| Serving the | Ivy Knight's Staff Meals, Toronto: October 2006, Gremolata Number 98. |
Home * More (Archives + Search) * Contact * Subscribe (it's free) * About Us * Wine Agents * Gremoblog | ||
    | Loves and Fishes
The first time I met Malcolm Jolley we had beers on the patio at the Beaconsfield and talked about various story ideas that I might write about. One of the things I suggested was a piece explaining staff meals. He thought that people would be interested to know what a restaurant employee eats. They are not usually eating the same things that you are ordering as a customer. In some places employees can order off the menu at a reduced price, in a high-end restaurant this isn’t really feasible. You can’t have busboys ordering something like foie gras torchon. Torchon doesn’t whip up in a few minutes, it’s a lot of prep, the ingredients are expensive and with the labour cost factored in it’s definitely not something you want to be selling at a reduced price. Most high-end joints have a staff meal either before or after service which the cooks throw together with leftovers, cheap filling ingredients and no small amount of resentment. Scenario #1, the pre-service staff meal: Scenario #2, the post-service staff meal: Just to throw a few wrenches into the works, the hostess is one of those “vegetarians” who eats lobster and caviar and because she’s hot as hell she gets whatever she wants. There are also real vegetarians and vegans to be considered, people who can’t have pork for religious reasons, people with lactose intolerance, shellfish allergies and so on. Every cook has his or her favourite thing to do at work, for me it’s making staff meal. If I could just travel around to restaurants just making staff meals I would be thrilled. It is my favourite part of this job, I’m not joking. I love cooking for the only people that are important to me in the restaurant. I care about the customers to the extent that I want them to be happy with whatever they order, but I really care about the staff, the people I work with day in and day out, who drive me insane but who make this crazy, hectic work fun. We’re marching into hell together every night, I want to make sure they are ready and let them know that I respect and value them. I love using up scraps and leftovers and turning them into something people can enjoy. I never do this at home, I hate eating leftovers in my own kitchen but it’s different at work. When you’re in your chef whites you don’t want anything to go to waste. A wilted head of lettuce is money, overcooked rice is money, it has to be put to use, so if it can be fixed up and made edible then it is. This allows you to get creative something that is not always encouraged or allowed. When you are low on the totem pole the chef doesn’t give a shit about your idea for a sauce for the pheasant, the only chance you have of cooking anything out of your own head is by making the staff meal. So, you mix the overcooked rice with eggs and veggies, egg wash it, dredge in breadcrumbs and throw it in the deep fryer to make some “Fiesta Rice Balls” (any thing that I mush up into a ball, coat with breadcrumbs and throw in the deep-fryer I call Fiesta to excite the staff: Fiesta Potato Balls! Fiesta Yam Balls! People love it.) you puree the lettuce into a soup then lay it before the crew. Every restaurant treats staff meal differently, some charge the staff for it, but usually only the front of house (the only place I know of that charges the kitchen crew is Oliver Bonacini) the idea being that the money goes toward providing the cooks with decent food to work with. That’s the idea…. right. Meanwhile the extra money those skin flints extort out of their half-starved, underpaid, pathetic slaves goes towards tax write off weekends at Club Hedonism. Some charge nothing and expect you to do the miracle of the loaves and fishes every night with leftover mashed potatoes and pasta. The worst though are the restaurants that do both, charge the staff and give you nothing to feed them with. In my experience the bigger and richer a restaurant is the cheaper and Scrooge-ier they are with their staff. When I worked at Mildred Pierce each member of the crew took a turn doing staff meal throughout the week. Our chef, Segar Kulasegarumpillai, would order stuff in for staff meal and not just dry pasta, he’d order in chicken, pork, fish, he wouldn’t get anything expensive, just real food to work with. It makes your job so much easier when you don’t have to come up with the Fiesta technique (patent-pending) with the pathetic scraps you’re given. I had no idea how rare Segar’s approach was until I had worked my way through a few more establishments. The norm is heavy on the starch, some vegetables and light to zero on the protein. There’s always leftover mashed potatoes and pasta kicking around, chop up some veg for a stir-fry and stretch one well-done, tough as leather steak by chopping it into the stir-fry. Now serve to fifteen to twenty people who all want meat, except the hostess who’s being fed lobster tails by a drooling manager who’s dripping butter all over her heaving bazoombas (the spell check suggested “biomass” when it saw that word, I guess that would kind of work), and see what happens. One or two servers, always guys (women never get so pricky around food) will dig through the vegetables until they’ve found every last microscopic bit of leather steak and leave the now ‘vegetarian’ repast for the rest of the staff who will grumble and complain as if the cooks had any choice in what’s on offer. I’d love to have unlimited protein to use for staff meal. It’s a lot easier to grill off a bunch of chicken breasts and serve them with a salad than to boil pasta (if you can find a free burner for your huge pot of water when everyone is desperately trying to get ready for service), make a pasta sauce and break down a bunch of veg, when you have hardly any time to commit to this meal in the first place. The servers and bussers are the people who are most obsessed with staff meal. The managers can order off the menu whenever they want, the dishwashers can walk up to any cook and ask for food and they’ll be fed, the cooks of course can whip something up for themselves if they are hungry, but the servers and bussers have nothing. The only food they can access during a shift is bread and butter, so they come into work half-dead with starvation fall on the staff meal like zombies on a hot sixteen year old blonde with a twisted ankle, and that has to get them through until the end of the night. I asked a bunch of servers to tell me about their best and worst staff meal experiences, and changed their names to protect their identities from their employers. Ruby the Rooster told me about two very different staff meal experiences at Jump: “One time about three years ago between Thanksgiving and Christmas I had one of the best meals, let alone staff meals ever. Barry Serrao was our sous-chef at the time and he cooked up a feast. We had bacon-wrapped rosemary chicken, mashed sweet potatoes, peas with mushrooms and pearl onions, glazed baby carrots, Caesar salad and perogies. There was also a chocolate cake for dessert. That would be the best, although a morning of sausages and breakfast burritos comes to mind also, and the day we had blueberry pancakes, fresh fruit and blueberry butter. Sounds like they feeds us pretty good? Just for perspective: Wednesday night’s meal consisted of fettucini noodles tossed with whole baby red potatoes (not meatballs as I had thought at first) in barely any tomato sauce. A beef chili from Tuesday’s staff meal was reheated under a thick layer of mash to become shepherd’s pie. Potato salad with fennel in Thousand Island dressing and a platter of mashed potatoes. But, to be honest, I’m just glad I get fed and won’t starve during service.” I’ve known Legs Diamond since I moved to Toronto, she’s an excellent server at a place that consistently rates in top ten lists: “I think the worst staff meal I ever has was a pasta (Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!) made with the leftover vegetables from the stock (no nutritional value or flavour) pureed with olive oil (or perhaps it was veg. oil, I’d even venture to say they used oil from the deep fryer but that could be stretching it a touch). It was vile, putrid, disrespectful, mean-spirited and super cheap.” Petit Lapin, luckily, has had some great experiences with staff meals while working at Batifole and Mildred Pierce: “My favourite was a gorgeous cassoulet that Jean Jacques Texier prepared at Batifole. It was decadent and rich and unctuous with seared duck breast and lamb sausage. He opened a beautiful bottle of red and then brought out some cheeses to finish. In retrospect, way too much for 1:00 in the morning, but my dish was licked clean and I uttered no word of complaint. I also enjoyed staff meal after brunch at Mildred Pierce. All my favourite kinds of food: pancakes, eggs, potatoes, salsa, bacon, ham, etc. My worst staff meal is not getting a staff meal which is a real pisser.” Olga Brunhilde has been serving in restaurants around Toronto for quite some time and hasn’t been so lucky with the after-brunch staff meal at the bistro she now works at, which would sit under the heat lamps for hours: “The worst was the brunch ‘trough’, as everyone called it. F***ing dried up botulism eggs and salmonella sausages. After running your ass off starving while you race to get everyone’s overly detailed, unnecessary, pretentious fucking asshole egg order in, then you get to eat shit and die. The best: the chef made us fish once. Holy f**k.” It embarrasses me to read some of these responses, these are people I’ve worked with, they are awesome people who do their jobs well and who I’m lucky to know. To think that someone would feed someone else what Legs Diamond and Olga have described makes me sick. Guadalupe and I worked together at one restaurant where the chef/owner, who I’ll call Barf, didn’t want to provide a staff meal at all. While I was there I made sure everyone ate before service to ensure they had the strength to get through Barf’s constant barrage of racial slurs, sexist comments and general screaming abuse, on my days off they starved. Then I quit and things went to hell. Barf was a big, fat, loud, ugly, disgusting piece of shit. They say never trust a skinny chef, I completely disagree. I say never trust a fat chef because they’ll shove anything into their mouth, and they don’t differentiate or discriminate between fast food, slow food or Hungry Man dinners. Barf would sneak out during prep time and go stuff himself with burgers and fries then come back and get out of his car with special sauce all over his face and greasy napkins and MacDonald’s wrappers fluttering around him. He refused to give his staff anything to eat, even when they offered to pay for it. They ate anyway, whatever they could get their hands on because they were hungry and they were mad and they had access to the fridge where all the expensive cheeses were kept. F**k you Barf, you got what you deserved. Still, Guadalupe has a few good things to say about the staff meal, “Sitting down at a table with food lends itself to conversation and resolving issues, it’s civilized and good for business. God forbid the owners and managers sat with their staff and ate the same thing, they might actually realize a few things about that night’s service. Don’t charge your staff for food they haven’t ordered or eaten. A plate of starch is not food, it is filler. Feed your staff, treat them like human beings.” I think that says it all. ____________________________________________ |  | |
| When not writing about food for eGullet and Gremolata or pillow fighting as 'Vic Payback', Ivy Knight works for a living as a cook in Toronto. READ MORE IVY AT GREMOLATA: Why Would You Do This? Ivy wonders why anyone would work in a kitchen. Quebec City Here I Come: Ivy mange tout! Sketch: Ivy visits a unique program for street kids Island Heat: Ivy eats her way through Caribana Sausage Party: Ivy discovers Berkshire pork Fill My Bowl: Ivy attends a gourmet fundraiser Brunch Bites: Ivy does not like brunch Apple of the Earth: Ivy makes potato salad Email Ivy at ladyslenderlegs@gmail.com
| ||
| |||
