08.21.07
Posted in The Story at 4:13 pm by Chef Matt
As a huge fan of Jane’s Addiction, I’m thrilled that I have the opportunity to use this as a title for one of my posts.
One of the all-time greatest albums. |
I sense a vague feeling of unrest out there due to the title of this post, so let me once again put your collective minds at ease, I was not the one who was caught stealing. They have yet to catch me.
Yes, I’m kidding. Rather, twice this past week I was confronted with issues of theft from the restaurant that I had to deal with, and it is just another element of the learning process in how to manage restaurant workers.
The first instance had to deal with paychecks. The paychecks came out this past Thursday (whoo hoo!) and chef pointed out two of them as being excessively high in overtime. I couldn’t explain this anomaly, but as the keeper of the schedule, I was able to confirm that they should not have had that much overtime since they simply didn’t work that many days. So of course the next explanation is a simple mess-up in the system. If they forgot to punch out, then the system would give them more and more hours until it reset itself at 4AM. That is easy enough to look up and correct in our management software, so I logged into the system to check their records.
All the days they logged in had appropriate log-out times. But then I noticed what was wrong. Somehow they had been logged in and logged out every day for the pay period. Including days they weren’t even there. Simply put, someone was logging in for them when they were not around.
Punching in someone else’s card… naughty naughty. |
This, ladies and gentlemen, is theft. As of yet, we have not yet been able to determine who the culprit is for this, but we are keeping our eyes peeled for irregularities like this in the future.
The next instance happened right in front of me. One of my better nighttime line cooks was in the walk-in with me and right before me he grabbed some cherries and began to eat them. I was flabbergasted. I couldn’t believe it was happening right in front of me! I informed him that the walk-in was not a salad bar, and he should not be snacking in there… I didn’t call him a “thief” or anything so extreme, I just simply wanted to get across the point that he should not be eating food other than the meals we make for them every day.
I don’t condone snacking on cherries from the walk-in, but I certainly understand it… |
He apologized, and a few minutes later came back with a dollar to pay for the food. Well, I didn’t want him to pay for the cherries, I just wanted him to not eat them any more. Alas, this refusal of the dollar by me made him more upset. He is a very prideful man, and as a result, he left. Just walked out.
We were wondering if he would return or not two days later when his “break” was over, and much to the relief of most who work there, he did. I am of split feelings on this. On the one hand, he is one of our better line cooks. He is a hard worker who consistently is on the ball and turns out a good product. On the other hand though, a worker who can’t handle a simple reprimand to the degree where it causes him to leave the line for a whole shift is not necessarily someone I want working for me.
Simply put, I can’t be expected to make food cost if my employees are helping themselves to all the ingredients. And if I can’t train them not to do that… well, I guess they will have to be on their way then. I’m guessing he is not going to be snacking from the walk-in much any more, but the cost of the lesson to him was that I had to have a whole night in the kitchen without him there?…
My guess is we have not heard the last of this situation. When so much pride is at stake, the outcome is rarely a good one.
Chef Matt
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08.13.07
Posted in The Story, Recipes at 1:07 pm by Chef Matt
Sorry I have been away for so long, but this past week - the “six” I had to pull - was more like an “eight” as I had two double shifts in there as well. It was an incredibly long week, and my reward for it is that I now get to pull together and teach my class tonight. I hope I can stay awake through the whole thing!
So enough whining, on with the story.
A few weeks back I received my latest issue of Saveur magazine, and as always I ran through it cover to cover as soon as it arrived. One of the articles that seized my rapt attention was an article on root beer - it’s history and recent resurgence in America. I have always been a huge fan of root beer since I love the flavor, and since I gave up drinking caffeine, it is one of the few soft drinks I can still enjoy. Therefore, learning more about the drink, and perhaps learning how to make it as well, was naturally a subject I took great interest in.
When I got to the recipe part of the article though, I couldn’t help but be disappointed as it called for ingredients like dried sassafras root and so forth that would just be more effort than they were worth for me to track down just to brew my own root beer. I figured I’d just have to continue sticking with Hires.
A few days later, chef came up to me with a series of magazine pages that had given him ideas for changes he wanted to make to certain dishes (some of them were flights of fancy, others were put into action immediately). Imagine my joy though when I found amidst the pile of clippings the root beer recipe from Saveur! He wanted to try brewing his own for the restaurant. What a great excuse to learn how to make root beer on somebody else’s dime! The tracking down of these hard-to-find ingredients had just gone from “unnecessarily tedious” to “inspired adventure.”
Because procuring obscure items was a specialty of mine back in the days of my cubicle lifestyle, it only took me about half an hour of calls to secure a delivery of these special herbs to our store. I bought a few ounces of each so we could experiment with different flavor balances so as to get our own unique recipe just right.
Since nobody in the restaurant had ever done this before, we had to start at the beginning. Earlier this week I made my first batch of root beer following the Saveur recipe to the letter. Yesterday was day 5 of the aging process, where they say the root beer should be ready to go with all kinds of great flavors and so forth.
The recipe calls for 2 cups of molasses. Perhaps substituting some honey as a sweetener might be a good idea?… |
No such luck as of yet. Our daily tastings so far have shown that day by day it is increasing in carbonation, and the flavor is coming about, but it still tastes strongly of molasses and is not really “fizzy” per se. Maybe our walk-in is just too darn cold, and this will take a little longer than the recipe suggests.
But the really exciting part of all this is the experimentation and learning involved in such an endeavor. When you boil it all down, I’m being paid to learn how to make root beer! Many people look at me strangely when I tell them just how much of a pay cut I took to leave the web world behind to become a chef, but it’s adventures like this that reassure me that I made the right decision!
Chef Matt
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08.09.07
Posted in The Story, Teaching Classes at 10:52 pm by Chef Matt
A long time ago - back when I was still working at Tirolo in fact - I was wondering if I should go back to becoming a cooking instructor, or maybe pick up some extra catering hours to help earn some more money for myself. The Tirolo job - being my first cooking job was one that did not pay enough for me to stay afloat by itself, and the fact that Sarah was trying to keep labor costs as low as possible meant that I was earning a very paltry paycheck.
Well the times soon changed as I moved on to Vero, and was earning enough there - thanks to a larger hourly wage and more hours - that I didn’t have to work hard to find outside employment. Though in a weird twist of fate, I was actually doing quite a bit of catering work while I was at Vero simply because that was such a major focus of the business.
Now, as a chef at Rustico, and a salaried one at that, I make enough money that I only need to do these jobs when I feel like doing them. The urgent need to find other sources of income is gone thankfully, and in its place there is the chance for me to pick and choose the extracurricular activities I actually want to do.
And teaching cooking is always one of those things.
Italian style - the only way to make something look good without any sort of functionality whatsoever. |
With my incredibly full schedule, I was hardly going around looking for opportunities to be a teacher. Rather, this was an instance where the job fell into my lap. Up in Bedford, PA - where my parents have that aforementioned “cabin in the woods” - there is a new store that has opened that is dedicated to Italian food and design. It’s called “Lifestyle” and it is a wonderful addition to the (until now) culturally bleak offerings in downtown Bedford.
Well, as my mom loves to do, she got to chatting with the owners, and let them know how I’m not only a chef, but way back in the day, I used to teach Italian cooking. Well, they were of course very excited about this revelation, so to skip ahead to the good part, I’ll be teaching a class there on Northern Italian cooking this Monday night!
I’m extremely excited to be back in front of a class again. And this time I am doing so with a culinary degree and over a year of kitchen experience under my belt. When I first started teaching the course, I almost felt like a bit of a fraud - I was simply someone who knew a lot about the subject, but with no real credentials. Now I’m fully bona fide, and while on the one hand this puts me more at ease - people tend to accept that any for real “chef” who shows up is just right about whatever he says - it also has opened that pit in my stomach of performance anxiety. I mean, I’m really supposed to know this stuff now, so if I freeze in front of the class - well, that just won’t be cool.
On the menu for the night: Risotto! (YUM!) |
Fortunately, this is a subject I’ve taught before, so I’m intimately familiar with the subject matter. Throw in my love of cooking and teaching, and I am hoping that it’ll all be like riding a bicycle. Easy to remember, and easy to make a fast get away if things go badly. 
Oh yeah, and the class sold out really quickly - so if I do a good job and get another gig, I’ll let you all know ahead of time!
Chef Matt
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08.06.07
Posted in The Story at 5:10 pm by Chef Matt
Summer is upon us, and that means that staff members want to take vacations. This of course means that there are holes in the kitchen where there are supposed to be cooks. This is where the responsibility of being a sous chef rears its ugly head as it is the other sous chefs and I who are required to fill said holes.
All my cooks get to experience this for the week while I get to fill in for them. I hope they enjoy it! |
And this week is an especially rough one, as two of my nighttime line cooks are away. I was able to cajole one of my line cooks to work an extra day this week, which was not too hard since it means extra hours and therefore extra money for her. But for those of us who are salaried, it just means more work to make sure everyone gets their break.
Now let’s be fair here - chefs are not a group of people that get extensive amounts of vacation. Usually one week per year is about all they are afforded. So this is hardly a case of all my cooks gallivanting off to the Caribbean while I am left to man the ovens. They have earned this respite from the heat of the kitchen, so I am more than happy to step up to the plate while they enjoy an all-too-brief break.
But of course that means this is my one day off this week. So I better make the most of it.
All I have to say is thank God Maury aired two episodes of paternity test results today!
Chef Matt
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