Tag: book notes

Is This the One?

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I don’t want to curse myself, but I love my new job. For so many reasons.  I know what you are thinking, you always say that when you always start a new job. You seek the full bounty of establishing your queendom in the kitchen, but it never turns out to be the fairy tale you have devised.  As one of my favorite people said, bore-O.  You are going to get bore-O and the luster will loose its polish.  More than I hope not, I need to remain clear headed about why I go to work everyday: it is my art, and it is for my sake mostly. I do it because eating is as close to divinity that we can get on a routinely daily bases.  Give us this day 3 times hopefully, our daily sustenance.  Since we eat so often, it’s nice to be given a surprise still, to indulge and whole heartedly enjoy food.

This is one: My friends went to dine there.  I was not working, but knew at least they would get dessert on the house.   They sent me a picture of my friend eating the last bite of a chocolate cake with a huge smile on his face.  All I could think of was, they gave them the best table in the house.  Thanks guys, for making my friends, whom you don’t know, so welcome.  I love that.

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Daily tasks

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Cooks notes for the day:

That day when you don’t quite get the seal on the ice cream spinner door to suck properly in place, so as you spin the ice cream, the loose base drips steadily cause a huge, huge sticky mess. The entire time you are debating weather to take it out and start over, or roll with the continual mess.  Either scenario ends in a fanciful mess.  If the ice cream turns out icy again I am going to loose my cookies.

The restaurant next door come over to ask to borrow 70 pounds of fryer oil.  You respond casually: “only if you beg and crawl.”

The entire bottle of yuzu spill on the floor because the bottom inexplicably detached as if an invisible alien snuck into the kitchen and sliced off the entire bottom in one quick pull of the trigger.  $100 bottle gone in a flash, it was a delicious smelling mess.

The server warns you that you probably should help the lunch guy because she just rang in 6 plates.  6. Total. Plates.  She wants it to be less than 45 minutes and I am sympathetic.

There is a young good looking man/boy applying for a food runner position, so you try to check him out behind the semi-sheer black curtain.  You dropped your work to see him, but do you say hello?  Nah, don’t feel like it.

A beverage delivery man tells you he just saw a rat run into the employee bathroom.  I obviously do not believe him, until I see the prep guy pulling the door shut as to trap Mr. Raton.  Until he gets a moment to deal with the situation, you kindly tell your co-workers not to use the bathroom.  After he kills Mr. Raton, he chase one of the line cooks around the alley with the corpse of the rat.

We know that when the toaster and the freezer are plugged into the same outlet, the fuse will eventually blow.  The situation still remains unchanged.

Finally get around to changing the menu into a format that I find slightly more satisfying.  Slowly, so slowly moving into the right direction.  I realized today how much I have given up on bettering the restaurant and myself.  I am glad that I found some small spark of motivation and integrity to continue to do what I think is best.  It gets very challenging when you have too much on your plate, covered with a thick sauce of negativity, sprinkled with hesitation, doubt, and fatigue.  Today was a step to the right beat somewhere in that kitchen dance.