Chef Mil
Berkeley, CA
Female, 49
I have been working in restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area for over 20 years (two of the restaurants had been in the SF Chronicle's Top 100 Restaurants). I have cooked mostly Mediterranean food, but have some experience with Asian food. I went to cooking school, and worked my way up from being a prep cook (think--prepping 3 cases of artichokes, de-boning 100 quail, and juicing a case of lemons!) to being a chef at a well known restaurant in my area. And no, I am not the yelling type! :)
How are you, baron? Hope all is well. I think in Europe there are more barriers to women in high-end kitchens. From what I've read, even the males when they start out in high end kitchens, are treated brutally. I read "The Perfectionist: Life and Death in Haute Cuisine"; the young cook in the book would go home crying several times. For the women, the added sexism makes it doubly hard. Here in the US, there are a lot more women chefs, but cooking is a physically hard job. You're on your feet the whole time, you have to lift heavy things, and the speed of the line during the rush can be intimidating. I don't think most people have the personality, male or female, to work in a restaurant kitchen. Hmmm, I have to think about this more. Although I was the chef, I worked with all men in the last restaurant I worked (they were awesome, I loved working with them)! The women just didn't seem to work out.
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Hello est15, When I worked in the restaurant, I had access to better quality foods at a better price, but only because the restaurant chose and set up accounts with purveyors who had the good stuff. Otherwise, I shop at higher quality markets and at the local organic farmers' market close to me. Personally, I always pick the good stuff. :)
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Hi Amy, Tomatoes!!! Stone fruit, such as apricots. Oh yes, when tomatoes are in season I would make salmorejo, which is a type of gazpacho and tomato salads. As for stone fruit, I totally incorporate them into desserts or pair them with roasted duck. I know tomatoes are available the whole year, but those unseasonal tomatoes, I don't consider tomatoes. Yuck! :) Can you tell I love summer produce?
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Hi baron, I liked that movie. They did a good job; I heard that Thomas Keller, the famous chef from French Laundry helped with the movie. Since I live close to Pixar, I've worked in the space where they helped to make the "cooking" sections of that movie. Did you like it?
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Hi Taylor, In the restaurant I worked, we did food cost times 4. I'm not sure what they did on the bar side; industry standard seems to be about 5 times the cost. The owners of the restaurant/bar I worked at must've done something wrong because we made more money on the food side than on the bar side, which is not normal. It was almost a 50-50 split with the food edging the alcohol out by a percentage or two. I've heard that many places want to make about 70% of profit off the alcohol.
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Hi Brooketown, I was just talking about this to someone! I tried to make this Spanish tripe dish with all this Spanish charcuterie, pig trotters, and pimenton. The tripe was slowly cooked for two hours which made it quite tender, and I thought all the add ons gave it such great flavor. Unfortunately, we have such a bias against tripe in this country that only 9 sold in the two weeks I had it on the menu. Even Alice Waters' ex-husband couldn't bring himself to eat tripe. He said he just couldn't stomach eating a stomach!!! :)
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Jason, I'm beginning to think that food critics matter less, especially since newspapers are getting less play. The food section in my area has gotten small; it used to have its own section every week. In a way, I think Yelp is more democratic and pretty accurate, although I know it does solicit money to give restaurants more coverage and to remove any bad ratings.
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