Part 19: How to nail a kitchen trial shift
On the occasion of this newsletter's one-year birthday!
What’s the first thing you do once you’ve successfully moved house?
If it’s anything other than sign up as a member at the astronomical observatory that happens to be 30 yards outside your front door, then apparently you and I are very different people.
This happened to me on Friday (yesterday as I write this).
It was cloudy here in my corner of Finland so I knew star-gazing was unlikely. But the lights were on in the small, white-domed building, and, though still terrified of speaking Finnish to anyone other than my wife, I knew I’d be proud if I summoned the courage to go inside and see what awaited me.
Fridays, as I’d learned on the observatory website, are members nights, when anyone can pay but 20€ a year to join for the chance to use the 2 meter long telescopes.
Having walked up to the observatory, my wife waving and giving me a thumbs up from our seventh floor apartment window, I heard Finnish voices coming from inside. Knowing no other way of doing so, I knocked gingerly on the door. The voices stopped and, gingerly once again, I turned the door-handle and walked in.
The rest of that story is probably best saved for the heart-warming astronomy memoir I’m unlikely ever to write.
What the experience of walking into that room of exceptionally intimidating Finnish amateur astronomers eating Pringles and discussing exoplanets (I assume, it could well have been ice hockey) reminded me of are the countless times we walk through doors in life and, faced with a group of people that already know and appreciate each other, must proudly declare something along the lines of:
I am here now. You must pay attention to me. I have summoned the courage to force my being here on you and I beg you to love me as you do each other.
Well, maybe not in so many words at least.
No more so has this been the case for me in life than during that thing I so often feared but always handled pretty well: the Restaurant Trial Shift.
The trial shift is the restaurant kitchen equivalent of a job interview. It is an unpaid, most likely full-length shift one completes to give a potential head chef the chance to gauge whether they can countenance spending a significant portion of their waking life with you.
When I was new to the industry, the idea of being on “trial” scared the hell out of me.
What trials, I asked myself the first time I was faced with one, would they put me through?
Timed pancake cookery?
Blindfolded soufflé baking?
Written tests on the nature of beef cuts and the cultural history of pudding?
I’m certain if I ever did need to make a pancake in order to convince anyone I was capable of making a pancake I’m pretty sure said pancake would end up, not only burnt, but, akin to the unfathomable mysteries of quantum physics, simultaneously burnt to the bottom of the pan and stuck to the ceiling.
Schrödinger’s pancake if you will.
But no, I never did experience such trial shifts.
In contrast, the trial shifts I’ve known have been little more than time spent doing menial tasks, showing enthusiasm, a willingness to clean, and, most importantly, indicating I’m not unbearable to be around.
Skills matter less than this last fact. Even to work at one of the world’s great restaurants, such as those fine-dining, Michelin-starred restaurants, the important thing is whether you seem like a cook that can make the working day a bit of fun.
Whether you are up to the technical demands of the job can be worked out later.
Maybe I’m wrong, maybe someone reading this really did need to make a pancake on order blindfolded in front of a group of note-taking sous chefs. But I became sure of this reality after my trial at Restaurant Esperanto, the now closed restaurant that, back in 2017, was one of Sweden’s best.
I won’t go into the line-by-line details. It was a fun night. I marvelled at the food they created. The balance between fancy-schmancy design and genuinely delicious things. I tried to show enthusiasm for picking kale in such a way they looked like tiny trees. And I definitely did my best to make some well-placed jokes. This was my first attempt at getting a gig at a fine-dining, Michelin joint. I didn’t have the experience, but I did, modest as I remain on the matter, know how to make people laugh.
I wasn’t surprised I got the gig. I was just ecstatic I had. The team were fun, the food was great, and I knew I had it in me to do the job. I didn’t give much thought to why I’d been chosen until the head chef explained a few weeks after I’d started.
“You know why we gave you the job, Reidie?” he asked. We were eating staff food at the time, the entire small team sat around a circular table in the dining room.
“No idea, all you had me do was pick kale into silly shapes,” I reminded him, both of us aware that was now my day job.
“You made us laugh.”
“I did? When?”
“Henrik [another sous chef] said something to you before we were getting changed for service on your trial. It was something like: “You can change into clean clothes in the locker room at the back, do you need me to show you?”
I then remembered what he was talking about.
“You told him he could point you in the direction of the changing room, but your clothes you could put on by yourself’.
We decided you’d be our guy after that.”
No, I’m not winning any comedy awards anytime soon, but at least I’m about funny enough to get ahead in fine-dining kitchens.
Apparently.
2024 and my current trial shift…
If you get this by email, you‘ll be receiving it on January 7, 2024. That’s exactly one year to the day since I sent out my first Recovering Line Cook newsletter to a list of one (me).
In a way, this entire first year was been my most recent unpaid trial shift.
I have sent everything out for free, no paywall. If you’ve subscribed for free, you’ve got everything. And this makes me all the more grateful for those of you who have become paid subscribers.
Really, thank you so much.
Since last January 7, I’ve written thousands of words of my kitchen memoir and given you a personal insight into restaurant cooking life. I’ve also created recipes and videos that show you some of the things I’ve learnt and continue to develop as a professional cook.
I’ve loved doing this. Whether you pay or not, I’m so grateful for everyone who reads my work. But it has become, between the video shooting, recipe testing, and, of course, writing, an extra day of work a week to create for you.
This in mind, I’ve decided to start a 50/50 split between free content that everyone will receive and content set aside just for paid subscribers.
Broadly speaking the plan is for recipe content to remain free, with the more personal, memoir work being reserved for paid subscribers.
Free subscribers can upgrade to be sure of receiving everything through the button below. It’s just $30 a year/ $5 a month:
In the words of Columbo…
… One more thing. After a lot of thought (and a little advice from a dear soul at Substack for which I’m very grateful) I’ve decided to offer an optional extra to paid subscribers.
I’m very nervous about this, but a little excited as well.
Early this year, I plan to start serialising my memoir How to Fail at Being Finnish.
This is a book-length memoir that explores what life in Finland, the country ranked happiest in the world six times running as of 2023, can teach about finding joy in an often frightening world. This is told through the story of my first year living in Finland, my experience learning Finnish language and culture, and its positive impact on my own struggle with anxiety.
Since it is not a food memoir as such, I felt it best to make this entirely optional for paid subscribers to receive. Paid subscribers will be able to sign up for the serialisation here. I won’t automatically add anyone.
It’s a story I’m very proud of and I’m excited to be sharing it through my newsletter first.
To get access when I begin serialisation, to get all my Recovering Line Cook work and to support me as a writer, click below to upgrade. Like I said, it’s just $30 a year if you pay annually:
Next week we continue the Memoirs of a Line Cook in Part 20: Nothing Dies like Love or Restaurants.
Hopefully I’ve seen Jupiter up close by then.
See you then and thanks for reading,
Wil
Also: one of my favorite memories from a week in Helsinki is being greeted each morning in the hotel cafe with a fortifying shot of sea buckthorn juice.
I love this piece! You demonstrated they were right to hire you by writing this one so it would make us laugh.