I've been working at the restaurant a week now and I'm sure some people are wondering what it is that I do. Well here you go...
There are three pastry cooks (including me) and the pastry chef. The kitchen itself isn't very big but the pastry people have just as much room as the savory, which is unheard of. The restaurant is huge and the main prep kitchen is upstairs. It's a steakhouse so the only savory foods being prepared in the kitchen are the sides and all of the meat is grilled in the dinning room. There is a small kitchen behind what I would call the "grill bar" where they do all of the savory plating. Pastry does plating in the dinning room in front of the "grill bar". The restaurant is only open for dinner during the week and has brunch and dinner on the weekends.
This was my first week and I worked three mornings and one dinner service. Mornings start at eight and it takes me about forty minutes on a train and a bus to get there, not bad (it's downtown in River North). There are six plated desserts and five of them are served with ice cream and such.
Everyday everything gets counted and you make sure there are enough desserts for dinner service. The S'more Pie is a dessert that is pretty big and is meant to be shared, I'm going to use it as an example. The pie itself has a graham cracker crust, chocolate ganache with marshmallow on top and it's served with peanut butter cookies and two flavors of ice cream. These are not dainty desserts. Anyway, everything is made in large quantities so if you need to make more pies you might already have graham cracker crust made but need to make more ganache and then build them and so on. There are also a lot of large parties that book desserts ahead. They'll order a variety of one bite desserts and we'll bake, cut and plate them, all ahead of time.
Saturday was my first dinner service and it wasn't too bad. They have a cheat sheet with pictures of the finished plate though two of the desserts aren't on it. The night started pretty slow and picked up at about 9ish and I was left alone for a short period of time. I was glad it was a short time though, I got a little frazzled. All in all it was a good experience, I think I'll pick it up pretty quick. It's nice being out in the dinning room too. The chef's walk around with all of the meat and fish and there are "harvest tables" with all of the sides. Our pastry station is behind the harvest tables and in front of the grill bar where people can sit. So during the slow times you can people watch but you're not really in a place where the customers are going to be talking to you.
From the questions some people ask I guess people don't really know what's involved in plating desserts. Everything is already made and baked and you're just putting it together on the plate. Some desserts are heated up in a little oven at our station. Example: apple tart. An apple tart gets heated just until it's warm. The plate gets a flower of caramel drizzle with the warm tart, caramel ice cream scoop on top and an apple chip on top of the ice cream. Ta Da!
