My name is Jason and I am the Chef and critic for the Taurian Experience. I was born in Los Angeles, CA to Latin parents. My late father was born to a Cuban immigrant and my mother to parents from Spain and Ecuador. So, I am as Latin as they come. However, the cuisine that I produce is not solely in this wheelhouse.
I have trained in many kitchens. There is none better than Le Coq Au Vin. Now Au Vin was more than 20 years ago. I was a wet-behind-the-ears pup of a cook who had only a summer’s worth of lessons from my Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie was a Chef at, Top of the World, a fine dining restaurant at Disney World, from 1970 to 1993. Cooking fine dining food is not for the faint of heart. You’re yelled at constantly. Told to start over and do it again. Then, when it was finally time for service, somehow everything worked out and all you could do was breathe easy at the end of the night and go have a drink with the survivors. I learned a lot of French techniques, picked up some bad habits, and eventually decided I had had enough.
The early days were much less cut and dry. People drama always tends to live in the hub of young and old cooks that gather around a flattop. We all had one thing in common – it was us against the world. One of my earliest kitchens was, (Believe it or not, Denny’s), this early young adult experience taught me a few things about cooking: one I knew I didn’t want to work in a kitchen like this, and two, probably the more valuable lesson, was how to be a short order cook. Short-order cooking is an art. When you are a line cook you produce or you go home. When you are a short-order cook, you produce or the staff will run you outta town and you will never work in a kitchen within ten miles of the place.
To be a short-order cook you have to have the ability to bear the barrage of tickets spewing out of the printer until they form a waterfall of paper and hot ink on the ground. These patrons to whom these tickets belong expect their food in under 4 minutes and bear it with a smile. These times are based mostly on the fact that hardly anything, ( besides breakfast), is cooked to order. Most meals are cooked and sit on a steam table waiting to be served. However, if you have the privilege of serving steak or chicken on the menu, fire up the grill and get the temp right, because if you don’t you’re paying for it. It will come out of your next check if it gets sent back. Well after all that there is still one piece-de-resistance. The Cude-Gra of short-order cooking. Sequence. Yes, Sequence.
There is no finer display of kitchen magic than watching a short-order line cook sling eggs, pancakes, french toast, bacon, sausage, ham, white-wheat-rye-toast, in a rhythm that mirrors a symphony in motion. When the eggs are cracked in the pan the pancakes are pushed onto the flat top and the sizzle of sausage and hashbrowns that have been working for ten minutes are all harmoniously blaring in unison over the din of the hungry and impatient customers in the dining room, nothing can phase him or her. He or she is a man or woman in motion. The ebb and flow of their prowess is seamless and the food hits the plate hot and ready in 240 seconds. One ticket down 40 more to go. (Morning shift Chris with the Gauge earrings, if you ever get a chance to read this, thanks for teaching me how to ebb and flow!)
So the short and skinny of it is this. I am a Chef with the ability to handle myself under pressure and to improvise when the task calls for it. I have cooked at StoneWood, Ruths Chris, Sakura, and a good deal of other upscale quality before-quantity establishments. In my opinion, what makes a good chef isn’t where he cooked or who he cooked under. What makes a good chef is the ease with which they deal with adversity in the kitchen. They know what flavors go together, whether they have time to re-fire something or it’s time to innovate. A good chef is always three moves ahead of the kitchen which is why when a crisis happens he or she is very even keel and do this and do that, let’s go! In the Head Chef’s mind, it’s not how do I clean this up, it’s what opportunity have I been given to shine!
As usual dig in and may harmony find you.
~The Taurian Chef