"To sleep, to dream, that is all" -Shakespeare

            I’ve worked long shifts before, but this one was an epic by any standard measure. I began work at 8:30 a.m. I left at 3 a.m., the following day. Granted I had an hour and fifteen minute break in between, but that was spent biking to the store and buying a suit jacket for the next day: my job interview at 9 a.m. for a teaching position in Japan. During my shift, I installed cabinet hinges for a refrigerator door getting through 1/8 steel with a wood drill bit, laid concrete, repaired a brick wall, served, bartended, took reservations and answered phones, and my usual work as pastry chef/restaurant consultant/manager.

            In all irony, if I had gotten my jacket the previous day, I might have finished my work early, gone home early, and have missed the management calling for me to stay for their party of friends arriving after closing for $1 drinks. I am the only one at the restaurant who can serve, bartend, cook, and still have drugless competence to do accounting, scheduling and paperwork so I often get these last minute tasks.

            Their “18” friends quickly turned into 30 or so raging alcoholics and a few drinks at 10:00 turned into me bartending in a bar from 10:30 to 1:55 with bottles missing, glasses short, and nothing else in the bar set up. I had half the bar trying to get me to take Jager bombs with them (imagine shoe-flavored cough syrup and a Red Bull), but with the commute to my job interview now four hours away (and the choice of drink), what do you think I said? In spite of not knowing most of the drinks until a few seconds before I poured them and refusal to drink with the alchies (which would increase tips), I made off like a bandit in tips. I even learned the most terrible thing you can (legally) do to a person at a bar. Order them a Prairie Fire - also called Satan’s Piss, but that name gives some warning as to what they are about to drink: chilled tequila with Tabasco sauce shaken, poured into a shot glass, and served with whipped cream on top. I’m sure it burns less coming up than going down. And if you are ever uncertain as to whether or not you have an ulcer, this is the definitive test.

            All this time, I still had my bread sitting in the kitchen ready to be baked and a sauce that needed to be completed.

            With the drunks departed, I finished in the kitchen as fast I could. I still haven’t decided if I was going crazy, simply lacking sleep, or suffering from a post-traumatic stress disorder, but I heard things. It was part that the tiny alarm clock/radio we have in the kitchen could not get a clear signal of anything but Spanish stations: As I was listening to my rock music, hints of strange voices kept sneaking in from other signals on the FM band. There are also four pipes circulating in the crab tanks causing a constant gurgling of water that may been able to explain it, but I kept hearing strange voices from outside the kitchen.

            I only heard them when standing between the radio and the crab tanks. I was hoping the place was just haunted. It’s old enough. The building is still the same brick from 87 previous failed restaurants and one successful laundromat of sorts. The City has told us we could not alter the brick in any way and even forced us to fill in a window with cinder blocks and rebar as to prevent a structural collapse. This building had the lifespan to be haunted, but I think it was just wishful thinking because after 17 hours of a 17 and 1/2 hour shift, I was ready to go make those %$*# freeloading specters start pulling their own weight in the restaurant and put them to work baking.

             I can just see it now. I get a call the next morning at 9:30. “When we came in, the kitchen was covered with spilled sauce, grease, and fourteen kilos of kosher salt. The giant pizza oven was set to 500 degrees, and the charred lumps inside were....you said you were making bread, right? I think that’s what it was.”

“But I gave the phantoms good directions! How could they have failed me?” I inquire.

“The phantoms?”

            “Yes! I put those laze-abouts to work. The crab tank let me on to them, and I found them hiding behind the fryer! I dragged them out gave them proper culinary instructions; then I poured salt around the oven to keep them from escaping before the first light of the 17th sun! I gave them such good directions. Golden brown I said, golden brown!” I blurt between mad cackles that slowly develop into sobs as I understand how the ghosts had betrayed me.

             Instead, I got a call after my interview, “Whydogoki jalean? Whiu came in idalla mess. Where the saucea made?”

“...what?”

“The sauce you made. Where’s it?”

“In the fridge, next to the other sauces and labeled.”

“Ini fridge? Nexa thotherauce? Ok. I’ll check.”

             It was more comforting: the familiar syntax and enunciation. However, it still rather upset me. Those ghosts, they wouldn’t get away next time.

             I biked home in the wee hours of the morning, got my paperwork in order for the following day, and found it was 4:45am. I went to bed, but I couldn't sleep. The drunks, the other’s simple tasks turned catastrophes that I had to clean up, the bad rap music pulsing like a dieing heart - it all reverberated in my thoughts each time I closed my eyes. The day had been so long that I could scarcely remember when it began. My heart beat quickly as the endorphins still ran circles within me screaming, “Oh no! The sauce is burning! You’ve run out of ice! The management has changed the menu with out telling you! Eeeeeeep! Panic panic panic!” I think I might have gotten 20-30 minutes of sleep in there but can't be sure. I felt awake the entire time, but my memory of my thoughts was too inconsistent when I got up at 5:45, so I must have slept somewhere in there. I was out of the door by 6:25. 

             I took the train to SF and found the office forty-five minutes before the interview began. I had another candy bar, some more chocolate milk, and counted down.

             The first part was a group informational session. We learned all about Nova, the largest English teaching school in Japan. I was, well at least felt bright and bubbly for the first two hours of it until the recruiter asked me a very simple question: what had she just said 15 seconds prior? I went blank. It took me a few ‘umm’s and several long stares before I came upon the answer. I hope I made some good impression on her earlier, because when it came time for one on one interviews, she picked to work with me.

             I’ve gone through countless interviews, and this had to be the oddest. “In this next section, I will ask you twenty questions and you have three minutes to answer them in three words or less,” she began. I’ve always gotten the question, “If I talked to your last employers, what would they say about you?” but never with these constraints. She followed with some rather ‘unique’ inquiries: “When was the most recent complement you received,” “When was the last time you had an argument with some one you live with,” and “What is the most independent thing you have ever done in your life?”

            I had trouble remembering earlier than the previous evening so it became the focus of a lot of my answers. I had to explain to her the time I left work that morning. I’m not sure if she took it as a note of my Japanese-like work ethic or as a mark as to how little I cared about the interview. I was trying to not fall asleep at the controls, let alone read the reactions of a stone faced interviewer making notes about each response you make punctuated by her ‘hmmmm’s and ‘uhm-hm’s.

             On the good side, I was the only one who did not live at home, had a job, had lived abroad, had previous English teaching experience and had previously studied Japanese even if I was at least three or four years younger than the other two applicants. I’ll see how I did in a few weeks.

             And lastly, a good note to close with: there is more to my job as pastry chef and restaurant consultant than meets the eye. The owner was too busy to actually meet with me over my position. I turned the job of Executive Chef down three times already, and finally had decided to do the position at an hourly pay rate where I make my own schedule and never have the stress of cooking during a restaurant shift. He gave it an OK and left.

            Of course, the owners had recently fired the manager. My friend, the assistant manager, therefore stepped up and took the position for the few weeks before he leaves as well. The management had been a bit ‘screwy’ to say the least with paying him and others for services rendered, so he already had his heart strings all a-humming for our noble restaurant. Being acting manager, it was him who decided my hourly wage with the aforementioned in mind. Granted I only plan to work 5 to 10 hours a week once school starts, I should now be able to cover my rent with just that. I love poetic justice.

            To top my longest shift ever of  18 and 1/2 hours, including my lunch break spent biking to the store and my longest job interview that spanned three hours, when I laid in bed at 3:30pm, I slept for 15 and 1/2 hours straight. And as I look back, I realize that I ate only tofu for breakfast at 8 a.m., a bit of Ahi for dinner at 9 p.m., and a long stretch of sugar and half of a can of Red Bull before finally getting home from my interview when I gorged on vegetarian pea soup, tofu, and raisins after getting back home at 2:00 p.m. the following day. I feel I lived three weeks in that time.

            Now to tidy up at home before going back to work in two hours. Only four more days until school starts and I’m only about 200 kanji short of being ready for my Japanese class. Oi.

Sauce à la 3 a.m.

            The fastest sauce to make for fine dining is a heavily fattened Bechamel. It basically is salted, flavored cream with a touch of water and some type of thickener (Roux, roasted flour, corn starch, rice flour, etc). A standard Bechamel sauce is thickened, flavored milk with butter. Cream with either milk or water is faster and gives a richer, better tasting sauce. Here is a recipe for a White Halibut Sauce.

3 onions

3 stalks of celery

2 carrots if the kitchen has them in stock, but don’t hold your breath

1/2 cup of dried lemon grass or other seasoning randomly left by the previous chef

3 quarts of heavy cream

1.5 pints of water

Salt

White Pepper

Rice Flour

3 leaves of gelatin

1 cup of canned tuna 

   Sautee the onions and celery under very low heat until cooked through after about twenty to thirty minutes. It should not brown at all but remain light since the sauce will be white. Dash back into the kitchen to turn it down as the kitchen staff might randomly stir it and feel it would be best on full heat.

    Add the lemon grass, most of the salt,  1 pint of water, and 2 quarts of the cream. Bring to a simmer, add the tuna, turn off, and let sit for thirty minutes. Normally a sauce like this is made from fish bones from any white fish. Tuna, salmon, trout and mackerel are never used because they give a strong pungent flavor. With little else on hand, I add much less fish but use canned tuna. The little fish flavor goes a long way. This idea came from my experiments with a sauce made from the water that tuna is packed in. It’s a fast, cheap trick that gives excellent results. Strain the sauce, add the leaves of gelatin to make up for the gelatin that is normally added to the sauce from the fish bones, then bartend for near three hours.

    Next add enough rice flour to thicken the sauce (about 1/2 a cup), bring to a boil, then promptly over-salt the sauce. Add the remaining quart of cream and remaining 1/2 pint of water to dilute the salinity, and rethicken it. Place it in the fridge in an obvious place, label, and wait for the phone call demanding its whereabouts.