I'd like to start off by saying that it's been a long time since I've blogged about anything. Well now, I truly plan on blogging some stories about my crazy times in the kitchen, since this blog was meant to be a culinary blog. I checked my site meter details and saw that people who searched for "student culinary blog" came to my site and found nothing interesting to read. That ends here.
It's my last quarter in culinary school and it's about time I started writing about recent events and memories. While I still have some really nice pictures posted, they don't mean much without a little bit of story to tell.
For anyone who doesn't know, I'm a graduate assistant at my school. For any other college institution, a grad assistant is more like a teacher's assistant. In culinary school however, it's a different story. Culinary school isn't like any other college institution, it's nearly all hands on learning. It's my job to help the instructors make students into better chefs.
Fridays & Saturdays, I'm the GA for the dining room front of the house. Here I help train students become better servers/waiters. I also do a little bit of bartending though my skills are still lacking. The most interesting things happen to me while I'm working here so hopefully I'll have something to blog about every weekend.
So today, work started off like any other day. My student staff got most of their sidework done and set up the room according to the reservation list. Some time passed and it was time for the briefing where we all talk about the specials and taste them. Today was an interesting day because this night was the unveiling of the new pre-fixe menu. For $38, guests get a really nice 6 course meal. It was good exposure to the student waitstaff, since it was their first time experiencing how to serve it. Being the first night, it went rather smoothly, so no horror stories tonight. I know, this entry must be boring.
There were a few tables who are worthy to mention though. One table, a 12-top comes in at 7. They sit down and start ordering drinks. A few glasses of wine, some cranberry sodas, and lastly, one man, head of the table orders a doubleshot of dewars on the rocks, specifically in a red wine glass. Now, I've never seen this before so I just fill the glass halfway with ice, then pour in the dewars. It gets sent to the table, then the waiter comes back asking for more ice in a glass. Dude ends up drinking the dewars with a whole red wine glass filled to the top with ice. Never have I ever seen this before. The guy finishes his drink and talks to the restaurant manager/instructor/my boss. As I'm filling up drink orders for other tables, he goes and critizes everything from the way our staff is dressed, to the way their table was served, this being 20 minutes since he first stepped into our dining room.
Boss lady sarcastically blurts, "Maybe you should be the one teaching here then!"
It turns out that he may have been kidding or whatever, but just listening to him and judging him by his facial expressions, he sounded serious. Geez, everyone's a critic nowadays. Including myself, but at least I wouldn't tell anyone how to run their restaurant. Unless they paid me of course heh.
Things started to die down, so I started breaking down the bar. As I was breaking down, one of my servers asks me,
"In Greek myths, who was the lord of the underworld?"
Thinking quickly, I immediately reply, "Hades?" I then send a text message from behind the bar asking Judy, my expert on Greek mythology, the same question, and I get confirmation that it is correct.
The server goes back to a table and strikes up conversation. I hear them talk about Greek mythology. It seems that the table was having a debate on who was lord of the underworld. I have no idea why. The server comes back to me and asks,
"Who's the guy that killed Medusa? Was it Pericles?"
"Ummmm...dammit who was that guy in Clash of the Titans...It wasn't Pericles, wasn't that the guy from Troy?...Achilles' cousin?...crap...gimme a sec."
Again I send another text from behind the bar. Server comes back finding out that it was Perseus who slayed Medusa with a mirror. Don't you hate it when you can't figure it out when you know the answer is in your head somewhere...then once you find it you feel stupid cuz you couldn't remember? Yeah, we all got that feeling.
Anyways, that's pretty much it for tonight. We did fairly well tonight with nearly 60 covers and shitty weather, we figured there'd be a lot of cancellations. We only seat guests for 2 hours so it's really not bad at all. Tomorrow, we're trying to get to 90 covers. It'll be a record for a Saturday night in our dining room. Hopefully my students can handle it. Since I've been GA for the dining room, we've been setting all kinds of personal school records, but I'll save that for another blog.
It's time to play videogames. Good night.