Tag Archives: line cook

Back in Black

Two years ago I stepped away from working in the culinary industry due to some medical issues that I was dealing with. The job I moved to was in retail with full insurance benefits. It was the first time that I had any amount of sick leave, paid time off, national holidays off with pay. It was easy and detail oriented, and though a major departure from what I was used to, it was a blessing as I was treated for and recovered from my illness.

I saw an opportunity to work at a prestigious and popular restaurant in Manhattan. A new adventure was waiting and I was the one that had to make the decision: keep living a relatively easy, but unfulfilling life? Or dive off the deep end back into a world that I had long since said goodbye to. I chose the latter, with hope and fear tangled around each other in my head like a Russian wrestling a bear to the death.

Two weeks in it’s like how I remembered. Constant until the end, especially at a popular place like this one. In Garde Manger (or garmo for short), it’s s lot of the same things with the occasional outlier dish. Both cold appetizers and desserts populate my side of the menu. The alpha and omega of the meal, our position is prep heavy with more to be done during service.

The main difference this time around comes from within myself. Before, I had undiagnosed ADHD and general anxiety disorder (not that it’s excusable), and I was a nervous wreck. Getting stoned on my lunch break kept my mind even hazier than it would’ve been otherwise, combined with being the lone hot line cook, garde manger and somehow the main dishwasher. It was a lot of pressure and u fortunately I crumpled like a RAW rolling paper.

Since then, I’ve been through a considerable amount of shit and learned a similarly considerable amount of shit about people, jobs, cooking and life in general. Right now I’m ambitious and proud, excited to put my head down and finally hone my craft through action, rather than my mind. The goal remains the same, to get to a point that I can write recipes for a living, write a cookbook and start a family. My pathway to those places is a but different than I expected, but I’ve found out that that doesn’t really matter by the end of your life.

I’m back in black pants, nonslip shoes, apron and a white button down cooks’ shirt, equipped with my knife roll and a few sharpies. I miss the ones that helped me get to this point, that I don’t get to see as often anymore. But it does still feels good to be where I should be. The universe feels more satisfied with me, like I don’t have as much of an urge to fight against it.

I’m tired, but I’m happier too.

My Leap of Faith

That late August Georgia day is tattooed onto my brain. It was warm, I was beyond nervous. My fiancé and I piled our lives into a 20 ft U-Haul, filling it only about a quarter capacity. The smaller, more practical truck we rented was unavailable, so they let us “upgrade” to a bigger one. They didn’t account for the extra dollop of anxiety that was plopped onto my plate by that behemoth, making itself comfortable beside my fear of failure, pandemic stress, and the sheer presence of the great unknown. Despite my worst fears, the trip went exactly as smoothly as it could have, which further cemented my decision to make such a dramatic migration. I even got a few days with my Grandma when we passed through Virginia, which worked as a great distraction.

In New York City, we dropped off our stuff at the new apartment and the truck at the closest U-Haul return location. We managed our way back and were left to imagine what lives we had ahead of us in a city crippled by the pandemic. Neither of us had jobs, and there weren’t many available, so taking leaps of faith was going to be the norm for the next year or so. We still aren’t comfortable with that part. What drove it all, defying the fear and anxiety, was a shared love of food and the faith that we would make and eat the best cuisine of our lives. I was going to train as a chef amid a worldwide disaster and industrywide collapse.

A few days went by and I was able to tour the place in which I was meant to hone my craft for the next 6 months. As I took my first steps through those heavy double glass doors, I was overwhelmed by the face of culinary-focused academics staring me down. As I passed endless fully equipped kitchens in my tour, my excitement was overflowing, and I looked at my fiancé and said, “This is where I should be.” After I received my start date and some paperwork to finish before then, we left and I was chomping at the bit for more. We spent the meantime exploring the neighborhood we lived in and we soon learned of the absence of energy in this once bustling city. I saw statistics online that really drove the point home. Despite the seemingly busy subway trains that kept alternating seats empty to combat the spread of Covid, the subway was only seeing a fraction of the riders it saw a year prior. Even Times Square was close to empty.

My first day finally arrives and I get up before the crack of dawn to make it to class a half hour early. I was a little nervous, but mostly excited. I was finally here! I had been waiting for this moment for almost a year, all the while imagining how the universe would find a way to pull the rug out from underneath me. My patience had finally paid off. We learned of knife cuts, stocks, sauces, cooking methods, regional dishes and much more, but what I’ll remember most about this time in my life are the relationships that I made. A native New Yorker classmate of mine told me, “I’m sorry you have to see the city this way, it’s a shitshow.” I told her there was no need to apologize, I saw past the tragedy and tried to focus on the beauty of the city in pain.

We often discussed our hopes and wishes that everything would be cleared up enough for us to have proper externships and find good jobs after school. Did we all really decide to go to school during a pandemic? Was it something we would grow to regret? I still don’t know the answer to the latter, but yeah we did it. We picked the most hopeless time to start careers in a tough, yet rewarding industry. And who knows, maybe we picked a perfect time. We’ll see businesses revive and mourn the ones we lost forever. We will build a palace on the ruins that are a pre-Covid world. Every chef that graced our classroom with their knowledge and experiences told us what would be expected of us young cooks. We’re the ones that will rebuild and permeate the industry with our talents and bring it back to life like a phoenix emerging from a pile of discarded masks and faded lines of floor tape.