine tuned machine just cranking out orders everything goes perfect, until someone fucks it all up. Usually a server but I'll admit sometimes its our fault. This is the moment where everything comes crashing down like a set of dominoes when one tips over. Suddenly all chaos breaks loose, people are getting wrong temperature steaks, plates are breaking, my cooks are falling one by one, I jump back to the line and try to rescue each of them as best I can and finally the big dinner push is over. It's 10pm, I'm exhausted, I feel like I've just won the war of us against them. I go to the bar where Peter greets me with a "good shift a" my response is one not appropriate for this blog. We have 3 beers and 3 shots of Jameson. I catch a cab home at 1am. There's my typical day for the 10 years I've worked in the industry.
