Aaron Maree: INNER PRIDE AND GRATIFICATION

Turndown !!

No-one "WANTS" to work a 15 hour day.
It sucks.
And the day after.....it hurts when you are nearing a milestone age.
But despite the apprehension and the nausea of the thought of doing continuous long days, there is always something amazing shortly thereafter, when you realize you have served another incredible dinner and made guests happy again.
Fulfillment and pride are the just rewards for the experience of spending the day with like minds of creative genius in food and after long tiring days of prep, to serve with success food that glorifies everything that you have worked hard for.
Over my career I've done countless meals like this, and I still enjoy them.
The whining is probably loader these days about the thought of the day ahead, but the inner pride after the fact is just as gratifying as ever.
Rewards are tiny in the cooking industry. The biggest rewards come to you at unexpected times and by unexpected people.
A chef bringing you a glass of wine to sample, a meal during the course of the feast as a reward for working a long day, or simply a thank you and hand shake. For me after 30 years in the kitchen these are great fully appreciated rewards.
I can imagine for the younger chefs who flock to the industry these would be mocked and seen as no reward at all.

Cooking is a team job.
You need the team to pull together to produce all that we do.
The team needs to cook together, work together, plan together and clean together.
But in the end , as a career , cooking is a solitary game.
We are all in it for our own individual reasons and those reasons are what either makes us or breaks us and keeps us in the game or sidelines us to another career.
A team can assist you, but you have to have the inner strength to stand on your own feet for 10-12-14 hours , to go to work sick or not sick, knowing that to call in sick is "NOT" an option, to walk away from the fun of friends and family, to create your own fun on a plate or platter for others to enjoy.

Cooking and its preparation - 'Mise-en-place" leaves plenty of quiet time for you to think to yourself, sometimes for the worst, most times for the better. I've seen it break chefs far better than me and Ive seen it strengthen apprentices into greater chefs.

This past week I was contacted via the wonders of social media, by a colleague with whom I cooked beside nearly 25 years ago. We both miss the good old days, when cooking was a trade for the rebels and the hungry. We cooked to live and played hard afterward. Beach parties, drugs and alcohol.
Today that kind of free spirit is frowned upon. The words drugs and alcohol now the thing of medical tests for those in the trade, and have been replaced by other intoxicants such as coffee and cigarettes. But the rebel inside never dies.

I miss the "good-olde' days of cooking. The only "rich kids" then where the rare restaurant or hotel owners children, very few of whom where ever really allowed to cooks seriously, but a few loved to try just to upset their rich parents.
Mostly cooking then was about rebels and ragamuffins, dropouts and destitute who wanted to cook because they loved food or had little education to choose another career path.
We never thought about the future, we created dishes on the day because a certain fresh ingredient arrived with a supplier, a certain new fish was caught in the morning by thee trawler, or sauce made wrongly tasted great and so we used it. These were the days long before gellifications and anything molecular. Cooking was just touch and feel and fun.

Today a lot of fun has gone from food. We are surrounded by "rich kids" playing at food for a few weeks or months before parents fund their new "start-up".
Filling in time or "doing food" for a semester is not what this career is all about.
Rarely does the touch and feel of food correspond to those we see come through the doors, it's a money business today. Profits, balance sheets, costings and headaches. We are shouted at for not moving fast enough, demand for new menus is constant and the slightest glitch is reprimanded. Some people just can't seem to be made happy because they have lost what food is all about.

Food is fun, it needs to be fun and many people forget that. Take out the fun and you may as well work in a factory or be dead.
The best places I have ever worked, were free and fun and we all worked off each others creativity. That was the case at Oskars Garden Restaurant back in the early 1980's, The sheraton Ayers Rock was a collective hive of ragamuffins from around the world, young traveling chefs who found themselves in the centre of a massive country and created genius food because we had nothing else but food to do.
at the end of the 80's and beginning of the 90's the same fun was still to be found as we strove for Michelin glory working for Gary Rhodes in England. He was a demanding perfectionist but he allowed us the freedom too to find the tastes he desired. At Hambleton hall also under Brian Baker we forged a bond like few others, the drive and strive for food perfection saw us all live at work. We only went to our rooms to wash and change and run back to the kitchens with more ideas. We had little choose being stuck in the middle of no-where. We cooked because we desired nothing else and we wanted a name for our establishment and for ourselves. We cooked because it was fun and we looked to each other for the energy to do better. So too it was also the case in the Middle East in one of the best private kitchen brigades I ever had the opportunity in which to work. We all had fun, we had freedom and we were not controlled by dictators, but allowed to feel the food and make delicious food for those we served.
Our Executive Chef, became a student and worked with us to learn our skills and then taught us his as well. He worked with us, in the kitchen and became our friend, mentor and assistant, a like mind with whom we could confer, question and throw ideas at.

Like any artist, control blocks the mind, perhaps the reason this week I find it freeing enough to write again, because Im not being controlled so harshly for a week.

In any case, throughout it all, Id like to share the past weeks works, fun fresh and freeing.
Remember cooking is about fun, not control.
Let others control the business, if you want to be a chef, you have to have freedom to move, to think, to create and to be the artist you were born to be.
Get an accountant and a lawyer for everything else.
And if you're in the business for the money...forget it.
If you were born rich, then great...invest it in something other than food and make money while you spend long tiring and thankless hours creating food for others lucky enough to dine on your creativeness..

Id never house another career, Ive seen such amazing places and worked with some of the worlds best chefs, Ive made and spent several fortunes and the best of all, Ive eaten some of the best food the world has ever proceed at the hands of some of the most talented people ever put on earth to prepare it.
I am thankful for every day I get to cook.

The Wine Dinner we served this past week was complimented by the dessert, the bread and the mignardise...of course the best parts of the meal ha ha ha....Enjoy the pics..