I finally get a job

I finally get a job.

So I finally get a job! A restaurant named 120 days has agreed to give me a 1 week trial. At the end of the week, we will sit down and negotiate my salary and responsibilities. I am to expect no pay for this first week, as a show of commitment. It has been so damn long since I have worked, I am ready to work for free at this point. I will try to give you an idea how things went at 120 days in a fairly abbreviated manner as I could get excessively wordy about this place.

The name 120 days stands for the amount of time that it will take them to get their gas permit from the city of Praha. After the many pitfalls of the restaurant business license process, the owners decided to open without a gas permit so as to not miss the summer season, the busiest season in Praha. The way the permit process is set up here, I gather you must apply for various licenses independently. After the permit is issued, the restaurant will close and remodel the kitchen and completely outfit it with new gas burning equipment.

So, needless to say, this is a commercial kitchen with absolutely NO gas. The equipment is all electric. I was curious as to how this was to work out being that electric can be a real pain in the butt with which to cook. Some of the equipment they have in the kitchen you want to be powered by electricity (ovens, induction burners, pasta boilers, steam tables, etc…). The main cooking equipment, should always be gas (cooktop, range, griddle, grill, salamander, fryer, wok cooker, etc…) The electric range, salamander, fryers and griddle, they just left on high all day to completely bake the shit out of the kitchen. The station by the range and salamander was really hot!!! The induction wok burners and 15 inch induction cooktop were really cool pieces of equipment! I can see the potential of having all the range and cooktop foods being cooked over induction as being great. The precise control over the heat source cooking the food is incredible! Anyway, the opportunity to work with some of the new equipment they had in the kitchen was exciting, not to mention the potential of the future kitchen and being able to work in a nice, new and fully outfitted kitchen.

I think that the owners of the restaurant have a bunch of money to burn. Some of the equipment in this kitchen is unbelievable. The place is not even busy yet and they have a vacuum sealing machine. These things are really expensive. And not to mention, the bags for the food are also expensive. Vacuum machines are in use in many of the larger, busier kitchens and especially in high rated ‘Michelin’ restaurants. Not only are they used for storage to preserve shelf-life, but they can also be used as a cooking method. Some of the methods are cool concepts, some I can’t get with.

‘Sous vide’ is a cooking method that employs this type of cooking. It is cool stuff. Cook food in a moist, temperature perfect environment to make it the best it possibly can be. Good. Steaks cooked this way and then finished on the grill as opposed to actually grilling the steak the from start to finish, just seems to go against the whole idea of a grilled piece of animal. Bad. Even if it produces the most juicy piece of meat, I still have a problem (based only on principle, of course). Who knows, maybe I have had a steak cooked like this, I just didn’t know.

Another piece of equipment that I don’t understand is a spice grinder. Not just a little home grade coffee mill this is, no no. This one is a converted commercial grade espresso bean grinder with a variable grind setting. Once again, a sweet piece of equipment, but a waste of money. The only thing I saw them grind in this thing was pepper. Black pepper. Peppergrinders all over the kitchen and they have to spend 600 to 1000 dollars on this thing. I am pretty sure that the guests have no idea that the pepper is ground in the kitchen or in a factory in say, Tunisia or Turkey. Maybe they bought the vacuum machine for the grinder because the pepper went into a vacuum bag right after being ground.

So, moving on, I will list a few notes I took while I was there at 120 days, or as I like to call it, 4 days. 4 days because I terminated my employment after that amount of time. I need a job. I don’t need one like that. This place was unbelievable. I have never experienced anything quite like that. I really wish some of my friends that I have worked with in the past could have been there with me. We would have had a field day with the place. I have never laughed so hard and simultaneously been infuriated so much in my life. Another name for the place could be Countless Red Flags. Countless because things are still happening, I am sure. One flag each little thing that drove a rusty nail deeper into my patience threatening to unravel it and make me go on a killing spree screaming ‘Hamas, bitches!!!’. Why Hamas? Because the place was run by 3 Israelis. I have nothing against Israelis, but these three are from Tel Aviv. Maybe we should have let Saddam’s scud get through back in ’90.

The flags are as follows:

1. Arrogant, bi-polar, lazy, condescending, disorganized, hebrew, bitch ass chef and sous chefs with no apparent skill in their job.
2. russian, czech, english, french languages with English being the primary language. The only people that could speak English in the kitchen were the Isrealis and me. The rest was broken English. One Czech kid was actually decent, but didn’t understand that much. I felt like an invader. Here we are in their country and one of the requirements of employment was that one must speak English.
3. One day I hear the chef yelling at one of the guys that started the same day as me because he always made mistakes that made more work for the chef. It takes a lot out of the chefs fat ass to walk around and actually look like he is doing something. Now he actually has do something. Not kosher. Dude was rudely fired. Could it be because he was not trained, at all, and never was given any direction, that he was fired? It is just a guess, but probably.
4. chef is fat and lazy. I have said this, but this is an underscore.
5. I saw his hairy buttcrack and was horrified. This thing was like the Israeli version of ‘FANGORN FOREST’, complete with ‘Shents’. A ‘Shent’ is an Ent made from shit, and just as old.
6. all of the sunspot arrogance but without any organization. When I worked at Sunspot at Winter Park, the chef’s were the most arrogant post-grad cooks ever. Assholes. But they were at least somewhat organized, thanks to, in part, their predecessors.
7. sous chefs barking orders. If I want to hear barking, I’ll get a dog. Clearly the method of management there is delegate, delegate and you guessed it, delegate. I mean, why do the work when someone else can?
8. chefs can’t do the work for which they ask. Ok, if you are going to bark orders, you had better be able to do the work for which you ask. Otherwise, shut up until you know what you are talking about.
9. cool czech dude. The Czech was not a red flag, what the chef’s are doing to him is. This kid is young and eager. Perfect for a good chef to mold as he is a sponge. These guys are instilling in him all kinds of really bad habits. These assholes actually would yell at this kid for not having something ready when they set him up for a failure in the first place. One sous chef actually physically pushed this kid one time. I was thinking the ‘Hamas, bitches!’ thing. I was infuriated. This one is good for a few Flags.
10. me training a czech speaking russian and trying to teach him in Czech. I suck at speaking Czech. Really suck. This was interesting. In a selfish way, it was cool for me as I was forced to speak in a somewhat stressful situation. I am sure the Russian was thinking: ‘What the hell!!!’. This was a job delegated to me caused the experienced line cook (who speaks Czech) was sent home on a Saturday night.
11. firecracker romanian chick. I have found the Romanian/Czech version of diahrea of the mouth. This girl was Romanian but spoke fluent Czech, and a lot of it. She was cool, and funny. She gave the sous chefs plenty of shit. I liked that. This is not a flag, but I figured she deserved mention as she was an integral part of the freak show.
12. sous always yelling for her. One of the sous chefs was always yelling for her. Always. I got really tired of hearing it. I think he wanted her.
13. poorly executed food, plating, composition of flavors, all shit. fusion food can be really good or really bad. This was worse than bad. I found myself wondering who signed off on this one.
14. cooking for ideals and not within the confines of reality. The menu was put together for what they wanted to cook and had nothing to do with the space, equipment, season, clientele, etc… it is obvious that they are still trying to figure out what the hell they want to do weeks after opening.
15. full of shit, sous asks me (on my 3^rd day) and other cook to do a food order, I said no and that’s not my job for the first time in my work career. I have always thought of myself as a team player. These people taught me how to get ‘me’ out of ‘team’ real quick. This one blew me away. I guessed that the executive chef handed this one down to him last minute. Shit flows downhill and I was standing under a waterfall of it.
16. sous chef pushing a cook because he was not prepared which was the chefs fault. I mentioned this earlier. Yelling is bad enough, but you DO NOT touch your employees like that. That sous almost ended up in the fryer. Once again ‘Hamas, Bitches!’.
17. no soap at any hand sink until I asked for some on the 3^rd day, the chef said it was not his responsibility and that he would have someone do it. Sanitation anyone. A nice case of runny poop that sprayed the bowl and was, well, quite messy to clean up prior to me making your ‘fresh’ salad with my bare hands. Didn’t happen. Or did it? You never know. And secondly, what kind of chef speaks of the hand sinks in the kitchen not being his responsibility?
18. the chef was all pissy and bitchy because he had to cook breakfast for 14 people. breakfast was ‘hamenex’ which is ham and eggs which is really 2 pieces of paper thin pancetta in a non stick pan with 2 sunny side up eggs put into the pan so the white can cook into the bacon and you cant pick it up, and a ‘fresh’ salad made with the chefs hands. I think he was just in the restroom before and had to cut it off to come make breakfast.
19. station versus line organization was fucked so you had to go from one end of the line to another just for a bowl of soup that came out of the steam table to go to the stove and then to a bowl and to a third station for garnish. Also, to get chicken rizek (Czech schnitzel), you had to leave the line, run to the back of the kitchen to the freezer and then back to the line, during the rush. Little help?
20. never available towels, aprons, chefs coats or anything sanitary.
21. no proper sanitation. We cleaned with water. The dishwashers cleaned most of the kitchen anyway. They had to be reminded to not spray stainless steel polish around the food. Sauce tasting spoons (always a good thing) kept in a .5l (pint) glass in room temp water. I saw people using the spoons and then returning them to the glass. Why did you get more that one spoon? Bacteria anyone?
22. pots and pans were always wet and greasy after being cleaned. There was a separate dish tank for this.
23. sous chefs taking breaks when the cooks have not had a break all day. Well, this applies to me. I don’t smoke. Everyone who smokes takes breaks. I think that I am the only one in this country, let alone Europe, that doesn’t smoke.
24. chef and sous come in after cooks and leave before cooks. Delegation has it’s benefits, doesn’t it?
25. euro-smell fuckin up the walk in.
26. eurosmell is Algierian and is the epitome of what many smell like in Europe (B.O.)
27. spastic czech cook. Nice guy, but if my hand is 1 centimeter away from grabbing the wok handle, and it is on my station, get the hell away. This guy was a blur most of the time. Meth potential here. DJ Cracky with some control.
28. sous chef not letting a hard working girl have a coffee break in an unused dining room and kicking her out, yet letting ‘eurosmell’ come out and eat in the very same place.
29. mushy overmarinated fried with no coating eggplant.
30. mushroom pasta with French style soup for sauce and soy/ginger shiitake mushrooms for garnish.
31. dim sum is prepackaged frozen shit that is then thawed and fried to soak all of the grease. There is ample freezer space here. Most of it is packed with this BULLSHIT! Why would you put this on your menu?
32. sous chef emphatically talking about things must be ‘fresh, fresh, fresh’. Hippocrisy of the century.
33. trout-like sea bass cooked on the flat top on both sides THEN covered with papasan paste (which is delicious, the paste, that is) and then baked, thereby overcooking the shit out of it,
34. hood fan does not work and has not since the opening. Has this place been inspected yet? Or does this not matter here?
35. ukrainians in the dish tank being treated subserviently. One sous chef tried to delegate to me to delegate the fryer cleaning job to the dishwashers. I DO NOT want these little women anywhere near the fryer at the end of the night. These ladies could not come close to lifting that stuff. Delegate to delegate, and so on. I need to remember that one.
36. chef and sous’ cool to me but yell at the other people because they suck and they treat the locals badly because they think they can. It appears that they can. Sad.
37. ‘come’ is the way one is beckoned by one sous chef. Should we also bow?
38. no place to plate food, yet they want it lightning fast. ‘High-end style’ of food, ‘short-order’ speed.
39. lame foccacia that I put too much oil on according to a sous. If your dough is bland, give it some extra oil. That usually helps a little bit. This was the worst foccacia I have ever seen of tasted. There are 4 fresh herbs in the walk-in yet old dry thyme is the only one to end up one the bread.
40. fucked fryers that no one wanted to clean. Electric fryers suck. At least these do. Also they were low volume so the oil was trashed after 1 or 2 days.
41. when faults are pointed out to chefs there is always an excuse. One sous chef asked me what I thought one day. I told him. I made sure to tell him, among other things, that the reason the young Czech that he pushed was not set up was the sous chefs fault because he had given him no direction. “Well, uh, …” was the reply. Common.
42. heavy thick clumpy sauces some of which alone have decent flavor but need to be strained, paired inappropriately, ugly color presentation.
43. frozen line flow fries in the refrigerator. French fries are good. Normally.
44. vacuum packing machine. Why? Money to burn? I’ll take some.
45. staff meal was mostly bullshit after chefs talking about how it had to be good. This is supposed to be the idea. If the staff likes what they eat at work, they generally have a more positive attitude and will sell your food more positively.
46. do these people actually listen to themselves or believe what they say? This is a rhetorical question.
47. are they prepared to make happen what they want without demanding it from others? Once again, rhetorical.
48. being told to do something 3 different ways from 3 different people always. Nothing sets the stage for failure like a good dose of confusion, delivered multiple times daily.
49. The sous chefs are always talking about communication. We must constantly be in communication with each other. You know, so everyone can be on the same page. One example: A hamburger was sent back one night because the guest said it did not taste like beef. The server was told it was all beef. I asked where we get our burgers. One sous chef said we order it. The other sous said we grind our own and the ratio is 70/30 meat to fat. A few days later, I was told not to put salt on the hamburgers when cooking them. Don’t season meat while cooking it. Hmm. That is the way all things are done there. Cook it with no seasoning to start. Against my background for sure. A few days later, I find out that the chef adds salt to the meat when grinding it. I also found out that the 30 percent fat, was PORK. Great. Jewish motherfuckers adding PORK fat to hamburgers and not telling anyone about it. I can go on forever in this category. Practice what you preach assholes.
50. clumpy cornstarch thickened sauces. My man Ian would be in heaven.
51. calamari being fried for more than 1 minute to make it ‘crispy’. The way they butchered the calamari was horrible. Little squares of squid, no tentacles. The tentacles were saved for risotto that did not sell.
52. potato starch on calamari fucking it all up.
53. banana leaves that were used as garnish, being reused repeatedly after being at tables and having food served in and on them. One of the plates was actually set up like this: wok fried rice with 5 spice suck (I mean duck), in a Chinese food to-go container, closed and placed on a banana leaf with some chopsticks. Probably one of the most wasteful, stupid looking plates I have seen to date.
54. dishwashers do nothing but rinse the banana leaves and give them back to the cooks. banana leaves on which food was presented were merely rinsed and then reused, some had knife and fork marks on them. I loved that. Bite tongue, turn head. Throw away leaf.
55. Dishwashers had the fruit juicer in their station. The restaurant served fresh juices. Cool. From washing plates to making your fresh juice.
56. power trip yeah that’s it.
57. I almost did not want to quit just for the sheer morbid curiosity of what would happen next. From a 3^rd person point of view, this shit was entertaining.
58. I almost walked out multiple times during my 4 days. I have never wanted to just turn around and walk out of a place where I worked, until this one.
59. does it really end here?

I don’t know. I called the chef and politely informed him I would not be back. When he asked why, I told him, and wished him luck.

Hamas, Bitches!