My First Day at Nobu New York

This is an old journal entry about my first day at Nobu New York. You may have already read it, but I wanted to keep all my entries in one place. Plus I added a few more pictures and a video! I started interning at Nobu during my last few weeks at FCI. After two weeks of interning, I was offered a job as line cook at Nobu Next Door where I worked for over a year. This takes me back…

Sunday, February 11, 2007

It's funny how this Nobu opportunity came along. It wasn't through FCI or through the few chef friends I know. It wasn't the job board or monster.com. Thankfully, it was the one thing that always comes through for me...family. My cousin's cousin's roommate is a line cook at Nobu New York. The connection couldn't be more random, but there I was at 10:30am standing in the Nobu kitchen with the roommate, aka Tom.

Tom is a FCI '05 graduate, but has been working at Nobu for over two years. He started as a prep cook working for free and eventually moved up to one of the most senior line cooks. He attended FCI while at Nobu, alternating working 12 hour days, and working 6 hour days plus 6 more hours of class. In short, he's a machine and one of the nicest guys I've had the pleasure of meeting.

Tom guides me through the kitchen to the locker rooms in the back. We walk through the upstairs line kitchen, the dishwasher's station, then down a narrow staircase to the prep kitchen, the walkins, dry storage and dessert station. He points out the Nobu jackets and pants and the girl's locker room. I change and head back upstairs to the line kitchen. I squeeze by the other line cooks and stand next to Tom. For lunch service, the line consists of fry, grill, saucier “middle”, garde manger “salad”, and pastry. There is one person per station and they share a small kitchen standing about a foot from each other. Some specialize in one station, while the more senior line cooks can work all of them (with the exception of pastry). There are three "Chefs" in the kitchen - Head Chef Ricky and Sous Chefs Frank and Marlowe. These, along with the sushi chefs, are the only ones actually referred to as "Chef".

Tom is on the grill station for today's lunch service and when I arrive he is prepping the most popular item on the menu - Black Miso Cod. The sliced cod has been marinating in a miso sauce for four days. (I find out later that it is actually Sable, not Cod.) It is then transferred to sheet trays, browned under the salamander and deboned. For service it is cooked in the oven, browned again under the sally, and served with more of that wonderful miso. I help out by prepping the dish's garniture - pickled ginger root and pickled shallots. By the time I finish, it's 11:45am and lunch service has started.

Typically when a student is trailing at a restaurant, they are either told to just watch or they are given only prep work tasks - cleaning, peeling, cutting the mise. So you can imagine my surprise when lunch service comes around and I'm not kicked off the line. Not only that, I actually worked the grill and plated! Tom let me heat the shiitake mushrooms, grill the Washu (California raised Kobe beef), and plate the black miso cod. As we go along, I'm thinking this is totally doable, I can handle this - heat, grill, plate - no problem! Little did I know the number of covers for lunch is only around 100 - a big number to me since that's about as much as we get at L'Ecole for dinner service. I find out later that the evening's dinner service is at 208 and Saturday night's covers are closer to 300! Apparently, I hadn't seen even half of it. A Wednesday lunch on one of the coldest days of the year is a walk in the park for this kitchen.

When a lull comes over the station, I watch the other line cooks plate - the new style sashimi, the squid pasta, the rock shrimp tempura with spicy creamy sauce. The cooks are nice enough to let me try a bit of each dish. The fry cook in particular was very generous and my shame at accepting food evaporated the second I crunched down on a rock shrimp tempura with spicy creamy sauce. The fry cook's name is Caesar. He's 18 and the youngest in the kitchen. His father, whom everyone affectionately refers to as "Pop-Pop", has been working as fry cook since the restaurant's opening 12 years ago right along-side Chef Nobu himself. Caesar shared stories of him and his brother running around the kitchen when they were younger. When they were old enough, they started to learn the fry station from their father. Caesar's older brother developed an allergy to shrimp, so he moved on to another job. Today's lunch service was Caesar's first service solo and although he did burn himself in the fry oil once, he did an impressive job. What's more impressive is that Caesar doesn't even want to be a chef. His career goal - what he wants to be when he grows up - is to work at Con Edison as a technician. Strange since he's achieved my career goal at age 18.

Lunch service ends at 2:15pm and I help clean up. Family meal, referred to as "comida", is served buffet style at Nobu Next Door. I line up for shumai, fried rice, stirred fried vegetables and chicken curry. Pretty good, but I'm still full from snacking on the line, so I don't eat much. All the chefs and cooks sit around Nobu Next Door. The sushi chefs sit amongst themselves, pastry is at another table, waiters at another. I'm sitting with the line cooks and they are, hands down, the loudest, most rambunctious bunch. They're joking around, throwing things, hiding each other's keys and wallets. We chat about movies, basketball, and spend about 30 minutes on knives. At that point, I look around and realize it's a boys club, as I'm sure are most kitchens. The only girls are those that make up pastry, one line cook, a few waiters and the hostess. The kitchen is also very diverse - White, Hispanic, Chinese, Japanese, Filipino, Korean. Tom as well as the Head Chef and the two Sous Chefs are Filipino, which I guess helps in my case, but would help more if I spoke the language. They ask me several times if I speak Tagalog and were obviously disappointed with the response. My biggest regret makes its way into my biggest passion. ::sigh::

Break ends at 4pm and everyone makes they're way back to the Nobu kitchen. I steal a few moments to check out the dining room and try not to wake the waiters napping around the restaurant as I take pictures and snoop around. Back down in the prep kitchen one of the line cooks, Kevin, is butchering the Washu. Kevin is a graduate from CIA, where the Head Chef and both Sous Chefs also attended, and tells me there’s a world of difference between working in a Nobu kitchen and a corporate kitchen. His previous job was at Legal Seafoods where he says all the food was pre-prepped at a warehouse somewhere and shipped to the restaurants already portioned. He said it’s similar to boil in a bag and expressed his concern of something similar happening if Nobu ever chose to go corporate. He then goes on to explain to me the difference between regular beef and Washu as well as the difference between Washu and real Kobe. Most of his work goes into trimming off the insane amounts of fat that encapsulates the beef. The fat is used to confit beef cheeks. The washu is then portioned into 4 ounce cuts. Priced at $16/ounce, Washu is a big money maker, but not the biggest. Wagyu, the top of the line, goes for $25/ounce.

I give many thanks to Tom as he leaves for the day and I'm assigned to trail the Garde Manger “Salad” line cook, Jason. Jason is a recent ICE graduate who, upon completing his externship at Nobu, was promptly hired. Another ICE student was currently trailing at Nobu under Jason, but he left at 6pm, so a space was open for me to trail for dinner service. Jason takes me on a tour of his station as well as the walkins and dry storage areas. He explains to me that some of the mise is performed by prep cooks - the garnishes, sauces and oils - but that for the most part the line cook is in charge of making sure everything is prepped and ready at his/her station at service time. As a result, there is a real sense of ownership over the station - from prep to plate on every single dish that goes out. Jason also tells me the one thing that surprised him most about working at Nobu was how informal it was. He imagined a militant Japanese chef throwing orders around the kitchen and using corporal punishment for bad knife skills. He was pleased to see the kitchen run by a gang of kids playing hip-hop music and calling each other by silly nicknames. But this gang of kids really do know their stuff and they love what they're doing.
The dinner service line up is a little different as there is a new station on the line - the Omakase, or Chef's tasting menu. The responsibility for creating the Omakase rotates among the more senior line cooks and they say it's the most fun position since you get to play around with Washu/Wagyu beef and foie gras.

Dinner service starts at 5:30pm and Jason puts me to work. He demos the first plates to go out (and lets me taste!) and then for most of the night we're working as a team. He'd push over to me the plates he was confident I could do on my own and work on the more complicated ones. He's quick and impressed that I'm able to keep up. By 8pm I'm plating a number of different dishes - new style sashimi, new style oyster/shrimp/beef, lobster salad, salmon skin salad, miso cod butter lettuce, miso tofu, miso asari, kelp salad, edamame, spicy tuna chips, ceviche, spicy seafood soup, lobster endive salad, mushroom soup, moroheiya udon salad. On two occasions, Jason actually steps out of the kitchen and leaves me in charge. Head Chef Ricky is expediting and I'm hoping he notices that I'm plating on my own. I must say, I do a damn good job!

Here's a little taste of a Friday night in the Nobu kitchen:

By 10:30pm, the last orders are coming in and we start to clean up. Head Chef Ricky passes around Sapporo beers to everyone and we toast to a successful dinner service. I help clean up and pack up some food for home. One of the pastry girls even gives me one of the imperfect chocolate molten cakes used in the dessert bento box. YUM! I follow everyone else back to the locker rooms to change and say my thank yous and goodbyes. Unfortunately, Head Chef Ricky left, but I catch up with Sous Chef Frank and thank him again, stressing my interest in interning or even better working at Nobu. He says he'll discuss it with Head Chef Ricky and they'll give me a call.

My first day at NOBU was a happy confirmation of what I always knew I wanted to do when I grew up. Let's hope it's the first day of many to come!

Chef Tyler Florence

While at the FCI, I was given the opportunity to work with Chef Tyler Florence. When I got this email, my head almost exploded...

"Hi Cynthia,

Thanks for your response to the event. We'd be really happy for you to come out to Armonk and help with the Citigroup dinner on Wednesday 20th September. We'll arrange transportation for pick-up from FCI in the morning and drop-off at the end of the night. You'll need your knives and chef whites and we'll be doing prep and service with the kitchen staff at the retreat. Service is for 90 people, and it should be a good experience and fun event. I will confirm the pick-up time and other details on Monday.

Event: Armonk, Citigroup Dinner for Top Customers Worldwide
Chef: Tyler Florence
Dinner: Upscale Italian - 4 courses (90 people)
When: Wed 20 September 2006
Volunteers: 2
Bring: Chef whites, knives
Work: Prep and cook during the day, service during dinner

Thanks,
Anthony Hoy Fong
Culinary Director, Tyler Florence TV"

Read the article I about the event HERE. It was picked up by the FCI blog: The Hot Plate.

Here are a few more pictures from the event:



And, yes, it was weird being around Citigroup folks again, but the whole experience was so great it still makes me consider corporate dining as a career option.

The French Culinary Institute

Entering the real world with an undergraduate degree in Quantitative Economics got me just where I was supposed to be - working for such companies as World Savings (now Wachovia), Morgan Stanley, BearingPoint (now bankrupt), Citigroup, and Fannie Mae. Basically, the who’s who in evil banking/mortgage dudes. After 5 years of closing bank branches (read as: dissolving lots of jobs), public relations (read as: lying to the press about crooked brokers), and consulting on corporate governance (read as: covering up screw-ups with fancy words and charts), I had my fill. I’d been suppressing my desire to become a chef since high school, and eventually realized if I wanted to make the leap, I should do it now – before marriage and kids – when I had the money and it was still okay to be selfish and spend it all on myself. And I got out of that hell hole just in time.

I attended the 9 month FCI Culinary Arts program from July 2007 to May 2008. There were four levels, although I think now there are six. Level One was the basics. In each class we would focus on one item – one day, stocks; the next day, soup; the next, chicken. We were partnered up and graded on our plates at the end of the day. At the end of every week, we were tested on vocabulary and basic recipes. The chef instructors were all militant strict old French, Ukrainian, and American chefs with thick accents and tattoos. They yelled and berated and told us our food sucked. When we eventually did do something right, we were rewarded with only a silent nod. Three people dropped out by the end of the first month. I thought it was all so very hardcore and exciting.

In Level Two we rotated stations - Garde Manger (cold station - salads, soups), Poissonier (fish), Saucier (meats), Pastry and family meal. Family meal was, for me anyways, the absolute worst station, as it was spent making dinner for the students and faculty (read as: breaking down 100 chickens). The whole of Level Two is devoted to preparation for the midterm. Two practiced dishes were drawn at random and we had an hour to complete it. Judges watched our every move, quietly ticking points on and off. By the end, we plated for four additional judges who were sitting in the next room, knife and fork in hand.

In Levels Three and Four, students are moved to FCI’s restaurant, “L’Ecole.” Here we rotated stations and prepped one or two dishes. After a two minute pep talk and a couple hours of prepping (chop, slice, marinate, parboil), orders start coming in at 8 o'clock sharp. A big black board in the front of the kitchen holds the orders, "order up!" and "fire!" are being called out by a big French chef with a thick accent. After deciphering that he was saying 4 lamb, 6 salmon, and 2 veg plates, pots clang, food is flung and plates appear under the warming lamp. It is during these last levels that I gained the new satisfaction that comes from knowing the food you create is actually being eaten by paying customers. Even better is the adrenaline rush that comes from working in a professional kitchen. There is no time for hesitation, second-guessing, or excuses. If you make a mistake, you fix it and move on. The heat is all-consuming, the challenges come every second, and the movement is constant. It's a feeling I could never get sitting behind a computer, in a conference room or in front of a client. I fell in love with it. Blink and it's over. Blink again and it resets.

Upon graduation, I was awarded “Graduate with Distinction” - ranked #2 in my class. I also won “Best Final Project” for A Tasting of Philippine Fruits and Vegetables, an original seven course tasting menu of Philippine fruits and vegetables prepared using classic French techniques. Finally, something I loved to do that I was actually pretty great at.

You know those people who love their jobs? Well, I'm not quite there yet, but now I feel like it's a real possibility.

My tiny space on the web.

My plan is to treat this blog much like I would brand new chef's whites - slowly stained with the colors of my culinary trails and tribulations... (gag)

Okay, so that was bad. I have to say creating a blog is easy in concept, tedious in execution. It took me the good part of a month to come up with the title. After some seriously punny ideas - food&whine (taken), my thyme (taken), how to blog water (will never be taken) - a friend suggested "the girl in whites". The most intriguing and a literal fact. Blogging also makes me reevaluate my writing style. Attaining a balance of detail, honesty, wit and humor without sounding forced is exhausting and the self-scrutinizing and editing is constant. In short, I take a big deep breath before I hit "Publish Post", but maybe that's just me.

And who is me? I'm a career changer from finance to professional chef. I went to FCI for culinary arts, was a line cook at Nobu, and am now trying to start up my own catering/cooking school/private cheffing company. Since it is the most awesome time economically for me to embark on this, in the meantime I'm experimenting in my tiny kitchen, creating a portfolio of original recipes and freelancing to keep my skill level up.

This is my little place to blog about culinary school, professional kitchens, and other food-related randomness. I know it's probably only family and friends reading, but that's fine with me.

So here I go - the girl in whites - ready to make a mess. (gag)