Stagiaire - Success, Failure and what not...

[Chef_]

Great story Keith! That's what I think is so important, is to understand cooking school does not take the real experience of having a team play the game of delivering stellar service and food. Applied knowledge comes from working with those who teach the dedicated.

There is no reason to ask to be taught, if you don't want to learn. That's what is so important about things. The attitudes of culinary graduates is that of entitlement. Going to school to practice is a great thing, but to apply a team dynamic of the highest integrity, is not too common these days.

I think there is far too much negativity surrounding the food service profession. We are best off taking every lesson with humility. Sometimes no matter how precise and perfect we do things it just is not good enough.

I frequently got criticized for not salting things enough. When the chef was heavy handed with salt, I felt a sense of disgust. But then I just sucked it up, one time I put enough salt in the mix to kill all the snails on planet earth. The chef said "this is better you got it buddy"

Personally, i think its better for a prosepcting cook to start off at a really low end POS restaurant or food service place. I got my start in a college cafeteria, where i learned how NOT to run a kitchen. Which has been just as important for me as a cook as learning how to run a succesful kitchen.

 

[Chef_]

Good post, I never went to culinary school either. I worked with European chefs many years, Swiss, German, French, Italian. Learned from all of them. Dishes I liked would write down recipe & procedure. Had all these hand written recipe's before computer.

The Swiss chef would pull the hardest working stewards dishwashers & train them in the kitchen. These local kids started at the bottom and a couple became Executive Chefs.

Wow, now thats an education worth paying for. Paying 30,000 dollars to learn from some schmuck at le cordon bleu that hasnt stepped foot in a real kitchen in 20 years just didnt seem worth it to me. Work 6 months in a kitchen, along with a little bit of researching, and youll be light years ahead of a culinary student, and youll already have experience under your belt.