Recipes and Regressions
Earlier this year, I met with the Dean of Engineering at my university to talk about school, work, and my plans for the upcoming summer. Our conversation was going well, until he brought up my experience on the University Iron Chef team, asking:
“How has engineering made you a better cook?”
Starting from Scratch
I’ve spent the past two years working in kitchens. I started off, like most people do, washing dishes, mopping the floors, and taking out the trash. Over time, I made my way to becoming a line cook for a ramen restaurant, a tapas and wine bar, and most recently a Yakitori (charcoal grilled skewers) restaurant.
Cooking has since become a central part of my daily life. Between working four nights a week at the restaurant and cooking for myself at home, I’ve likely spent more time in kitchens this year than in labs and lecture halls combined.
Despite how central both were to my life, I always considered cooking and engineering to be two distinct entities, with little to learn from each other.
Until I was posed with that question.
As I sunk back into my chair, frantically trying to come up with a somewhat competent sounding answer, I realized just how intertwined my experiences with cooking and engineering really were. Just not in the way the Dean had thought. Engineering had not made me a better cook:
“If anything, cooking has made me a better engineer”
(Hopefully) The most expensive ring you’ll ever wear
I had never heard of, or seen, an iron pinky ring until my first week of university. I was quickly brought up to speed on the history, tradition, and meaning behind the ring by two incomprehensibly hyperactive “Frosh Leaders”, both dyed royal purple from head to toe. I knew I was in for quite the ride.
While still far from getting my own iron ring, I was intrigued and motivated by what it represented. The tradition, started back in the 1920’s, involved presenting engineering graduates with an iron ring to wear on the pinky finger of their dominant hand. This ring, rough-cut and unpolished, is meant to actively serve as a reminder of the impact your work has, and of the standards you should strive to uphold. This website explains it in some more detail.
Over my 4 years of university, I wondered where and when these values would be instilled in us. How do you “teach” humility? How do you “instruct” someone to truly understand the detrimental consequences that being careless can have? I encountered these values not in lectures, or in group projects, but during the countless nights I spent in my 2nd 3rd, and 4th year working in various kitchens across Canada and Japan.
Not as glorious as TV makes it seem
Working in a kitchen is tough. It’s a physically and mentally demanding job that leaves you utterly exhausted by the end of your shift. It requires you to be on your toes, multitasking, communicating, and improvising to ensure that all of your tickets get out in time, looking and tasting perfect.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have spent the majority of my time cooking at restaurants with open kitchens. I say fortunate, because open kitchens bring with them a whole new host of factors you need to be cognizant of while you navigate your way through the hundreds of slippery, sharp, and red-hot moving parts around you. Open kitchens can be far more nerve-wracking to work in, but they bring with them a certain “realness”, ultimately impacting the way in which you approach your work. Open kitchens have helped shed light on the importance of transparency, preparation, and accountability when it comes to cooking.
Transparency
Cooking in an open kitchen is almost akin to putting on a performance: the ‘audience’, diners, takes their seats, eager to be entertained with food. They see every move you make, they hear the clanking of pots and pans from far back, they smell the aromas, good and bad, wafting out towards them, they feel the heat and intensity, mere feet, away across the counter, and finally, when the dish is served, they taste what was crafted at plain sight.
Working so close to your ‘audience’ helps you learn right from day one that there is little room to screw up, and that having a “bad day” isn’t really an option. Even if you’re exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated to the point of passing out, your station damn well better be clean, and you better have a smile on your face, because people are watching.
Preparation
Most peoples perception of what happens behind the doors of a kitchen is quite far from the reality. Cooking in a restaurant is largely about the precise assembly of a dish. When an order comes in for two skewers of salted chicken hearts and a plate of karaage, no one grabs a knife to go and butcher a chicken. Everything that can be prepared in advance, is prepared in advance.
You have your charcoal is burning steady at over 700°C, hearts skewered and drained of blood, chicken thighs cut, measured, and resting in their marinade, frying oil at just over 175°C, lemon wedges sliced, deseeded, and chilled next to the plating station. During my first day on the grill, I was told:
“Preparation is 90% of the game. Spend the extra time before service prepping your station, and you’ll make it through the peak rush with minimal problems. Slack on your prep, you’ll fall apart in 30 minutes”
Being prepared doesn’t mean you’re never going to run into any problems. You could be doing everything right, and all it could take is one overcooked skewer of chicken liver to throw you completely out of flow. It’s in these cases that proper preparation makes the difference between a speedy recovery, and things falling into utter chaos. Especially in an open kitchen, the last thing you want to see while dining is the look of sheer panic in the eyes of the person who’s making your next meal.
Accountability
Fridays and Saturdays get pretty hectic around 8:00 pm. During these peak hours, when a waiter comes back to hand off an absurd number of tickets, the head chef makes it a point to pull me off the grill for a second to breathe. We take a moment to organize our tickets, grab a sip of water, before looking up and out of the window.
We look out at the faces of everyone in the restaurant, to remind ourselves of who we’re cooking for. We look at them, and remember that we’re responsible for giving them the meal and the experience they came here for. The proximity to your customer that an open kitchen provides adds a level of accountability and reward that makes standing above 700°C coal for hours on end so much more worth it.
Hiding in plain sight
Iron rings and an open kitchens seem to have an oddly similar effect. Over time, you get accustomed to their presence, but never get so comfortable that you forget they’re there.
They’re both meant to serve as constant reminders, one more symbolically than the other, of people and values you’re working towards. Both add an extra layer of awareness, reminding you of what’s at stake, encouraging you to look beyond the immediate task at hand. Both stress the importance of transparency, preparation, and accountability, and why its so important to never forget the people on the receiving end of your work .
From here on out
My time in kitchens unfortunately came to an abrupt end on March 16th. The last shift was nothing short of an adventure; 3 people running a 5-person kitchen, with orders pouring in like eager first-years trying to get a front row seat in a lecture hall. It got so busy at one point, that the national manager of the restaurant group had to throw on a t-shirt, grab a towel, and start washing dishes just to keep us afloat. I ended the night hours past schedule, reluctantly stepping out of the kitchen, saying an indefinite goodbye to what had unexpectedly become the center of my life.
I don’t know when I’ll be back in a kitchen next, but I’ll be ready in a moments notice, with an iron ring on my right hand, and a cast-iron skillet in my left, to jump right in when the call comes.
