**to avoid personal drivel, please scroll down to the next set of : ******* First of all, a little intro. I've been going through a little - I don't know what to call it - writer's block? Lack of ideas/inspiration? Midlife crisis? I'm not sure but lately my brain just hasn't been coming up with any food-related ideas. In the last 4+ years, this has rarely been a problem for me so I started freaking out and then decided to take the advice of a friend and just write about things which came more easily (easier? see, everything's hard).
I have decided to blame my new job for this lack of inspiration. They are always plying me with yummy things to eat and so for the past month I haven't had to think of what to eat on my own. At any rate, I thought I would document some stories from my life as a server while I wait for food-related inspiration to come back. Hopefully it won't be too long...
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I probably got into the restaurant business a little too early for my own good. The thought had really never even occurred to me until I was a sophomore in college and my well-meaning friend Liz suggested I join her at her job in an old school fine-dining restaurant somewhere in the Virginia countryside.
My first day there, marveling at things I had never heard of like foie gras torchon and crabmeat imperial, the other waitresses warning me how evil the chef was, trying to remember my high school french well enough to decipher the labels on bottles of wine, I thought I was just supplementing my meager student loans enough to keep myself in combat boots and manic panic all the while learning how to write the great American Novel or become Poet Laureate.
If you would have told me I would still be a waitress at 30, well, maybe I would have taken my Critical Theory professor's offer of a letter to a friend at Berkeley. But instead I was making enough money that when I finally got my degree I could see no reason to ever sit through another Shakespeare class.
It became something which would define me more than my education. So began a lifetime of yelling at and being yelled at by chefs, of learning to flip the bird at half a second's notice, of never going to bed before 2am, of learning to swear like a sailor, drink grown boys under the table, antagonize arrogant sous chefs, and engage in the practice of quitting smoking and taking it back up again on a regular basis. It solidified my future as a lifelong slacker who could spend 10 hours a day playing Guitar Hero and live for weeks on nothing but caffeine and beer.
I don't possess the math skills to calculate how many pieces of flatware I've polished in my lifetime, but I remember the first time I ever stood around a dishtank polishing endless flats of silverware with white kitchen aprons, because it was at that moment I ever had my first crush on a line cook. His name was Jason; he was tall and skinny (the top 2 requirements for any boyfriend of mine at the time) and half Korean with long black hair that always hung in his eyes and he looked exactly like James Iha from the Smashing Pumpkins. He had a penchant for wearing his full-length pajamas underneath his clothes even in the summertime. I didn't realize he had a crush on me until Liz pointed out that polishing the silverware with me was absolutely not one of his duties as saucier.
I thought old-school checked chefs pants were the hottest piece of clothing I had ever seen on a boy.
Jason's life was amazingly unencumbered. He had skipped out on college altogether and even though he was a year younger than me, he had a "career" and had been everywhere. Every few months he would take off to Savannah or Charleston or Atlanta and do a stage in some amazing kitchen where he spent hours creating tiny garnishes for restaurants where the kitchen staff outnumbered the dining patrons.
He would come back from these kitchen adventures and call me up and we would sit in the restaurant bar and he would tell me all about the dishes he created and the things he had learned, the chefs he had worked for, the famous people he had cooked for.
Aside from my lifelong infatuation for kitchen boys, it was at this funny old restaurant where I started to develop what would later turn into my passion for food. It was where I learned to love spaetzle, where I tried my first 50 stunningly delicious Austrian pastries, where I first filleted a trout tableside, and learned to decant wine, where I had my first Irish Mist (I was 19, give me a break), where I tried my first Bombay Sapphire martini (which I hated), where I learned that there was real crab and krab stick, where I had my first glass of red Burgundy. Where I learned how to bleach and strach a white shirt within an inch of its life, where I learned to be nice no matter how I felt, how to properly structure an argument with an egomaniac, how to be bribed by line cooks to keep them out of trouble when they did something wrong, and how to ply them with beer to get my way. It was where I learned how to make perfectly dainty salads for ladies who lunched, with seeded cucumbers and grapes cut into halves.
And it's where I learned that every once in awhile, you just need to sit in the walkin and eat some chocolate buttercream for a few seconds. If there happens to be some duck confit in there, well, it's a bonus.
