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turkeybone

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Everything posted by turkeybone

  1. Yeah -- above anything else I'd recommend TWO pairs of comfortable supportive nonskid shoes( so one can air out, hehe).
  2. turkeybone

    About roux

    Ive always done 50/50 by weight, and thats what I was taught in school. I know sometimes chefs would like to do 60/40 flour... but nonetheless, it was always done by weight.
  3. All this Ithaca chatter and no mention of either Maxie's or The Heights?
  4. Yeah, it all depends on where "here" is to each one of us. I mean, at the very least, being understaffed is fine for my wallet, but I don't want to be hourly forever. Also, Im still in my mid 20s so I can take a lickin and keep on tickin, but my girlfriend wont be able to stand seeing me 4 hours a day forever. And yeah, trying to find some good help is tough, real tough up here. My specific co-workers are great, thank god, but thats after we got rid of all the other people -- my kitchen manager whose lunch shift would be 10-whenever i got there, and then she'd sit at the bar and drink. Or the prep monkey who tested burgers doneness by tossing them on the grill and judging their bounce. Getting the dish guys to smoke up only /after/ the rush is an accomplishment. Luckily Ithaca has a strong restaurant/organic/local community, and the chain restaurants aren't as all powerful as Im sure they are in much of the country.
  5. I'm in Aurora. I worked at the Statler a few years ago (chef Hartman era) when I was a student (non-hotelie, though I'm probably going to apply next spring). I just graduated from the CIA this past September, so I was very excited to get a chance to run a kitchen right out of the gate. But now I'm almost literally doing it all myself, as I said. And I'm not competing with other restaurants, its with the Firehouse's charity bbq and spaghetti dinners. As good as the food can be, a half hour is just too far away from Ithaca to be worth driving, especially with all the variety Ithaca has. The most enticing job posting Ive seen is like, $13-$15 to be a lead line cook at Maxie's, and at best I would be just re-creating what has been working for them for almost a decade. So yeah, on the one hand, I like having a lot of control and responsibility, and being able to say "Look, I took this restaurant from total crap to profitable", but it's tough not having anyone really excited about food, either in the dining room or behind the line.
  6. Ugh Im in the same boat now. I'm Upstate NY /trying/ to make some nice things happen with the bar Im running -- ugh already in the few months we turned over the whole kitchen (except me) and got rid of the mediocrity. No more premade stuff, actually having some good food out there. The problem is now, this town is so small, the locals just bitch and moan about the prices that they remember from 20 years ago, and the college kids just want cheap wings. The place is making money now (cut the food cost from 46% to 32% in 2 months), and the busy season is coming, but we can barely find another competent person; I work dinners, my counterpart works lunch, and the uber grand exec himself has to come down and cover our days off. If we could find /a single/ person who had some drive to be not shitty, we'd all get some breathing room. On top of this, the city 25 miles away seems to tempt me with more and more enticing restaurant positions opening, and listening to my friend talk about shadowing at Per Se last night makes me more depressed with every 2oz cup of blue cheese I portion.
  7. I did a guest chef thing with Ming Tsai -- man what a prick. He definitely had an attitude the whole time, including one moment where he told our F&B manager he wanted to take her to his hotel room and show her how "east meets west".
  8. One of my instructors told me back in the day he would frequently batter and deep fry green scrubbies and give them to the waitstaff. Also, and even more fantastic, was the story he told about being a banquet server at this one hotel in Switzerland... in the winter, there would be 4ft of snow on the ground, so during weddings he and the fellow servers would casually throw bottles of champagne out the window.. then go digging in the middle of the night
  9. So what are you cooking that isn't "text book" food?
  10. Koobi Kits were all the rage when I was in school last year: www.koobikit.com But after I got mine (about 60ish) the various zippers and such started breaking. They're really well organized and have a lot of pocket, but I had a lot of extra stuff, too, and the koobi couldn't handle it. Won't the school issue a knife kit to you? Also -- it's funny to see the one upmanship of knife kits at school and the like. There's kids with briefcase, metal "nuclear football" briefcases, tackle boxes, craftsman tool kits.. If I had infinite resources I would have bought a sniper rifle case for my chef knife and nothing else. EDIT: I had an old version of this wusthof case ( http://www.cutleryandmore.com/details.asp?SKU=6331 ) and it served me very well.. a good amount of space and very very sturdy for sure.
  11. Did anyone else notice the side comments and later camera views have been skewed towards the people that get kicked off lately? I kinda noticed it with franks depature.. that they gave him a lot of air time since it was his swan song.. and then I DEFINITELY noticed it with this episode... though I thought I was going to be wrong, but then Mia jumped in and took herself out. Is it just me, or did anyone else seem to notice this too.
  12. I remember one day before school, my mom asked me what kind of sandwich I wanted that day (this was like 3rd grade ish), and I said "eh, either bologna and cheese or peanut butter, I dont know". Cue a few hours later, and Im chomping down on my sandwich, loving it, and then I see that it was peanut butter, bologna, AND cheese... but yeah, I freakin loved it. My girlfriend thinks Im crazy for eating peanut butter and cheese (muenster, cheddar) sandwiches. Am I?
  13. Yeah, Warren is /the/ place for the CIA students, as they sharpen CIA knife kits for free -- and they do a great job. There's "the kitchen drawer" closer in hyde park, and while they get plenty of business too.. there's just something about going to warren that makes it better.
  14. Thanks for all the replies, guys. Your ideas are all great, and have been pretty helpful. I'm going today to hammer out the finalities of the menu I've been working on. I'll snag some pictures today or tomorrow, too, so you can see what I'm workin with. Yeah, the liquor cost is amazingly crazy, I know. We brought someone in to put the smack down (someone that was already kicking around the company, not an outsider).. someone was already let go within a day or two of that, heh. There were plenty of little issues with the booze -- no real inventory, the right prices not being charged, a little MICROS hell trying to even find half the things, all sorts of different sized glasses, oh and of course staff being liberal with the definition of "shift drink". It's funny, as soon as I got out of school, I thought to myself "I can't go back and work at X, the first thing Id want to do is change everything." But instead X calls me and says "hey, Y is in the weeds, we want you to come bail it out". Anyway, the bar/grill across the street doesn't have a website just yet, but the sister restaurant is here: www.aurora-inn.com Luckily, our baker sends us cakes and stuff over, so dessert is a no brainer.. some of the best carrot cake Ive ever had... mmm. Anyway, I'll let you guys know what happens, we're going to present our menu ideas to the big boss sometime this week.
  15. It's about a half hour drive from Ithaca, which is a large college-town with a Hotel school and a very, very active food culture. So, in one way thats good because the interest in food is there, but not so good in that people wont always be willing to drive a half hour for what they have in front of them. The restaurant itself is in another, smaller college town with a small local populace. The seasonal changes are large -- the winter is pretty cold and snowy, and the summers are warm and very pleasant. A fair amount of business comes from tourists traveling the lake, or wine touring, or visting local high-end furniture shops and the like. Across the street at the main restaurant/inn, the prices go from $16 (pot roast) to $38 (surf and turf). Right now the prices over here are about $7 bucks for burgers and most other things.
  16. Hey folks, Well, less than a month out of school, and I've been enlisted at my old restaurant town in the Finger Lakes to save a dying kitchen. This operation owns pretty much all the dining in this small town -- a 10 room lakefront inn, a little pizza dive and my little gorilla, a poorly mismanaged bar with awesomely awesome costs and no sense of self. Things were pretty bad here. We negotiated my wage Friday morning, and my exec said "alright, well, come in Monday, we'll do a walk through, get you settled in, etc etc". An hour later -- "yeah... can you come in right now? The kitchen manager had to take a personal weekend". When I got there, the General Manager was in the dish pit. This was gonna be fun. I fixed a lot in those first few days -- just the general cleanliness of the place was horrible. I think I lost a few years of my life breathing in the carbon that got scraped off the grill (which now doesn't spontaneously combust anymore) and hosed out of the deep fryer. Other things also came along, like not being so darned dependent on the tiny little fryalator, so when you get 4 orders for fish fry, the kitchen goes down. Revenue is up a fair amount, but not so much the profits. I dont even want to talk about the liquor side, which at last /guess/, runs about 50% cost or more. Yeah -- that takes skill. I could go on and on about how I'm trying to turn this little place around, but my attention is now set on the menu, which needs some serious attention and inspiration. We're talking a few different burgers, some wraps, some crappy salads (baby carrots and green peppers is the 'garden salad'). Mostly SYSCO-junk for the fried food.. but at least the fries are hand cut and good.. well once I taught people how to blanch them properly. So... finally, the point. It's fallen on me to develop a new menu. The mitigating factors: Across the street is the small country inn that we also own, so it has to be a bit cheaper and not really in direct competition (though thats from above, competition is always good in my book). There's another "american bistro" a few miles up the road, so it needs to be a little more sophisticated and focused than that place. Also, there's a large population of locals and regulars, so the food needs to be relatively approachable. My mental soundbyte has been "regional american brewpub comfort food". Im sure that means a lot of things to a lot of people, so I'd love to hear what you all think that means. I get a lot of my inspiration from Bradley Ogden's stuff -- that's where I'm coming from. I'd love to do some homemade sausages, beer pairings on the menu -- I dont know if they could handle a beer and cheese plate, but who knows. Ive run bbq with plenty of success, people eat up the coleslaw, mac and cheese, catfish.. a lot of the new england stuff too. Anyway, its pretty obvious I do like to ramble, which is why getting these ideas together in my own head is hard enough as it is! I've been pretty absent from egullet since the CIA sucked up most of my time, but I'd love to come back with presenting one man's quest to turn this dive into a gem.
  17. Just to clarify I do believe Croques are without egg, and Monte Cristo's are.
  18. ps, that last paragraph is a far more interesting discussion that I'll probably hit on once I have some more free time
  19. Well, I'm about to graduate from the CIA, and we are made very well aware as to how important running a /successful/ kitchen is. And yeah, its not always "if you cook it, they will come". There are /plenty/ of places where a restaurant can go awry. It should begin with demographics and lots and lots of research. Pick a location, and develop a concept around it; pick a concept, and find a city where it hasnt been done to death. Find a city that can support the number of covers you need to break even. Then you need to develop the site, the decor, and the kitchen! Its all about space.. Do you know how much a square foot of ground floor manhattan costs? You can't afford to spend $20,000 a month for a walk-in. And then theres the floor. The struggle between comfort and putting butts in the chairs. We're talking inches. And then of course, you have to have a menu to get those butts in the chairs. A menu is ultimately a large advertisement -- it has to be well written and enticing. It has to be properly laid out, so when the eyes naturally move to the bottom third of the right hand page, you put your profitable entree there. People are likely to order more courses if the menu isn't broken down to apps on one page and entrees on the other. As far as the kitchen, it really comes down to receiving the product, storing the product, and utilizing the product. Nothing against purveyors, but if they know they can give you 2nd rate product, many of them will. You have your lunch specials to push your past-its-prime product, the purveyors have you (if you let them). At Daniel, you cant even get in the back door without tripping over the scale. Then theres storage -- proper temps, proper humidity, etc.. I think they say fish loses 1 extra day of shelf life for each day it spends at 1 degree over 32 (or something similar). Anyway.. I could go on and on, but Im getting kicked off the computer by my significant other. Needless to say, people who have even a small amount of training are more aware of the narrow profit margins and the effort that needs to be spent in maintaining a restaurant. Because great food, great service, and tons of covers can't guarantee a profit at the end of the month.
  20. Twist up in Hyde Park (route 9) is really good, as is The Haymaker's sister restaurant, Crew, also located on route 9.
  21. Hey guys, thats really funny that you all say JG.. my previous experience with JG was less than stellar.. it was myself and two classmates and we went for dinner.. which was pretty good (especially since one of our friends was a baking extern, and they loaded our table with 16 desserts.. hee hee)... but for $250 tab, it could have been better. But for $14 a course? Sounds like a really good deal. Does anyone have any other alternatives? As far as the location, I'm not sure of the cross street but I think the address (which I know is generally useless) is in the 200s. heh.. speaking of broadway being long.. it turns into route 9 eventually, right? Which is the same road the CIA is on.. so I guess, I'm just down the road ;-P
  22. Hey everyone, So, me being a poor about-to-graduate CIA student, I always joke around and bug my friend, a tech-consultant for a small manhattan based firm, to find some way to get a chef on staff, this that, etc.. well to quote myself, "hey, find a way to make your company give me money". Well, after a fair amount of joking around, he's actually gone ahead and done it! Apparently the CEO is a foodie (to what degree, I dont know), and there's been an exchange of emails and they want to set up a brainstorming lunch -- meet & greet & eat, and basically find a way to make them give me money". Well.. while asking /what/ to talk about is a whole other thread, right now I'm more interested in finding a place to go for lunch for three. There are, of course, some requirements: 1. As per the CEO's request, it must be "high-end". 2. It should be in Manhattan (the office is Broadway) 3. Until I graduate (end of September), I can only do lunch on Mondays -- which knocks out a few obvious choices. 4. It probably shouldn't be a multi-multi course extravaganza -- they need that time to make the money before they shower me with it As far as my own ideas.. well theyre all nerds so something that would appeal to that aspect would be fantastic (I tossed around the idea of a liquid nitrogen ice cream demo for the office and they ate that up).. if only wd~50 served lunch, hehe. Anyway, I'm sure you guys will come up with some great ideas, I cant wait to hear them!
  23. That's chef Andreini. I went to wd~50 about three weeks ago.. the cornbread ice cream was amazing . Too bad I missed the demo -- I'm on restaurant row so I dont have time for anything :-p
  24. brandied or bourbon'd cherries.. both the fruit and the liquid are divine.
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