Vac Pac's, Water baths and Paco Jets

I would love these machines but have never seen or touched them in the flesh. I have of course tried my homemade versions with some clean film and a rationale on steam but I really don't think it is the same. I am lucky if I can keep basic equipment up and running like robot coupes and soup blenders. The other day the soup blenders was broken for a couple weeks and I had 3 chefs stood around a big pan of soup each with a tesco value stick blender in hand willing it to puree. Every time I do manage to get some new equipment I must get the one that they have just stopped making because when something goes wrong with it, no one can ever manage to get a replacement part for it.
I do envy these chefs that get a totally brand new kitchen and get to choose everything they want to put in it, but to be honest I wouldn't have a clue how to use any of it any way. If we did have a Vac Pac machine Big Stan would probably try and vac pac his over sized balls for a giggle. It might be worth trying to get one!

what happened to the Xmas presents?

What ever happened to a good old fashioned Xmas present off a supplier? I know that taking kickbacks is deemed illegal and I would never condone it ( well no one has ever offered me anything so we don't really know!)  but surely a Xmas present is just a thank you for spending £50k a year with someone. I remember some of my old head chefs getting a office full of booze at Christmas as presents from various suppliers and one would be taken away on all expenses paid golf days. I never did ask him though if he was with these suppliers because they offered the best service or they were the cheapest. Actually i do remember seeing him with lots of brown envelopes full of cash sticking out of the ass of a chicken.

Employees that say YES to everything

Now you would think these are the perfect employees that do anything and everything you say. In actual fact these are some of the most infuriating and lovely people you can meet. The people that say Yes and nod there head to everything are foreign and don't understand a word you are saying to them. The perfect example was the other night when I was on desserts. I did a beautiful (well it wasn't one of my best!) Lemon Tart which obviously I wanted to sell because it would have saved my main prep and also because it is lemon tart and best served on the day. Anyway about 20 people in of a 70 service and I haven't served one piece of tart so I asked the pretty young hungarian waitress what her selling technique was. She looked at me with that big blank expression and going slightly rose in her cheeks and said "YES!" my heart sank. It took me 10 minutes to explain and in the end I got out of her that her selling technique was as follows

"I give dessert menus and i take dessert order!" in a thick hungarian accent of course

 Please can I have someone who speaks and understands english to take orders!  Am I asking for too much?

What happened to the slutty waitress?

There used to be a waitress i knew that loved rubbing herself up against chefs, getting them to feel her tits, showing them pictures of naked slutty poses of herself on her phone, loved talking about how she sorted herself out with her rampant rabbit, liked telling everyone how shit her marine boyfriend is at shagging and how she had to finish herself off afterwards, loved fucking other men behind his back, just basically a good slutty waitress who the loved the kitchen environment and talking filth.
She then dumped his Marine ass and started shagging one of my commis chefs and this was still all good because the details would still keep flowing and it was interesting and fun.
This all changed when they started dating proper, she then turned into a blubbering, bunny boiler, insecure mess who would listen at doorways to hear what the chefs were saying about her and if she was good enough for the commis. This boy was 18 and just wanted to fuck something, he didn't want a blubbering mess on his hands, who wanted to argue about everything. He wanted to get his willy wet in all the positions that the chef was telling him to try!
Please bring back our slutty waitresses!

Is Chef's Ass known as a medical condition

To anybody that doesn't work in a kitchen, this is one of the most painful things i have ever felt.
Chef's Ass usually happens in the summer months, when a chef is at their sweatiest. I don't know the medical terminology for it all, but it seems that the salt in your sweat causes some friction on your ass cheeks when they rub together, it feels like a bit of sandpaper is wedged in your ass crack and this burns everytime you move. And before you all start shouting at me to lose some weight. The extraordinary thing is, it isn't just fat chefs that this happens to, it is also the skinny ones.
Now there are numerous ways of trying to cure Chef's Ass. I personally have a shower and then smother myself generously with talcum powder. Others I have seen nip down to the dry stores mid service and get a couple handfuls of cornflour for a bit of instant relief. The best one I saw though is someone came back into the kitchen smelling rather sweet and when asked what he had done he replied

"I found some Birds custard powder and thought it might kill two birds with one stone, curing my chef's ass and B.O at the same time!"

At least he was thinking outside of the box!

Is the Iphone the best invention for a chef?

I would say yes!
This is because chefs now think they have a social life. Before the iphone it was just a case of go to work for 12-14 hours a day and not know anything what is going on in the world. Now they have every bit of information at their fingertips. They know which single mum facebook friend is moaning about being bored sat on their ass at home and how their life sucks. They can kiss other chef's arses through twitter, watch porn, listen to gay tunes on the ipod, they can sky plus Glee for when they get home, check out the sport results, actually watch football as they work, play angry birds all day, receive naked pics off the missus so they can show everyone in the kitchen, there is even an app for converting lbs into kgs when the scales are broken and stuck on kgs. and I have even seen a chef draw black lines on his penis and use the tesco grocery barcode scanner to check if they have any instock! Tesco said they had plenty of cocktail sausages in stock.

Is staff food the most contentious issue in the hospitality industry?

I don't think I have ever heard a chef moan about staff food. Their philosophy is quite simple, they will eat pretty much anything but if they really don't want it they will have something else when they get home. This is the only industry to my knowledge that provides free staff meals. So you would think that everyone is very appreciative for the efforts that the chefs have put in, unfortunately not! Most people are appreciative, but not the 9-5 working, middle aged upper management level women, who all sit on their chunky asses, eating biscuits, bitching about everyone and telling everyone how well they are doing on their diets. These people have nothing better to do with their time than talk about what they want to eat and how they can fuck the chefs off the most. No matter what you do for these people, nothing is ever good enough and they are always the managers best buddies. They try and drop the chefs in the shit where ever possible and they walk round the hotel with the pissiest face on them imaginable.

Do all chefs think they should be rock stars/pop stars?

Is is just me or do most chefs want to get wasted on booze, sniff cocaine off naked bodies and smash up  bedrooms. In reality though they drink beer, smoke weed and leave dirty pants under their bed.
The trouble is they don't actually sing rock tunes either, instead they sing pop tunes in the gayest high pitched voice they can muster.
Tunes of the moment are

1. Bruno Mars - Just the way you are
2. Cee lo Green - Fuck you
3. Lady Gaga - Alejandro

and they don't know the whole song either just the catchy chorus. When one starts that is it, it get's in everybodys head and you will have a male voice choir starting up during service. One will sing

"I see you driving round town with the girl I love, and I'm like"

Then the whole team will join in with the words

"FUCK YOU!!!!!"

Then you see the restaurant manager coming flying in through the restaurant door, shouting
"The guests!, The guests!"

Why do all butchers look abit dodgy?

I don't know about you guys but I use a local west country butchery. They have the bushiest sideburns, the broadest west country accents and the squint in there eyes that shows they could do some unsavory things to a pig! I wonder what sort of things they get up to in that abattoir, but I can imaging they are pretty hardcore at either mutilation or bestiality . I am only kidding the meat we have is mostly top quality

The bosses dinner

I am not talking about working in a place when the boss comes every six months, I am talking about when I worked in one place where the family that owned the hotel, lived in the hotel also. They would always place their food order for dinner after we had finished service. No matter how many times they were told to place their order early and we would sort it out for them at the end. We would always be hanging around at the end of service to sort there food out. This would piss all the chefs because they all wanted to go home or go to the pub to get wrecked. The head chef would come up with little tricks to cook there food quickly. The owners always wanted everything well done so it was quite easy really. Any meat would been thrown into the fryer to seal and then nuked to it was dry, Voila! well done. The owners would always say the next day "that steak was lovely chef!" the head chef could hardly keep a straight face.
warning to all owners who want dinner. DON'T FUCK THE CHEFS OFF!

A breakfast chef could probably kill someone and still keep their job!

A good breakfast chef is thought of as a god in a kitchen team. None of the other chefs want to get up early in the morning and have their prep interrupted for 3-4 hours. When you find someone who is keen on waking up 5 days a week at 5.30am for little over minimum wage, you keep hold of them and never let them go. You even don't mind there occasional whinge, or their holidays, or you try and accommodate any specials days off, just so long as they keep turning up for breakfast everyday and don't get many complaints. If any one comes in and tries to upset the breakfast chef, you had better beware because I am sending Big Stan into the walk in fridge with you , to have a few quiet words.
This is all until the breakfast chef goes off sick, then they are a right C**T!

Why do chefs love porn so much?

Please don't read on if you get offended by filth or if you are eating your breakfast!
I don't mean regular porn either, it has do be the nastiest, dirtiest, most hardcore porn they can find for free on the internet and then tell everyone about it and explain in the most extreme detail exactly what happened in the movie and then what they done to themselves while watching.
I will be honest I love hearing everybody's porn and sex stories but then you can probably tell already, I am a little bit weird! I am not a drinker and don't do drugs and have never cheated on my wife, but there is something inside me that is fascinated by peoples sex stories. I think it is down to reality TV like Big Brother and how people love to watch others and live out there fantasies through others.
I will be honest I think it is a man thing about porn, because I remember when I found my dads stash hidden away years ago, I thought all my Christmas's had come at once. When I asked a waitress today if she had ever found her dads supply when she was younger, she said she had and it was disgusting!

When big Stan met Stumpy!

A few years ago i arrived at a hotel as sous chef. There was about 10 chefs at the time but one stood out like a sore thumb, mainly because he was about 5ft tall. Everyone called him Stumpy for some unknown reason (joke). Anyway as i worked there for a few months I heard lots of stories about Stumpy's drunken antics. He was the one I told you about earlier that I had to fine for turning up late when I became Head chef.
One of Stumpy's worst habits was getting so wasted he would stay over someones house on the sofa and piss himself which he did on a regular occurrence. The worst story of this was when he lived in the hotel where we were working. The Head Chef at the time was on sleep over and covering the night porter, anyway he was doing his walk round at night and found Stumpy passed out on the public stairs. He thought to himself he couldn't leave him there so he tried carrying Stumpy to his room, only for Stumpy to piss himself and covering the Head Chef! 
I was first introduced to Big Stan about 5 years ago. He is about 6ft 5, 25stone and had the campest hand shake I have ever seen., he had joined as a commis chef.
Big Stan had left Birmingham under a bit of a cloud and wanted to start a new life in the westcountry. I found out later that he owed drug dealers quite a lot of money because instead of selling the drugs, he took the lot, on what he says was the best weekend of his life!
Big Stan and Stumpy formed an instant partnership because of there love for drink, drugs and there love for doing crazy things when they were wrecked. Together they were a dangerous double act because they excited each other and pushed one another into doing more drugs and getting more wrecked but to the untrained eyes they were just lovable rogues enjoying themselves.
The hotel decided that all the staff living in the hotel was too much trouble so they decided to rent local houses for the staff and some bright spark put Big Stan and Stumpy together in one house with a poor gay Romanian guy. I heard one story that the duo had got wrecked and made the Romanian waiter wax there initials in there chests. Some of the neighbours complained to the hotel that they had seen Stumpy watching porn in the middle of the day on full volume with the curtains open and pleasuring himself. Also the next door neighbour had complained that Big Stan would wake up in the night and instead of going to the toilet he would just open the window and piss on the neighbours rose bush.
When Big Stan and Stumpy got kicked out of the house it took 2 days to clean it and they found a yellow pages near the toilet with half the pages ripped out and none of the light bulbs in the house worked.
Stumpy left the hotel shortly after I took over as Head Chef but Big Stan is still with me to this date and is now my Junior Sous. He has grown up a lot in the last 5 years and is more into expensive wine and michelin starred food these days than sambuca shots and very rarely takes class A drugs. He still has the habit of whipping out his over sized egg like testicles for everyone to see, but I can forgive him that as long as he washes his hands afterwards!

Are you a head chef or a glorified care assistant for the mentally unwell?

I have asked myself many times over the years and I am still unsure. Please don't get me wrong not everyone who works in a kitchen are mentally unstable, but nearly all the ones I have met are! Maybe it is just me and I am actually cursed.
The team I have have now are brilliant and cause me very little aggravation, but it hasn't always been like that. I remember the days when people wouldn't turn up on time for a shift and he didn't start til 1PM. I have lost count the amount of times I have been called in for breakfast because the chefs were too pissed and hadn't turned up. It got so bad I started fining them from their wages. This was until i could get rid of them
I have a sous chef before who was a brilliant cook but when he got pissed he was an absolute knob. In the end he got chased out of the town because he had got wrecked and started threatening the landlady of the pub with her bar stool until her teenage son came over and knocked him out. I got back from my days off once to hear how the junior sous chef had started service and then went to the toilet, 30 minutes later the other chefs went to check on him and found him sleeping under the sink. I had a Kp who had no teeth couldn't live without speed, the boy could down a 4 litre tub of ice cream in seconds and then start on jam tarts, If he wasn't addicted to speed he would have been a right fat bastard!
I have had to get in between so many chefs and Kps to stop them kicking the shit out of one another over the tiniest thing because one has the hangover from hell!

Relief Chefs, a breed of their own

Relief chefs are relief chefs for a damn good reason. They can come in, help out for a few weeks and they are fine, then they leave. everyone is happy! Any longer than a few weeks and their true personality comes out, which isn't pretty. The one thing they say when they first come in is "I love being a relief chef because i don't want any responsibility and I get paid loads doing it!" and for the first few weeks they are fine, doing as they are told etc. When they get comfortable in their surroundings the story starts to change and they start thinking they are in charge and start being knobs to waitresses and commis chefs.
The main reason these people aren't Head Chefs is because no body wants to work for them because they are absolute knobs who treat people like shit and that is why they don't want to be Head Chefs because they always end up in a job where no one wants to work for them and so they have the problems of working all the hours under the sun for a salary and not the high hourly rate they get as a relief. And so the cycle begins again as they go back to reliefing until someone hires them again because they did an alright job when they were reliefing last time.
All relief chefs I have met seem to have the crazy fantasies about their lives aswell.

1. They have so much money
2. They have holidays whenever they feel like
3. They have multiple houses and holiday villas

Maybe they all do and I am missing out on a trick, but I don't think so! I think they are bullshitting, psychopathic, backstabbing pricks myself. Not all them of course, I have met a couple good ones out of about 30.

What qualifications do you need to work in a kitchen?

What qualifications do you need to work in a kitchen?ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
That is why anyone who drops out of school, or wants to bum around in the summer, or needs money to feed their drug/alcohol addiction all become Kitchen Porters. When I say all I don't literally mean all, but MOST!
I think there are 3 types of kitchen porters

1. The older person who is reasonably sane, has a mortgage, doesn't want any responsibility and actually takes a bit of pride in their work. We like this kind of KP and will do anything to keep them!
2. The young bum who is between 16-21, whose mum has told him to get a job or wants to go surfing in the summer and needs a job to pay for their weed and alcopops. These people are bearable for 1 summer season, but no more. Sometimes you do get one hidden gem in these though, who you can train up and they become cracking chefs
3. Then there are these, they are the usually between 30-50 years old, and you are quite sure if they are psychotic/serial killer/paedophile or just a bit weird and they are usually eastern European who don't speak much English. You always need one of these in your team because it keeps everyone else on their toes. It also is great for team morale because it gives everyone something to speculate about and wonder what they did in a previous life. It is also great for threatening the commis chefs with because if they don't do as they are told you will lock them in the walk in fridge with the Psycho Kp for half an hour and that usually does the trick.

Working for people that don't have a clue!

Why is it that you always end up working for someone who hasn't got a fucking clue of what they are talking about? I don't think I have ever worked for a hotelier who has actually worked in the Hotel business, they just seem to get money and like the idea of having a hotel and lots of staff who can run around after them. I keep hearing from them "I am not a chef, that is why I employ a chef!" yet they all seem to want to throw their fucking shit ideas into the mix and expect you to act upon them, without even the slightest consideration that their idea is a fucking logistical nightmare. Also i keep hearing this one to "It will only take you two minutes!" how the fuck would they know!
Why do most people with money have to be such pricks, who treat staff like shit and expect everything in return.
Now please don't think that I just hate management because I don't. I just believe that if you buy a hotel and don't know anything about hotels. Pay for the best heads of departments you can find and let them kick some ass for you because at least they know what they are doing!

Kitchen Confidential, my favourite book of all time!

Kitchen confidential is one of my favourite books of all times. If someone wants a good idea of what goes on in most kitchens then read this book. It is great writing by Anthony Bourdain and really brings to life what happens in quite a few kitchens. I have seen some sights in a kitchen and heard lots of stories. I have seen waitresses been touched by chefs and chefs being touched up by waitresses, i have seen chefs groping chefs and dry humping them, i have seen chefs turn up for work pissed, stoned and hungover, i have seen a cock with purple spots on it from a sexually transmitted disease, i have seen nude pictures of the waitresses, i have shown naughty pictures of my wife, i have heard stories about sex and blow jobs in the dry stores, i have seen people sleeping off a hangover in the linen room, i have heard about the orgies in the staff houses!
and i fucking love all of it!
that is one of the best bits about my job and kitchen confidential goes into quite abit of details about it. So please go out and read it

If you want to be the best, learn from the best!

I had a young lad in my kitchen for his work experience last summer. I was sat down with himself outside after service and I asked him what sort of chef he wanted to be, his reply like all young chefs was "I want to be as good as Gordon Ramsey!" to which my reply was "if you want to be the best you have to learn from the best!"
Now i was really proud of my advice because I really wish someone had said that to me when I was 14. I really think if I had trained under a Michelin Starred chef I could have been something special and please don't think that is me being big headed. I know I am average chef now, I do nice food that my clientelle want and most appreciate and I get paid a decent wage, but I am at my limit. I am a 1 Rosette food that could possibly push to 2 Rosette, that is as far as I can go.
Anyway the boy left after enjoying his 2 weeks with us and went back to working saturdays in his local pub.
One of my waitresses came up to me the other day and asked if I remembered a work experience boy from the summer. His dad had come in for lunch and asked if I was still around. He sent in a message saying that from my advice his son was now working weekends at a 1 Michelin Star restaurants and wanted to thank me for what I said!
That was nice

A Chef's Life

I am at the stage in my chef's career where I am started to look at myself and think "What else can I do?"
I am 28 for god sake and already thinking I cannot carry on in a hot, sweaty kitchen until I am 65!
How did I come to this decision? I hear you ask
Well I shall tell you,
I first became a chef because I loved cooking, i wouldn't have to wear a shirt and tie, and when I did my work experience I heard so much filth talk I nearly cum in my pants!
I will elaborate on that bit a little, I was a virgin 14 year old boy in a kitchen where the head chef would bend the breakfast chef over the hotplate and dry hump her, only for the breakfast chef to turn around and say "Your cock isn't even big enough to fill my ass!" Now as a 14 year old virgin this is a very exciting place to be! Then there is the 18-19 year old waitresses playing up to the chefs and rubbing themselves up against them, just so they can get something a bit special for dinner. This is a world I like!
Now I am 28, a Head Chef of a 4 Star Hotel, a pretty decent chef I think, and still have a laugh. But now i have a family who are hardly see, I am dealing with hotel politics pretty much all day every day, I don't miss cooking anymore when I am not in a kitchen and its not the only thing on my mind anymore.
I am gutted that I have fallen out of love with cooking because it was everything I ever wanted to do and I still have good days but it isn't the same!
I want to be the chef i use to be!