A Sainted Stage

Baby girl's growing up: I finally sucked up my courage last week and went around to all the restaurants in town that I admire, begging for an internship. In the restaurant world, it's called a stage [staʒ], or an apprenticeship, which is historically how chefs got started in France. It's much more rigorous and they start much younger (at, say, twelve; I'm a bit late) on the fairer continent. Stateside stages generally comprise part of a culinary school education; I'm kind of an unusual case in that I'm getting a degree in English, not pastry, and am willing to get kicked around a kitchen not for course credit.

The first restaurant (French) I went to was closed before service, but through the window I saw a pot steaming in the open kitchen. Calling yielded nothing: I decided to email; haven't heard back since. The next restaurant (Italian) was three times the size of the first, gorgeously pine-paneled, and open during the hours after lunch. They were too busy with special events, but the sous-chef encouraged me to check back in a few weeks. The third restaurant (New American) told me to email the chef, who raised his eyebrows at my lack of a culinary school education. The fourth restaurant (Italian) put me on the phone with the chef, who told me to come in the next day; I went in as promised to find he was out with a cold. I left my card and haven't heard back since.

But the fifth restaurant was the charmed one:

Chef Aaron won me over immediately with his enthusiasm: he loved that I was trying this life out through a stage rather than through school and told me to come in on Saturday and bring my knife. When he sat me down that day before service, he didn't sugarcoat the parts of restaurant life that suck: the cuts, the burns, the long hours, losing your social life to the long hours, the low pay and the slow pay-off. To slough through that requires that ever elusive 'passion for food.' It would suck to go through years of culinary school and then realize you didn't have it. Which is what brought me there, to the postage stamp kitchen of a little French restaurant and pâtisserie in Portland.

That night, I started out mostly with my hands in my pockets, getting a feel for how things worked. But within an hour I was shown how to make aioli ("Three months of culinary school in thirty minutes! You wouldn't even see a sauce before that") and cut lemon faces (so called because they artfully disguise, for those with delicate sensibilities, the bulging eyes on the whole trout that gets served). A few hours in I was piping madeleines into molds, plating dishes, and throwing bones full of marrow in the oven. I also learned: that a beef cheek is done when it's tenderly falling apart; how to form quenelles (though I still suck at it); why lamb kidney smells like piss; how not to apologize for aggressively seasoned French fare. When I collected my things from the cellar (c'est comme les caves de Paris) at the end of the night, I did the math and realized I'd stuck around for seven hours.

Today, I went in for a mere three, but I learned how to shuck oysters efficiently, that the way I was taught to cut shallots is called a brunoise, that there is flour in frangipan, and that tempura bacon is a great but dangerous idea (even French restaurants stock soy sauce and sriracha, it turns out). While I was there I also learned that the pastry chef doesn't already have an intern, contrary to my prior assumption, and thus has vacant counter space to her right. So guess who's biking two-and-a-half miles at seven am tomorrow morning to bake croissants? C'est moi.

And I feel pretty great about the prospect.

[all photos from stjackpdx.com; credit to Kim Kolba Photography]