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Real Cookin' and Serious Dough
Restaurant work doesn't have to be a dead-end gig. A delicious new trend has star chefs becoming moguls — and cooking up some tasty take-home pay in the process. Gabrielle Mullem recounts her days of hard work in the kitchen and chats with a panel of well-known gourmets about what it takes to cash in on America's culinary craze.
Lately, I've been noticing that I don't eat so well during my work week. At such times. I fondly recall the days before I became a pizza eatin', take-out grabbin', cup of soup swillin' editor. The days when I used to fan tender green asparagus, confit duck with garlic and fresh thyme, and make canals of eggplant caviar and Mediterranean tapenade. In those days, I was known by another name; I was known as... Salad Girl.
Actually, I was a garde-manger girl — garde-manger being the title (derived from Escoffier's "kitchen brigade" system) for a person who, in the course of managing the pantry, makes salads. If that sounds more Greek than French to you, suffice it to say that a garde-manger is a person who prepares salads that cost more than seven dollars — and don't ever come in a huge, crispy corn tortilla. It was a good life for a while, but the way of a salad girl, or salad person, is not as carefree and romantic as you might imagine — frou-frou title notwithstanding.
A typical shift might go something like this: After several hours of prep work spent picking, sorting, washing, drying, and again picking over eight different types of lettuce (a very "Zen" exercise, my sous-chef enthused), I would look up and take in my surroundings: at the grill, the lunch chef gesticulating to one of the waiters about a favorite waitress; my pantry partner hiding his burnt tray of croutons under the vegetable scraps in the garbage; the guy on the back prep table stuffing quail and making jokes about the questionable nature of the dishwasher's heterosexuality. Suddenly a quiet tension would work its way through the kitchen — the executive chef was amongst us. Everyone became serious and just a wee bit paranoid. After several minutes of this, a small, hollow, screechy sound would hit our ears. The first order for lunch service coming out of the ticket printer. It was on!
(On a really great day somebody would call out, "Time to Rock 'n' Roll" — and really mean it. It almost made you feel sexy in a fighter pilot kinda way.)
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