My First Job in Pastry: The Mayfair-Regent Hotel
I was still in culinary school, just finishing up my custards class at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago (CHIC). One of my teachers came into class and leaned over my shoulder during the lecture and said, “youse want a job Beckman?” This was Chef T, Paul Tinaglia. He was a well liked chef at CHIC and had taken a liking to me. I don’t know if he sought me out or I was just the first one he came to but he asked me the question. Of course, I said without hesitation. I had been working at Starbucks and The Gap, both without much success or monetary reward. I thought if I’m going to make a low wage, I might as well be in a kitchen. Plus I had the recommendation of one of my chefs. I thought, what could go wrong.
Chef T told me to be at the Mayfair-Regent Hotel on East Lake Shore Drive at 3:00pm on Friday afternoon. I was there, just a bit early sitting in the human resources office. The woman asked me some basic questions about employment. I must have answered satisfactorily because I was ushered upstairs to the ninth floor to meet the Chef. Keep in mind, I was not headed towards pastry at this time. I wanted to be the next Charlie Trotter, a local fine dining celebrity chef of the time. I was a culinary student. But then I found myself in the pastry kitchen talking to the executive pastry chef, Margarito. He was a small man of about 5 feet. But to me he was sort of scary. Remember this was going to be my first job in food service. Well, that’s not entirely true. I had been a bus boy at a pizza parlor growing up. And I did serve water and butter at a country club during college. But this was the real thing, a hotel dining room.
Ok, so pastry, I can do that. Margarito led me into the pastry shop which was the size of a small hotel closet. It did have a bank of refrigerators and freezers along the back wall. The room was dominated by a very large marble topped table. There was a 30 quart Hobart mixer in the back of the room and a couple of Kitchen Aid 5 quart mixers as you entered. The strangest thing though was the window. Restaurant and hotel kitchens are notorious for not having any windows or outside light. Here was a kitchen with windows all over. It looked out on to Walton Street below. You could see the Knickerbocker Hotel from this window. Margarito proceeded to open each of the refrigerator doors revealing different pastries in various states of finishing. There were pate a choux eclairs, cream puffs, puff pastry sheets, cookies, creams and many other things I knew and some I didn’t know. He kept saying, “you know how to make this?”, really fast. I, of course dutifully lied and said yes to every one of them. I figured I could learn or could look it up in my culinary school text book. I was fearless! Yeah right, I was terrified. Well, I was hired and started on Monday.
The job was not going to be a long one. The hotel had been sold earlier in the year and was slated to close at the end of the summer. I started in March and hotel was going to close in August. This turned out to be a good thing. I can say that now 35 years later. It didn’t seem like it at the time. It is liberating to know when your job is going to end though. I started learning things from Margarito and the other pastry cook, Vincente right away. I learned that what I had been taught in culinary school was not 100% of what was going to happen in real life.
It started that first Monday morning. The first thing Margarito had me do was whip some cream to fill cream puffs. He was working on some lemon curd on the stove. I whipped it to the consistency that I had been taught at CHIC. This was medium peaks. The cream held a peak but was still relatively soft. There was a little curl of cream when you lifted the whip. Margarito came over and says no, it’s got to be stiffer. He proceeds to whip until I would say it was broken. It’s that look where it’s starting to look like cottage cheese. I was amazed he wanted to whip it that stiffly. He went back to cooking his lemon curd. He’s the boss; he knows how he wants it.
When I finished the cream to his specifications, I went over to watch him cook his lemon curd. I was taught to cook it over a Bain marie. This would protect the eggs from overcooking. Margarito was cooking it over direct heat in an aluminum pan. It worked for Margarito. He did so many things differently than what I learned in school, I wondered if I had gotten anything out of school. He had such an interesting way of doing things. They were unconventional to say the least. I found out that he had worked his way up from dishwasher. He had worked under some of the best chefs in Chicago. I have a lot of respect for Margarito to this day. I would learn so many other thing from the cooks at the Mayfair-Regent and especially from Margarito over that summer. But the main thing I learned was to be flexible and understand that each chef has their own way of doing things. It’s their kitchen not yours. When I became a pastry chef a few years later, I would be the same way. It’s my kitchen; you’ll do things my way. But I can always learn.
