Dudes,
It's hard to believe that it has been 20 years since I started my professional life as a chef: I started off at the age of 16 as a potwash then Kitchen Porter for my local pub and at the age of 18, I was working for a burger chain as a 'fry bitch'- fries and onion rings don't cook themselves- working my way up to the grill line, flipping burgers, often doing 10-12 hour shifts, with a 20 min break , it was knackering. The length of shifts only went up as I progressed through the industry. After that I spent time working at various places across the market 'spectrum', which are fine dining, middle market and fast food, both Jewish and non -Jewish .
(in between these categories I would say there's a relatively new category - at least in the west- of ' Kitchen street food' which combines elements of both middle market dining and fast food, where chefs cook inside a truck, but provide better quality food than the old fashioned burger or breakfast vans you used to find outside factories and warehouses).
This line of jobs over a decade included hotels, pubs, restaurants, a greasy spoon (sausages were spelt suesajes) and even office canteens- although I've never been a 'dinner lady' at school- before trying my luck in France, Greece, Switzerland, Israel and 6 months in the Caribbean, cooking on oil rigs and ships, by which time I was still a Commis Chef, rather than taking a particular 'station' or 'line', as I was more interested in different types of food and cooking, than specialising in one particular area. Today I enjoy cooking the traditional food I was bought up with- e.g. Fish and Chips T'beet and Kubba Stew, but also to adapt other food to kosher rules, for example sausage and mash can be made kosher if the sausage is not made from pork, so I have spent many times trying to find out whether beef, lamb, chicken was a better substitute, before trying a vegetarian sausage.
I think the biggest adventure I undertook in those days was taking a decision to work on several cruise ships, which would take more than one blog post to reminisce over. The thing was that both the cooking and the people meant that global cuisine came to me, rather than I having to go to it. This was both because the people you worked with were of almost every foreign nationality and because cruise ships have a variety of restaurants to choose from. My favourite line was the pastry and bakery section and I guess this is why I see myself as a Pastry chef, rather than as a Grill chef. After I'd settled down back in Britain, it became more hum drum, even as I managed to get various promotions. In fact by the time you become an 'executive chef' you don't actually do any cooking, except to design menus. That's exciting, but so many of these executive chefs have forgotten what it is like to work in a kitchen and can forget that a one size fits all menu is okay, if every kitchen is of similar size and every chef of similar competence. In fact as you get promoted in the industry, you actually do less and less cooking, a Sous Chef and or the Head Chef rarely do so, their role is akin to the conductor of an orchestra during service: vital, but as we know a conductor doesn't actually play a musical instrument. Not good if you actually enjoy the cooking part itself. Hence why I decided to set up as my own boss.
For those of you who don't know much about kitchens, they are organised like a military into 'brigades' and because this system was created by the French, everyone has a French name: the Head Chef (Chef de Cuisine or if you own the business Chef Patron ) at the top, the Sous Chef being the deputy, followed by Chef De Partie, Commis Chefs, the Plonguer ( Kitchen Porter or KP and /or the Pot Wash). The Chef De Partie specialises in a particular line in the kitchen, e.g grill, fish, pastry etc, whereas the Commis Chef is an 'all round' junior Chef, who has to get to know the basics of every line and eventually gets to specialise in one (ironically once promotion beckons you revert to being a generalist rather than a specialist!). Not every kitchen will have a such a big set up and have maybe 3 stations such as grill, starters, garnishes and maybe deserts ( but then in your average 'non gastro' UK pub the KP or Potwash is often left to do deserts as they are mostly microwaved products) .
As for my faith during my twenties and now into my late thirties, I wouldn't pretend that I was some Orthodox poster boy, as I have cooked pork and shellfish in the past, although I do not nowadays, but I wasn't some ultra liberal either, I kept the Shabbat and tried to attend Shul when I could. After many years, I think I prefer the Israeli Masortim which is found among the Israeli Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, rather than the extreme of being totally secular or totally ultra Orthodox religious . This is distinctly Israeli and nothing to do with the 'Conservative' or Masorti Judaism of Ashkenazi origin and those of us who identify as 'Shomrei Masoret' or 'upholders of tradition' look to what outsiders would see as 'Orthodox' Rabbis and belong to traditional Sephardic congregations, with a desire to uphold the culture, tradition and heritage of our form of Judaism, without being sucked into a vortex of conflicts with secular education, science or not working but studying Torah all day, managing to avoid IDF service or trying to isolate oneself from the outside world as a deliberate policy, This Wikipedia article explains more fully .
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