Tonight the sous chef threw me onto the middle station, which puts out spaetzle, vegetable side dishes with nice sauces, soups, German sausages, and a bone marrow dish. It’s a fun station, because I can have a lot of pans going at once. I very much prefer working saute pans to grilling. Not sure why, I just enjoy it more. Building sauces, flipping things, controlling heat.

Anyway today was my first busy night on the hot line, and I found out 10 minutes before service started that I’d be working there. I spent 50 minutes setting up the garde-manger, and then all of a sudden it was like, okay, I have 10 minutes to set up this other station. Also too the menu just changed yesterday, and the side dishes on middle station were different, and I hadn’t seen then. But I learned a long time ago that working in the kitchen, there’s no point to stress over anything. The work that needs to get done is always possible, and it always gets done, somehow, some way.

So I found out what the new sides were, drank some coffee, checked my mise-en-place (station set-up, ingredients, back-ups, etc.), drank some more coffee, prepped the crap out of some vegetables, ran around getting stuff assembled, and organized, into quart containers or whatever, and then finally, everything came together and I could chill out, and have a nice service.

The most important thing in the kitchen, on any station, even if you don’t have a clue what you’re doing, is good mise-en-place. You find out exactly how much of everything you have, like how many quarts of soup, how many quarts of the carrots, the mushrooms, if you have all the herbs chopped, and then minor things, like if you have salt and pepper, olive oil, etc. Once you know you’re good on everything, and you know exactly where each ingredient is, then you’ve got yourself set up to work the next 7 hours and never once have to worry about running out of something. That frees up that part of the brain to stay focused on the service, and staying afloat. I was good today – nunca en la caca – never in the weeds. And nunca nervioso – never nervous.

The best part of it was that I was back into real cooking, rhythmic cooking, like I haven’t done in 3 months. First I was trying to put in time at DB Town, and they screwed with my paycheck, so I had to quit, and then I had to put in time over here at my new restaurant, putting my new guy time in on garde-manger, making salads for 8 hours straight. So it’s good to be back. And I got to talk trash all night long to the Mexican guy who works the saute station next to me. In two months I hardly ever heard a word from him, and now I finally got him trash talkin’ with me. So work is gonna get a lot better now – got the whole crew tight, and talking trash, and enjoying the good life.