Jessica's Dinner Party

by jessica yoon

paris

Le Stage: I Survived the First Week

It has probably been the longest, physically most challenging and taxing week of my life.  Working in a kitchen is in no way glamorous or a bed of roses. I spend half of my day wearing these fashionable chef shoes, an awful white hairnet, and a variety of food smells and stains; lovely, no?  Putain (fuck) and merde (shit) are probably the two most used words, and I have been criticized as a cochon (pig, which always means dirty and messy in French) and slow many, many times.  The chefs are crazy/uptight/angry/unreasonable/scary/insane and I hope I never become like them. My hours are long, our lunch break is 10 minutes, and I work on the weekends…but I’m still looking forward to going back to work tomorrow.

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Superior: Sucre

We’ve finally come to the final chapter of our patisserie course: sugar.  Pulled sugar, poured sugar, and blown sugar are the main focus, but we kicked off this unit with some sweet confections that ended up being our last edible treats!  We’ve been so busy practicing making sugar sculptures for our final exam that cakes and tarts seem like a far off distant memory.

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Superior: Chocolates

We’ve been working with chocolates for the past few weeks, trying to master our skills in tempering, molding, and sculpting.  I have to say, I had a lot of trouble getting used to chocolate: it’s fickle, sensitive, and extremely messy.  It was to the point where I felt a bit overwhelmed and stressed.  However, the chef gave some really good advise: don’t let the material dominate you.  In order to become a master chef, you have to dominate the ingredients.  Having that attitude gave me a lot of confidence and calm, and I think in the end it helped me really enjoy this chapter in our studies.

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Superior: Restaurant Desserts

For the past two weeks classes have focused on cocktail and restaurant desserts.  We’ve been making petits fours, verrines, and plated desserts, all of which I find really exciting and different to what we’ve learned thus far.  There’s a bit more creativity and artistic freedom than before, which I find to be a fun challenge.  Verrines and plated desserts are especially open to interpretation that during planning I’ve let my ideas run wild.  However, 99.9999% of the time my ideas have stayed in abstract form.  Time constraint and above all my lack of experience and skill are harsh road blocks to my fantasy presentations.  I’m not discouraged (yet) though; I have years of practice ahead of me.

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Tartes Kluger

Tartes Kluger has been on my restaurant list for quite some time.  I first read about it in Le Fooding, a French publication about restaurants and food.  The food’s concept: simple and organic, and the restaurant’s atmosphere: casual with communal tables and take away, struck me more as New York Sunday brunch than Paris, that I was intrigued.  This place indeed oozes more American with its minimal wooden decor and cluster of food magazines, but the Parisian staff and ingredients along with a view of the tiny rue du Forez keeps this place grounded in France.

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