First Impressions

I finally made it to Acuto. After a very hung over trip to Rome from Munich and a couple sprints through the Rome Central Station, 68 km later, here I am. I plan to Stage (en francais, means "work experience" or "to apprentice",- I provide free labor and get a place to live and a couple meals a day in return) for 2 months at the restaurant Le Colline Ciociare under Chef Salvatore Tassa.
http://nymag.com/nymetro/food/features/14837/

October 5th, 2010

Day one of work just ended. I am home at 11:17pm and I started at about 6, not bad. Tuesdays will always be great for that, Wednesday- Saturday however we work 10am-4, then 6-11:30,12ish, and Sundays we work 10am-3:30. So I realize I will soon grow to love my 2 hour breaks as well as my kilometre walk all up hill at the end of every shift- no joke. And the last 400m are as about as straight up as it gets.. perhaps I will arrive home with buns of steel. Having said that, with the amount of pasta I am eating I highly doubt it, but I will try. Anyways, I met the sous chef tonight who is great, he speaks a tad of English which is helpful and another stagé is here from Toronto, he obviously speaks English so that was a great welcome on my first day. There is also a Pastry Chef, Roberto but he wasn’t here tonight. Chef overlooks what is going on during service in the kitchen and plates a few dishes. He also makes a point to talk with the guests a fair bit, sometimes he switches things around on the menu according to the conversations he has with his guests, which he did tonight.

I was a little worried at the beginning of the shift to be honest with you because the prep was so incredibly minimal; more time was spent on family dinner. But, need not worry… it was all under control in the organized chaos that is a kitchen.

Chef really brags about his sous, any chef should because they really need to trust them which is very hard for a controlling chef to do. Then chef said- out of 3 chefs, 1 is good.- No pressure or anything. Then I learned that the sous was nominated to go to a competition in Italy where the best 60 chefs in the whole country are invited and he came 4^th! Very impressive! And he looks quite young.

Today the only thing I made was pasta dough. I was given the recipe: 3 egg yolks, 125g of flour, 30g of water. I didn’t know how much you are supposed to knead the dough. The sous chef was just starring at me while I was kneading it which was very nerve racking then he asked- who teach you?- I didn’t know what to say because they didn’t teach us to make pasta dough like that in chefs school, I was just kneading it because he told me too, so I said- it’s good?- he was very impressed, then started making fun of the guy from Toronto. Moments later Chef came over and also starred over my shoulder, he soon after took it from me and showed me the real way to do it, damn he was good. . . so I copied, and I think I’ve got it down, it was smooth as a babies bum by the time I was done with it.

Lasagnawild rabbit, red onion, herbs, mozzarella, pasta and white truffle

As the courses rolled out through the evening starting at about 8:40ish, I just watched and jumped in when I could or was instructed too. I was happy to do this on day one, it gave me a chance to see how everything ran, the pace of the service, etc. The menu was very impressive- from what I was able to try it was absolutely incredible. I lost count of the courses but there must have been at least 8 or 9 or something, this is including a number of snacks, the main meal and two dolce (sweet) courses.  Nothing on the menu looked overly complicated, the flavours are clean and honest which I really appreciate, the plating is beautiful and fairly simple.

I will have pictures of more of the food soon!