Formal Restaurant Cooking week one

Mussels with caramelized
onion broth and fennel
sausage (from our menu)

The countdown begins...

That is our last block at the school - Formal Restaurant cooking. During this block we suppose to focus more on quality of dishes and on time management so the food should leave the kitchen on time. We have different chef-instructor for this rotation. Our previous instructor is going to teach morning class and we got an instructor from the morning class. For the first day it was a bit hectic, as she tried to micromanage every single aspect in the kitchen. Honestly, some people really need it, however they do not appreciate it. For me it was all right - she tried a couple times to teach me basics, but then she saw what I can do and since then there were not micromanaging for me. Yes, she comes once in a while with some constructive criticism, but she always has a point and I see it as an opportunity to learn and improve.

For this rotation John and me decided to chose
an appetiser station. We worked well together on sautee and now we are going to work together on appetisers. The biggest change is that we are, in a way, independent from the main course. Once in a while we have a table where an appetiser is ordered as a main course, so we have to coordinate our work with other people. In general we start service and do not depend on others. For the first couple days of service servers were complaining, because appetisers were delivered very quickly, but then the guests had to wait for a long time to get their main course.

Tuesday was a prep day and we had no guests. However  we had a special lecture in the morning. Also we finished class at 9 p.m. instead of 5 p.m. scheduled. With our part of the class it's almost impossible to finish all tasks on time. Two persons are consistently waiting for others to have job done.

Wednesday and Thursday were two average days with about 80 covers per day. Our station (appetizers) were the best, we were able to send out food in 8-9 minutes per table on average. We did not get a lot of attention from the chef, she was quite busy helping on the hot line.

On Saturday we were busy, we did 100 covers for the first time of cooking in the restaurant. The service went quite smoothly, we had just a couple of tables where we sent appetizers in more than 10 minutes. One table was 16 guests and it took us about 15 minutes to send food out. At the end of the service we were scrambling with soup and meatballs. The soup we had to make another batch - reheat, adjust seasoning and consistency. With the meatballs was really funny. By the end of service I had 4.5 meatballs left in a pot. They were hot and ready to go, BUT the portion is 5 meatballs. We weren't expected to get another order of meatballs, but we did get it. So I opened a new bag of meatballs (already cooked) and get one piece. But it was cold, so the only logical decision was to microwave it for 1 minutes and then mix with the old ones. The timing was perfect and the guests were happy:-)