A day in the life of a chef…
Running pubs can be tough. The hours are long, the kitchen is hot and chefs get grumpy. Not to mention the drunk people who get even grumpier than chefs when you say no more drinks. It is also, however, an epic amount of fun. We meet some incredible people and spend a lot of our time giving our guests memories that last – what more could you want from a job? Apparently silly, old, glutton for punishment me still needs more. I love the Onslow, and I love that I get to call it my business, so I wanted to make sure I could say I had an honest view of every aspect of it.
That meant completing a kitchen shift…
The boys were very kind and didn’t make me do a ‘Breakfast Double’- that would have meant starting at 6am and cooking food right through until 10pm. So a nice leisurely 9am start was quite a treat. The first thing that has to be noted is how horrendously unattractive the attire is. I don’t know if female chef whites are any prettier, but borrowing the boys oversized jacket, baggy trousers and ugly apron definitely does not scream glamour to me. I’m used to being by the bar in colours and heels, not hair scraped back and Crocs for ‘safety’. But when in Rome, I guess.
Kevin, our head chef, was the perfect host, and what does a good host do – he makes you butcher and gut dead birds. So there it was, lesson number one, how to quarter a chicken and not waste a morsel. It’s a good skill to know though, and being an absolute carnivore squeamish-ness around animals was never likely. Delicately removing the fat from pork fillets was next, which was surprisingly therapeutic.
That was the shock gore out of the way, which meant it was time for some pretty prep…..
Making a chocolate ganache takes patience, something I am not renowned for. But Rich, one of our amazing CDPs, had faith in me and decided it was my turn to make the key element to one of our most popular desserts. With some careful measurements, and a few Valhrona 80% chocolate nibs that didn’t quite make it into the mix but went in to my mouth instead, our creation was delicious! Come down and sample the Valhrona Chocolate Shortbread in the next few days to make your assessments on my tempering skills.
The first thing I noticed about working in the kitchen is the time quite literally runs away from you…. I’d barely finished making my flame-grilled pepper and olive salsa verde for our mullet starter, and it was 12 o’clock.
Time to brief the front of house team on our specials for the day and crack on with service; the point when the attractiveness of being a chef really peaks. Not only are you in over-sized drab looking clothes, but it then gets super hot, and super stinky. Sending out some delicious specials, including Steak Diane and Poached Enderby Haddock was fun, and made even more so by Kev showing me how to prep, cook and plate all the other dishes on our menu too. Timing is by far the most crucial thing in cooking, and I finally see why the boys get frustrated at us when we take our time letting them know a table is ‘Mains Away’, or ready for their next course. My perfectly pink, Medium-Rare Rump of Lamb was nearly ruined by soup taking 20 minutes to be eaten.
Kev terrifyingly said he would let me decide what would be on our specials for that evening and with it being a Friday, night of the classic pub dishes, and me being the queen of carbs, I obviously had to go for a pie! I figured a Chicken and Mushroom Pie wouldn’t be overly intricate to make- but it turns out I was wrong. The velouté (chicken sauce to me and you), was packed full of phenomenal flavours and methodically trudging through the process step by step gave me a real insight into how a proper pie should be made. From now on, I promise to start with flavourful ingredients and build on top of them, banned from making a béchamel and then just adding the meat and veg. Kev’s plan of topping them with mash was out the window when I threw a paddy and determined that a pie is not a pie without pastry, resulting in an extra job of making the puff pastry- sorry chef! It was all totally worth it, and they turned out absolutely delicious.
Rich then decided I should come up with our soup of the day, and make it of course. That was easy- French Onion Soup all the way. It was an onion heavy process and I was crying three onions in. Not to mention the garlic!! My hands still smell now. Creating this classic French dish was a lot easier than I thought, and finishing it with Gruyère cheese on every portion meant that my fellow cheese addicts out the front were begging to try a portion. Camilla and I struggled to let them past us with their spoons, but once in, the verdict was success.
Evening service started, and having told a fair few of our guests I was in the kitchen that day, it seemed all the world and his wife decided to join us for dinner to test out what I’d learnt. The evening turned out to be a lot of fun, and when Kev gave my tricky to get right sea bass fillets the a-okay, I knew I was getting somewhere.
Our burger night returns on Monday and building up to it we’d been doing a different burger every evening this week, so tonight’s star was a Breakfast Burger. Bavette Steak Burger, Hash Brown, Bacon, Fried Egg, Chips & Beans was the winner, and plating six for one table turned out to be as easy as under-done eggs.
So I made it! If you came down for some dinner on Friday, it’s likely that your Cornish Lamb Rump or Medium-Rare Fillet Medallions were prepared by these garlic-ridden fingers.
It was an enormous amount of fun…. maybe I’ll just come up with some prettier chef whites!
