03/25/20
That night was an absolute shit show to say the least. The large party was filled with indecisive women who didn’t know they temperatures in which steak was served. I used a thermometer still since I was just getting the hang of things and they still said their mediums were too pink and their medium-rares were overdone. Chef didn’t even get upset with me because he knew they were wrong. Oh and to top it off, the entire table told us they were gluten-free at the last moment. This was my first experience cooking gluten-free. Hell, before this I didn’t even know what gluten was. Needless to say, we did our job, we were on time, but you can’t please everyone.
The next weekend went by fairly smoothly and I like to think I was starting to get a hang of things. Chef started allowing me to break down the particular cuts of meat from the giant slabs we got in fresh every other day and it gave me the opportunity to learn what part of the cow each particular cut came from. I think Chef saw my eagerness to learn. That Saturday all of the cooks and I went out to the pub across the way for a few beers. One turned into two turned into fifteen and before I knew it I was spending $30.00 on junk food at 711. It had been awhile since I drank like this, it was nice to make friends who understood that I had very little time off. The majority of my friends who didn’t work in the industry just thought I was flaky as all hell but in reality, I was spending the latter half of 60 Hours a week at the steakhouse.
10 days later I finally got a day off of work. A week and a half after my initial day off in which I got called in. I must’ve slept until noon that day. I had so much I had to catch up on that I had subconsciously crammed into that one day. 3 loads of laundry, Clean my apartment, pay some bills, and eat dinner with my mother to name a few. Somehow I miraculously got kidnapped and held at ransom to join a few friends at the bar that afternoon and got a whopping one load of laundry done and shoved the rest off until my next day off whenever that may be. I was starting to spend 3-4 nights a week at the bar and at the time I didn’t think anything of it, that is just what people do my age I had thought. I did notice It was getting harder and harder to wake up every morning though. My mornings consisted of snoozing my alarm, procrastinating movement until I had less then an hour to make it to work, and popping every pill I could find in the medicine cabinet to try to ease the effects of the night before. All of this I see so clearly now, but at the time, that was my life. I legitimately thought that’s what adulthood looked like for everyone, little did I know, that wasn’t the case.
A Chef's Journey 