The service entrance at Splendido (click any image for more info)
Our regular contributor Renée Suen was recently invited to put away her fork and don an apron to stage at Splendido (a culinary stage is a brief and usually unpaid educational stint at a restaurant). Renée is an ambitious home cook, but her professional experience consists mostly of high school summers working at a soup and sandwich shop and weekends slinging bubble tea during university. Can she handle the heat of 12 hours in a professional kitchen? Will chef de cuisine Patrick Kriss make her cry? Find out below, and check out our behind-the-scenes gallery at the end.
12:23 a.m. (the night before): Chef Kriss messages me to make sure I’m still game. I send my confirmation and tell him about my borrowed (but new!) slip-resistant shoes, which are a half-size too big for me. He laughs at me.
10:55 a.m.: I arrive at Splendido’s service entrance and recognize Kevin Jeung (who moonlights at The Cookbook Store) among the eight cooks waiting nearby. I learn the names of my soon-to-be colleagues (including Vanessa, a new intern from Humber College, and Alain, one of the chefs de partie). I also learn that there’s a stagiaire from The County General, Splendido’s sister restaurant, who was accepted to stage on the condition that he shave his beard of five years. He did.
11:08 a.m: Kriss arrives and I follow the chefs into the bowels of Splendido’s two-level kitchen. Everyone puts on their chef’s whites and gets busy at their stations; I feel like a lost sheep. Kriss sets me up with garde-mangers Andrew and Rob, who give me the glamorous job of taking fresh herbs and packaging them for proper storage.
11:40 a.m.: My herb-picking instructions: pick out the best leaves, leaving about six millimetres of stem, then gently wash and dry them and pack them for storage.
12:02 p.m.: The entire brigade congregates at the bar for a brief (I stick to the side). Everyone’s equipped with a notebook, a pen and plastic containers of coffee. Kriss goes through the game plan for the day, the special menus planned for the week and the upcoming TBD dinner he’s hosting. Staff members acknowledge their duties with a respectful “Oui.”
12:21 p.m.: Rob comes by and tells me that stems aren’t necessary on the mint leaves. I have to go back through all my leaves to pick the stems off. At least I haven’t burned anything down yet. Meanwhile, Kriss works on some brussels sprouts taken from the garde-manger station and inspects the deliveries coming into the kitchen. He also tests out a new dish of cold cherrywood-smoked oysters.
1:31 p.m.: I’m now on my last batch of herbs, blue cress. I’m a little nervous about the low yield. Kriss looks over at my station and tells me my cress leaves aren’t blue enough. Sigh.
People who say that staging is equivalent to other internships in other fields having never worked let alone staged in a professional kitchen. Staging could be a 12 hour shift or it could be as long as a few months, it could be menial commis work such as picking herbs or dicing shallots, or it could be actually working the line or at a station. People watch too much television, and think they can fully understand something without every actually experiencing it. Now to be fair to Renee, she is not a professional cook , and she claims throughout the piece that this career path is difficult and not for everyone. The stagiere itslef was not to different from most stages I myself have been on and honestly , minus the staff knowing she was their for TL, it was pretty close to what a true stage is. You work for free, try not to screw up and stay out of the way of people trying to do their jobs. I hope Renee does other stages throughout other Toronto kitchens and some of the younger , unknown cooks who work 10-12 hour shifts can get some love and exposure they deserve .
February 4, 2012 at 1:06 pm | by DanielFrom A young chef
To DJN and Kristina Groeger.
Chill out. Why do cooks always have to be so self-righteous and rude? It makes our profession look like it is inhabited by a bunch of egocentric brutes.
What restaurants have you worked or staiged at? It seems like they were not good places to work. For one, they apparently taught you that writing unfairly critical posts on an article that was POSITIVELY highlighting our line of work was a good idea.
As for the specifics of what you both said about your experiences with the restaurant industry, please, if you will, let me go over why you guys have either not worked enough, or not been in the right places.
First, you can talk casually and joke around with your chefs if you are in a healthy work environment. The fact that you think you cannot, leads me to believe that you watch too much Gordon Ramsay. I spent the last year and half as a chef de partie at a One Michelin star restaurant in Denmark and trust me….I was never once yelled at or never once felt like I couldn’t have a good time with the head Chef. And that has been my experience in almost every restaurant I have worked at. Full stop.
Second, staiging is abusive and hard? As compared to what? Where else do you have the opportunity to learn for free? How many aspiring basketball players do you know can just email the head coach of an NBA team and practice with them for a few weeks or a few months?
Yet, that is exactly what we are able to do as cooks. We can send an email to some of the best restaurants in the country or world and, without so much as an interview, their chefs will take you to help in their kitchens. Be grateful for this.
Any staige who says their time at a good restaurant is boring, tiring or that “they aren’t learning anything” is a crap cook. They either can’t observe while doing prep or they are so bad at doing their jobs that the chefs don’t give them anything interesting to do because they can’t trust them.
Third, the chefs you staiged for didn’t let you taste the food that came out of their kitchen? WHAT???? Seriously, where have you been working? My first two staiges in Denmark I got the ENTIRE tasting menu sent to me while I was prepping. The same can be said when I staiged in Vancouver. My last staige in Toronto in December, they gave me one dish of my choosing every day, for a month. One of the major points of staiging is to see how the things you are doing throughout the day effect the final dish that goes out to the customer. Either the chefs you were with didn’t like you, didn’t think you did a good job or genuinely did not give a crap about you.
Fourth, who cares if you can’t pay rent? Why does that make cooks so special? There are plenty of solutions to that problem: how about going to staige at the many, many, many fine restaurants that can be found in the countryside and offer room and board for their staigers (you can find tons in the States and Europe, I am sure the plane ticket would be cheaper than trying to make rent month after month working your “slave” job).
Or maybe you can cut down on the binge drinking and drug indulgence and cigarettes that are perennial black holes for cooks’ pay cheques. That will save you tons of money too. Or maybe you don’t really need that tv you just bought or maybe that 3G crap on our iPhone wasn’t that necessary, or maybe…aw, well, you get the point. There are always ways to get you through the month if you really want it to happen.
And further, where were you an apprentice, by the way? Canada I am assuming. We don’t even have a well-established culture of apprenticeship here. You go to school for 6 months, a year or two years max. That is nothing. Try going to Europe where you have to work as an apprentice for one quarter of minimum wage for four years before you can be hired as a chef. If you can’t get money together for a two year stint at school, you should learn basic accounting, not go on about how tough life as an apprentice is.
Sorry for this long post, but holy god in heaven I hate it when cooks make our profession look bad.
For new cooks starting I would have this to say: be humble. Travel and learn as much as you can. Treat your craft with professionalism and dignity. But always remember that being a cook doesn’t mean you have to have a big-ass chip on your shoulder.
NAMASTE BITCHES
February 5, 2012 at 4:16 am | by HPC