Saturday, January 29, 2005

Technical Notes of the Fridge

It’s good that I work during the daytime because that’s when the deliveries (food and linen) and repairmen come in so you learn a lot of the practical things that you can apply to save money down the track. For example, the sous chef noticed that some of the meats felt lukewarm and deduced that the food was probably left in the sun so he called the supplier and returned the meats immediately.

When handling meats and seafood, wear gloves because your natural body oils on your hands tend to speed up the decomposition rate of the raw food.

Today, I was once again alone in the kitchen when the fridge repairman came to service the fridge so I barraged him with questions. He told me that a basic 2-door bench fridge costs about AUD$4-$5K while a 2 x 2m cool room costs AUD$9K onwards. He complained that nobody cleaned the filters which could get clogged and overheat the compressor, causing the fridges to leak water. He said that it should be brushed clean every 2 weeks and hosed down every 3 months and in an ideal situation, it should be serviced every 4 months where the filters are rinsed with acid to remove the grease and you would only have to replace the compressor every 3-4 years that would cost approximately $1500. However in kitchen nirvana, all motors should be housed outside of the kitchen where it is properly aired and grease-free.

When cleaning crab, remove the gills (dead man’s fingers) and the folded tail flap (the apron) from the underside to remove the guts (viscera). Female crabs have rounded aprons and male crabs have thin, pointed aprons (Lepard et al.). Do not soak seafood in water as it will lose is flavour of the sea.

Sunday, January 23, 2005

Balls of steel or plain stupidity?

I got the gig in the restaurant! There’s a catch though – half the week I work in the breakfast kitchen and serve patrons and the other half of the week I get to cook in the kitchen. This is probably an ideal situation to see both sides of the restaurant and still get paid better than the average cook in the kitchen. Again, I intend to learn as much as I can for at least the year.

Apparently there are multiple Grade levels of staff salary. The poor kitchen hand gets the shortest stick while the king of the echelon is the executive chef who gets paid between 60-80K, but it could go to 100K if you run a restaurant with 150 staff members in a hotel. It is quite a rude shock when you switch from a monthly remuneration to getting paid by the hour. No wonder so few corporates move across to the restaurant industry unless they own their restaurants! I keep telling myself that I am doing it for the love of cooking.

January appears to be the worst month for business and it usually picks up in February. I shall find out more about this when I get the chance. Perhaps it is because most people are overseas on holiday. I remember talking to the owner at Orso Bayside Restaurant who told me that June & July were quiet months in the more affluent areas because their customers were away skiing during winter.

Tomorrow I shall clear out my closet and pack away my business suits since I will not be using them for the time being. I am so scared taking this leap of faith. I am worried that I may have wasted an entire year and will be obsolete in the corporate world should I go back to it. But then again, when I think back about the quality of some of the corporate newbies in my old company, I think ANYONE can enter the corporate world.

Friday, January 21, 2005

The Harsh Reality of the Business

A very cynical female chef told me that you don’t get into the restaurant business for money but at the same time, it is a very cut-throat business. She also said that every well-run restaurant aims to achieve a profit of 10%, which isn’t as much as we all think it would be.

She also said that the breakdown of the costs of running a restaurant is as follows: 30% food, 40% labour and 30% other running costs (which includes rental). And the main factor in the kitchen is to minimise food wastage. I’ve seen so much wastage in commercial kitchens. Chefs make too much salad and throw half of it away, rather than giving the extra salad to the customer. A whole container of Avruga Caviar (worth at least AUD$110) thrown out because it was left exposed for a few hours. Food is sent back to the kitchen because the order was not taken properly.

And for those spending years in technical colleges or Cordon Bleu, no one takes these apprentices seriously and only hire them for one reason: cheap (below minimum wage cheap) labour. Again, it goes to show that qualifications mean nothing!

Oh and FYI: chefs are lucky if they get 10% of the tips given to the wait staff which they have to split with the rest of the kitchen. So the next time you think that you are generous leaving $5 as a tip, fifty cents is shared among a number of chefs which means each poor sod gets about ten cents.

Perhaps this explains why there is so much unprofessional behaviour among chefs. They walk out of the kitchen without notice because they are not financially compensated for the long hard hours plus they are abused on a daily basis. However on the bright side, because of the extremely high turnover, the die-hards are most likely to climb the ranks faster.
No news from the restaurant yet and it is driving me crazy. But I try to tell myself that one thing that I have to master is patience. Oh, this is so cliché but I really do think that I have to. I think that we are so used to seeing what is behind the other side of the door (i.e. business plans, forecasts and set career paths) that we almost expect immediate results. But sometimes we aren’t meant to see what is installed for us in the future for the sole purpose of finding and maintaining faith in a higher power. Allowing something else to take control of our lives. I believe that although we are all connected to a bigger picture, there are elements in life that we cannot control and to reconnect with ourselves, we have to accept that loss of control.
The book “Do You!” by Russell Simmons talks about how every one of us has a purpose in life (i.e. dharma) and by listening to our higher selves, will we be able to realise what our dharma is. When we accept that God has given us a role in life, fulfilling that role isn’t so hard after all, no matter how ridiculous or ambitious it sounds. So I am not going to worry about whether or not I get the gig because either it is part of my journey or it isn’t but there is a purpose for everything.

Thursday, January 20, 2005

Day One in a restaurant

Today I learned how to cut vegetables for 2 hours. The words ‘julienne’ and ‘brunoise’ do not sound so intimidating to me now. I hope that one day I can do these things blindfolded without slicing my own flesh.

Julienne: Trim the vegetable into the desired length. Using a mandoline, slice the vegetable into thin sheets. Overlap the sheets to form a line of the vegetable. Finely slice the sheets to form a julienne.

Brunoise: Small dice of approximately 1/16 inch.

Another thing that I noticed in the coldroom was that everything cut and stored for the week’s use were stored in clear plastic takeaway containers and labelled with dates.

Carrots which are cut are fully submerged in cold water while beans are kept dry because moisture speeds up the decomposition process.

All these strange stoves – the grill breathed fire from above, the normal 6 burner stove, some strange hot cupboard that appeared to function as an oven, another flat top stove which I noticed was used for simmering risotto & gently heated water for poached eggs, a huge fryer and another machine which looked liked a deepfryer but filled with hot water as well. What happened to just cooking with a stovetop and oven?
Also, all the meats and bags of coffee were kept under lock and key. This I can understand, after reading in the papers that top-end butchers were actually being robbed for their prime cuts... at least they can rule out the skinny vegetarians.

Tuesday, January 18, 2005

The Importance of Education

“I put you through overseas education for 12 years so that you can earn three dollars an hour…. BEFORE TAX?” were the words that came out of my poor mother’s mouth when I told her that I wanted to become a chef.
Yes, I knew these would be the exact words that my mother would say years before. But like every obedient Asian kid, I studied hard in school and came out of university with three degrees in Biotechnology, Biochemistry and Marketing with an Honours thesis in stem cell research, not to mention an ASEAN Scholarship under my belt. All to prove my insecure point that I had at least an ounce of functional grey matter and for my parents to have something to brag about amongst their family and friends.
But after all these years of turmoil behind the books, I learnt one valuable thing from this expensive exercise – all the qualifications and letters behind your name are worth nothing, except to open that first door to your very first job.
Then you learn something even more valuable in your first job – any monkey (even those without qualifications) can do what you are doing.