Culinary Externship: First Week at Prospect
This was my first week working at Prospect, a fine-dining restaurant that’s owned & operated by Michelin star chefs and staffed by amazing humans. I’ve taken six weeks vacation from my full-time job so I could learn and grow working in a professional kitchen. My first week included cooking recipes, preparing vegetable, shadowing stations, shopping at the farmer’s market, taking a mountain of notes and learning how a real kitchen functions.
The Humans
The most important aspect of any work environment for me are the people. Everyone I’ve met at Prospect is kind, supportive and individually a just really nice person. I occasionally look around, take in these amazing people and smile.
Plating — Spoons, Tweezers, Tongs
My first day in the kitchen Chef Ty casually mentioned “Yeah, and you can put all your spoons here” as I looked down at my one and only spoon. Fine-dining needs a lot more then one spoon: from laying down sauces in intricate shapes with antique spoons; to plating three consecutively placed pieces of pickled shiitake mushrooms with tweezers (“Culinary Tongs”). Chef Michael Mann had a great demo for me that first day of how the same sauce with the same hand movements plates differently from different spoons. I’m a spoon-nerd now and it’s because of him.
What to look for in a plating spoon? Look for pointy-tipped deep spoons. A good keyword I’ve found for eBay and Etsy is “grapefruit spoon antique” and “orange spoon”.
My first evening at the restaurant one of the first things I did was help plate amuse-bouche for a private party. Later that evening a close friend attending that same party sent me this photo of her eating the food I had just plated. I’m definitely not in culinary school anymore. Actual people are eating my food now.
My first night at Prospect I was shadowing Chef Joh at the Garde Manger station (“cold apps”). That was my first night and by the end of it I’ve prepared all the dishes on that station. After shadowing each station I ended up with a set of notes on each dish. For example here are my notes on Plating Heirloom Tomato & Cucumber Salad:
1) 3 concentric circle of Labneh
2) Sprinkle Sumac in and around the circles
3) Dress 3 tomato slices with Lemon & Honey Viangrette and maldon. Plate in 2–1 stacks.
4) 2 slices of large cherry tomatoes
5) Dress 3 sun sugar tomatoes + persian cucumbers with Harissa. Plate.
6) 5ish thin slices of cucumber.
7) Decorate with purslane, mint and agretti.
8) 4 hot falafel balls.
9) Drizzle olive oil on Labneh and on top of falafel.
In the aforementioned Plating for Heirloom Tomato & Cucumber Salad everything was placed on concentric circles of Labneh. For a dinner party my first evening we changed the presentation for the salad since we plated on oblong plates instead of circular plates. You can see in the above photo it’s more of a spiral “S” shape than a circular shape.
Presentation zen: plating for a dish can vary depending on different chefs and circumstances. The dish’s components and the order they’re plated should still be consistent.
Every dish has many hours of prep work for the multiple components that collectively make up that dish. The Prep work for Little Gems & Fresh Figs is a great example of how much attention each dish gets.
- The grapes are quick-pickled overnight in red-wine vinegar.
- The hazelnut vinaigrette simmers for an hour combining multiple imported oils, vinegars and herbs.
- The fig puree are fresh & dried figs simmering in imported wines and then pureed.
- The hazelnut crumble are crushed hazelnuts baked in a crumble.
- Not to mention that the blue cheese is diced, fresh figs are quartered, watercrass is cleaned and so on.
There’s a lot I can say about the Beef Tartare. But the coolest thing… See the crescent shape for beef? It’s actually shaped around stainless steel rings. #mindblown
Those stainless steel rings are used extensively at the restaurant from shaping the Beef Tartare, to vertically stacking the Hamachi Crudo, to proofing & baking Black Sesame Brioche.
The bread thing in the back of the Caramelized Hudson Valley Foie Gras is a Black Sesame Brioche. It’s a brioche bread made from a 1:2 butter: black-sesame-paste baked in the aforementioned stainless steel rings. Also, worth noting is that plate has 5 different preparations of pear: shaved pear roasted pear, pickled pear, pear butter, and pureed pear.
This week I shadowed all of Prospect’s four appetizers & entrees dinner stations: cold appetizers, hot appetizers, fish & poultry entrees and meat entrees. For me “Shadowing” meant I’m going to take notes on the components of each dish, how it’s currently plated, notes of hot cooking (what goes in each pan, plancha and grill) and plate everything. I got to plate every appetizer and entree on the dinner menu in my first week. That duck breast dish above? I made that (with Chef Nelson looking over my shoulder) about an hour after first seeing it done.
Vegetable Prep is a part of every dish at the restaurant and it helped get me working on multiple dishes starting my first day. My favourite zen of prep I heard this week was from Chef John Cahill “Always work from one container to another”. You can see the difference from cutting the pickled grapes on my first day, to the peeling potatoes a week later.
Peeling baby potatoes, a cheaters’ method: Place baby potatoes in a deep frier for 10s–30s until the skin gets oil-logged. Then gently squeeze off the skins with a towel.
This week I made recipes used in multiple dishes.
- Falafel: I made the house’s falafel recipe, portioned and rolled out 767 falafel balls which are served in the Heirloom Tomato & Cucumber Salad. The trick is to let them firm up in the fridge after portioning but before rolling.
- Barigule: made the barigule poaching liquid for the artichokes served in the Potato Gnocchi & Chanterelle Mushrooms.
- Tasso Aioli: With Chef Rick’s help I made the Tasso Aioli that’s served with the Fried Green Tomatoes & Local Squid. It’s basically mayonnaise sauce made from tasso-infused oil with diced aromatics.
- Black Sesame Brioche: Mised out ingredients and rolled out 200 portions of the black Sesame Brioche served with Caramelized Hudson Valley Foie Gras.
This list could get super long. I could talk about Squid Ink Ravioli, or Hazelnut Vinaigrette, or Duxelle, or brining chicken, but I’ll stop here.
The restaurant is a real business. They do inventory. There are work shift schedules. There’s daily 3PM meetings where the chefs discuss the menu for tonight, ask if anyone needs help to make a dish happen and offer advice. The last thing I expected was for Chefs to have daily standups.
Read more about my culinary adventures by reading about my last week in Culinary School:
