On my fourth day at the new job, the boss gave me the keys
to the bowels of the Xcel Center and let me go up to the suite level and check
out the status of my restaurant. I call it mine because I am now responsible
for preparing and cooking all of the food at The Reserve, one of several
restaurants within the stadium run by Levy Restaurants.
When I made it upstairs, I opened up the swinging doors to
the kitchen and looked around. Straight ahead, resting on two large steel tables
was enough coffee brewing equipment to caffeinate a thousand people. None of it
had been used recently, and it wouldn’t be used tonight. To the immediate right
of that was a large walk-in cooler used primarily for chilling beer for the
bar. Keep going right and I have made a U-turn from where I entered just
moments ago, and I see my workspace on the left. It’s small, maybe 16X16. As
you walk through the only opening, I see a battered three-compartment
dishwashing sink, two Turbo-Chef ovens, a hot-box on wheels, and a prep counter
with a reach-in cooler underneath, and a cold-well up top. It’s more of an
assembly line than a kitchen, but I have everything I need to put out a plate
that looks like it was freshly prepared.
The real prep is all done two stories below in the enormous
kitchen. We spend eight hours the day before, and four hours the day of an
event to prepare food for 16,000 people. Then we spend roughly four hours
setting up our areas, plating food, then tearing down and cleaning up. So it
takes a lot of work, and we don’t really ever stop moving. Well, I don’t.
The people that I work for seem really happy with what I’m
doing there. Only four shifts in and I can pretty much fly solo, and nobody
needs to check on me and what I’m doing. As I sit here at my normal off day
hangout, Nina’s Coffee Café, I ponder what this opportunity would look like if
I were still under the constant encouragement of drugs and alcohol. Would I have
even sought out this job? Eh, doubtful.
I remember, somehow clearly, going into The Bent Wrench and
Pedal Pusher Café every day with a hangover that could drop and elephant. I was
barely functional, and only mildly coherent. I think of my season at The
Riverside where I had to take a bathroom break every 20 minutes or so to hit
the meth pipe just to keep moving. Or much farther back, my years at Burger
King dropping acid and working 16 hour shifts regularly. (I apologize to
anybody that ate at the B.K. on University and Fry in the mid- ‘90s.) I had
difficulty holding together orders and would have to check, and re-check
tickets almost redundantly. Don’t get me wrong, I was still better than a lot
of people who were self-taught, but wasn’t at my best. And this is really the
first time in my life that I’m seeing what I’m capable of, and it’s not even a
challenge with a clear head. It makes me wonder how much I’m actually capable
of now. What can I do with all of this knowledge I’ve acquired over the years?
Somehow, a lot of what I’ve seen and learned over the ages is still rattling
around up there, and my brain is putting it together nicely for me.
I think the next logical step is to get into a smaller
kitchen setting, something not so large-scale, and see what I can do to help out
with a higher end menu. I look at some menu’s around town, and I’ve seen the
menu for Bleu Duck and I wonder if there's any point in learning about that whole new class of food. I recognize a lot of words they use in their menu's but I don't have a clue how to start any of it from the ground up. That's where a culinary degree would come in handy, but I don't believe it's completely necessary. I believe I have the knowledge necessary to get the fuck out of this laminating job, and at least try to use the rest of my brain for what I think it's meant for; making great food.
I think I smell a New Year's resolution post coming on.
