Summertime in MAC

We're pushing it hard.

After 3 months, first course was up to 13 dishes, plus 3 salads. Brad, our pizzaiolo has really stepped it up, a dishwasher convert into a serious chefs’ project now handles the majority of the bar’s needs, and regularly helps to bail me out of the weeds when I’m being bombarded with multiple ticket calls. As the team is tight and fluid for dinner service, the daytime has the ball-and-chain of a dishwasher catastrophe. He’s a young kid, a mere 17, kicked out of high school, which I was under the impression to be next to impossible this day in age, has all the work ethic of a surviving Kennedy who has finally inherited all the riches the far more deserving of his family has left behind. To put it bluntly, he has a 5 minute timer now, to prove to him how excruciatingly slow he is. A walking disaster, he is lazy as can be, and with no sense of self awareness or comparative pride for the work being performed around him.

I guess my fear is that I might see a little of myself in him, perhaps when I was his age, working job after job around hockey, that my nonchalant may have been detrimental to my employers. It has caused me to sit down on more than one occasion to evaluate the potential of my past, and try to enumerate the amount of stressful moments I caused by being more focused on the clock than my work. I’ve questioned how much more I could have accomplished, learned, progressed if I had only spent every moment dedicated to what I was doing, instead of just chasing paychecks. Would I be a 26 year old line cook, struggling, with aching joints, swollen fingers and knees? The answer is a resounding yes. Even through the torment, the part time positions, the long drives, I knew what sacrifice meant. I should have apologized much more back then, but there is no time to dwell on the past. So I write today, with my legs elevated, and stretching my fingers, to loosen up and to get back to business. I am still aspiring, so it’s time to make full use of these sacrifices.

Oh yeah, and we have a WHOLE COW coming in today.

Go Slow, Stay Local.

Not seen: Mortadella Plate, Trippa alla Milanese, Chilled Marinated Mussels.

Bruschetta: Raw fava beans, poached egg, olive oil, sea salt, cracked pepper, Parmigiano Reggiano.