The Culinary Tales Week 39: When One Door Closes…

November 3, 2014

The third week of bistro rotation was made 100 times more pleasant with the departure of See You Next Tuesday. But with a three-man operation now down to ONE (sad, little ol’ me), Chef had to bring in reinforcements. He re-assigned one of my classmates whom I will call Badass.

 

Badass, who had been manning the sauté station, came from the morning track, the one in which class started at 6 a.m. She caught on to the tasks quickly, was a hard-worker with an amiable personality, and we got along swimmingly.

 

If anything, everyone else left in the kitchen made an awesome crew. The only person from my original class was Lightning Fury, who was assigned to the grill station. Advertising Buddy and Annoying Girl were doing front-of-house duties as servers.

 

AG, for her part, provided moments of hilarity as she had a tendency to drop things clumsily. I had a few friends pop in to try out the bistro’s offerings, and once she spilled wine on one of them. She was so nervous about repeating the mishap, that, on a subsequent occasion, she almost dumped wine again on another friend, whipping the tray around so fast to avoid them and instead sending the whole kit crashing to the floor and causing a commotion. We all looked up from our stations to find AG, amusingly, frantically trying to clean up the mess.

 

We had our share of excitement in the back of the house when a fantastic grease fire erupted on the grill station, during which I learned that corn starch made an excellent fire retardant. (One reason to keep a supply handy in your pantry.)

 

My culinary life was falling into place just as my professional life was falling to pieces. Rather than work around my school schedule (I still had three weeks of bistro left), my boss asked me to resign, though he gave me a month’s notice. It was a disappointing turn of events because had I reported to someone else, I might have been able to work out a temporary arrangement. But it touched me to no end that my two previous supervisors went out of their way to try to find a place for me in the office and for that, they will always remain aces in my book.

 

One of them offered me freelance work that I could perform from home (which I gladly accepted), while the other personally approached other departments to find me an alternative position. I would later learn that a series of mass layoffs was in the works; the economy was, after all, about to implode. I still hadn’t decided on my externship plan; I thought about going to Europe, but it was going to require cashing out my 401k plan to execute. By this time, my once-fruitful nest egg had slowly whittled down to nothing and it became clear that wasn’t going to be an option.

 

I needed a job. The only way I could keep going with school was if I had a day job to pay the bills.

 

Yet I didn’t break down. I cried once previously, only because traffic was so brutal on my way to school that my normal hour-and-a-half commute had taken three hours (and more than anything, I was worried that I was missing something good at school.)

 

I did, however, almost lose it when I couldn’t get the pepper aoili that accompanied the tortilla to come together. The emulsion kept breaking that I had to ask Chef to fix it for me. I recounted the story to Angelheart, who was happily hammering away at her dessert tasks, who responded, quite enthusiastically, “Well, you get the best help then!”

 

Life has a way of giving and taking, that every time you lose something, you gain something in its place. I lost my job at the worst possible time, but found a lifelong friend in Angelheart, whose genuine goodwill and unfettered, unflinching optimisim (and not at all in an annoying way, which even Chef acknowledged) inspired and fueled me to keep going.

 

It turned out that we both had similar goals and that we might be business partners in the future. I am not a religious person (not anymore); I am not sure there is a god, nor do I believe that if one existed it has a plan for each one of us. I’m not going to say that bad things happen for a reason but I couldn’t help but be comforted in knowing that, bumpy as the ride was, I was on the right path. What’s that saying? When a door closes, another one opens. It is the damn truth.

 

 

 

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