![]() ![]() “We’ll take care of it.” That was the last time I set foot in a professional kitchen. One of the cooks handed me a Bud Light, and I dropped it. ![]() At the end of the shift, I was shaking and trying not to cry as I cleaned up. They eventually had to jump in and help me, and, needless to say, they were not happy about it. Orders piled up, and the cooks screamed at me in Spanish. The low point came during Restaurant Week, when Mesa did about 500 covers (meaning it served 500 people instead of the usual 300). I kept wondering when I would start liking it. ![]() I found the kitchen cramped and hot, and the game of bumper cars we played while wielding knives in the tiny space wreaked havoc on my body, not to mention my mental state. Sorry, Emeril!) I met Bobby Flay, and he hooked me up with an internship at his original NYC restaurant, Mesa Grill. (Except for that time I forgot to plug in the food processor. I was successful in the prep kitchen, because I could follow a recipe by this point. When it came time for our required internships, I headed to New York City to work at the Food Network. But I made a few friends, and little victories kept me going. Vinaigrettes tasted overwhelmingly of raisins (no idea why). I couldn’t grill a chicken breast without drying it out. Sadly, though, I was still an awful cook. I bought eggs by the dozen and spent nights poaching them and whisking batches of hollandaise sauce. I learned more each day than I could process, and each night I would walk up the hill to the market to buy handfuls of potatoes and a bundle of carrots to tourne while watching Iron Chef. But with no kitchen experience, I knew I didn’t have the knowledge base to write about food. I had become obsessed with restaurants, chefs, recipes, ingredients-anything food-related. The truth was, I was dying to write about food. Going to culinary school had surprised just about everyone I knew, because they had never seen me do much more than melt Velveeta in 24 years. In 2004, I graduated from the California Culinary Academy, in San Francisco. The whole thing was my idea, springing from my previous experience in a professional kitchen-which had been nothing short of a culinary disaster. This piece of fish remained rare in the middle no matter how long I left it in the oven, and chef Rathbun stood over me screaming, “I need the SEA BASS!!” I had a recurring nightmare about cooking fish. For two months I anticipated my kitchen time with a mixture of dread and more dread. Mine is only two days long, and it is at Abacus, Kent Rathbun’s ballyhooed restaurant on McKinney Avenue. Cooks and chefs might do a stage for a few nights at a restaurant to gain experience or try to get hired. A stage is essentially a French term for an internship. It’s the second night of my first stage, and I am as scared as a Pentecostal teen on her wedding night. If not, we’ll both be in trouble!” He smiles, slaps me on the back, and walks away. Loose means the sauce is close to breaking-the culinary equivalent of a fourth-quarter goal-line fumble. Omar, one of the chefs, dips in a spoon and stirs my sunflower-colored creation. I allow myself to exhale for half a second. Finally, the butter is in, and from what I can tell, the sauce is holding together. With a cramping wrist and beads of sweat forming on my upper lip, I furiously whisk chunks of butter, willing them to emulsify with the champagne vinegar and herb mixture before me. ![]()
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