breakfast chef s01e02
You’re half an hour into your shift. The start, as advertised just below the room information pack's hairdryer operating instructions, of the breakfast service. It’s as good a time as any to switch on the metallic unit of kitchen furniture known as the pass.
Many tunes ago, upon delivery and installation, its four wheels were locked in place. They support a slidey doored heatable cupboard with shelves now fully stacked with round plates, smaller round plates, square plates, rectangular plates, pasta bowls and soup bowls. Above the warming plates, the principal plating surface, where presentation ideas are enacted under high wattage heating lamps wired to the underside of a second, narrower, shelf that’s sometimes used for plating, but more usually designated as a holding area for sizzling pans. And above it, another set of lights attached to a dusty upper shelf that’s home to excess rectangular plates, a saucer of napkins, a pen that will soon be acquired by a member of the waiting staff, the lighter you found half an hour ago, a small pile of previous menus, a plastic bottle of honey, a plastic bottle of maple syrup, a clunky phone charger of unknown ownership, and a spike on a wooden block holding the paper checks from the previous day.
You experience a flashback as you pull the checks off the spike and drop them into the bin. The restaurant manager, asking for the third time for the desserts for table whatever it was - urging the pastry chef to hurry it up please. And the reply that they were coming up paired with the widely appreciated opinion that if you’re in a rush to eat desserts, you shouldn’t be allowed to order them – it’s that simple. From the kitchen’s perspective, it was a very smooth service.
As you slide the second batch of gastronome-trayed bacon from the oven, you hear an enthusiastic ah like this, whit is it from the waitress who lives five miles away and has a car. She wears her hair all bunched up when she’s at work. You begin a conversation based on your evident agreement that it’s very pleasant to listen to music while working. Essential, even. That good music makes you forget you're at work and therefore makes that work easier. Yep.
You ask about the music in the restaurant. It's awrite she says. It tends tae be quite jazzy. They insist it’s changed every coupla weeks. It's no as loud as in the kitchen.
You comment on your trade in telling her you don’t understand why all chefs aren’t as bothered about music to be honest, adding that it's half the reason you’re here. You revert to an anecdote about how you spent a week in a bank once, but you have to rush it as she has tables to set up – you tell her about the temp agency sending you to a room with dilapidated décor and blinking clerical software, and how there was so much chat about what people were going to have or had just had for lunch or were planning to have or had previously had for dinner, that by the Friday you’d decided that you might as well go back to restaurant work and make food as well as talk about it.
You’re suddenly aware that you haven't prepared the breakfast fruit. You should have done it last night, but you were slipping poached eggs into a bucket, and the outside sounds of laughter, beers cans being opened, and deckchairs being positioned on gravel led to its postponement. You were intending to come in early, but you didn’t.
So fuck, you establish. It’s been weeks since that nightmare of a shift when you got majorly in the shit. All those other times have been fine. You know where everything is now, and you’re fast. The fruit can be a morning thing from now on.
You form a chopping board length s-wave of tap splattered blue roll on the work surface, grab the green board and secure it on top. You unattach a pastry knife from the magnetic strip of wall knives, noting, as you do, that the porridge water’s boiling vigorously. You lift the hefty cardboard box of oats from the side of the pot shelf, tip a load of them into the porridge water, and reduce the heat. Then you stroll to the walk-in fridge to collect an assortment of fruit, grabbing a large plastic container and taste checking some dried apricots en route.
Melons and pineapples and mangos. You hurl them in. I was about to list papayas and guavas, but I can’t even picture what they look like - I’m probably only thinking of them because they were constituents of the meal deal smoothie I bought this morning. A blue smoothie, a triple chicken sandwich pack, and a small tub of coconut pieces since you're asking. They're still in my bag – together with a bottle of water, and a carton of coconut water from yesterday. I like coconut water - I sip it in the cinema if I'm not necking red wine. It used to be more difficult to take your own food and drink into the cinema, but to be honest I don’t think they give a fuck now. They know how pricey all their junk food is.
Anyway - apples and oranges and pears, two plastic bags of plums, kiwis and more kiwis, and three punnets each of blackcurrants and strawberries. As you do most days, you consider the word punnet - that it’s an odd word - that you’ve never used it outside of work - and again you wonder when you might use it – in a fruit shop, yes - you could say a punnet of blackcurrants or a punnet of strawberries there and they would know what you meant. Perhaps in a supermarket too. Probably only some of the staff, but you’d be asking in the fruit section. They’d know.
You effortlessly pull off a leg wrap round, step forward with eyes closed, horizontally extended leg door slam manoeuvre to the walk-in fridge door, then you return to tip the fruit onto the workbench. Did any apples or oranges roll off onto the floor? Let’s say none did. It’s time to consider how the fruit’s to be presented.
In previous hotel jobs, you’ve been asked to mix the fruit together into a large glass bowl – with the chunks to be subsequently spooned out into small bowls. Only rough chopping was required, and if you had to hurry the fuck up, the percentage content of grapes and strawberries could be increased. That said, you had to watch it with the strawberries – using too many would inevitably trigger a later that morning deep sigh from the pastry chef as he checked his section, and you’d soon hear his dejected call out for anyone planning on going to the supermarket. And you’d no doubt receive a minor reprimand from the sous chef at some point in the day - a gonnae no dae that fuck sake, or a that’s not how we do things here.
The fruit isn’t being glass bowled in your current job. The breakfasteers are to be presented with what one hotel reviewer has called a lovely display – an antique oval tray with origins deep in the hotel's history, laden with fruit which they’re kindly asked to deftly select from with one of the provided half-fork half-spoon tongs.
Preparing tray fruit takes three or four times as long as bowl fruit, but hey, you’ve been finding that it’s an enlivening way to step up a gear. It does make sense to do it first thing in the morning, you realise – you enjoy sculpting with the colours – it's not such a bad way to earn money. You wonder if you’d be better off in one of those function catering jobs - doing conferences and weddings and so on. There’d be no rush. No impatient table fuckers. Everything easily getting done on time. And it’d be more of a laugh. The staff there would probably be smoking weed on their breaks.
The colour of Cantaloupe melon flesh is cantaloupe, says the internet. Like orange and orange. You trace the skin off each half in curves, remembering that Christmas day when you came into work still blootered and began hazily hacking melons into cubist sculptures you said in your defence, but there was no aesthetic consensus on your melon work that day. None at all. You received a red card from the head chef and were instructed to go home.
Yeah, thanks for that. Meant to say.
You half the halves, remove the seeds, place one of the quarters flat again, then slice it at regular intervals, producing shapes ranging from flat horse-shoe to trapezium. You separate the more trapeziumy ones out for a decoration idea, and begin with the first contour of fruit on the ornate tray.
Fast forward. You've repeated this process with the remaining three quarters and moved on to the other melons, the pineapples, and the fiddly mangos. You've been slicing apples and oranges, slicing and positioning the skin-on pears and the skin-off kiwis. You’ve de-stoned and quartered the plums, halved the passion fruits, and lobbed the tops off the strawberries.
That orange plum and kiwi combo sweeping across the diagonal. An excellent use of secondary colours. Very nice.
Voila. Voici le fruit tray, you say to the French waiter who’s just walked in, and you immediately recommence your yesterday conversation about rugby - reiterating your opinion that rugby’s mental though. It’s fucking bizarre. Particularly that drop out kick twenty two thing – like, why is there a random line at twenty-two metres? – it makes no sense. You tell him you once watched a game all the way through, and there was no discernible pattern to what was going on, and it got you wondering if rugby was the actual inspiration for the title of Joseph Heller’s anti-war novel Catch-22. You ask the French waiter if he knows of the book, and whether he thinks it might have been.
He says zis book I have not read eet, but he’s happy to tell you about the relevant rules – that it’s to do with where the balls kicked from and where it bounces and if it bounces and who touches it just before it bounces or doesn’t bounce you hear as the powered-on coffee machine whirrs from the bar in the restaurant. He persists with his rules of rugby elaboration, and you add to your uh-huh, your uh-huh, and your is that so, with an oh is that the coffee machine ready? When he asks if you’d like a coffee you say oui, merci beaucoup. He lifts the heavy fruit tray and departs for the restaurant’s fruits and cereals table.