breakfast chef s01e03
You pull a bag of hash browns from the chest freezer, and press your finger into the plastic. It stretches, lightening the colour of the company logo till you puncture though. You rip it apart, and encourage the frozen flake-coated slabs of shredded potato to fall into a gallon container. You put the gallon container next to the fryer, and switch the fryer on. It’s already set to the hash brown temperature, which is the temperature used for everything apart from blanching the chips that'll accompany the lunchtime battered fish and the evening steaks.
Triple cooked chips, it says on the menu. Which, as you know, entails rinsing them, boiling them to al dente, flinging them around in a pot lid covered colander to coarse them up for crispiness, then dunking them in the fryer at one thirty and cooling them in a tray till they’re dunked to order at one eighty and stacked four-storeys high on the plate like a repeating knots-and-crosses board.
But that's then and this is now. It’s the point in your shift when you run through the menu in your head to think of anything that needs doing.
In the parlance of hotel human relations, you’re checking your mis-en-place. This is a French phrase often cited in lengthy job adverts which has the effect of making your potential place of employment seem overly bureaucratic – alerting you to the possibility the management would be tedious and wanky to you about things that didn’t matter while you were in the middle of doing something that did. In contrast to, to take a random example, stating proudly by the third paragraph that all members of staff have full access to the swimming pool.
The literal translation of mis-en-place is put-in-place, and the translation of this translation is putting the menu ingredients wherever’s most practical. So eggs in coffee cups - good, having the oven trays next to black pudding - good, and taking the smoked salmon out of the fridge – also good. You take the smoked salmon and the ham containers out of the fridge and remove their lids. They’re both fine. You restocked them yesterday.
The next thing you need to do is prepare the garnish. It'll sit on the unlit secondary shelf for the next three hours.
So you segment up a couple of lemons, pick some sprigs of parsley, and get a punnet of blueberries from the fridge. Punnet. You move the honey and maple syrup bottles down from the dusty shelf, feeling that the maple syrup one is light. The top is crystallised. It's nearly finished. You turn it upside down and get a new one, along with a carton of hollandaise sauce, from the dry store.
You devote some seconds in appreciation of all of those who have contributed to the on-going policy that the hotel’s hollandaise sauce should be bought-in rather than made from scratch. You thank them. You’re at one with their wise concluding that there’s an insignificant taste difference between the two, and you praise their admirable empathy with the chefs of breakfast past present and future in removing the requirement to, every morning, not only fanny about pouring already clarified butter into already separated out egg yolks over steaming water in a metal very heat-conductible bowl before whisking vigorously for five minutes, but also, when, as sometimes happens, the sauce reverts to a grainy scrambled egg form, to fanny around once again, pouring the already clarified butter into the already separated out egg yolks over steaming water in the metal very heat-conductible bowl before whisking vigorously for five minutes, but this time with the checks on the board increasing and the restaurant manager giving you shit.
The French waiter's brought you a coffee. He puts it under the lights, says he has two questions, and politely asks that you draw the distinction between a traditional breakfast, an all-day breakfast and a fry-up, and between the traditional breakfasts of different countries.
You open the hollandaise, pour half of it into a small pot, and rest it on a medium heat as you conjure a reply that what a hotel calls a traditional breakfast is called an all-day breakfast in a pub, and a fry-up in a cafe. You tell him all-day breakfasts will have beans, and fry-ups might have chips too.
In answer to his second question, you reply that he won’t find any breakfast haggis in traditional breakfast lands, nor potato scones – and you take a quick tangent to add that you know the hotel isn’t currently serving potato scones and that perhaps they should be – it’s potato and flour so it’s a bit heavier than hash browns, and less suitable for a breakfast chef to snack on, but it’s very tasty.
You pause to think, then tell him that outwith Scotland, the sausages will all be the link variety. And that there could be additional breads served as well as toast – for example in Ireland they like soda bread, and in the southern counties of England, poppadoms.
You’re about to add Welsh laver bread to your list of breads, but you’re suddenly privy to the information that laver bread isn’t actually bread – fascinatingly, it’s seaweed that’s set in a terrine shape. It’s only called bread because it’s bread shaped. And it’s served with cockles. Wow. That’s wild. You’re astonished.
The local waitress arrives, and gives a cigarette to the French waiter.
You pour the hollandaise sauce into a metal jug which you put under the lights, and you leave the pot next to the dishwasher. You collect your coffee, then exit the kitchen to stand in the gravel car park with the waiting staff as they smoke.
The French waiter believes France have a chance of winning the World Cup of Rugby. You know nothing of the tournament, and, again, you’re scathing of the sport. It’s not democratic like football, you say, but the French waiter doesn’t know what you mean. You say, well, it seems to be a very institutional sport - it’s something people in institutions pretend to like but, come on – surely no one actually does.
The local waitress and the French waiter both remain silent, and you embark on a ramble inspired by the memory of playing with a leather football in a lane, taking turns to kick it against a green garage door from increasingly acute angles, and then graduating through a prised up loose plank in a wooden perimeter fence to community games behind one of the nearby rugby pitches, where the ground was flat and the grass short. You tell them the games were played after school and after dinner with peers from all over the neighbourhood - that you used jumpers or tracky tops as goalposts, and that there was a fair bit of skill involved. You could do twenty-five keepie-uppies, and eventually two hundred.
You tell them that sometimes, when it was raining and you weren't playing, you heard troops of older kids or adults clickity-click-clicking along the street in approach to the open gate they passed through like farmyard animals to churn up the pitch with their chasing and grunting, and when they’d finished and the rain was off, you found you could only play golf there by unplugging your ball from the mud, cleaning it, and positioning it on a tuft of grass, if you could find one.
Nothig’s said, and you then fill the silence by saying you’re thinking of buying a camera and going to a regional tourist destination with it this Sunday. The local waitress says oh the receptionist went there recently. You ask her if there are any buses on Sundays. She says she’s not sure, but she’ll get back to you.
The French waiter asks a question to which the initial answer is Debenhams, and the follow-up comment yeah that’s yer best bet.
You leave to return to your room. You lie down with your eyes closed and laugh to yourself, remembering the time your friend hit his best golf shot ever. The name of the game was to hit the ball between and under the rugby posts for a point, and between and over the posts for three points. The clubs you used were seven and nine irons, and maybe your friend hit a seven when it should have been a nine, but neither he nor anyone else was expecting the strike - a perfect connection that lifted the ball off the ground for the first time and flighted it over the rugby posts and over the fence out of the field completely into the adjacent fire station car park where it smacked BANG onto the bonnet of a car belonging to a man standing talking to someone, and as the guy inspected the two-thirds of a golf ball shaped dent, his confusion gave way to anger, his face turned red-purple which you’d never seen before – you thought it only happened in the Beano - and your friend, oblivious to this, and thinking only of the scarcity of golf balls in his bag, confidently shouted down to the fire station car park, asking if he could have his ball back please. You couldn’t stop laughing.
You laugh some more as you stand up and pick up your phone with no texts. You walk down the slope to the kitchen again, plug it into the socket next to the fryer, and stretch it a cable length away. You dunk three hash browns. With everything to do done, it’s a case of waiting for the hotel patrons, and you’ve been encouraged, in such situations, to get on with something.
Arrival times for breakfast aren't given in advance as they are for breakfast. That the first guests have arrived in the dining room is a status update that will be relayed by the waiting staff before they bring the first check.
The transmission mechanism for the notification will either be a barbaric printing machine which cuts across your music, or a piece of paper torn from a notepad. You're glad it's the latter, and you've made sure you can read and understand the shorthand of all the front of house staff.
Tables at breakfast tend to be twos or fours, and you can equate the maximum number arriving with the number of guests in the hotel. Unless you get people tottering in from the street that is. These unwelcome street people are known as walk-ins, and their number will depend on how remote the street is.
And while wilderness levels of remoteness might be deemed sound as far as the predictability of patrons goes, being distanced from basic activity like pub going and gym going will force innovations like the purchasing of plastic encased stone weights from gumtree, the collective ordering of a car boot fill of beer, and, at the weekend, if you're on a split shift, a frantic search for football streaming websites as you sit in your hoodie in a intermittently two bar wi-fi signal window alcove somewhere in the hotel, awkwardly saying hello to passing guests and, twenty seconds later, hoping they’ve sufficiently shuffled down the corridor to avoid hearing your loud oh for fuck sake at your frozen laptop screen.
The local waitress briefly enters the kitchen, interrupting your spinach destalking daze to tell you that there's a table of two in, and to let you know that, on Sundays, if you need to go from a to b, you have to go from a to c and then from c to b - so it’s only two buses, but you'll have to wait a while at c, both there and back. She says she’s asked the receptionist to print off the timetable for you.
You’ve spoken to the smiling Polish receptionist before and you anticipate she'll very quickly talk about her cat and scroll you through many, many photos on her smart phone. You also know you’ll be very tempted to try and make her laugh with a double entendre - already you’re considering do you talk to the hotel guests about your pussy, you clearly enjoy stroking your pussy, gosh your pussy looks wet in that one, and don't know if you heard, but your cousin was covering a couple of kitchen porter shifts last week and he was saying that catnip drives your pussy wild for attention.
It would be a gamble, for sure. After all, you’re not working in Grace Brothers Hotel and Spa. And the receptionist will almost certainly not have heard of Mrs Slocombe.
Play it like Mister Worf on Rana Four. Say nice reception, good photos. Thank her for the timetable.
