Food and me - a short history (part 2)
For some reason, one of the first jobs I got outside the home was in a small restaurant. Not really even sure why now, but it probably impacted the rest of my life in some ways. My first job was at a little cafe in our little town of Greenwood called “The Lettuce Bowl”. Simple little place, mostly salads, sandwiches, pastries, baked goods and soups. I washed dishes in the back, mostly for the baking and sometimes at lunch I would help make sandwiches. So that particularly job wasn’t anything special, but I did like the environment.
When I was in 11th grade right after Christmas, a new Bonanza restaurant opened in Milford, the closest town to us with real grocery stores, shopping centers and that sort of thing. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Bonanza, it’s one of those places with the gigantic food bars where you can get not only salad, but also everything from pasta to chicken livers to soup to soft serve ice cream. They also served a lot of hot food. One thing that was particularly popular was the steak plus all the shrimp you could eat specials on the weekends. The steak was really pretty crappy, but you could get either fried or steamed shrimp with it, as much as you wanted. We went through bags and bags of the stuff on a Friday or Saturday night.
They were starting from scratch and needed lots of employees and so I started at the fine wage of $3.65/hr., just slightly above the then minimum wage of $3.35 if I recall correctly. I still remember one of the first orientation nights where the manager had us all give the kitchen a good clean. I can still remember his battle cry – “I don’t want to see anything but elbows and a$$holes”. I was like, yeah, I’m not in my little sheltered community any more. I don’t think I had even heard the f word before.
I started off working the fryers, which was a busy, but easy job. Lots of french fries, along with the aforementioned shrimp plus the occasional fried fish or clam strips. The oil got into everything, you could never get the clothes clean. Exactly what the adolescent pores needed. I also learned the flat grill, which consistently mainly of the rather popular sirloin tips with peppers and onions and “prime rib” that was soaked in a big pan of au jus long enough to get warm.
From there I moved to the gas grill where all the steaks were made, as well as chicken, burgers, that sort of thing. It was at this point where I first took on a role I typically had at other restaurants thereafter, one of the few people who could hang with the rush on a busy night. I think it was a combination of growing up not fearing hard work, plus I have a very logical mind and could keep more stuff straight than some of the other cooks. I didn’t get flustered that easily until it got really bad.
I was kind of the odd man there because I had been so sheltered and most of the other employees were kids from the local high school. So sometimes I didn’t fit in, but I still made a lot of friends (including my first real girlfriend) and really liked the camaraderie of the kitchen.
Like I said, in retrospect most of the food was pretty terrible by my standards now, but it did teach me how to hang with the rush, start to learn how to cook meat and that sort of thing. I stayed there through high school and part of the year after, but then I needed to make a bit more money for college and decided to go down and work in Rehoboth Beach. I had a friend of mine from Bonanza who was working at a bed and breakfast down there called The Corner Cupboard Inn. He said they needed cooks and it paid a bit better, so I decided to give it a shot. I got hired and this became what I consider my first introduction to more serious food. It was super gourmet, but everything was cooked from scratch, with fresh seafood and vegetables every day. So it was a great place to learn.
The place was run by Mrs. Hooper, a cranky and rather stern lady who was a very particular, but fair employer. She ran the place with a bit of an iron fist, but was also very complimentary when you did a good job. The funny thing is that every year it seemed she would try to bring in some young chef either in or just out of culinary school and they never seemed to make it more than a month. So we would go back to our normal routine, which was her ragtag band of cooks who had been around for several years and knew how to make the kitchen run. It usually worked out just fine and we put out some tasty food.
It was a cool gig because we worked a split shift. I would get up early (still living with my mom) and go down for breakfast from about 8-12 or so, depending on the guests and how full the place was. Then I would have the afternoon free to lay on the beach, eat pizza, play pinball or see friends until about 5:30PM, when we would start prep for the evening dinner. We would get done around 9:30 or 10, clean up and go home to start again the next day. Or at least I went home, most of the wait staff would go out drinking and come in for the breakfast shift hungover. A great restaurant tradition. It’s a good thing I didn’t start drinking until later.
One of my first days there I was taught how to flip a fried egg without the use of any utensils. We would have contests to see how many eggs we could do. I could generally do 3-4 without a problem. We put out so many eggs you had to do it that way, in a little skillet greased up with rendered bacon fat. We also did scrambled, poached (just in a pan of boiling water with vinegar), boiled and even broached in hot oil. Kidney stew was a standard menu item, as well as sweet breads. I never learned to like either. Also kippers on Sundays, along with waffles which we would make by the Hobart (floor-stand mixer) full as a Sunday tradition. Pancakes the rest of the week. Plus a full range of breakfast meats. Yummy.
Dinners had a selection of standard items, plus different daily specials which might be London Broil, Duck a l’Orange, broiled lobster, various other seafood, scallops and so on. Veggies would be sauteed beans almondine or carrots, corn on the cob (cooked with milk and sugar), usually new red potatoes, stuff like that. All prepped and made from scratch. I learned a ton, including basics like how to cut meat, how to use a knife properly, how to prep all kinds of seafood. I still use a lot of those skills today.
Well, this is already getting long and I’m only partway through my restaurant experiences, so I’ll continue this later.