I finished classes, and my final chef instructor was amazing. She was one of the NYC "slow food" chefs, and I totally adore her tattoos. She's got the british sailor bluebird of happiness duo and some amazing other ones. And we started our classes with a pregnant chef, and ended our classes with a pregnant chef. I'm not sure if that means anything, but it's at least vaguely interesting.
So the dilemma I'm having now revolves around ethics in the kitchen. I found what I thought was an ideal externship. Fancy restaurant, simple bread (only one type, modification of the traditional parkerhouse roll, easy enough, just involved boiling 50 pounds of potatoes every day and carting huge heavy doughballs up and down stairs - can we say buns of titanium?), three simple desserts (literally from the back of the package - how hard is that?) and the potential for some cool chef specials.
Except the sous chef was a jerk who told me to my face that he could do the executive chef's job much better, that the point of the restaurant was as a place to be seen (implying in my mind that the food was second to the hipster bar scene, and since they got their food from one of the mediocre food suppliers that hires criminals because they can pay them less, I could tell they were more on the cost-efficiency 'I shop at Walmart' side of the fence (I don't, btw, shop at walmart.)), and finally, as they've been in business "almost a year", they didn't need any suggestions for improving their flow.
I'm a consultant. It's how I made my money for a while. I'm really good at looking at big-picture and saying "this isn't so efficient - this can be improved". It's what consultants, for the most part, do. And he blew me off. Whatever. But he did it in a mean, nasty way.
And then told me that, despite the fact I was told my schedule was my own to set, it wasn't true. And apparently I agreed to only get paid for the hours I was posted to work, not the hours I put in, according to the notice on the schedule shown to me a week after I had been working there. And it looked like they wanted me to work Saturdays for the rest of my stay. I already have a Saturday gig. I love Lisa and Bark for Peace and if I can keep baking for her and her fabulous wonderfulness, I am going to keep baking for her. (I tried to make a chewy little drop yesterday as a test run for a good treat for training (basic profiterole recipe with rice flour and banana instead of wheat flour and egg) and it was quite possibly the most disgusting thing I've ever made - although the dogs LOVED it. But they love cat poop, so who am I to judge? But I'll keep trying. I think rice flour is going to be the answer, just maybe in combination with potato starch instead of just rice flour. Too gooey.
So in the ridiculousness that is my day to day existence, I don't have an externship lined up, and I've got about a week to find one. It's only a twelve-week gig, but experience has shown me that I can't work at a place without respect - apparently even for a week. I sent my resignation in using the only contact methods I had and they didn't seem to go through, so I got a call from the executive chef yelling - yes, yelling - at me at how I was unprofessional for not wanting to work in a kitchen with people I didn't respect and then accusing me that if I was so desperate (I admit I did use that word during the interview), why did I quit? In my defense, I didn't say I was a crack whore, just that I needed an externship and I was worried about getting one. And the whole "if you're going to break up with me, I'm going to break up with you first!" mentality thing seriously reaffirmed my feeling that
So yes, I took the lame way out and walked away from the situation rather than sticking around and asserting my rights. Maybe it wasn't right of me to not care enough to make it my battle, but there was just so much to overcome and I'm still too fragile from all the wounds of last year (I still dream about Taki and Tsuki, although never Nuncle, which makes me cry thinking about it). So now I'm just now trying to figure out if all restaurants are filled with chip-on-their shoulder confrontations or if there is a commercial kitchen or bakeshop with "ISA", and what I can do to get in it.
