.......breathe, oh I'm sorry chef were you saying something. Well I guess I didn't realize just how anal you are.
I have to tell you, I've herd what you are saying 3, maybe 400 times. Well I'm not going to"insert career here" as most
on the boards do.
You have a nice way of trying to paint a picture of my career. You don't have a clue how I feel about training. Here in the states
we have let this industry implode.
The last half of your post backs everything I was trying to express. I scan new posts and if I see something that I may be able to help someone with
I will respond. I respond because I have the blisters and the scars from making mistakes. Inevitably someone will google something
and pop on with it. There is so much misinformation on the www it's criminal. Almost all of it has an agenda. These young chefs
do believe most of what they read.
Somehow you got that I care what to call a sauce or what. Wrongo bongo. I came to ChefTalk 10 years ago. There was always intelligent
banter about cooking. Now it has become www references. If you don't believe that then oh well. I have always thought that we should be
required to post a bio to be in the professional forum. Real or not who cares. It's just getting old reading copy and pastes.
Now I don't understand too much what you do with all that fancy equipment and brigades and such. I did it for a while and quickly figured
out it was not for me financially. I still respect it though as I do someone working at Ronanld Mcdonalds. If you read into that
that the money is important, YES!!! IT IS! You might say I'm anal about it.
Now let's talk about you name:>D
Do you know what a Shiner is?
Panini
You seem to be taking a lot of things I'm saying as if they are a personal attack on you. If you feel this way I apologise. It was not my intention. I have made no assumptions about you or your career. Any assumption I would have made would have been in your favour judging by your willingness to offer advice. I wouldn't trust anything I found on the net and assumed most other chefs were of the same opinion, perhaps I am wrong on this. When I refer to "old-school" I don't mean that in a derogatory way it's just my way of saying classical. When I say "dinosaur" I mean in mentality rather than in age. You can be a young old-school chef and a young dinosaur, just like you can be an older new-school chef or an older innovator.
I haven't spent much time on this forum as I usually post on a UK one so I will trust you know more of its intricacies than I. If I didn't think I had anything to add about a topic I wouldn't post on it, simple. If someone disagrees with me, great, maybe I've been doing something wrong all these years and am about to learn something, maybe not.
The reason why I mentioned my experiences was because I felt they painted a picture of an industry based on short cuts and of chefs who have been trained properly by their Head chefs but are not passing on that knowledge when they become Head chefs. The attitude I see so often now is "I don't need to train my chefs how to cook because I have a water bath, I don't need to teach someone how to make an anglaise or hollandaise etc because the thermomix will do that, I don't need to teach my chefs how to butcher meat or prep fish because my suppliers will do that and so on and so on.
Of course money is important, to be a good chef you have to be a good businessman, you can't have one with out the other. I have just taken up a new position, completely different to anything I have done before because I was fed up of fine dining and totally burned out. I've just spent the last year travelling and generally bumming about due to this so I have a lot of respect for guys who have been in this industry a long time. The first person I call with any questions I still have about cheffing, or life for that matter, is my first Head chef so I in no way mean to belittle experience. The truth is there are very few experienced chefs in this industry any more. I don't know what happens to chefs after the age of 40 but they all seem to disappear. I'm 29 and feel 129 after some services so anyone still in the trenches later on in life has my respect.
One of the best chefs I ever trained came to me from Mcdonalds. He could work quickly, cleanly and efficiently, pretty soon after I hired him, I couldn't say that about too many of the kids I get with their fancy culinary diploma's and self important attitudes. I can never be bothered filling out my Bio's on these things but if you're that interested PM me and I'll send you my CV and references.
My name real name is Dom, my username is because I'm part Italian and everyone at school thought I must therefore be in the mafia. It kind of stuck after that.
A shiner? Is it a black eye?
Cosa Nostra,
You know partly I jest. I guess I was feeling a little old.
I'm still very confused. Now this is coming from an old hippie. This attitude of non confrontation is something I'm not familiar with.
OK, an educator gets up in front of a class and tells you he is enjoying the rain. You look over and see a dog peeing on his leg.
You best believe I'm going to confront him or her on that. That's basically what my secondary education was based on. My son is in college
and I would never tell him to conform to something he knows is wrong.
Is that what happened?
Trust me, after a Saturday service I'll feel older than you. I'm not sure what you mean here. If you're talking about my experience of college then everything I got taught at college, my head chef would immediately tell me that it was a load of rubbish. If I went in the next day and told my lecturer what my HC said, it wouldn't go down to well. If I used techniques I was taught at work, I was marked down for them, If I wrote in an exam the way I would do something at work I was marked down for this etc etc. I learned just to have the attitude of "when in Rome" by the end of the course and was glad when it had finished so my real education could begin.
I teach my chefs to question all their pre-conceived ideas about food and if they can show me a better way of doing something I'll always listen. Although usually I am right all along. /img/vbsmilies/smilies/smile.gif
I have walked into many kitchen on trials, interviews etc that have been run appallingly. If I didn't like the way it was run I wouldn't tell the chef I thought he was s**t, I'd just leave.