Foodies

I like cooking so it's good that I choose it as a profession. It's both creative and demanding of your right half of the brain. I don't have to shave everyday, hell I can even drink if I want to. I really can't see doing anything else as a means of income. Whats funny though is the transformation my profession has taken over the last 20 years. I remember, when I was just a pup, sitting at the bar after serving 200 pounds of prime rib and 60 orders of salmon on a Saturday night, watching customers looking at you like what the fuck is the HELP doing at the bar? They didn't want to see you. Chef, dishwasher it was all the same to them. We were pee-ons. We all had the same menues, steaks, chops, salmon, Friday fish fry and Saturday prime rib. Bullshit factory line cooking. So in a sense we really didn't deserve much respect. It wasn't as though we didn't want to serve things like venison sausage with wild mushroom ragout, there just was not any call for it. To this day you can't serve meals like that in most country clubs. They want meat and potatoes, chicken with lemon pepper and salmon with dill cream sauce. Eeeeeefuckenyuck. It was a daily struggle to find your creative outlet. Most times it was soup, sometimes specials, but mostly it was drinking............... Drinking and dreaming of what you would do when you got your own place. Sure you would have to move to a more cosmopolitan place. New York, L.A. even in Chicago where there were chefs pan frying homade, breaded ravioli, with real lemon juice and brown butter. Crazy shit man. We would do that. It would be glorious. Then you realised that there was not a bank in the world that would finance your dream. The only time you'll see a banker associated with a restaurant is for the 3 martini lunch. Dreams........crushed. It is a painful day when you look around, chained to the carrage broiler, 8 years invested in your career, and realise this is it. Salmon, steaks and chops.
But then a funny thing happened. Almost overnight the landscape began to shift. Not tilt or teeter but continental drift shift. This 100 mile per hour gust called hurricane salvation, blew in a huge wind of change. Her name was The Food Network. The gravity was felt almost immediately. People started asking for garlic aioli, EXTRA VIRGIN olive oil, if the bread was made in house, did you make the soup, is the fish fresh? Wow. I remember it like I remember my first time with a girl and even more fondly. A drink at the bar became a coversation about how to make stock, which way to cut brisket, how to emulsify a dressing. These same people that had nothing but disdain for our craft had climbed out of the graves of the supperclubs, and THEY WERE HUNGRY. The same old same old would no longer satisfy these newborn "foodies". They wanted change, they wanted what they had seen on tv and in their imaginations in thier mouths, dancing on their tastebuds, challenging their senses and opening up their experiences. Most of us chefs were ready, the old dogs, comfortable in their routine were reticent. I was fucking chomping at the bit. It was time for a new generation to take over. The owners of the same old, same old were now at the mercy of the chef and the foodie. Change would happen, or you would die. Those who could feed the needs of the new market would thrive, the others would be left to serve buffets to septegenerians. Young guns rose to the top taking away long held positions of half checked in, soul-dead, keepers of the kitchen. The old guard would now work for the nouveau chef.