Brandon Jones
May 6 2018
First Week (2 days) Reflection
To summarize my first two days at the restaurant in 3 words: it was amazing. The first day I was there, chef Brendan immediately sent me upstairs to get changed into my chef whites. I was partnered with a young female chef Carolyn, whose main job that night was working the fish and vegetable station. To assist her I peeled dozens of artichokes, shucked hundreds of muscles, and prepared shishito peppers for the appetizers. As we got closer to dinner service the palpable excitement in the kitchen grew. Chef brendan was pacing about barking orders and the rest of us did our respective duties as quickly as possible to prepare for service. Luckily for my first day, the fish station was relatively straightforward. The two main menu items for that station were mussels sauteed with white beans, clam sauce, and white wine and seared sea bass with confit fingerling potatoes and braised artichokes. During service on my breaks, Carolyn had me try three separate appetizers: fried green tomatoes, fried green olives with black pepper cream, and jerk duck drumsticks. They were all delicious. The most difficult part of the night was certainly juggling multiple orders being shouted at you at once. For example, I would be halfway through preparing an order of seabass when chef brendan would yell “Two orders of shishito peppers stat!” I would have to quickly organize myself to prepare the peppers (grilled on a poncha and then tossed with olive oil and pecorino cheese and served with a smear of harissa). I completed service without any major mistakes and my reward was a freshly woodfired pizza with fennel sausage and fresh buffalo mozzarella. What a night!
The second day was harder and I got a better sense of the in-kitchen dynamic between staff. For three hours straight, chef had me deshell literally hundreds of green garbanzo beans for the octopus dish as well as shave asparagus spears for the burrata salad and shell an additional hundred or so english peas. I spent no time cooking that night, and in fact I had more of a spectator role during service which allowed me to better view the social dynamics. For one, I noticed that all the dishwashing staff were Haitian black males. Knowing where we were geographically and the demographic of Milton’s own service staff, it did not surprise me that the majority of the chefs are white. There were overall less women, and both of them were white, another two white men, and the rest of the kitchen were male minorities. I was pleased to see everyone in the kitchen was treated with respect and everyone was held to a high standard no matter what the role was. I realized that the Steel and Rye kitchen staff is truly a family. Being a dishwasher, line cook, or server makes no difference because all roles are integral to the success of each other. I hope to learn more and experience more about this dynamic next week, when chef will have me assume more roles, hopefully assume more responsibility in the kitchen, and become closer to them as a member of the Steel and Rye family.