I hate Chicken Saltimboca, but I love working the line

Wednesday
Got in early again today, so early in fact that I was the only chef there. The lunch crew had left, and the dinner crew had yet to arrive. When Chef Nick got in, he told me he needed me to break down some chickens for him. He gave me a quick demo of how he liked to break chickens down, than I got busy. The first couple of chickens took me a couple of minutes to get right, since I hadn't broken down a chicken in months. Well, chef told me to hurry up, so I did, I broke down those 20 chickens in under 30 minutes. I pumped my arm and thought of how proud chef Luke would have been. We woulda high fived, screamed "FUCK YEAH", and play air guitar together.

And in my mind we did.

Well, after thanking Hermes for blessing me with the speed of a god, I cleaned up and did some dishes. Than chef had me do something so horrible, so mind numbingly painful that you should pray you never have to do it. He had me wrap the breasts in jamón.

"But Brendan" You say to yourself yourself, "how is that difficult, it sounds easy"

That's where you should shut your whore mouth, this shit is hard. You have to make sure that you wrap the breasts really fucking tight, or something bad'll happen. I don't know what it is, chef never told me. But fuck me, it took me 40 minutes to FAIL at making 8 or 9 of these fuckers, 2 of which I re-did cause of how ugly they were. After running out of jamón, chef told me to steam the ones I had finished and that I could do the rest tomorrow.

Which I didn't.

Whoops.

After that, I did more dishes, than helped close down the kitchen. We left that day at 10:15pm, more than an hour earlier than Monday. It was pretty sweet.

Thursday
Chef Trevor was here today in place of Chef Nick. People say we look alike. Which we do, I guess, but Jax (one of the waiters) said I was cuter. This made me feel good about myself. I have never been called cute by another man, or woman for that matter. There wasn't much prep to do today, so I mainly stood around joking with Matt (another waiter) and Robin (the other line cook, besides me). We weren't expecting many people today, and we only had one reservation at 8. Trevor told me I was gonna work the line today doing salads, sushi, really anything that didn't need to be cooked. I was thrilled with the idea of doing real work for once, and not wash dishes all day.

My first Salad was a ceasar, one of the easiest salads to make. Just toss baby romaine in the dressing, stuff in a round piece of crispy baguette, roll up an anchovy for the side, crack some pepper on it, grate some cheese over it, and send it out. BAM. First one down. I got a couple more ceasars, a surf crudo, and some fennel kumquat salads. Really the hardest thing for me to do is the cheese for the cherry gazpacho. I forget the name for the thing, but you use spoons to make it.

Lets talk about the surf crudo for a second. The thing is the weirdest interprotation of surf and turf I have ever seen. The thing is a thinly sliced frozen scallop, topped with beef tar-tar and wasabi foam. The beef tar-tar is amazing, I could eat that shit all night. But pairing it with scallops? I guess Chef Nick likes it, so it stays.

Matt got us some pizzas from Old Town Pizza, one of the best pizza places around.

For some reason drunk people love sushi. I don't know why, but closer to the end of the night, the drunkards at the bar kept ordering sushi. We couldn't figure out why, so we just decided that it must be easy to eat since you only need your fingers.

We started to break down the kitchen at 9:57, but didn't leave till 11:30, since the restaurant is open till 11 on Thurdays.

I'll finish this post with a joke Trevor told me today. Whats the difference between Jelly and Jam?

I can't jelly my dick in your mouth.