I think that cooking is really funny. I've worked at a lot of restaurants and worked for and with a lot of people. I've worked in fast food, fine dining, greasy spoon dining and everything in between. The thing that sticks with me are the people. Nice people, stupid people, bitchy customers, bitchy servers, slutty servers, nice servers and the list goes on and on and on.
this brings me to my topic of today:
The Pretentious Chef
This is someone who gets to be in a position of authority and oversees all of the aspects of the day to day operations of a functional kitchen. I've worked for many chefs and also worked for many people who think that they are chefs. In my opinion, you either have 'it' (in otherwords, you can be a chef) or you don't. There is no in between, and there is no middle ground.
I have worked at a restaurant that had no chef. Now, think about this for a bit. A restaurant runs in a heirarchical manner. there is always 'one voice', which is the person that dictates the style of the restaurant. the plating, the presentation, the decor and the atmosphere of the entire restaurant concept. Food and wine play a major roll in this, but the front of house or FOH for short is an entirely different aspect that the chef, for the most part has no control over. There is an exception to this though, in the case of the Chef/Owner which is a totally different category of person.
You could understand and see the potential problems a restaurant might encounter if there was no person that was the ultimate authority figure. Pizzeria Gusto is a restaurant where I worked at that had exactly this problem. I worked there in the summer of 2009 for my second work term while i was at Red River College, in Winnipeg. After I graduated, I moved directly to Toronto with my girlfriend at the time. we lived there until april, at which point i had decided to move back to Winnipeg. Naomi moved back with me, but only for the summer. The weekend before i was supposed to move back to winnipeg I recieved a text message from my friend Tara, whom with i had worked at PG with for the entire summer previous. We were close friends, along with Scott Bagshaw the chef, Bre, Mat Withoos the sous and several other young children that were hired on as the part time dishwashers.
So i get this text saying something like, 'we all just walked out'. Now, me i'm thinking, 'whats the worst possible scenario that could have happened?' I thought that maybe something happened and everyone walked out on Scott, but no. Scott had been fired and the whole kitchen staff walked with him. Fucking Rad!
So now, this leaves me wondering where I'm going to work when i get back to the city. Scott and i had been talking, and he had said that I had a job waiting for me when i got back to winnipeg.
This leads me to the entire point of this story. I started working again at PG. We had to re open the restaurant from ground zero. no recipes, no nothing. I had worked there for over 6 months prior, so I had alot of recipes memorized. There was no chef at all, which leads me to the next type of cook.
The Paper Chef aka 'The Slacker'
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