not about school
This one isn’t about school, per se. I got my first kitchen job! I’m working at Aziza (www.aziza-sf.com), fine-dining, Moroccan cuisine. It is really exciting! Right now I am working the Garde Manger station, making salads and that sort of thing. Chef said that I will get to work all the stations as well as some front of the house stuff. He also wanted to take me to visit his purveyors, and kill a chicken! His philosophy is that you can’t really appreciate the chicken unless you’ve killed one. I think that is just great and I’m looking forward to going. Chef Mourad has some great ideas about organic food and locally produced food that I totally agree with and am excited to work with his team. I really like the attention to detail that they all have, and the food is really great. I’ve been working there 1 week and I absolutely love it.
Most of the people in the kitchen are spanish speaking and informally trained. While they are some great cooks, and definitely know their stuff, I don’t think most of them will ever be an executive chef, or restaurant owner. They just don’t seem to have the drive to get there. It is interesting to compare my classical french-style training with their lack of training. One fellow wanted me to mince a shallot, but didn’t know the term mince so he had to show me on one shallot. He would have saved us both time if he had just said “mince these shallots”. So I am seeing some value in being formally trained. On the other hand, I learn ways of doing things that are ridiculously slow in kitchen, and the cooks at Azizia have shown me some better ways. I will learn a lot from them and I think I will be able to contribute to the kitchen too.
Getting to see how a real kitchen works is a great experience for me. The two people that failed out of my culinary classes would never make it in a kitchen, they just didn’t have the right approach I think. There are people in my class now that I’m not sure how well they will do in a kitchen, we’ll see.
Some school stuff:
I finished all my competencies in Butchery, so the rest of this week I will just do production and whatever interesting things Chef wants me to do. I should get to practice sharpening my knives tomorrow (kinda scary for me to say that right?)
