User:AlexGreen

=English Composition=

Statement of Intent
I am planning to write an autobiographical piece about my life as a Cook and Chef for the last 7 years that I can use as a basis for self reflection and to build upon as my career progresses. This is something that I would be interested in trying to publish, but at a later date after I have my own restaurant(s) up and running successfully.

Overview
I hope to complete atleast 7 full chapters, separated by either year or kitchen/location before the quarter is over.

Rationale
I hope to form a strong base that I can build upon later and also to reflect upon how far I have come since I started working in kitchens and ideally, provide a bit of inspiration.

Publication/Presentation


Schedule



 * week 2: begin to write, make outline
 * week 3: write chapter 1, first kitchen job
 * week 4: write chapter 2, 2nd kitchen, cooking in japan
 * week 5: write chapter 3, back to the u.s., considering culinary school
 * week 6: write chapter 4, attending CIA
 * week 7: write ch 5, Moving to the west coast, difference from east coast
 * week 8: workshop, edit, proof read
 * week 9: write ch 6, first Exec Chef job
 * week 10: write ch 7 and conclusion.
 * week 11: final paper due

Anticipated Problems
I don't really know what problems could arise with this. I really just have to make sure that I keep up to date on my writing and don't slack, forcing myself to make up a chapter or two in less time than I really need.

Week 6 Project Review
<	So far I've found that the hardest part of writing this autobiography has been the start of each chapter. I'll usually sit around for a while and try to think of what I want to say or how I want to open it, which can be a bit frustrating. What has worked best for me so far has been to just write anything, even if it's robotic sounding to get started and then go back later on when I'm feeling more creative to edit it to sound a bit better. I've never really written anything like this where I've had to really sit down and plan it out, which is pretty cool. For each chapter I'm writing, I have a full page of notes that is serving as a sort of rough outline and I just try to put them in chronological order and make sure I include everything in the chapter. Even if I'm just sitting around at home or at work, it's easy to just jot an idea down and work it into the chapter later. One thing I've done that is different than how I've planned is I've started to write a little bit out of order. Some chapters just seem to come easier on certain days, so I end up working on that one instead. Overall, I think I'm making good progress so far.>

Reader's Report


Project
<Alex Green, Computer Programmer Extraordinaire Chapter 1 The summer after graduating from high school I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I started taking classes at Georgia State University and still had no idea what I wanted to do. I was in a computer programming major, of all things. I knew hardly anything about computers and really had very little desire to ever know more about them than I did at the time. High school teaches you that you have to do something with your life that is going to make you money, but never really teaches you that you should do something that you enjoy. Computer jobs were supposedly fairly high paying, so that's what I went into. After not passing a single class at GSU in my 2 quarters there, I decided that my hour long drive downtown and sleeping in my car in the mornings just wasn't really worth it. Plus I was bound to be put on academic probation at some point. Not that the classes were particulary hard, I just had issues with actually attending them for the full duration of the quarter. Then, for no good reason at all, I enrolled at Kennesaw State University, a bit closer to home, where I ran into the same fundamental problem. Again, I couldn't attend a full quarter of classes and actually finish. Halfway through every semester of every real college that I went to, I stopped going to class for no reason at all. Looking back, I think it was just an issue of work ethic. I never really had to put in an honest hard day's work in my life until that point and just assumed that everything in life would come easy. I was a terrible student in high school, but I still had everything handed to me. Free car, free apartment, free education and I didn't appreciate any of it. I had been working in restaurants since I was 18, mostly as a server and occasionally as a bartender. I took a liking to the business pretty early on and thought that I'd like to open up a restaurant of my own one day. To a kid, the odd hours, strange people, and hands-on work made it ideal for me. I had been a bus boy, a server, a bartender, a host and felt like I had a pretty good grasp of what it took to run an operation from the front of the house. If I was going to own a restaurant one day, I wanted to do it the right way, which meant I had to learn every position, which eventually led me to the black hole that is restaurant cooking. I was pretty spoiled at the time and was spending the summer of 2003 in Paris, where my parents had been living, eating new foods that I'd never heard of and falling in love with the whole foodie lifestyle that I was deprived of, having grown up in suburban America. Everything in France revolved around food. The French would wake up in the morning and their first order of business was heading to the bakery for fresh baguette. Every day these people would wake up and get their baguettes for a dollar or two and take them home for the day. Fresh bread every single day was something totally new to me. I was used to bread coming in a plastic bag, filled with preservatives and overpriced by my local grocer. In Paris, we ate baguette every day and tried foods that I never would have tried when I was younger, like escargot, unpasteurized cheeses, rabbit, and bone marrow. Even our milk usually came in a box from the dry goods aisle. We felt so lucky to be eating these foods that most of my friends back home would have cringed at. Summer in Paris combined with childhood memories of summers in Japan and the amazing food we always had there definitely laid the ground work for my eventual food obsession. All of our family trips started to revolve around food. Sure, you can go and see all the temples in Japan, but why waste time seeing a temple when you could be eating sushi for breakfast at 6 in the morning at the best fish market in the world. We have a phrase, “hana yori dango”, which means “Food before flowers”. The saying can take on a number of meanings, but my grandma always used it to describe me since I'd ignore all of the blooming cherry blossoms at the festival while in search of the perfect festival food. All this love of food was great and all, but I still didn't know the least bit about how to cook. As my summer in Paris was coming to a close and I came to the realization that I'd soon be back in Atlanta, I stumbled upon an article about Atlanta's biggest new chef opening a new restaurant. In what was probably the most unorthodox job hiring of my life, he hired me without meeting me while I was still in a foreign country. Not long after getting back home, I started my first kitchen job under Richard Blais, who would later go on to some mild Top Chef and Iron Chef fame, in his restaurant that he decided to name after himself. I don't remember where I originally heard this, but if a chef puts his own name on a restaurant, he's probably not somebody you're going to like working for. I found this to be absolutely true. From what my coworkers told me, he was much more likeable at his previous kitchen, when nobody really knew who he was. While construction on Blais was finishing up, our kitchen crew got to know eachother by cooking small events around the city. The very first event that we cooked together, my first time in a professional kitchen, was a private party for Ted Turner at his penthouse in downtown. I'm not really sure about the rest of the country, but in Atlanta, Ted Turner is as important as they come. And in terms of events happening early on in a new job that make you fall in love with it, this was a 10. I still knew almost nothing about food at this point, but I was sitting in Ted Turner's kitchen with an amazing view of downtown Atlanta, cooking for him and his friends. The highlight of the night was Turner casually popping into the kitchen to refresh the cranberry juice in his wine glass and snacking on half of a lobster tail that we had out ready to cook for the next course. Of course, everything at this point was portioned and now we were down one half of a lobster tail. We ended up having to give Turner's wife a dish with half of a lobster tail less than everyone else's and hoped and prayed that nobody noticed. Lucky for us, nobody noticed. We cooked a few more private events before the restaurant opened and by that time, I at least knew how to hold a knife properly and a few other kitchen basics. Our pre-opening training was so much more intense that I ever imagined it to be. We were working 70 plus hours each week and some new small business law even prevented us from collecting any overtime pay. Our grand opening was huge. Even though it's somewhat of an unwritten rule, we had critics coming to eat our food within the first week. Usually, you get a minimum of a few weeks to a month to figure everything out before they start coming in. The critics like to pretend to not want to be seen, but I'm pretty sure they enjoy being noticed since they usually have the kitchen's entire attention for the duration of their stay. Most big name restaurants, including us, will only hire dining room management who know what all of the critics look like. It's a big deal when these people come in, especially to those chefs who have their names on the door. All of our reviews were amazing and we were suddenly the place to be. Unfortunately in the restaurant business, cooking and serving great food is really only half of the battle. The pressure was definitely taking it's toll on Blais. He was seen less and less in the kitchen by the day and started to get argumentative with all of us. I remember a particular instance when I nearly walked out when he accused me of lying to him during service. We happened to be using both white and green asparagus for an amuse bouche that night. We ran out of the white at some point because we had about half as much of it. When I told him we were out of white, he exploded and called me a liar. I was new to kitchens and didn't really get the whole respect thing and that you aren't supposed to talk back to your chef. I talked back, made him even more angry, and just escalated the situation. Later that night, the Sous Chefs said that they wouldn't have blamed if I had left that night. I'm glad I stayed though. There's some pride to be found in staying at a restaurant from the day it opens until the day it closes. Despite the glowing reviews and steady stream of customers, we stayed open for only about 6 months. I'd say that I learned more about food in those 6 months than I have in all of the years since. I never imagined that I'd have the good fortune of going to work in a kitchen and making food for photo shoots for local newspapers and magazines. It wasn't that we weren't profitable, but was more along the lines of the chef gradually shifting his focus from the restaurant and the food to the bartender her was dating. We had actually nicknamed her Yoko a few months earlier as we all knew where that was eventually headed. Our investors were some of Atlanta's wealthiest men and they didn't need to give this gift to somebody who was going to take it for granted. We were all pretty shocked at how abrupt it was, but the actual closing didn't really come as a surprise to anyone. My sous chef called me that day as I was about to get into my car and told me that our chef had been fired. We laughed. The management had become so bad that the entire kitchen staff by that point had talked about all walking out on him on the same day. The next day I headed to the unemployment office, signed up for some free government money, and started to think about where I would go next. Chapter 2 There are always those people in life that seem to really believe in you and think that you're capable of more than you ever thought that you were. For whatever reason, these people have to be constantly updated on what you're doing because they are expecting huge things from you. For whatever reason, one of those people in my life happened to be a successful owner of more than 100 restaurants in Tokyo. He was a business acquaintance and friend of my mother and he wanted me to come work for his company in Tokyo Mr. Ogawa is one of the nicest people I've ever met. He is the most unassuming President of a huge company that there probably is. So unassuming that I really had no idea what I was getting into when I signed on. Mr. Ogawa came to visit me in Atlanta after my mother had told him all about me and my love for all things food. Wanting one day to open a restaurant in America, we did a lot of scouting and research about the Japanese food, especially noodles, that is available to Americans. We spent this time discussing his restaurants, food, and my future plans for a restaurant. At the end of this day, he invited me to come work for his company in Tokyo for a year. Before I knew it, I was on a plane on a scouting trip, visiting his company and looking at apartments in Tokyo. I spent October of 2004 to October of 2005 in Tokyo in would be the best experience of my life to date. One of the best things about being young and stupid is that moving to Japan seems like the smart decision, even when you can't speak or read any Japanese. However, I was really lucky to be able to have that job and even more lucky just to be able to work in Japan legally. Having dual citizenship, I literally just booked a plane ticket, went through customs as a Japanese citizen and almost immediately started working there. The only paperwork that I really ever filled out was for my bank account, which turned out to be a huge pain in the ass. My name on my Japanese passport reads: Toshima Green Alexander Kenta. I had to write this several times in Japanese. Not only did I have to write this in Japanese, but the Japanese names had to be written in Kanji, the chinese characters that are ridiculously elaborate and every tiny mark and slash is completely necessary. Our 24 letter alphabet had never seemed so beautiful to me. Since legally, I had to be the one to write this, one of the company guys had to write everything down and I had to copy it. This took about an hour. Each time I made a wrong stroke, they'd either laugh or show frustration. I'm sure everytime I missed a stroke somewhere, I was changing my name to something with a totally different meaning. Luckily, I think this was the only day that I ever had to write my name down there. Aside from the whole struggling to write my own name thing, the rest of living in Japan was not all that difficult. I've said numerous times and still believe to this day that, as an English speaker, it is easier to navigate your way around Tokyo than New York City. NYC has all these different trains that take you to the same place. 8 different numbered trains on the same colored line will take you to all sorts of different places. There arent really any signs around anywhere until you get on the train and then it's too late and you don't want to look like the tourist who has no idea where they are so you just hop on a green train and hope for the best. Tokyo metro is beautiful. There are probably 10 different lines, each given a name and color. Each line goes from one spot to another with no variations other than a possible express train, which have big signs on the side that say “EXPRESS” in English. Huge maps are right above the ticket machines in English at every station. The platforms have scrolling LED signs that tell you what train is coming next and the exact time it is coming, in English. I'm not sure how it's possible, but the trains are never late. I can't imagine that there is a better and easier to navigate subway system in the world. Where America really struggles as a foodie culture is where Japan and most other countries really excel. We like to have these sort of all encompassing broad diner themed restaurants like The Cheesecake Factory, where there is a5 page menu and something for everyone. Unless of course, you like good food. Personally, I'd rather go eat a skewer of chicken from the guy who has spent his entire adult life perfecting the art of skewering and grilling chicken. That is a beautiful thing. The main thing that I really took away from all of this is that when I open my own place, it had to be something focused and special, rather than broad and boring. My job in Tokyo was a cook in a tiny homemade soba noodle shop. When I say small, I really mean small. Our kitchen was tight for 3 people and very uncomfortable for 4. I remember being able to stand up, put my arms straight down and still have my hands a few inches from the table. That makes for a very short table and it didn't even take a full month for my back to be reminded me of it. This was the most challenging job that I've ever had and probably ever will have. The restaurant that I worked in was called Edo Konya. It sat around 30 people and was placed right in the heart of one of Tokyo's many business areas. Everyday for lunch, we would server homemade soba noodles to around 80 businessmen. After lunch, we would close for a few hours, take naps in the restaurant, and get ready for dinner. Unlike any place I've ever seen in the America, everyone worked lunch and dinner every single day. I would leave my apartment every day around 9 am and get back home around 10:30. It was rough. For my first whole month there, I thought I was going to die, or atleast kill somebody else. In Japan, you have to work your way up, whoever you are. I spent my first month at Konya washing dishes and scooping rice into bowls. We were too small to employ a dishwasher, so it was sort of a community effort. But being the new American, most of it was put on me. I was so miserable my first month there and had no idea what I was going to do. I really was hoping that I hadn't signed up for a year of washing Japanese dishes. Not too long after my month of washing dishes, I got to work all parts of the restaurant. By this time, I had become very close with my coworkers, though we spoke in a mix of broken English and broken Japanese. I was soon making soba noodles, cooking them, and running the entire line for lunch and dinner. Since I couldn't really read any Japanese, I had to memorized characters to be able to read tickets. The character for duck looked like a house, so I would see a house on a ticket and call out for a duck. It was hard work. In the summer, all we had was a small fan, which did hardly anything to offset the enormous pot of boiling water that was constantly behind us. Tokyo summers are as hot and humid as I've ever experienced, so keeping cool and hydrated was a chore. On my weekends, the company would set up a workshop for me, where chefs from the company would come and teach me about Japanese food products that I had never seen before and how they are used. These classes were so beneficial for me and I learned about so many new kinds of foods and preparations. Where I learned the most about food in Tokyo was just by eating. I spent almost all of my free time and all of my extra money on food. There is such an amazing assortment of great food everywhere you go in Japan. Each city and town has it's own specialty, which is something we are definitely missing out on here. Seasonality is much more important in Japan, as importing from around the world is very expensive. Of all the food that I ate in Japan, one restaurant really left a lasting mark on my memory. My mom was visiting at the time and we were looking for some food in Asakusa, an old Samurai town in Tokyo with a lot of temples. After walking around for about 30 minutes, we settled on a restaurant that had a live squid tank in the window. It turned out that they also served fugu, or blowfish, the poisonous fish that requires a license to prepare. Of course, we had to try the fugu. It was served simply, thinly sliced like sashimi, with a few dipping sauces. I found the fugu to be very disappointing. It was actually incredibly bland. Though I did feel a slight tingle through my body as I ate it and still to this day don't really know if that was just a mental reaction to the thought of eating a poisonous fish or possibly small trace amounts of the actual poison. Regardlesss of what it was, the sensation was much better than the actual taste. Having said that, it was defintely worth eating at least to just say that I've had fugu. The fugu was only the second strangest thing that we ate at that restaurant. Those live squid that were in the tank, we had one of those too. When you order the live squid, the chefs pluck it from the tank and immediately prepare it, sashimi style, and arrange all of the flesh on a platter of ice. I have to say that this was the most amazing piece of squid that I have ever had in my life. The flesh was tender with almost no chew whatsoever. I had never in my life eaten squid that was not at all chewy and this was the one exception. Where it got weird was that also on that platter of ice, was the head and the innards. They were still intact. The eyes were moving, the heart beating. The squid was alive and watching us eat it. This was disturbing, weird, strange, a little funny, but definitely memorable. What a moment for a mother and son to share. As we finished off the flesh, they finally put the squid out of it's misery, cooking the rest of the body for us to eat. In my opinion, restaurants like these are why people really need to travel and experience the food of other countries. You will never ever have an experience eating those things anywhere in America. Ever. I learned so much in my year in Tokyo. There was so much new food that I had never seen before. So many new tastes and textures. I met so many amazing people that I still keep in touch with to this day. I fell in love with Japan, the people, the food, the culture, everything. But the most important thing I learned while I was there was the value of hard work. I worked hard, long hours and it always felt worth it. I would go home exhausted and feel proud of my day. Of everything I took away from that amazing year, my work ethic was definitely what I took back home with me. I spent exactly one year in Japan. I moved in October and by the next October, I was back in Atlanta.

Chapter 3 My first few months of being back in the States was basically just spent training a few Japanese cooks from the company I was with on American cooking techniques. I was doing this at a small brewery in Atlanta that happened to serve some great food as well. Training the Japanese guys was really fun and since we were at a brewery, we had plenty of free beer for after work. There is probably nothing in the world that is better after a long day in a kitchen than a cold beer. Even sex would have to take a backseat, there's just too much work involved. The training worked out for both companies as they Japanese guys got some experience and the American company was able to experiment with some authentic Japanese food on their menu. I was really just the middle man and didn't really do a whole lot during all of this. After 2 months, the Japanese guys went back home and I kept on working at the brewery. The job was alright, but I knew it wasn't a long term place for me. Realizing that I was going to have to go culinary school to further my career, plus the fact that I really wanted to, led me to the CIA. The Culinary Institute of America is more or less the Harvard of culinary schools. So many well respected chefs have come from there and the whole campus and experience is unlike anything else available in this country. Blais had told me years before that I should avoid any of the smaller schools and just go to the CIA. I read a book by Anthony Bourdain, who reminded me a lot of myself, about how the CIA was perfect for people like us. Class is mandatory or you are kicked out. I needed a school that would be strict on me, so I wouldn't just end up dropping out like I did at my other schools. I filled out the application, wrote an essay, and sent in probably the most amazing letter of recommendation that is humanly possible, from Mr. Ogawa. I was nervous. I knew I had the experience and the recommendation letter to get in, but I was worried that my previous GPA of a 0.0 would haunt me. If I didn't get into The CIA, I had no backup plan, no safety school. Eventually, the inevitable call from The CIA came and if I remember correctly, the first question was, “So what happened at this Kennesaw State?” I did my best to answer as honestly as I could and somehow, eventually, I got in. The downside was that it was still only January, I was to start school in March, and I was learning absolutely nothing at all at the brewery. With two months until I had to leave for school, I decided to see how well the old CIA connection would work and asked a local CIA grad chef if I could work for him for a few months before I went to school. He said yes and I knew that this CIA thing would pay off. Hell, the school got me a job before I even started there. The restaurant was “Dick and Harry's”, a small upscale restaurant in metro-Atlanta. The food was your standard American fare, but done well. Up to this point, I had never cut a piece of fish in my life. I asked the Chef if he would teach me how to cut fish. He said yes, but there was a catch. I had to come in once a week, an hour before my shift, and cut fish for free. He was getting free labor and I was getting a free class. Illegal in the best possible way. The very first piece of fish that I ever cut was a grouper. However, this was no ordinary grouper, but a 20 plus pound beast of a fish. I destroyed this fish as well as about the next 5 or 10 fish that I learned to cut on. Looking back, he showed an extraordinary amount of patience with me. If I had a kid in my restaurant, butchering my fish was poorly as I did to his, I would go nuts and he would never hear the end of it. The extent of my embarrassment came in the form of him weighing all of my scraps and calculating how much money I had left on the bones and as unusable product. This was a great lesson learned, seeing how a wrong knife cut or two directly affected the bottom line. For 2 months at a job, I learned a surprising amount. I cut 2 months worth of fish and shucked more oysters than I have shucked in all of the time since. I met some great people, cooked great food, worked my ass off and before I knew it, March was there and it was time to go off to school. Chapter 4 It was March of 2006 and I was finally about to start classes at The Culinary Institute of America. I packed up all of my belongings and drove for a few days until I landed in Hyde Park, NY, a few hours away from New York City. There was still snow all over the roads by the time I got there. More snow than I had ever seen in Georgia. After spending the weekend in the city, I hopped on a train back to Hyde Park and started school. However, it did not start out as smoothly as I had hoped for. Not that I was really looking forward to living in a dorm room for the first time, but it would have been nice if they had one available for me. The CIA uses a 3 week block system of classes so every 3 weeks, there are about seventy or eighty new students. There were a lot of new students and not enough dorms when I started, so a lot of us new people ended up in hotels in the surrounding area. As a new student looking forward to the college experience, sharing a room in a Holiday Inn with a guy I didn't know at all was just awful. Luckily, after those first 3 weeks, we were all placed into dorms on campus. The CIA campus is beautiful. Our main building, Roth Hall, is an old Jesuit Monastery that has been expanded over the years and is nestled right alongside the Hudson River. We have the world's largest collection of culinary books in our bookstore, and an Italian villa style building for our Italian restaurant, complete with fresh herb garden in the front. There are 5 restaurants on campus, 2 of which are fine dining, 1 upscale dining, and 2 cafes. These restaurants are unlike the restaurants in any other culinary school that I've ever seen. These are real restaurants with great food, great service, and nearly always full of tourists. Our school president even mentioned to us once that The CIA is one of the top five tourist attractions in the state of New York. The beautiful campus and amazing food are a great way to spend a day away from the city. The system in place at The CIA is truly one of a kind. You are submerged in a food culture from your first day. Everything you do revolved around food. Our first set of classes were what are commonly referred to as “B-Block”, with the new students being called “B-Blockers”. Those lecture classes provided us with the basis of our whole education there and though they were only six weeks long, they felt like closer to six months. Everyone was so eager to get in the kitchens, that sitting through this classroom setting was just torturous. It was a great chance to see what the school had to offer though, as everything we did was carefully planned. For me, the highlight of The CIA, more than the cooking, was what we had available to eat. During B-Block, every single day we had our lunch cooked for us in a banquet setting on what was called “stage”, because we were eating on an elevated stage away from the rest of the dining hall. We were served by waiters who were part of a service class and cooked for by students who were part of a catering event cooking class. For dinner, we had the option of choosing from any of about 15 kitchens, ranging from American to Asian to French cuisine. That is the beauty of the school. Rather than just cooking food for yourself or a small group, you are cooking food for the other students in a high production setting almost every single day of your schooling. This system turns the dining experience into a whole extra learning experience as you are constantly being exposed to new foods, unless you go to the same kitchens over and over. The breakfast was amazing as well. I am not a morning person at all, but I would wake up at 6:30 every day before classes to go and eat a big breakfast. There were two breakfast kitchens, each with about 6 special items each day that could be anything from crab cakes with a poached egg to an omelet with veal sweetbreads and beurre blanc. Hardly your standard breakfast fare. Baked goods from scratch and smoothies were always available. The classic “Freshman-15” from most schools doesn't even compare to what happens to you at The CIA. The classes progress in a logical way. After B-Block, we take a few basic skills classes, where knife skills, stock making, and soups are taught. After skills, we progress to cuisines from around the world, starting in America and working our way around to the Mediterranean. After we've worked our way around the world, we are sent off on our externships. Each student has to find a job for 18 weeks, anywhere in the world, to see new foods and apply what we've learned thus far in the program. My externship was at The Four Sesasons in Atlanta, GA. I missed my friends and home and thought being back would be the right decision. I was wrong. I can summarize my Four Seasons experience by saying what other people at the hotel told me, which usually went something like this: “Don't judge the Four Seasons based on this hotel. I worked at the (insert any other location here) before this and it was great”. I've never seen and worked with so many miserable people in my life. The Chef was nowhere to be seen, the Sous Chefs did nothing and even took doing nothing to a whole new mind boggling level. I remember being really busy one day and asking my Sous Chef for help. After giving me a bad look, he just left. We didn't see him for a while and eventually he came back with a bag of donuts. While we were busy, rather than helping, he decided to go to Krispy Kreme because he felt like eating donuts. Even looking back, years later, I don't think I really learned much from The Four Seasons. In fact, I was teaching our fish cook how to cook her fish properly, while I was relegated to cooking mostly food for the bar and room service. The one thing that I really took away from the experience was that I made a great friend, Jerome, who was on loan from a Four Seasons in France. He would get just as angry as I would with the management and the lack of originality in our food, but he would yell in a French accent, which is just so much better. If anything, I did learn to manage large amounts of tickets as I was left by myself on the busiest station food station in the hotel. The peak of my disappointment with this job was on New Year's Eve when I had a ticket for a pasta at exactly 12:00 midnight. As champagne was being popped and everyone in the hotel was enjoying their glass, I was cooking a pasta for what had to have been the loneliest person in the world, to order a pasta at exactly midnight on New Year's. I actually considered a few times quitting my externship and finding a new one, but that would have meant delaying my graduation, which just wasn't an option. So I stuck it out for the 18 weeks and eventually, somehow, I finished. The disappointment continued even after I left as I realized that my externship report that they filled out ended up giving me a very average grade. They expressed how great I did and everything, but it's just a matter of Four Seasons standards in which nobody is really worth of 100% as we all have things to improve on. In most corporate hotels, an average grade is considered good, poor is poor, and nobody really is great. If you were great, you'd be in charge. That's just how it is. So my average grade that I received for working my ass off for 18 weeks was lower than most everyone else's who had gone to magazines and such and whose bosses just filled out the forms with all A's. Not a very fair system, but I guess it isn't really my place to fix the system. Spring break took place during my externship and I spent a few days in San Francisco, where I had always wanted to move. To me, it is the ideal food city, except for the cost of living. There are so many good restaurants that it's hard to ever pick one. This trip to San Francisco actually turned out to be a life changing experience for me. My Uncle on my mother's side lives in the Bay Area and he wanted to spend some time with me while I was in town. This Uncle has done very well through some investments in his time and as it turned out, really had an interest in opening a restaurant one day. After a long long and a wine tasting near his office, we spoke for hours about my goals and what type of restaurant I wanted to open. At the end, he let me know that he would be financing my restaurant when I was ready to open it. There are life changing experiences and then there are life changing experiences. From that point, I didn't have to worry about securing funding for a restaurant. All I had to do was make sure that I had a great concept and all of the tools to execute it. That turned out to be the best trip I would ever take. On top of spending time in San Francisco and eating amazing food, I finally caught a break. Before I knew it, the trip was over and I was headed back to New York. Back from externship, I was ready to graduate. Only a handful of classes and I would officially be a CIA grad, ready to make some money in the working world again. The second half of the education was much harder than the first half. A lot of people dropped out of school in the first half and during externship, realizing the business was too hard for them, so our class size was cut down to nearly half of the original size. By the time I graduated, each of my classes only had about 7 students, compared to an average class of 12, and our original class size of 18. When October 2007 finally rolled around, I was ready to leave New York. While I was in school, my parents had retired and moved to Bainbridge Island, Washington, so I no longer had a home in Atlanta. I had dreams of moving to San Francisco after school, so I stayed with my parents for a bit as I went back and forth between San Francisco and Washington, interviewing and looking for apartments. San Francisco is an amazing city for anybody in the food industry, but the job offers I was getting in were less than those I was being offered in Seattle, but with the cost of living being so much higher in San Francisco, it was hard to justify a move. San Francisco was definitely where my future would be, but for the time being, I was going to have to make it in Seattle. Chapter 5 In 2007 and 2008, I worked a few jobs in Seattle, none of which were particularly memorable. I cooked for a “pan-asian” restaurant on Bainbridge Island when I first moved out. I'm still not sure what pan-asian means in terms of cuisine. Anytime I see a pan-asian restaurant, the menu just seems jumbled and non-sensical. People use these odd words and phrases to define food, I think just to confuse the customers, so that they can actually serve anything they want as long as it sounds asian. I only worked there part time as there wasn't enough business to warrant having any full time employees. Needless to say, I didn't stay very long. They even demoted another employee to promote me in hopes of keeping me around, but that only lasted a few weeks. I still feel bad for the poor guy who was demoted. From mediocre pan-asian restaurant, I moved on to Juno, which had the misfortune of opening just after the movie, which made it seem like a weird marketing gimmick. Juno highlighted both the negative and positive aspects of being a big name hotel in Seattle. The restaurant prided itself on being local and organic, but it wasn't really. In Seattle, to avoid backlash, you have to atleast pretend to be a locally themed organic restaurant. What this means to most restaurants is that you buy all of your meats locally and as much of your produce locally as makes financial sense. There is usually a compost bin, a recycle bin, and a trash bin. The recycle bin is usually used properly, while the other two very rarely ever are. It's hard for cooks, who are running around and extremely busy to take extra time to find the right bin to dispose of something. It's all about efficiency, and usually it's just less efficient to search for the proper bin. I made good friends at Juno and was able to work with some new foods that I had never seen before. But again, it just wasn't for me. I realized more and more as time went on that I was not truly going to be happy until I was my own boss. I hated working for other people and I hated making other peoples' food. I always thought of ways that they could be improved. Six months into my time at Juno, I realized that I had to go. A new job opportunity came up that would look great on my resume. I sent in a resume, interviewed and was soon hired on as the Sous Chef at a small restaurant opening on Bainbridge Island, just down the street from the bland pan-asian place that I was at not long before. I had no previous Sous Chef experience, so this was going to be a big deal for me. I met with the Executive Chef, who was an idiot who somehow talked his way into the position. I remember my first phone interview and asking about the food. Rudy, the Chef, told me that the food was Mediterranean, which I found a little bit intriguing. You can do a lot with Mediterranean food and they have a lot of great flavors and ingredients to work with. However, when I went in for an actual interview, I looked at the working menu and it was a trainwreck. The menu was about 90% standard Americanized (bastardized) Italian food. It was literally a bifold brochure that opened up into three pages plus an insert of probably thirty plus menu items. Just an extremely large and unmanageable sized menu for a restaurant that small. The owners were first time restaurant owners, which is never a good sign. There were two positives in this situation for me and only two: the job paid almost twice as much as my previous job and I'd be on salary, and the words “Sous Chef” look great on a resume. The first positive can really almost be cancelled out when you realize that being on salary in a restaurant just means that you are signing yourself up to work an insane amount of hours and fill in for anybody who doesn't show up. Salary is extremely overrated. I accepted the job in November and started immediately. Like any restaurant opening, we were delayed and delayed. Nothing ever meets fire code or health code the first time around, though new restaurant owners expect it to. We spent the first month building tables, buying kitchen equipment and trying to get the restaurant in working order, which I don't think ever actually happened. I was actually the last kitchen employee to be hired, so I didn't have any say in who I would be working with. The team he put together was like a bad news bears of cooks, only without the heartwarming successful ending. It was then that I realized as a Chef and owner, you are only ever going to be as great as the people you have working for me. Luckily for our Chef, he had me, and I did almost all of his work for him. I don't mean that as an exaggeration either. The day before we were to open our doors for the first time, the day before he was to open his first restaurant as the executive chef, he had no prep list. I had two full pages of food prep that I was working on like mad, delegating what I could to incompetent employees while doing the rest myself. Two whole pages of prep for our oversized menu. I was moving as fast as I've ever moved. Rudy approached me near the end of the day and asked if he could help out with anything. I could never imagine being that close to opening my own restaurant and not being totally in control of what was going on, much less not even being aware. Thanks to me, we were somewhat ready for our opening day. By “ready”, I mean that all of the food was prepped and ready to cook for customers. The problem is that our owners had lost so much money during construction, that we had never actually cooked the entire menu for anybody, not had the kitchen really ever cooked together. Any restaurant opening I've been a part of in the past had several days of mock service, where the servers wait on eachother at tables, order food for the kitchen to practice, and tie up any loose ends in the kitchen or the dining room that need to be addressed before actual paying customers are in the doors. However, we were not any other restaurant. We just opened. We opened the doors for service, expecting maybe fifteen to twenty people strolling in throughout the night, but ended up with something wildly different. The day of our opening was one of Seattle's heavy snow days of December 2008. We had a few guests trickle in early on in the night and things were going fairly smooth. Somewhere around 6:30 PM, about 75% of Bainbridge Island lost power. The entire side of the island that we were located on had lost power. To this day, I still don't know why, but our restaurant had power. We were literally the only restaurant around, the only building around, that happened to have power. It was cold, snowing heavily, and it was dinnertime. We served about two hundred people that night and I was the only one who thought it was a disasted. I wasn't happy with the food, the service, anything. From top to bottom, I did not think that it went well. Though the owners and Rudy couldn't have been more pleased. They only looked at it from a monetary standpoint and the amount of covers that we had done. If only there were a snowstorm everyday, we would all be extremely wealthy. Day two came around and things were not much better. We had not had enough time to talk about the menu, what worked and what didn't, so we planned for another night of service just like the first. We ran into a new problem on night 2 when the our propane tank ran out of propane. Bainbridge Island has no gas lines, so all the restaurants have to use propane tanks. I was not aware of this until our flames were barely flickering and I couldn't even boil a pot of water. The previous degenerate owner had not paid his propane bill in months, meaning the company was no longer automatically refilling our tank, which we ended up learning the hard way. Having to shut the restaurant down on the second day of service was a sign of things to come. As business slowed over the next two months, funding ran tight. The owners realized that Rudy spending $10,000 from a specialty purveyor was not going to help the restaurant stay afloat. Up to this point, I had been running out entire dinner operation, meaning that Rudy was not really doing much of anything. He would pop into the kitchen and say something along the lines of “I'm going to go work on the menu for a bit”, yet the menu never changed. However, it was full of typos and printing errors, which could have definitely benefitted from some attention. As the kitchen staff grew tired of Rudy's lack of ability to do anything, the owners started asking questions, which eventually I had to answer. As much as I despised Rudy and thought he was terrible at his job and costing the owners a lot of money, I appreciated that he gave me the job. The restaurant business is cutthroat, however, and the owners had to make the decision to let him go. I was next in line and they promoted me to Executive Chef. I actually never really wanted that job. I didn't want to be the one talking to guests and working on menus. I just wanted to cook. I liked being the Sous Chef, but it's hard to turn down a promotion that you deserve.

Chapter 6 February rolled around, Rudy was gone, I was the Chef, but as much as I tried, things didn't change a whole lot, aside from all of the labor that I was able to cut from the kitchen. Even though Rudy was gone, I inherited his incompetent staff and still had the same first time owners calling all the shots. One of the first things I had to do was create an actual schedule, which Rudy never got around to doing. I had to enter 3 months worth of invoices into our computer system, which took weeks and weeks to finish just to get our system up to date. However, the good news came in the form of the food. With Rudy gone, I was able to cut the menu down by about one third, which was still a huge menu, but at least it was somewhat manageable. This change opened up a little bit of time and money for me to get in some seasonal foods for specials, like fresh halibut and Copper River salmon. The specials were a hit. People loved them and we were selling tons of them. But whenever the situation started to look up, the owners were there to bring it back down. While we were finally starting to be appreciated for serving great food, the owners wanted to dumb down the menu for no reason other than that they were not familiar with upscale food. I knew that I wouldn't be able to keep positive for too much longer when the owners approached me about putting spaghetti and meatballs on the menu because their 14 year old son liked it. They were turning their restaurant into a replacement for raising their own children. The kids started to roam free through the restaurant and the food became more and more broad by the day. There's a saying that I love, “A camel is a horse designed by committee.” In a business, to be successful, you have to stick to your guns. I truly believe that. You have to have a great idea and you have to execute that idea well. This is what was missing in our owner's plan. They listened to every friend, every drunk at the bar, and tried to integrate everything into their restaurant. In trying to create somewhere that will please everyone, you end up making a restaurant with a lack of identity. A restaurant without an identity is bound to fail. The lowest moments for me as the man in charge were when I had to fire people. It's hard to fire someone, but it's even harder to watch somebody who you interviewed and thought would do well, not do well. You feel like a failure when you hand select somebody and then they can't do the job properly. I had a grill cook who I had to talk to about whether or not he wanted to continue working with us due to his personal issues getting in the way of his work. On his next scheduled day, he came in thirty minutes late, drunk out of his mind, and told me that he couldn't do it anymore. The next day he asked for his job back and I had to respectfully decline. My only other firing was a girl who was breaking up with her boyfriend, who was in and out of jail, and wrecked her car for her. She would burst into tears for some reason or another almost on a weekly basis. She eventually had to be let go, as texting in front of the owners when there is work to be done is just not a great idea. The next week I found out that she was pregnant. I wondered if she would have worked a little harder if she knew she was pregnant a little earlier. My dad, who I look up to and trust more than anybody in the world, always tells me that the most important thing to learn from any job is what not to do. In that sense, my first Executive Chef job was great. I learned all the wrong ways to run a restaurant. I admittedly made a lot of mistakes myself. I stayed around for as long as I possibly could until they made me cut labor down so that I was working about 70 hours a week regularly, up to 7 days a week, and cooking food that I despised. The most important thing I realized though, was that when I opened my own restaurant, I was going to have to do it my way or I would never be happy with myself. In terms of learning a lot about myself and learning how to manage people, I consider the experience a success. Chapter 7 My goal was always to learn as much as possible about the restaurant industry and know exactly what kind of restaurant I wanted before I actually built one of my own. However, I still to this day feel as if I have some unfinished business. I never did well in school until I went to The CIA. I learned there that when I really care about something, even if it's school, I apply myself and I do well. The last thing that I had to do before I dedicated myself to a restaurant was to finish my schooling and get my Bachelor's Degree. I've come a long way in 7 years and finally know almost exactly what kind of restaurant I want to open. I know for sure that I am going to open a small restaurant and focus on doing a few things really well, rather than a lot of things moderately well. However, I am in no hurry to go and open a restaurant in this economy. I'm lucky enough to already have an investor or two lined up, so I'm going to keep studying, keep learning as much as I can about food and the industry, and hopefully keep on writing and chronicling all of my experiences here, for better or worse. Hopefully better.>

Self Assessment
I have conflicting feelings about the work that I did in this class. My first thought is that I'm glad that I was able to finish my paper and get a good start on something that I'd like to keep up for a long time. But in a way I'm also a little disappointed in the way that I wrote it. At times, I just felt that I had so much to write that it was just as if I were spitting out facts and there was no personality behind it. I used to write a fairly popular blog that revolved around food and cooking and a lot of people would read it and leave nice comments. My goal with this paper was to write in that same style, but just chronicle everything that I've done. I just feel that I missed out on that style for a few reasons. a) I think that it was so much more content than I've ever written that I felt the need to just go. If I got stuck, I'd just write anything and then go back to it, so some bits felt forced in a way.  b) I think that since I was writing it for an English class, albeit a non traditional one, I still felt that I should leave out of a lot language or stronger opinions that I would have used if I were writing it just for fun. Having said all of that, I am pleased that I finished it and I think at some point I'll have time to go back and make it the way I intended it. I think it serves well as a rough outline right now. As far as the class, I do think that I should have been more involved in class, but I had a hard time critiquing people's work. Especially poems. I have no idea how to critique poetry, I think my brain just doesn't function poetically. I was excited after the first day of the class, knowing that I'd be spending the majority of my time writing something that I would enjoy, rather than some forced book review papers or the kind of stuff I had to write in High School. In that sense, I think it was very successful and giving people, especially in an art school, the chance to write freely about what they are interested in writing about, in my opinion, is definitely the right way to go about an English class. It was actually my favorite class this quarter, which I never expected from an English class.