what do i know about diamonds? nothing really...i'm a boxing promoter, and until last week a happy one at that, but...what do i know about diamonds? i know they come from Antwerp.

ok.  i got a night's sleep under my belt since the insanity of last night.  hindsight is 20/20 folks....we did good but there was a ton of stuff we didn't do/should have done differently.

it's funny, we had a successful first day, and i guarantee we made money hand over fist (mostly cause of the bar), and for as good as everything actually went, i came away from it thinking "oh, we can do this next time and it will be better" and "we really should have done this and this" and stuff like that.  i'm my own worst critic.  all things considered, we did really well...none of us really even knew eachother (i'd never met any servers, and i'm also horrible at remembering names), none of us had touched the equipment or beta tested the menu or anything.  last week when i went to orientation and signed my papers they were all talking about doing a couple of tastings during the week so everyone could get familiar with the menu.  i had to work at old joint all week so i guess i just assumed they had done it.  nope!  it was the culinary equivalent of the first day of school, only all the chalkboards are broken and nobody can find any books.  anyway.  things we need to address immediately...the window/heat lamp situation.  at my old place the out window (the pass-thru that we cooks put finished food in and the servers grab it from the other side) was two 10 foot shelves, one on top of the other, with two 4 foot lamps on each level.  and as much room as that is, we can fill it pretty easily.  at new place last night we were using a window that was...oh, say, look around the room you're in.  see a bookshelf?  just a standard bookshelf.  yep.  we had one level of a bookshelf worth of window.  and a little 18 inch lamp that couldn't keep up.  so that needs to be fixed first off, cause food needs to stay hot.  period.  also we need to get the flat top grill figured out.  it just has dials with no numbers on the front, and we were having a hell of a time getting it dialed in.  usually with a flat top you have a hot side (350-375) and a cool side (225-250), and you cook burgers and stuff on the hot and grill sammies and stuff on the cool, and we had one big ass hot spot, and we trashed a lot of bread cause it kept burning on us.  we need to figure out the appropriate places on the dials.  the more we cook on it the better it's going to be.  another thing i feel bad about today is my timing.  i bet el chefe would tell ya i did good but i felt like i was in the weeds all night.  granted, right off the bat one of the fryers went down so all i had was two baskets.  so i was either backed up or firing things too early.  mostly too early.  see, at my old place i'm so used to just running on everything the second i get a ticket that i kept getting ahead of el chefe and sous chefe.  they were having their own problems, of course, so none of us were really focusing on banging out tickets together, it was more like we were each having our own little complications.  we had two new hot table contraptions (bins with electronically heated water that you keep pans of sauces you want to keep warm in)...before service we filled them both up with water and one of them just immediately leaked out all over the counter and the other one refused to get hot, so we ended up having to dominate half our spider top (stove top burners) with double boilers of sauces.  sous chefe had to deal with that, and also with teaching the dish kids how to make salads and wraps.  el chefe had the flattop problem and i had the fryer issue but goddammit we all came together to push through and i think we did a damn fine job.

it's only going to get better, of course, and i have a big smile on my face today, cause last night was a pretty good start.  i rocked a 12 hour shift and loved every second of it.  and i work with a bunch of dudes just like me.  they're cooks, not just people who can cook, ya know?  we are all tattooed and gnarly and we listen to heavy metal real loud and we all just plain love cooking food for people.  it's not just a job, it's a passion, it's a calling...i can't really describe it well enough.  but last night i felt like i was home.  and last night was my first shift.  it just felt right, and the vibe was there, and we had fun and we did serious work and talked shit to eachother the whole time.  el chefe kept singing the "my name is kobe, uhh, these are my shoes, uhh" from that nike commercial, and each time he did it it got funnier.  see, i figured it out last night when i was watching tv.  el chefe sounds exactly like the dog whisperer, except he swears a lot more.  also he's pissed i got the chef knife tattoo on my arm cause he wanted to do it but now he'd be a copycat.  anyway...we're just a bunch of culinary thugs, and we're gonna be a powerhouse, i promise...