Perils of the Hotel Kitchen
or how not to get fired for screwing upBack in the Mayfair-Regent pastry kitchen:
I was being tried out in the evening putting out desserts for dinner service. I was horrible at it. I’m not so good with fast timing. I don’t do well with à la minute desserts. This is the kind of stuff that drives me crazy. The tickets came in so fast and there were a lot of them. Well, to be fair, there probably weren’t that many of them. I just am that bad at getting dishes out quickly. If you give me an order of thousands of items but give me two weeks to make it, I’ll have it ready for you on time. But three Grand Mariner soufflés in a row and I’m toast. I think the management felt the same as I did. I was not good at dinner service. Margarito, the executive pastry chef, moved me to early morning and lunch service. This meant I would be prepping all the creams, doughs and other items that the evening service would need. I find I’m better at support than the actual dinner service. I did have to provide some items for the lunch dessert service but those were all pre-prepared items like mille feuille and fruit tart. I even got to make onion quiche for lunch service. I really enjoyed making the savory pastry items. The pate brisee (pie dough) was from scratch and the onions were slow cooked. The onions became a luscious color and texture; buttery smooth, soft and sweet.
I loved making the mille feuille. It was a big one. You may know it as a Napoleon. It’s an odd number of puff pastry layers separated by pastry cream. Sometimes there is fruit between the layers as well. Ours at the Mayfair was 5 layers of very thin puff pastry with thick layers of pastry cream. The pastry cream was studded with fresh raspberries. I would start each day by rolling out several sheets of puff pastry. I would dock them and bake them with parchment and sheet pans on top to keep them flat. Docking means to poke holes in the dough to keep it from rising. At home you might use a fork. In a professional kitchen, we have a roller with small spikes called a docker. It goes much faster than using a fork. What’s really cool is that the dough remains super flaky but doesn’t rise up out of the pan. With flat sheets of baked dough, you can stack them much more easily and accurately.
While the puff pastry sheets were baking, I got to working on the pastry cream and the fruit for the filling. We would often have pastry cream on hand but every few days, I would have to make a new batch. It became one of my favorite things to make. It’s a custard filling that was stabilized with gelatin. By adding the gelatin, the mille feuille remained sturdy and stable. It was such a small amount, you could barely tell it was there. But when the pastry cream was done and cooled, it was pretty firm. I sliced some strawberries thinly and cut some raspberries in half. These would be nestled in the pastry cream as I assembled the mille feuille. Often a mille feuille is finished with white and chocolate fondant. This one was just dusted with some powdered sugar and each piece would be served with more fruit on top of it. We tossed the fruit in a sugar syrup to give it a bit more sweetness and shine.
I had completed the days mille feuille and was ready to put it in the refrigerator to firm up before service. It was 10:30am. Service was at noon. I was pretty proud of myself. I had gone from being extremely slow to only really slow. I struggled to keep up some days. There’s always so much to do in a pastry shop. I had assembled the five layers of puff pastry and four layers of pastry cream with fruit on the back of a sheet pan with parchment underneath it. We assembled on the back of a sheet pan to make it easier for cutting for service. One of the challenges to finishing the mille feuille was to get it in the refrigerator on the rack. The work table was very close to the refrigerator door. You had to open the door, hold it open with your foot and gently move the full sheet pan with the mille feuille on it into the rack in the refrigerator. It was a very tight space to work in. I lifted up the full sheet pan with one hand and I thought I had a pretty good purchase on it. I did not. As I wheeled around to put the pan in the refrigerator, I didn’t make it all the way. The mille feuille slid, almost slowly onto the floor. The pastry was more than 24 inches long. As it hit the floor, it stuck up like a post in the ground. It seemed to linger there for a few seconds and then it fell over all the way. I was horrified. What am I going to do? Should I tell Margarito? I was panicking! I just stood there for a while not knowing what do to. I knew I needed to tell the boss, I had screwed up and dumped the mille feuille. We would not have that pastry for lunch.
“Um, er, Margarito, I have to tell you something.” I stammered to get out. He was having “comida” as he put it. He like to have lunch early so he could oversee lunch service fully. He was enjoying some enchiladas with mole sauce. (We had some of the best Mexican food in the city even though the restaurant was French cuisine. Our staff were excellent cooks of all cuisines.) He looked up and said, “Make it again.”. It seemed so matter-of-fact. I thought there was no way I could get another one made before service. I said, “Really? You think I should?” I was incredulous. He just said again, “Make it again.” Well, I guess I had to then. He didn’t freak out or get made or even make fun of me. He surely could have. I really messed up. I went back to clean up the mess I had made. It was a lot of food. It would have served 15-20 slices. Oh well, now it’s just a mess on the floor. Once I got it cleaned up, I set my mind to how I was going to make another one in just 30 minutes. Today, I don’t think I would be worried if I could get it done. I am fast and resourceful now. I did have all the ingredients. I even had baked off sheets of puff pastry. But back then, I was very slow. I just didn’t have that much experience. Remember this was my first job in pastry. Luckily, we kept some pastry cream on hand. I had plenty of fresh fruit. What I found was that the second one of the day went even faster and smoother than the first one. When you make something over and over, you get faster and more accurate. Anyone who’s worked in a kitchen knows this phenomenon. I was very proud of my second mille feuille. It came together so well. I was ready for service.
I will always be grateful to Margarito for not getting mad at me for screwing up. I would continue to screw up throughout my career. We’re human. We are going to make mistakes. But they get fewer and farther between. I stayed at the Mayfair-Regent through the summer and when it was time to close the hotel, it was a bittersweet time. Folks who had worked there for over 25 years were sad to see it go. Some were retiring and some were moving on to other jobs in the hotel industry. I had a job lined up at the Ritz-Carlton. I had only been there a few months. But it was very hard to go to work that last day. It was still the beginning of my career and the end of others. I had learned a lot from my co-workers. Margarito went on to be an assistant pastry chef at the Four Seasons. He had given me some valuable life lessons to work on. I will always be in debt to him for what he taught me.
