MrGerbick

if you're going to be in te bywater, you have to check out the joint. best bbq in the city.

I've got plenty of stories on the reel that I can share but I'll add the most recent. As most of you know, pretty much every kitchen has either goldbond or cornstarch in the bathroom. I, more so than others, use it quite often. Our pastry Chef recently decided to empty the goldbond and refill it with powdered sugar. Needless to say, every 10 minutes I was wayyyyyyy sticky again and would need to reapply the "powder". Yeah, after a few days, it didn't turn out well. Bitch. My revenge was bitter-sweet. No pun intended. We all know that Seabass is real fishy, right?! Really fishy. Anyhows, she got a piece of Seabass duct-taped under the desk of her main work counter. It took 2 weeks of the pastry department being in agony before they found it.

If you do go back, make it 'show and tell' style. Get a bunch of really great ripened Peaches and some not so great ripened Peaches. Have the kids eat the bad ones first. Then, send out the gusto. Sure, Peaches are great right now, but that's just an example. Anything works. There are few more rewarding things to me than sinking my teeth into something amazing. Tasting how insanely pure one single flavour can be without laying it with something else. They'll like having something to munch on other than caffeteria food, anyhows

its not just FOH. I hear this from many many many kitchen employees. As people that work on hourly pay, many cooks come to accept that your base 40 hour workweek isn't where you make your loot. Its generally accepted that overtime is where the bills get payed. When hourly employees go from making 20+ hours of OT a cheque, to not even hitting 40 hours a week, it causes chaos and major uncertainty. "Real jobs" with real benefits and a real salary sound a lot more appealing than not knowing how much money you're going to have when payday comes around.

This topic has actually come up many times over the course of a few pints with other cooks. I often find that the conversation always ends up leaning towards how male Chefs often "prefer" having other men in the kitchen and vice versa with female Chefs. Although I do believe all kitchens should have some diversity, kitchens work better when the conversations and companionship made between the staff lean more towards having common ground. I definitely know the atmosphere in my kitchen is very different when our girls have the same day off. When the girls are away... the boys will play. I recently had a meal at a mostly female run kitchen. Eight girls and one boy in the kitchen. Oddly enough, the male is the pastry chef. The food was amazing, however, you could tell immiediately that the food wasn't neccessarily "homely", but did remind me of the simple melding of flavour combinations that I became used to growing up with no male figures in my life as a child. The food and plate-ups weren't as bold as I'm used to seeing when I work in mostly male run kitchens. As guys, regardless of how tight-knit we are, always try to one up each other. That didn't seem to be the case while we enjoyed our meal. Every dish that came out didn't out-do the last, it did however, compile at the end to be an absolute adventure in flavour without the slightest bit of flash. No-one can say which genders cuisine is better. You can, though, tell the difference in food. That's my 2 cents