A Culinary Observation Podcast
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Hello and welcome to a culinary observation. I'm your host, Marco Gutierrez. Well, hello and welcome back to this podcast. Thank you so much for checking it out. Okay, here we are. And this time around I wanted to do something um spending a lot of time at home recently. Thank goodness too. It's so rare to get days off. I don't have the typical monday through friday job. It happens when it happens and sometimes you get one day off, sometimes you get many days off, but you know, life of a chef on a salary position. Right? So recently I've been watching more movies obviously and been catching up on some old ones. I just want to reflect how some of the movies that I watch. They tie these memories to me, even if they're not directly contributed to the time and place that I watched these movies, they just bring out these memories that I've had of being in the industry and some of the good times and some of the bad times I've been a part of, I'll try to do this in a linear fashion. Um, memory to movie essentially. And I'll try to keep it from the beginning to the end. So a lot of the movies that where it's about like a startup uh restaurant or even just like restaurants that have been around that are having struggling moments in their life that always reminds me of, you know, my first time being out in the real world, like working for the hotel at the standard was awesome. That was an interesting experience in its own, it was almost like a movie in itself because I mean it's west Hollywood, you're around stars, you're around people of high importance almost all the time And you cook for great people that are just nice and even being the 24 hour joint that it was, it was just a lot of fun, good people to work with good people, good experience overall, right? So I can't really like put too much memory to movie on that one, but after leaving there, which was kind of a mistake on my end, I can't believe sometimes that I did it, but I did it for a reason, I guess I was starting to get lazy and I just remember feeling like I didn't want to be a part of that, that life like is this it, I'm gonna work here for years and years, like I haven't seen really everything I want to get out and do something different. So I quit that job, they were nice enough to like let me leave on good terms with them even though it was abrupt, it was just kind of like one day I was there the next day I wasn't anymore. So after a conversation with the food and beverage director, we kind of just realized that I was getting to the point where I needed to get out and do something new and I applied at a lot of great restaurants and like I said, laziness is really getting the better of me. So I applied, I went to go stodgy at a few places and you know, meet a few chefs and I just flaked out a lot. I would either show up for day one or show up for the stash and not feel that vibe and there was a few places that I just like walked out in the middle of a stash or a shift and was just like, nope, not doing this, don't like it or didn't even show up at all. Like maybe I drove up to the restaurant. Okay, okay. There was one time I drove up to the restaurant of the new job that I was getting, I think it was on Melrose, I just was looking for parking and I was like, is this really what it's going to be like all the time, I'm going to have to find parking just so I can go to my job or I'm going to pay for it even worse. So I'm driving around, I'm trying to find my spot, have like five minutes left, so I'm already working late at this point. For sure because it's getting out of finding the spot wherever it may be walking to the restaurant. I'm ******, I'm not gonna make it, it's a bad impression for the first day, so if I didn't find it by the time that I was supposed to start, I just drove home or went to a weed dispensary, picked up and then went out and met with my friends and just smoked. It was bad for a while because laziness, I just set in. I just didn't want to do anything. I'm living with my parents so I didn't feel like I have to be responsible and find a real job and help out because it's not like they were making me pay rent, I didn't really owe anything because I had just left culinary school so I didn't have to pay my bills for at least I think it was like a year. So you know, no interest was being piled on and I didn't have to make any minimum payments. So yeah, it was like okay, cool, I don't really have responsibilities, I'm just gonna do what I want and find the right place to work at. And then eventually it got to the point where I had to start making payments and I didn't have some money put away and my parents were happy enough to like help me out until I got a job and I would just pay them back. They gave me a car that I could drive that I would just pay them back with and you know, I was given a lot, I was very, very fortunate in in my life to be have to be given the opportunities that I had to to be successful and I was shipping all over them. Not because I wanted to intentionally or because I was trying to like hurt anyone. It's just I didn't really see the um the value in it, I didn't really care. I was like why don't I just live my life like I want to and hang out with friends all the time and do exactly what I want. But eventually you know the bills did start to pile up and making credit card payments and whatnot was becoming hard so I didn't want to go, I couldn't directly go on unemployment because I'd only worked at one restaurant for one year. So I went around and I found this spot called actually there is no name to it because I don't really remember too much about it. I only spent one week there but it was like a real eye opener into the industry. It was a small little restaurant out in Long Beach. I can't even remember like the part of Long Beach but out in Long beach California, a small restaurant was the theater next door to it. The owner of that restaurant owned the theater as well. The theater was more important to him than the restaurant was. The restaurant was kind of just that fantasy of you know, I'm gonna own the spot next door. So when we're all done with the theater production, we all go next door and have drinks and have food. It was a personal thing for this guy I think and he didn't, I mean he was struggling to pay everything. He couldn't pay for produce. He couldn't pay for his staff, couldn't pay for Pete for like the licensing that it took to, to have things there. He wanted to have a full bar and full cocktail lounge, but to get that, you know, you have to have a certain license. So he was just like, I can't afford it. So he just had the wine license good enough. There's some alcohol at least that they can, they can serve their no beer, just wine. So I took this job and when he explained it to me, showed me the, showed me the theater first and then explained the restaurant to me. We walked in, I got to see the kitchen very small, very, very small. Only a few things in there to cook with. Um, saw the bathroom, saw the dining room area wasn't very busy midday and it was just like, oh, we just finished our rush. So there's nobody there but you can come in and we can talk and if you want this job, you know, talk about what to pay you. So I go in and ask what are the responsibilities and off the bat, you show up, you open the doors, you clean and sweep and mop the floors inside the dining room, you water the patio outside, put down all the chairs, obviously, turn on the lights, get the espresso machine on, clean the bathroom, take out the garbage that may have been left the night before, prep for the kitchen, you know, make sure all the equipment equipment is in good working order, do the breakfast, lunch service, set up the people for dinner and then go home. Sounds simple enough, but I mean that is the that is everything to do in the restaurant and I think he was like trying to find someone that would get suckered into essentially being his opener. But the guy was only paying me like 10 bucks an hour so that wasn't very much and I would get there early in the morning, six a.m. Start doing all the normal chores. We would open about 10 o'clock and then be open from 10 to 3 shut down and they would prep for lunch later on or dinner. And uh the owner wouldn't show up until like two in the afternoon. And yeah he just treated the place like his own personal hang out and it was kinda ******. I didn't really see it at first, I kind of wanted to stick it out and just do a full week. I was like okay let's just do this. It's a lot of work but I mean it's training, it's it's a lesson in opening your own restaurant and being successful there. No, at no point did I ever get any clear instructions as to what the menu was? He just gave me a menu was like here, this is what it is. Um There aren't any recipe. So just if you know how to make the stuff, you can make it the way you know how to do it. If you don't know, you can come in at dinner service and we can show you how we do it and then you can just do it how you want to do it and cool. I took that as creative freedom. Like I'm sure many other people were smarter than me at the time. That would have been like, no, you know, you get paid more for that, you're essentially doing all the responsibilities that the opening manager should be doing and you're also prepping for the kitchen. So you're not only a front of the house manager, but you're a kitchen manager as well and you're in charge of the staff as well. I mean at some point I'm sure he would have asked me to do scheduling for everyone just because I would have been there long enough to have known so easily wanted upon that on me. I didn't want to like not do it. So I stuck it out for the five days and I just gave up. It was a lot of work to do on my by myself, started to get really lonely and I mean I was just out of culinary school, I didn't know really what I was doing. I had been working successfully at that restaurant in Hollywood or west Hollywood and I felt like I had learned a lot, but even then my selfish reasons to leave that job or lazy reasons to leave that job were only piled on in this job. So you know, Yeah, I left, I tried to get my one and only paycheck and that took a month to like finally cash because you would have to go to the bank that they had their money stored at and as soon as the bank open, you'd have to be the first one from everyone else to get your money out. And even then you weren't guaranteed to get all of it. It was a pain in the ask because like he would have the automatic order for say, uh you know, paying the delivery, the produce delivery, that automatic would just come out. So like you may be calling and saying like, hey, I'm trying to cash this check. Is there any money today by that time? You're already too late? So the minute you walk in, hopefully you beat the delivery payment, which it's electronic. So it totally beats you every day. So you just have to wait every day for money to come in and he'd have to deposit every day to try to pay staff. And it's just a pain in the past. So it was a good move to leave. And the stories though of like the front of house staff telling me like they haven't been paid in weeks or months and just they're doing it because they get you know time next door theater to go on stage and do what they want to do. And he found that like as a way of currency to like dupe these people like, well if you curve your uh the need for money then you can come to the playhouse next door and you can express yourself all you want there will give you a whole night to yourself, will put you on the marquee and everything. So it'll make it feel like you know, it's all you but I don't think anyone ever showed up for any of that ship and it was like way outside of what long beach people think is town. You know like if you're thinking downtown, this is completely on a different part of long beach like the far west side of Long beach. Yeah it wasn't glorious but it was something that I wanted to do. So that just reminded me of like a lot of movies like chef with uh that you know the food truck one also the first no movie that came out um him struggling, you know, obviously I wasn't like, like him where he had this, you know amazing restaurant with backers that were giving you know thousands and millions of dollars to open up and do nordic cuisine or anything but like that feeling and the struggle of getting people through the door of having staff paid is real and it sucks and like even then when I had no investment in that restaurant, I could feel the pain of all the staff around me because I was one of them also, but like just trying to soothe everyone and comfort them and let them know that yeah, you're gonna eventually get paid but yeah, this is a guy to work for and why the funk are we all here anyway. So yeah, tough tough life to, to start out that way and especially, you know when you're young, you know, it's not that bad, but the people that work sometimes that are in there like late thirties, forties, fifties, sixties that are getting ripped off by people like that, that sucks to watch and then that's like a real thing out there in the world, you know, if it was real back then, I could only imagine what it's like right now. Well you can't talk about the chef life without talking about like addictions to substances and alcohol and that is a real point to shine on um when you look at the type of people that typically have worked in the kitchen, they're like immigrants, their ex convicts their people from, you know, the military of some sort of, you know, whichever, it may be one branch of the military, those are the guys that usually show up to the kitchen gigs that um they aren't on the level of like high end food necessary places for their community, but you know those tend to be the people that were gravitating that I knew in Los Angeles that would gravitate to those types of jobs. Not saying that there aren't people that were totally motivated and just wanted to do. I mean I felt like I was one of them, I was I was never addicted to alcohol or smoking anything, whether it's cigarettes or cannabis, never really had addictions to things. Maybe the lifestyle maybe like that was more of my addiction but you know watching those around me with real problems like at the Standard Hotel, the cook that I worked with that worked on the grill, you never knew if he was going to have a good day or a bad day could have been coming off a long bender and coming down and those were like the worst days because he has a knife in his hand like good Lord. Yeah you have to like look out for that now, you have to deal with your maybe getting stabbed because you put the ******* omelet up too early. Like it's like real even at like the restaurant I worked at at Long Beach also not the one the ****** one with the ****** owner but when I worked at the Eldorado, I mean there was signs of addiction and problems, everyone has personal problems in the kitchen. But yeah my chef, his name was Don and I've spoken a little bit about him but Don came out of one branch of the military and felt like when he got into cooking there, that's something that he could have done. And even meeting him, he put up this huge facade of like, you know, it's very strict here and what we do is good food, it's very common food. The clientele are old, so we make things to their liking. But I mean we have the ability to make good food here and I believe that how I've structured this kitchen is ideal for making good food for people that are paying a decent price. It's like cool, I want to be a part of that, sold it to me guy come in for like my first week and start to really see what the kitchen is in there. Uh It was an old piece of ship kitchen. Uh the equipment was very outdated and you can tell these are people that new maybe how to put a kitchen together and expected what type of food they were going to be making. This was it. But yeah, I mean when you're, when you're building your own first restaurant, I'm sure like these original owners did that, they anticipated having to pay high prices for ships. So they would just go buy second hand product and it's not bad. I mean a lot of the restaurant equipment out there in the world, we just keep recycling it, we buy it from someone else, change the parts out and it's brand new again, as long as the insulation is good, it should be fine, even like huge refrigerators, like walk in so you can buy second hand. So yeah, I mean the equipment there wasn't top top notch but it worked sometimes too good. Like where the pan, where the plates would go on the steam table, they're like right next to the burners. So yes, your plates are going to be hot but they're like rip roaring hot. So like you have to make sure a towel on hand to grab plates unless you're grabbing from the end, which is where all the clean plates were, you know, coming out from the dish machine. So like yeah, you just keep pushing them through, they dry off because they're right next to the ******* the pilots and the heat. So it was cool. Like that was one of the cool things I liked about that job as there were some old school things in there that just made sense because that's the type of clientele were, you know, catering to. But yeah, don had addictions that showed and they were the common ones, like smoking cigarettes, drinking energy drinks um maybe he partied a little bit more after that, I don't know, the cook next to me Dave, he put it out in the open, the dude did speed and he would go walk to the restroom, you know, take, take a bump and then come back and that she would be like stuck in his nose like, hey Davey, you got, you got a little bit right there and you just like take it out, eat it, just like go on with his day. Uh Yeah, he needed, if anything and yeah, it was crazy to, to be a part of that with him and he would like have a time in the middle of his shift, even after doing speed, he would go into the cooler and have a beer and like to calm down to even out that ******* guy man. But like my day would come in, I would take care of all the fabrication for you know the breakdown, the salmon and do all that and get the chicken ready and clean him up and whatnot and have the beef ready to go for Dave. So he worked grill, I did saute don would do in the middle, he'd be like a swing guy or he would prep out for the next day and I remember one night specifically, we were on a good one, I had been there long enough to know the routine now and it was felt like a good day, you know, done was having a little bit of trouble in the beginning of the day. He thought maybe he was catching a cold or something or you know catching the flu was about that time and he steps outside to have a cigarette and an energy drink and he would buy the large energy drinks and yeah, so he's like drinking outside, having a cigarette, looking at his phone and he just ******* drops guy has a heart attack out in the parking lot before we even open for the day. They call the ambulance, pick them up, take him to the hospital. Obviously we didn't really know he was having a heart attack. I mean they could have could have been having a stroke for all we knew or an aneurysm. So we're all freaking out. Service has to go on no matter what the front of the house maitre D guy and his son, that was like a runner food runner and waiter also, he was like, okay, well marco you got this. I mean if you need help, let me know, we'll jump in there, we'll get you where you need to go. So the old man, his old man gets on on the line and starts reading tickets off his son. He's like, where do you want me? I'll just be swing in the middle. So he's like in the middle between us, we're going at a good click. He's like, cool, can I step away and like run food, I can't do that. Then the rush comes and I mean the place could fit like 50 people, so 50 come in. I mean they're old people so they're on clocks, like they have to be there at a certain time, get their dinner and they would all order the same thing. So pretty predictable from time to time. And then sometimes there would be like a bus that would just get dropped off and there would be people coming from the casino coming out to El Dorado. So yeah, you'd get the whole restaurant sat, including like the bar area getting full from the regulars and they ordered bar food too. So like now you have two competing areas and you know, three hours, four hours of service. You flipped 50 every hour. So we do 100 and 50 that night and it was one of the most intense nights I've ever cooked because there was nothing but communication clear through and through And then the dudes at the end of the night came by and helped us clean up. Um, they bought us beer at the bar but it's not like we weren't already in the, in the walk in drinking our own or snagging from the pile of the, of the rejected beer, which is usually like wine coolers and lights of different types. Don was out for a couple of weeks and when he came back, he was at limited capacity and just like on his way out essentially, he was done like, He must have been in his like late 50s, early 60s. I mean he's probably gone by now I would imagine from back then and Davey to God knows where he's at. But yeah, it was interesting to be a part of that in their life. The fact that I got to see one chef essentially lose it all because of, you know, being addicted to cigarettes and being addicted to energy drinks and that feeling of, of intensity, you know, he could have been looking for that high of, of anxiety and frustration all coming together as some sort of like adrenaline rush and I definitely got that too. I felt that, I mean eventually I started smoking cannabis. I was like, that job is when I first started smoking cannabis, the dishwasher Anthony, which has been on a previous episode. He and I, I asked him one day, I was like, hey, can I get a rip of some of that weed and like it just felt like a fun thing to do with my friends and there I was working on the line like high for the first time just trying to get through it and it just felt like another challenge. Like cool If I could do this, if I could turn 150 in three hours, let's see if I could do this while I'm high in such a bad way to look at it. Like I could do it when I drink beer, can I do it when I smoke weed? Such a bad thing to do And in retrospect. Yeah, it's not smart to work that way, especially if it's like the first time you're doing anything in your life, it's like doing mushrooms and then just going and working on the line, like you can only imagine that would suck. But like some people that's the way they coped and that was the only way that they can make it through. Oh man. Another story kind of sad one. I don't know if I ever said it on this podcast, I may have an earlier season, but there was one day at the Standard Hotel where you know, it got bad people are starting to steal beer out of the cooler. Uh easily so much to the point they had to put a camera in the corner facing the fridge and a lock on it and it was only accessible to the managers. So because the beer would be stashed right behind it, like at the end of the, of the fridge? So one day the grill cook that did a lot of coke and ship like he was on one, he just needed a drink. So he went downstairs, got in the cooler and then just walked out with a case of corona, like a 24 of corona bottles, 12 ounce bottles. And typically we would ask for them for, you know, our fish taco batter. So it was no big deal. We can maybe, you know fool them and be like, hey, can we get two bottles or can we get three, can we get four? We're gonna make a lot of batter today And it's not like we were drinking consecutive ones but like you know if all of us were on the line which is like myself, the other grill guy and the fry guy, three of us, you know we can get maybe asked for three bottles and one of them for the actual batter so that we have something to show because you can always cut batter with like baking soda. I mean with with soda water or water itself and and the beer like you don't have to just be straight beer right? So I mean yeah if we grabbed a lot of beer we would just make batter quote unquote batter like and a lot of it But most of those beers were just going straight to us. So this guy steals a full 24 and he's like hey let's go, I gotta get out of here. And I was like getting off my shift and he worked at the standard hotel and he worked at chin chin down the street uh and he pulls me into my car like pulls me to my car and he's like hey look what I got, I'm gonna go hide in the in the bushes and then you drive around and we'll drink him. I was like okay I don't know why I agreed to it but I was starting to get to that point must must have been like months and months into that job where I was starting to feel, you know bored and feeling like used for what I was doing and none of it was true. I was lazy and I was looking to experience something, you know, all the stories that get told when you're in culinary school of, you know abuse and drinking and substance abuse and just the life of a chef started to get to me and I was like, well I've never done that and I want to do that, I want to say that I did that in my lifetime. So I took that dive and rode in with him and yeah, he gets in my car and we literally are sitting, you know, steps away from the hotel. But if you've ever passed by the standard, there's a side street that like dips down, it's, it's on a hill. So if you go down the hill enough, no one's really going to see if there aren't any cameras out there. So we sit in the car, he takes down 12, I take down almost six. I think he was just like pushing me like, man, you gotta drink more, you gotta drink more. And I was like, no, I can't, I'm *******, I'm 18, 19 years old and I don't even really like beer at that time, I don't even care for it at all. I don't have like the palette for it and to drink corona, I was like, my parents drink that all the time, so it's not a terrible beer? I like it. Um But I like it now but then not so much so he drinks the rest of them. He's ******* hammered and we're just like chilling for a little while. I'm like starting to feel the buzz, starting to feel like maybe I'm crossing over into that lane of kind of drunk and I was like okay uh I think I need to get food to kind of counteract this and luckily you can find burritos and tacos just about anywhere in Los Angeles, especially that area. Not like I made a lot of money but I had enough to like you know enjoy myself. I think I went to I went to mel's diner down the road and uh but I dropped him off at chin chin and he was just sucked up and before he gets out of my car he takes a ******* line of cocaine and he's like you want some. I was like no I am totally good man. He's like ok. And he just takes off and goes to his other job. And uh I didn't see him for like a week. I forget when he showed up was probably like a month later. I think he was just like constantly calling out because he didn't want to you know get fired and hoping that they would just forget and I think they ended up just forgetting that that even happened. Everyone questioned it for a long time and we're like uh does anyone know what happened to that case and like uh just never said anything kind of bad, so yeah, he eventually did come back and when I quit he was still there and he definitely called me a ***** for quitting the job, but like I didn't care, it wasn't about like trying to show that I can do this job better than they could. I mean as it was, I was a young 19 year old, uh like latin spanish kid, Mexico, mexican kid, uh they were all from like Oaxaca and stuff like all from different parts of Mexico, so they kind of looked up to me in a way and they also the sous chef definitely gave me a lot of good advice and tried to like steer me in the right direction and I love that job, it was one of the, one of my favorite ones, but yeah, when I left there, you know definitely a lot of ship talking because I left so abruptly, but I feel like I probably let them down now, looking back on it, so bummer, but a necessary move, I have had some experience in fine dining, I can't say that like I've done it for a long time, it's a, it's a part of this world that is hard to do line cooking and a fine dining restaurant is really difficult and I don't have the stamina for it, I felt like I did and maybe I would have, if I would have stuck with it, but at the time it was the people that really got me through it. So when I watch these fine dining movies, like the Noma movies, the two that they have out or I watch um even burnt a fictional fine dining movie, which I will say is probably the most debated chef movie out there because a lot of chefs that I know hate it and a lot of chefs that I know and cooks that I know like it for different reasons, I will say that I like it because it just reminds me of a time of being around people that gave a ship, whether it was on the food trucks are in fine dining. But the fact that the fine dining reminded me very heavily of the restaurant I worked at. Uh it just like it rings true to me and that's probably all I'm looking at when I watched the movie Burns is just the food aspect of it. Hollywood tends to put a love story on just about every movie out there. And nowadays I don't think there's any movie that doesn't have a love story as one of the A or B. Like plot lines of the movie and it's always, it's so ******. I feel like Pokemon, Detective pikachu was one of the only movies that I've seen in recent days other than like boiling point that just came out but Detective Pikachu didn't have any type of like love, like maybe the love with the dad and the son but like there wasn't anything in it about a boy and a girl falling in love or a boy chasing a girl to get to that and that's what burnt kind of sucked up I think is that they they put in that love story between you know the love life that he had before with the addiction that makes sense but to fall in love with the new sous chef or whatever she was like to fall for her like yeah that does happen, that's a part of our lifestyle, I mean we're around each other but like you see these people all the time, this is all you know this is the only life you know so you get close but I don't agree with how that storyline particularly worked out and then he also had like a storyline like a love story line with the maitre d like just way too many minor conflicts that weren't really like explored that were just kind of peppered in there and you know it should have been about the food, it should have been about you know redemption for him which it kind of was I mean he gets his third star and everything but there should have been less of those side plot plots in it and that probably would have helped you know at least focus on one or two of them and really get into them. Like the addiction one was a good slide side plot because there was a woman involved of his former restaurant where he funked them over and like that that works, that works for me, that that could have kept going. But yeah, I digress when I look at those movies and I see how they work together and the inspiration they give each other to be better to do better. That's where I think about like working at um working at the fine dining restaurant and like the, the fish guy there ******* didn't know who I was or he knew who I was and didn't care, he didn't ever call me by my name, he would always call me guy and I may have talked about it before, but like then he motivated me in a way that it made me feel welcomed to that environment. It was kind of like in ******* way to like not call someone by their name, but the minute that he funked up and we can all catch him and call him out for that, that was the day that like he humbled himself a little bit, but he would also, he also eventually found out that I was decent at what I do. There was a night I think like a defining night for him and myself too. We finally became good friends. He and I were both in the ship. The restaurant had opened to a big crowd. We were, it was probably within like, the first couple of weeks of like the real opening, not the soft opening and we get ******* nailed. And I had been working on doing this carpaccio platter faster and faster. I mean it was intricate, there was just so much ship that went on it and I would have been working on it and it took most people that working there like a couple of minutes, like 12 to 14 minutes was the ticket time on the carpaccio. So you can see that other people that were doing warm appetizers or that we're doing um other salads would be frustrated because everyone's waiting for you to finish the ******* carpaccio plate so we can go all go out because it had to be sent out with that pomp and circumstance of everybody gets their food at the table, no, like left behind, but prior to that week, I had been sucking up for sure. And the timing was so off, I would have like three or four or five carpaccio plates at a time that I have to do and that just like throws off service so bad. So I eventually got it down to seven minutes. I was like, flying on this, that's seven minutes to make appetizers, warm appetizers and get them like, plated and sauced and other, you know, get the bread plate out, serve the drinks, all that good stuff like that. Seems like a more reasonable ticket time. Especially if you're doing a table of six or a table of eight. You can just knock it out and it's not like a carpaccio plate that you can just like preset and have it done because there's like three sauces that go on it, that need to be perfectly put in place and if you let them sit on there too long then you know they'll either get too cold because the plate is really cold or like you know and start to like gel into turn into a gel as opposed to being like a fluid liquid. And then same with like the citrus can overcook the can start cooking the carpaccio meats and also like the grains that go on it. Um They're all just like micro grains of different types that had to be placed precisely in a certain order. Like it's just a nightmare for any cold line cook. But that was my challenge and the night that I ******* killed it and got I think I did like 15 or 20 like Simon, I was just knocking them out. I just set up all the way across the cold station on the opposite side where all the kitchen, all the front of house staff come pouring through. So like I'm trying to fight a bunch of people walking in behind me and having all these plates laid out and have them like spread out to like the bread area and the service area for front of the house, like just making a mess everywhere, but still killing plate after plate after plate and like setting a standard in that kitchen, everyone at the end of the night was really proud of how I handled myself and no more than this guy, Jason comes over to me and he's like marco, just want to tell you did a really good job tonight and I'm really proud of what you did is good food is good work, like to buy you a beer and I was just like, wow, ok, yeah, I'll take it man. And after that day he and I became really good friends, him uh this chick Nora that worked with him on the fish line, we all became very good friends. Uh Mika that work behind me. Uh Gosh, there's so many people on that line and I have them on my linkedin profile and I'm sure I'm doing a disservice to not saying their names and I'll figure it out and I'll, I'll find the time to get all their names out there. But yeah, everyone that worked in there just was amazing, like chef Remy lou von just killed it. He set forth a standard in that kitchen that I felt super proud to be a part of. Eventually I started to get my bad habits back of, you know drinking because at this point I had already been the industry long enough, I had left working a different hotel, I had been working in long beach and learning that life and then yeah, so I get to this place, Jason Norah myself become really good friends and we start going across the street to the bar at lunchtime because we're, we all take like a mandatory one hour lunch break, so I go across the street with them and it becomes this everyday thing, Tuesday through saturday of us going there and seeing how many Boddington we could put away before going back to service. It was bad, like we started getting pictures and just like challenging each other and then we get back to service and be sweating bullets and like hanging out on the walk in longer than we needed to or head in the ******* regions like they got bad, it never never got so bad where we couldn't perform our duties if anything, I felt like we were getting better at it and we gave more of a ship and we just like were lighthearted in the kitchen and I'm sure the chefs knew what was going on because you can easily just walk to the front door and watch us all run across the street. Uh God, yeah, run across to the cat and the fiddle and grab a few beers and then at the end of the night go to the cat and fiddle and grab a few beers. So yeah, I mean addictions were becoming too to show on everyone. Eventually I got to know the sous chef well enough that he let me smoke weed with him in his car. I remember being out of catering and we were doing catering together it was maybe 1234 of us uh the C. D. C. Sous chef and like one person one or two other people myself. And uh we knock out the catering. We did all of our own dishes which is really awesome. I really enjoyed doing that. And then at the end of the night he's like hey man uh I did a really good job tonight and really happy to have you on the team, do you smoke weed? And I was like yeah I totally do actually grow my own and like have a business so you want to come with me and we go he has like one of the sweetest parking spots and he uh yeah the kid was well off like his family was all well off and they owned a cannabis farm and he grew him and his family grew like really really good stuff for medical uh grade. Yeah so after getting to know him he got to know me, he stopped giving me ship on the line as well. Like you can just slowly see that gaining that respect not only because of how well I was doing but just starting to know that like okay he's not just good at his job and he cares about his job, but he also has fun. So we should let this guy in. So an interesting another way to just like get in with people like the other people on my line and on the cold line, they were already really nice and if I would have asked them for anything they would have done it. That, that's how great they were. And eventually I moved in with uh Nora and Jason and it was an interesting time to live in north Hollywood. I would ride my bike all the time down to the bars there and it was just on the other side of the hill from Universal Studios. So good time and I got to see more and more of like the addiction side of this job and how good it can be when it's just you and a lot of good people doing great work every night last but not least is cooking at home. And many, many movies that I've seen over the years all have some sort of like cooking at home scene of some sort and yes, it could be said that any of those movies would be just as much as of an influence on me as like chef movies are when you're cooking at home. But I feel more motivation when I have something on at home. Like I just recently bought with kitchen confidential the tv series on DVD had Bradley cooper in it, it's really bad. The main character's name is Jack Bourdain and it's supposed to be like little bits and pieces of what the book was, but not exactly what the book is. And also like really bad writing and acting. I mean Bradley cooper is great in it. I mean you see him from kitchen confidential and then he goes right back to being another chef in burnt, pretty cool. But yeah, I mean the Tv series the ship, but just fun again to like watch uh interactions with chefs and cooks in front of the house and it just brings me right back to working in the kitchen. Maybe that's my only addiction is wanting to always be in the kitchen at the same time, never be in the kitchen. But I try really hard when I'm at home to, to continue cooking and learning and keeping up on things like many of the people that I've had on this podcast can attest to it. Like I never stop whether it's making beer, making pastrami, making my own corned beef, whatever it is. I'm always trying something in the kitchen because it's just, I feel the need and want to get better at what I do. I want to understand myself when I cook. I think more than anything more than wanting to learn good recipes and try everything out of the recipe books that I have. Maybe that's what it is too, sorry, as I look forward out into Beaverton Oregon and looking at the trees, I'm thinking about memories. I mean looking and reading books, looking at videos and reading books, they're all memories of some other chef and I'm reliving their memories in a way, not exactly obviously because I don't have the product that they have, I'm not in the environment that they are, but the end results trying to hone in on what they made is interesting and I honestly will never know if I'm doing it right or not and that's that's a bummer part like especially reading older cookbooks and seeing the way that they did it. Every chef has probably gotten better from what they wrote originally. Like Momofuku, I was there and had their ramen in new york tastes nothing like what I make at home. I had the ramen that they have in las Vegas tastes nothing like I had what I what I had in new york and nothing like what I make at home. But I have their cookbook and I try my best to adapt and really that's all you could really do is you're not always gonna have the best ship that they've had. You know, I can't get, I can get benton's bacon, I could get new skis bacon, get whatever bacon that's like good out here like hem players and stuff and try to recreate what they make, but it's not necessarily the same and I'm sure that they cook their own way too and they add their own flair and just their own personal preferences are part of it and that's where I like building my own personal memories is my personal preferences and what I like. I'm not a picky person but I do have like an idea of what I like salt, salt level, heat level, suite level. I'm probably more of a sweet person than anything, but I also love salt and just how they interact with each other and acid and you know sour like learning those things a little bit more in textures, whether they're creamy and crunchy or having all of it at once or none of it at all. Like it's fun to go through those books and continue to push myself to learn. So when I'm at home and I have any tv thing on or movie on, it's just like comforting to feel like I'm back in the kitchen and there's people around me and I hear things that remind me that there are passion and passionate people out there doing the same thing. So when I'm at home I try to give it my all as well, I try to not only learn but create memories and hopefully one day cook for someone else and hopefully I can pass those, my feelings of how I felt, making it how I learned to make it pass it on to the people that I'm serving it to and that brings us to the end. Thank you so much for checking out this podcast. I definitely want to go back and review a few other movies that have been more current, um, such as Road runner and boiling point. There's some things to be said there and just thinking about movies and talking about the experiences that started to bring out more feelings and thoughts that I could remember. So definitely want to come back to this and do it again. So until then, thank you so much for checking us out. I hope you enjoyed it. Please take care. Be safe. Bye bye.