Razor-Sharp Lessons to Be Learnt in the Kitchen

It’s barely 20 minutes into Tuesday’s anthro lecture, and I’m already foot-tapping and soda-slugging all over the place. I get a text message from my friend two rows behind me: “Can’t you sit still, woman? Do we need to get you a straight jacket?”
I’m afraid my answer is: no; yes.

After a summer on the line of a busy two-star Midtown restaurant, I can’t seem to sit still anymore, and yet I am quite far from qualifying as a legit cook. However, I did learn that there are few pursuits that require more divergent skill sets than working in a restaurant kitchen and being a student.

I worked with some superstars in the kitchen. I hoped their lightning duck-deboning skills and knack for perfect grill marks on 14 simultaneous sirloins would rub off on me. I longed for just a sliver of their superhuman precision, stamina, and speed. No such luck.

But I learned a whole lot with a sweaty bandana on my head and a borrowed chef’s knife in my hand. The cooks and their kitchen had wisdom to impart—wisdom that went beyond slow roasting and perfect brunoise. Don’t get me wrong—I would never dare underestimate, for example, the importance of knife skills. Mine are still embarrassingly lacking. But of the lessons I want to take from my summer, the art of crystal-clear consomme is just the beginning. Here are a few. Like my knife skills, I have a long way to go before I can claim mastery.

1. Jean-Marco worked Garde-manger (cold prep). I often worked by his side, slicing cherry tomatoes in two and shaving parmesan into translucent sheets with a mandolin. I found the latter task especially daunting. The sliced stuff would be shoveled into the risotto and ravioli, tossed in the arugula salad, and used for garnish on many of the plates. That is to say, there were many hefty blocks of cheese to attend to. “How’s the parm coming?” Jean-Marco would ask. “Slow,” I’d moan. “Then do it faster!” I blamed my lack of mandolin expertise and my negligible attention span. He wouldn’t hear it. “You just got to push yourself,” Jean-Marco insisted, “I have an inner monologue constantly looping: “Go, go, go.” Since I was still working on my own, Jean-Marco helped me out by bellowing “Faster, faster, faster, faster,” when my speedy grating lost steam. Or just for fun.

Big life lesson: Sometimes you just need to get shit done. Fast. My goal: Apply this to writing papers, etc.

2. Working from nine in the morning until after midnight on your feet, with no break and continuous pressure, is no stroll in Riverside. Everyone is in the same boat. Jean-Marco was out drinking last night until dawn, and Nick hasn’t had a day off for a few weeks. Maybe it’s time for service and you still don’t have your remoulade ready, your sage picked, your chervil vinaigrette made. Maybe it’s the height of lunch rush and you have seven things on order and burn the asparagus and need to make a trip to the walk-in for more potatoes and chef is yelling loud. Bitching is really tempting but seldom helpful. Even the very best cooks—the legends—have found themselves deep in the shits.
Keeping cool is gold. The alternative is to totally lose it.

Life lesson: Be chill. In stressful situations, continue being chill.

3. Hopefully, in that moment of calamity, the grill cook or sous chef will step in and save your ass. You notice the charred asparagus, then there’s magically another order almost ready in a pan, a full bag of potatoes at your station. This means you are expected to stir Nick’s bordelaise, remove Zamir’s almond cakes from the oven, make a few Nicoises when Jean-Marco is in the weeds.

Life lesson: Teamwork, baby.

4. If you clean up Jean-Marco’s station so he can call it a night and go out with a girl, he might repay the favor and help you fill a few hundred gougeres. If you clean up Jean-Marco’s station so he can call it a night and go out with another girl on another night, he might make a habit of asking. You can say no. You have people to go out with, too.

Life lesson: No one needs a pushover.

5. Cooking is brutal. Sweeping the floors at 1 a.m., I couldn’t figure out why anyone would put themselves through this for the long run. I posed my quandary to Nick. “I love it,” he told me. “There’s nothing else I’d rather do.” He meant it.
Life lesson: Be like Nick. (Do what you love!)