Sweet Tidbits

Another busy night on Station 3. I should’ve known when I walked in at 4PM and the restaurant was nearly full =_=
It pretty much stayed like that the whole night. I’m SO glad I stocked myself up the night before because I never really got a chance to ever go downstairs. O_O Phew! Total covers by the end of the night: 270.

Other than that, not much to really say. Ruth was killin’ it on station 2. I held my own on 3. I sold all my foie (though I was super annoyed at cooking it in the first place), though I thought I’d cooked them all really nicely.

At some point in the evening, I looked up and Koren’s friend Scottie, aka Wildcard, was in the window talking with Armanzo. I know I haven’t mentioned Scottie much. At some point he was opening a lot for us, but once we hired more people and our staff numbers evened out, Scottie bowed out since he was there to help us out anyway.
Anyway, the reason Scottie came by was to drop off a crap load of crawfish for us (it filled up two full hotel pans). With corn. And some Zatarain’s. What the–?! Not that I’m even going to question this. I mean, it’s Wildcard fer cryin’ out loud. You don’t question him. Yay! Thanks Scottie!
Armanzo brought one crawfish up and had it in the window for a while before he gave it to me in a pint container with instructions to cut it in half and throw it on the plancha. I’ve never cut up a live specimen in half before, so this was cool. I felt a little bad since it was a little life and it was thrashing, but I said a little prayer, put it on a towel and then I cut it in half. Then I sprinkled some salt, pepper, and sumac on it and cooked it off for Armanzo.

Another highlight of the night was when bartender Mary Rose told me a story about how her roommate, Michelle. Two things to know about Mary Rose’s roomie: she’s Asian and a line cook at Gilt Bar. Anyway, so the story goes that Roomie was talking with someone somewhere (you know how I am about these details), and mentioned she was was a line cook. Apparently the other person in her conversation said, “Oh! You must be the Asian girl who works at Avec!” AHAHAHAHAHAHA!! While I feel a little sad for the roommate over the mistaken identity, I’m tickled pink that this person has been to Avec and has seen me. Someone knows me! I’m not just any ole Asian girl! I’m the one who works at Avec! Ehehe! \^_^/ Woot woot!

I’m off tomorrow but why do I get the feeling I’ll be seeing more line time on Station 2 next week…?

I leave you with the horrible picture of Blackbird’s pastry chef from Food&Wine that I mentioned a while back. We have a new dessert to replace the old hazelnut cake. It’s a lemon cake that comes with rhubarb compote among with some other accoutrements which I don’t know because I’ve never seen a completed cake. While the cake is tasty, I hate it because I’m required to heat it up. So everytime a ticket comes, I put a cake in the oven, and then when I plate it, I have to pop it out of its hot aluminum tin, and then rip it in half, while burning my fingertips on the hot sugar the cake is baked with. When I put it up in the window, instead of calling “cake!”, I say “Bryce sucks!”. It cracks Fred up.
In the name of petty revenge, here’s the picture:

This is terrible. I am traumatized.

Don’t Ask Me To Rise

I ended up not doing any training on Station 2 Tuesday. Either Elliot told Koren I was a spectacular failure, or maybe it was because we got a little busy right off the bat for me to get another try on that station.

Either way, I was a little relieved and disappointed.

It was a steady stream of orders that kept us busy until about 10:30, and then it suddenly died and got quiet. What a difference… you’d think we’d be mellow on a Tuesday but at one point I had three cheese plates, a salumi plate (or two), and some foie going on. It kinda sucked at the time. (Elliot: “All I want to do is drink my Gatorade and enjoy my fun-size Snickers. Is that too much to ask?”) I ended up selling out all my whole fish (granted, I only had 5 all day), and by the end of the night, I had one order of whitefish left. Phew!

After work Katie and I went to Ian’s to have after-work pizza, which I think is the best time to have that pizza. We brought some dates, hoping our regular pizza would be there. Ian’s somehow renamed itself into Dimo’s, but the pizza and the staff (we finally found out the guy’s name is Jason) are the same, so I’ll probably still be calling it Ian’s out of habit.
(For the record, I had the corndog pizza and the steak & fries pizza. Random and delicious! Katie had buffalo chicken and… I’ve forgotten her other slice of pizza, but oh well, it was tasty.)

I open on Thursday.
Hopefully I’m not confronted with that horrible wallpaper on the office computer that’s essentially a tiled picture of Blackbird’s pastry chef Bryce Caron with an awful haircut and trying to pose all avant-garde. He looks like a goth Geico caveman. It’s terrible. Why he cut his hair, I’ve no idea, but it looked better when it was longer and he tied it back, as opposed the current pigeon’s nest he’s sporting on his head.
I guess one good thing came out of it. Elliot sent a picture of it to Armanzo who got a good laugh out of it.