Setting myself a goal

I have decided to set myself a goal for the rest of my time doing this stage.

Here is the problem: our vegetarian entree sucks. It isn't just "not our best dish". Its not disgusting, but it also isn't a dish and isn't anywhere near the same level of execution for the rest of our food. It's really a platter. I know one thing vegetarians hate a lot, and that's the veg entree which is simply a collection of sides. Here is what we put on our veg platter right now:

-A slice of eggplant parmesan
-Sliced roasted peppers (the veg side for the lamb dish)
-Sauteed artichokes (the veg half of our squid and artichoke dish)
-Sauteed chicory (the veg garnish for our fava soup with chicory)
-A breaded and deep fried mini mozzarella sandwich (yes, we flour, egg, and breadcrumb bread)
-Sauteed broccoli rabe (veg side of another dish, cooked in the same way as the chicory)
-A beaten egg mixed with some crunchy dried sweet pepper and cooked in the oven as a kind of souffle-thing
-Sauteed swiss chard (again, cooked in the same way as the other two green things, and also a side)

We heat all the veggies up in the microwave when an order comes in. Yum!

Saturday night we had an abnormally large number of these ordered. This is one dish that isn't made on the line, which means that chef is the one to assemble everything. Saturday, since I was there she delegated everything but the side veggies to me (parmesan, egg, and sandwich), and then complained to the front of house that they need to sell fewer of these because it takes a lot of time split between two people to assemble this dish. All the components do mean that it takes a lot of time to assemble one order, but I don't understand why we have the dish on the menu at all. Our most complex entree has five parts, and yet here we are with eight, to the point that they can't even all fit cleanly on our biggest platter. Furthermore, it doesn't even make any sense. There is no focal point of the dish, though on the menu it always lists "eggplant parm with other seasonal veggies", so maybe the eggplant parm should be featured, but it is just presented as one item in this smorgasbord.

Last night I tested the waters. Just with us cooks, not chef. We were discussing prep for Tuesday, and I mentioned that we needed more eggplant parm. I then also said, "you know, I'm not fond of our veg dish." They asked why, and I explained how its a platter, a collection of sides, not a proper entree. Keiji looked at me and said that with just vegetables, what could we expect to do? I replied that there are vegetarian entrees out there that we could do, and that was the end of the conversation. However neither of them stood up to defend the dish, and I think they may have just been confused as to why I cared.

Hence my goal: Get the restaurant to start serving a proper veggie entree. I think that while it is ambitious (a stage convincing the restaurant to change a dish), I think it might be doable. The chef dislikes putting together what they currently have, it isn't the favorite of the owner or chef's mother or anything sentimental, and I don't think anyone is proud of it or anything. However my work background gives me at least a little bit of authority on the matter of vegetarian dishes, and so I'm going to leverage that all I can.

But if I say that we should change it, I think then that I need to have a good alternative to propose. So I'm going to try playing with ideas and developing something this week that I can bring in as an alternative. I'm going to stay conservative though, and probably try to keep on the theme of eggplant parmesan, but by elevating it in some way such that it actually fits the context of a fine dining restaurant and can hold its own as an entree. I'll keep you updated on my progress!

(photo credit:  martina0315.blog.deejay.it. Not actually our eggplant parm.)

Who I work with

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I definitely missed it a little here, but instead I went to Mac Dario's (scroll all the way down for menu) instead and had a feast of some of the finest meat you can find in Tuscany (if not all of Italy) in the lovely company of Josh, and I was happy (and so, so stuffed!).

In other thanksgiving news, if you want to know why it might be fun to be a food scientist, read this post which entertainingly details part of the scientific method of how to cook a great turkey and along the way discusses flamethrowers and dragons. That blog in general is terrific, but this post was just fabulous.

So I started work last week, and I thought it would be good to introduce you to the cast of characters. Running the kitchen is Giovanna, who requests that she be called "la cuoca" (the cook) rather than "la chef", and while I think this is somehow related to hubris and her desire to not be obnoxious, I'm going to ignore it here and refer to her usually just as chef. Life is simpler that way.

She really runs the kitchen like the matron of a family. At this point all of the daily work has been delegated to her two cooks, and she just oversees things and puts her nose in where she feels like it. Generally speaking she is extremely jovial, and you can tell she enjoys the work. She personally prepares staff lunch almost every day, but that's about the only thing she always does. Usually during prep time she will come in at a certain hour and start standing by the stoves. There's a little workspace there where she will slice things for sauces, and she takes complete control over all sources of heat for a portion of the day. It actually is nice because the prep area is not near the stoves, and so if you put something on and need to check it constantly, she will do it so you don't need to constantly be interrupting your work to run over there and see how things are going.

I guess its the way she approaches staff meal that makes me think of her more like the mother cook in the kitchen than anything else. She always cares about it, and if I stay working for an extra minute or two to finish a project before going to eat, she scolds me and tells me to stop and get some food. As well, she has an opinion about everything. In the first week she has delivered lectures on why black truffles aren't really good, the differences between various kinds of prosciutto (gray and red, I think), why chefs in American restaurants don't work in the kitchens anymore (hours are too ridiculous), why you shouldn't do pasta for an entree when serving lots and lots of people at once (though we did it), and I'm sure you get the picture.

Furthermore, she's a short, very large woman, who always wears this kind of work dress that is probably actually a maid's outfit. It is short sleeved, khaki colored, and stops just below the knees. She always wears hose and a pair of black mary-janes.

Susanna is from somewhere in South America originally (I couldn't get her to tell me where exactly), and has been working at the restaurant for about three years. For all intents and purposes she's the sous chef, and as such she always knows what's going on. She likes to ask me lots of questions when we're working (what are you doing for christmas? where is the rest of your family? do you like x?) and got very interested in the fact that I was Jewish a while ago (so you guys believe in the trinity but not christ, right? umm.....that doesn't even make sense) and I got questions all day long on what that's like. She was especially curious about what I do on christmas day if I'm Jewish (Japanese food).

Her workstyle doesn't remind me much of the cooks at home. She has intensity but for some reason lacks that kind of smooth confidence I associate with someone who has been doing their job for a long time and thinks they know it well. Maybe it's because she doesn't want to be in more of a leadership position, but something about it strikes me as a little strange. It's probably just me. She too is really short, which means that in my clogs (2 in platform) I actually tower over these women. Its a really strange sensation for me.

Keiji is the other person who works in the kitchen, though his Japanese accent is so thick and he talks so quietly that I often have trouble understanding him, which means we don't talk too much. But he's a really nice guy, and always smiles. He works hard, well, and has a good attention for detail which Susanna sometimes misses. It's probably for that reason that he's in charge of the pastry menu and doing our breads, and I think he does a great job at things.

So that's our kitchen! Small but kind, fun and relaxed. A very different experience than what I've had in the US, but I'm enjoying myself tons, and my Italian is improving so much!

A party

Friday night we were supposed to be doing a private event for a group of 80. I got in Friday afternoon as the chef (she doesn’t like to be called chef, but its just easier terminology) was trying to figure out how to make our food stretch because apparently it was instead going to be 100. People complain that Top Chef throws those guys into situations that would never happen in real life--except that they do.

The main issue was that we only had made 85 portions of the bavarese (halfway between a pudding and a panna cotta) that we were serving for dessert--the rest we could just do slightly smaller portions and make it alright. Luckily our regular menu serves a bavarese but in a different flavor; our plan was to just slip some of these in and sauce them up the same as all the others in the hope that nobody would notice the inconsistency. We didn’t have any more mandarins with which to make new pudding anyway, and they were all set in individual cups.

I started my day by prepping a squash that was long and thin, like butternut. When I say long, I mean it--I needed two cutting boards for this thing because it was about the length of my leg. So perhaps “prep” is also not quite the right word. Because of the size, maybe “butcher” would be a better term. Not to mention the fact that the squash was very hard and the knives in the kitchen all a little dull. At one point chef mentioned that my grunts of effort made it sound somewhat like I was participating in a wrestling match (or at least I think that’s what she meant....). It took about an hour and a half to get all the squash peeled, diced, and in the oven. At this point I could hardly grip a knife anymore and had lost all upper body strength.

Starter: Puree of roasted squash soup with black kale

The soup is super simple, with the ingredients being just squash, a bit of potato, oil, butter, almost caramelized onions, broth, salt, and pepper. It has a nice smooth texture even though we don’t pass it through a fine strainer, and the color is that bright orangey-yellow that makes squash soups so wonderfully delicious. The black kale (cavolo nero) we just boiled off quickly and sauteed in a pan. Turns out that at the restaurant they don’t overcook their greens (much).

Primo: Tortelli filled with broccoli and served with a sweet paprika sauce

Tortelli are big tortelloni; they are about the size of a golf ball. These we filled with a broccoli and ricotta puree which I was not a huge fan of. The broccoli was very overpowering and still had the little bits of florets intact, which meant that the filling had a kind of rough texture. We make fresh pasta at the restaurant, but the rough filling sort of hid the nice texture of the dough. The paprika sauce is very neat, a definite improvement on a red pepper coulis, with the sauce being much stronger and richer while missing that taste of bell pepper which I dislike anyway. I still haven’t learned how we do the sauce, but I will for sure.

Secondo: Roulade of chicken stuffed with prosciutto and fig with potato-swiss chard puree

Myself and the sous, Susanna were cutting the chickens while Keiji was doing the stuffing and rolling of the birds. About halfway through the chef walked over and asked Keiji where the prosciutto was. “Prosciutto?” was essentially his answer.

Hence ensued a discussion of how it is hard to stuff something with prosciutto and dried figs when you don’t have the prosciutto, and from here we began a discussion of how to get prosciutto into the dish. We immediately decided we didn’t have time to re-roll and -stuff the birds already done, and we had to be consistent, so the first thing was that we continue on. We then thought of various plans, from cooking the birds with prosciutto on top (no, because then the string would be under the prosciutto), cooking the birds, untying them, and adding prosciutto on top when we went to reheat them (no, we’d lose the crispy skin of the birds and the prosciutto would get tough in the oven, or would fall off when cutting), pushing little pieces of prosciutto into each slice after cutting (no, that’s stupid), or sauteeing up cubed prosciutto and just drizzling it on top as a garnish and pretending that the menu was wrong, not us (that’s what we did). The skin on these birds was deliciously crispy.

Dessert: Bavarese of mandarin orange with Strega sauce.

Strega is some kind of Italian liqueur. I can’t figure out what’s in it, but it makes me think of what mint would be like if it were a spice instead of an herb. Good news was we ended up having enough bavarese because after being told 100 were coming, only 70 showed. This is probably in large part because while they originally were coming at eight or eight thirty, we got a call at half past seven that they wouldn’t arrive until just after nine. At eight thirty we were told just before ten. And they did show up just before ten, but my guess is some of the conventioneers decided it was too late and they were tired and so they went home. This solved some of our problems, but made it a very late night. However, I really enjoyed it and was glad to have so much to do all evening (or at least until 8, when our prep was all ready and we were set up to go with no guests. During this down time, the owner opened up a bottle of prosecco for us, we did an oil tasting, and we discussed why it is that American cooks work so much harder than Italian cooks, but whether or not there was an ensuing difference in quality of cuisine. The jury is still out.)

Coming soon!

Took a little hiatus, but I just started work and am going to be posting all about it soon, so check back in a day or two!!