February 05, 2006
Chez Panisse Café
At the end of December 2005, I graduated from The French Culinary Institute's Culinary Arts program. Shortly after I ventured out to California to try out for a position with Chez Panisse Café in Berkeley, California. In the first week I was there,I began to despair over just how little a culinary program could prepare one for working in a professional kitchen, especially as short a program as the one I completed, 9 months. I didn't get the job. Yet the chefs offered me a chance to come back for a short 3 week internship as they liked me and wanted to work more with me.
I just finished my second week working at the Café (first of the 3 week internship) and I still haven't lost my respect for the way they run the restaurant. Each day my admiration and appreciation for the way they run things there increases. Also, I've learned to put my education at the FCI into perspective. I think it did give me just enough to jump start my abilities in a professional kitchen and not be a complete nuisance. However, I feel working for free for a period of months could do the same.
The standard internship at Chez Panisse, or Chez Panisse Café is usually 6 months. I'm sort of filling a gap between interns. I can say one thing, its worth every dollar I'm spending to be here and working with them. I wish I'd been experienced enough to get a job here as it is probably the best choice of kitchens to work. Everyone that works there is deadly serious about food, cooking and sustainability. Still, it is one of the smoothest, well-balanced work/life experiences I've ever seen in a professional kitchen.
Mind you, I've a fairly limited experience working in kitchens. I've worked in two fairly small bistros and merely staged in one larger kitchen (not including the school kitchen of L'Ecole of course). Nonetheless, from what I've read over the years, people I've talked to about their experiences, it sounds like the best and most thoughtfully designed restaurant (perhaps workplace) in the United States.
Alice Waters may not be a goddess, and may be put too high on a pedestal by many across the food world, yet judging by the legacy and good works alone she's built here in Berkeley, I would have to say it is a model to be replicated, not ridiculed.
Spend any time in the Chez Panisse kitchen and one learns very quickly, how confidence with ingredients, experience, freshness, and a desire to work sustainably and create wonderful, beautiful and delicious food has created this one spot in the country where a cook can feel at home and delight over every workday.
Undeniably, here in the Bay Area of California, they have the best seasons and the most access to probably the widest variety of fresh, organic, local and sustainably raised or produced foods in the world. But this didn't happen over night. It has taken Alice Waters and the staff of Chez Panisse over 30 years to build their reputation, their network of local farmers and producers and spread the word of why we should all think about these things and work in a more sustainable and thoughtful way and more to the point, why it works so well.
I can't help but be thankful for the experience, however short, working here in the Chez Panisse kitchen. Everyone that works there, is knowledgeable and adds something unique to the kitchen repertoire and everyone is given a chance to contribute creatively in some way on a daily (I would dare say hourly) basis. Hands down the best and most challenging kitchen I've worked in.
Just yesterday, it was near the end of the day (actually well past when I was supposed to leave, which is discouraged there but I kept quiet about it so I could do and see more) and I was de-stemming some spinach for dinner service in the cafe (the spinach was later served with paneer made that day by Nikki--for the first time in the kitchen). I was tired, my shoulders hurt and I had strained my neck tripping up the stairs earlier in the day. So, I guess was moving a bit too slow on the spinach. Chef Cal was working across me. When he finished what he was working on, I'm guessing not just to help me out but also to help pick up my pace, he casually started helping me. And just him working there across from me, helped me speed up and remind myself that I could always move faster and find better ways to do things in the kitchen.
Now, for those of you who've never worked in a kitchen, particularly a New York kitchen, this is unique in that in other kitchen's, to try to get you to move faster, you'll either get yelled at to hurry up or be given unsubtle dirty looks. At Chez Panisse, that does not happen, rather than dissuade you by intimidation as I've experience in other kitchens, they actually help you and use more subtle methods, like asking you where you are at and suggesting moving on to something else for now, or doing like Cal and chipping in until you get faster. Leading by example. What a concept.
I wish all kitchens could be as gracious, inspired and thoughtful about the process of cooking, but for now we can still look to Chez Panisse Café and Chez Panisse to shine a light on dark kitchens across the land.
Posted by wayne at 04:22 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
