Culinary School, Finale #2: Serving Friends & Family
For the last week in Culinary School we cooked & served a menu of our creation to friends & family. There’s a lot that goes into cooking 80 covers: prep work, setting up stations, front-of-house and more. Let’s talk about my last week in culinary school.
The Menu
Two weeks ago we developed and practiced the menu that we cooked for friends & family this past weekend. You can review that menu here:
This week was all about execution. Overall the menu we executed on was 99% the menu we planned. There were a few minor changes based on produce availability and plating preferences (e.g. rainbow carrots instead of julienned carrots, serving ginger ale and melon float separately, etc). Here’s a few of the star dishes:
And some delicious desserts:
For more information on the menu and each dish you can read last week’s post.
Restaurant Line Up
An hour before the first seating of each day we made one serving of each dish and tasted. It’s an opportunity to check cooks know the dishes, adjust seasoning, revise plating, improve station setup and more. It’s also an opportunity for the front-of-house staff to taste each dish and provide feedback.
Station Setup
Each cook in the kitchen was responsible for executing on ~4 dishes as orders came in. It was up to each cook to make sure they have everything they need within reach to plate all their dishes. A station needed to include plates, raw & cooked ingredients, garnishes and everything else we’d need.
My main rule was “like with like”. For each dish I tried to spatially group everything I needed. You can see all the mango dessert ingredients are right next to each other; and so are the peach dessert ingredients.
Prep Lists
We spent the whole week cooking in advance whatever we could. We wrote up multi-day prep lists, buy-ahead shopping lists and executed on them the week prior. For example we rolled out and froze pasta, marinaded meats, pre-baked tart shells, made ice-creams, made a few sauces and much more. Here’s an example from our prep list for Thursday 6PM-10PM:
Friends & Family
The best part was feeding friends and family with our own creations. Here’s a few of their impressions:
Parting Words of Wisdom
Before leaving SF Cooking School and heading out to our externships we wrote down some advice for the next culinary class. The best advice I had to give was: “Take notes. Delete them. Take better notes. Share those”. And I guess in a way that’s what you’re reading right now.
“Part-time: School will eat your life. So what? It’s worth it.”
