filthykitchen.blogspot.com
Filthy Kitchen: October 2008
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Scrapings, floor sweepings and save-for-well-dones from the bottom of the catering industry barrel. Friday, 31 October 2008. Being nice to the dish-pigs. When people find out what you do ("Ooo! 8211; part interest, part contempt), they inevitably whip out an anecdote about a youthful summer washing dishes in a pub kitchen where all the chefs were assholes. The conversation that follows ("I do. I don’t know. You do it…") is intensely wearisome. You see, I am not unpleasant to dish-washers, KPs,. Theirs is...
filthykitchen.blogspot.com
Filthy Kitchen: Credit crunch? What credit crunch?
http://filthykitchen.blogspot.com/2008/11/credit-crunch-what-credit-crunch.html
Scrapings, floor sweepings and save-for-well-dones from the bottom of the catering industry barrel. Friday, 7 November 2008. You can smell the fear amid the cappuccinos and the panninis. Well, no you can’t. I recently did a bit of research for an article on the impact of the credit crunch on the catering trade. All the restaurateurs I spoke to were in a state of aggressive denial. This was perfectly demonstrated by the owner of one poncified café. Was she making any changes to help weather the storm?
filthykitchen.blogspot.com
Filthy Kitchen: Never be sorry for a waiter…
http://filthykitchen.blogspot.com/2008/12/never-be-sorry-for-waiter.html
Scrapings, floor sweepings and save-for-well-dones from the bottom of the catering industry barrel. Thursday, 4 December 2008. Never be sorry for a waiter…. There is a mutual antipathy between kitchen and front-of-house, a two-way conviction that. They don’t work as hard as we do…. But that’s as far as my sympathy goes, because, while most chefs do have at least some understanding of what a waiter does, experience suggests that very few waiters have the slightest idea of what goes on in a kitchen. That i...
filthykitchen.blogspot.com
Filthy Kitchen: November 2008
http://filthykitchen.blogspot.com/2008_11_01_archive.html
Scrapings, floor sweepings and save-for-well-dones from the bottom of the catering industry barrel. Friday, 28 November 2008. Try everything once… Part 3. But the dinner that Jack Tammala offered me one hot night in his house down a dusty side alley in Waikabubak (google it if you’re that bothered), was shudder-inducingly awful. It wasn’t. There was the usual overcooked rice and insipid boiled vegetables. No problem there, but then Mrs Jack presented the centrepiece, the delicacy…. A half hour of mastica...
filthykitchen.blogspot.com
Filthy Kitchen: Try everything once… Part 3
http://filthykitchen.blogspot.com/2008/11/try-everything-once-part-3.html
Scrapings, floor sweepings and save-for-well-dones from the bottom of the catering industry barrel. Friday, 28 November 2008. Try everything once… Part 3. But the dinner that Jack Tammala offered me one hot night in his house down a dusty side alley in Waikabubak (google it if you’re that bothered), was shudder-inducingly awful. It wasn’t. There was the usual overcooked rice and insipid boiled vegetables. No problem there, but then Mrs Jack presented the centrepiece, the delicacy…. A half hour of mastica...
filthykitchen.blogspot.com
Filthy Kitchen: September 2008
http://filthykitchen.blogspot.com/2008_09_01_archive.html
Scrapings, floor sweepings and save-for-well-dones from the bottom of the catering industry barrel. Friday, 26 September 2008. Not a lifestyle choice. How did this happen? A decade ago, though people might still have watched Gary Rhodes and his stupid haircut, or bought Delia Smith’s patronising tomes on egg-boiling, there was a general awareness that a chef was just another manual worker, a tradesman. Like a plumber. Or a builder. In short, not a “lifestyle choice”. That’s a real job! This deluded indiv...
filthykitchen.blogspot.com
Filthy Kitchen: December 2008
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Scrapings, floor sweepings and save-for-well-dones from the bottom of the catering industry barrel. Saturday, 13 December 2008. An experiment in socialism. One of the many things that I dislike about the catering trade is that the whole grubby business is at radical odds with my own political ideals. 8220;Waiters are seldom Socialists,” wrote George Orwell. Damn straight they’re not; nothing about restaurants is remotely socialist. Think about it for a moment – how can it be? We dressed scrawny KPs in cr...
filthykitchen.blogspot.com
Filthy Kitchen: Try everything once (twice)
http://filthykitchen.blogspot.com/2008/11/try-everything-once-twice.html
Scrapings, floor sweepings and save-for-well-dones from the bottom of the catering industry barrel. Friday, 21 November 2008. Try everything once (twice). Sometimes it’s necessary to try things twice – just to be sure. That was the case with the evil monstrosity that is durian, Satan-incarnate in the form of a fruit. It’s dirty-green and as big as a football, and inside it’s the texture and colour of ripe brie. It smells like a sewer filled with petrol and rotten eggs. And its exotic ...It was a stormy n...
filthykitchen.blogspot.com
Filthy Kitchen: Being nice to the dish-pigs
http://filthykitchen.blogspot.com/2008/10/being-nice-to-dish-pigs.html
Scrapings, floor sweepings and save-for-well-dones from the bottom of the catering industry barrel. Friday, 31 October 2008. Being nice to the dish-pigs. When people find out what you do ("Ooo! 8211; part interest, part contempt), they inevitably whip out an anecdote about a youthful summer washing dishes in a pub kitchen where all the chefs were assholes. The conversation that follows ("I do. I don’t know. You do it…") is intensely wearisome. You see, I am not unpleasant to dish-washers, KPs,. Theirs is...
