Brandon Jones
May 21 2018
Today, I finally discovered why all the chefs have been telling me not to go into the restaurant business. I literally stood in a corner and picked, shelled, and blanched (when something is scalded in hot water for a brief interval before being dumped in ice water to halt the cooking process) fava beans for brunch on Sunday for three hours straight. I had managed to work my way through 2 and a half large cardboard cases of them, which totals about six hundred. My fingers hurt to move. I was eventually rescued after Head Chef Brendan recruited me to make some banana bread. I wasn’t supervised whilst making it, which was a first. I have been allowed to do some pretty important tasks within the kitchen but I was always supervised by one chef or another to make sure I didn’t mess up. I understand that totally. It is a business after all and if the quality of food drops because some random untrained intern messes up a dish, it could potentially cost the restaurant.
This brings me to my next point. More so than any other night, I saw Chef Brendan get more upset over a messed up dish than I ever had before. The tensions within the kitchen were also higher than ever. This all stemmed because one particular chef was having a bad night and was semi-consistently making mistakes on the line. The consequences of such may not be as obvious to someone who does not know kitchen dynamics and processes so let me paint the picture. We’ll call the unlucky chef Robert (fake name) and he’s on the grill station. Chef Brendan calls out an order — for example, “order for table 4: 2 spaghetti, one with no crab and the other has a nut allergy, one sea bass, and one burger, cooked medium” — and the chefs cooking at the relevant food stations would start the food. The key here is making sure that every single plate is ready to serve within 2-3 minutes of each other so that one dish is not served cold whilst the others hot and vice versa. Robert starts grilling the burger and ends up overcooking it. The other dishes of the order are already waiting at the pass, getting cold as the burger prevents the table from being fully served. Chef Brendan discovers the burger is overcooked and tells Robert to make another one. This means that the other dishes have to be thrown away as they’ll get too cold and stagnant to be served by the time the second attempt at the burger is finished. In other words, everyone has to start the order all over again. As the orders started piling up, this became a problem.
Seeing that situation occur taught me a couple things. Firstly, composure is a necessity in the kitchen. Allowing yourself to become flustered and caught up in your past mistake(s) can cause you to overthink, make additional mistakes, and never recover. The end result is that your station collapses and eventually you drag the entire kitchen down with you. Composure allows one to regain confidence, stability, and to finish out the dinner service. Secondly, communication, specifically, positive reinforcement is crucial to maintaining harmony and flow between chefs. It really is a team effort. Everyone works on a particular piece of the order and it all comes together at the end for the final product. When one of the pieces is lagging behind, it can ruin everything. Thus, the importance of positive dialogue between chefs. Showing passion is ok but there needs to be positivity and encouragement to help the lagging piece to catch up. I would say Steel and Rye does a really good job of fostering both composure and poise amongst the chefs and positive dialogue between them. Because of it, the kitchen is usually able to push out high quality food at a good pace.