Hello,
I am sorry I didn't write for some time. I have been working in a very very busy place. The place I have been working in is on the Cheshire, Shropshire border. It was only a pub in a newly renovated grade 1 listed building. This particular building had been featured on Britain's most haunted buildings. It was only open as a pub 4 weeks ago or 4 weeks before I started their. Everything in that building is brand-new including a state of the art kitchen. There is about 10 chefs working in that kitchen, who are very professional. It was a great team to work with. Even so we did anything between 100 and 250 lunches and between 150 and 250 dinners a day. So you can see it is a very busy place. With me been an agency chef, I was working split shift with 2 to 3 hours off in the afternoon. The regular chefs were working all day everyday sometimes from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight.
Even so it was hard work it was of a happy team very supportive to the head chef who was a very hard worker himself. I was very impressed by how the head chef and his team handled the workload. As you can imagine catering for such high numbers in the relative small place is not easy to organise. The amount of food that use to arrive for preparation every morning was over warming. It used to take two people 1 to 2 hours to pack it away. The chefs including myself used to start immediately prepping meets, fish and what ever necessary. We only use to have until 12 o'clock to get ready, after that service would be starting and that without delay. From then on we would be busy until about three o'clock, then business would ease off a little and we would have time to do a bit more preparation. At about 5:30 the evening service use to start until about 10 o'clock.
Unfortunately there's not much to report about this place because it was probably the most normal place I've worked in for some time. Therefore there is not much funny business to report except that I enjoyed working there very much.
I am now working in a village called Bray where Heston Blumenthal has is restaurant called the fat duck which used to be the best restaurant in the word, also the roux brothers have their restaurant in this village, so a very exciting place for chef to be.
Unfortunately I am not working in one of these places, I am working in a nearby hotel which is in a brilliant spot, right on the Thames, at this moment in time we have the Russian Olympic team as guest in the Hotel. Fortunate for them they don't know what the back of house is like……
I will carry on writing maybe tonight after work if not then I promise I will write more tomorrow.
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Sunday, 21 August 2011
This is unbelievable……
If I wouldn't know this is true, I wouldn't believe it myself. But today, we had yet another coach disaster.
This time we knew the coach party was coming. We prepared a special three choice three course menu. When the party arrived, keeping in mind that it was a coach party of 59 people we just finalised a preparation. The chicken went in the oven approximately 20 min before the party was supposed to sit down for dinner. Shortly after that we found out that the operators have booked a standard no choice three course dinner. Now that wasn't what we were prepared for, therefore didn't have 59 dishes of one choice ready and that by now after lengthy discussions who’s fault it was, 10 min before sit down. As chefs always have to turned into mediations we managed to quickly prepare and cook more chicken. Of course because of that we had to cope with all the leftovers from the other two choices, speak 35 fanned Mellon left over approximately 20 chicken liver parfaits left over, approximately 20 portions of fish leftover and approximately 15 portions of vegetarian. That means our kitchen profit is now sitting in the fridge of course.
This is the second day running that these disasters have happened it shouldn't happen once, but twice? Heads should roll, somebody is not doing their job properly. But nobody seems to care. I can't help but feel a little sorry for the owners of this hotel, but at the end of the day the overall responsibility lies with them, they obviously haven't employed the right people to run the hotel on their behalf.
Since I am now busy, trying to sell leftovers, I will try and write more tomorrow,
see you then Dirk
This time we knew the coach party was coming. We prepared a special three choice three course menu. When the party arrived, keeping in mind that it was a coach party of 59 people we just finalised a preparation. The chicken went in the oven approximately 20 min before the party was supposed to sit down for dinner. Shortly after that we found out that the operators have booked a standard no choice three course dinner. Now that wasn't what we were prepared for, therefore didn't have 59 dishes of one choice ready and that by now after lengthy discussions who’s fault it was, 10 min before sit down. As chefs always have to turned into mediations we managed to quickly prepare and cook more chicken. Of course because of that we had to cope with all the leftovers from the other two choices, speak 35 fanned Mellon left over approximately 20 chicken liver parfaits left over, approximately 20 portions of fish leftover and approximately 15 portions of vegetarian. That means our kitchen profit is now sitting in the fridge of course.
This is the second day running that these disasters have happened it shouldn't happen once, but twice? Heads should roll, somebody is not doing their job properly. But nobody seems to care. I can't help but feel a little sorry for the owners of this hotel, but at the end of the day the overall responsibility lies with them, they obviously haven't employed the right people to run the hotel on their behalf.
Since I am now busy, trying to sell leftovers, I will try and write more tomorrow,
see you then Dirk
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