Earlier today, I made a statement that seemed to hit a raw nerve with some:

Almost immediately after I posted this, I was made aware of the controversial tone. Do you see one? I don’t. But apparently, here’s the rub – I am one heck of a misogynistic racist son of a gun. You see, SF has something along the lines of a “community kitchen” – La Cocina. Some friends and fans of the “incubator kitchen for minority women” took offense with my “REAL” (emphasis mine, twice :) and wondered if I, sad misogynist sack of manure that I am, needed a few hours of training in non-offensive behavior.

I stand by my statement, and I am sure La Cocina will agree with me – LC is not a real community kitchen. Way back when, the later years of the last century just barely fading into the dim dusk of history, I helped design and open a community kitchen in one of NYCs less affluent neighborhoods, Hunts Point. The project was sponsored by both a Catholic outreach program, and a Jewish Center community grant, making it important for us to work out the basics of what precisely a “community kitchen” was…

• The Community Kitchen is non-judgmental. We admit anyone, regardless of race, religion, gender, income status, or citizenship.
• Our classes are open to anyone, both as student and as instructor. We are blessed to have rallied some of the greatest culinary minds in the greater New York state area to visit us and show their craft. Admission prices are based on a voluntary sliding scale.

These two lines became a mantra to me for the years to come, both in commercial kitchens as well as a teacher. Community Kitchens can not afford to work with one particular population segment over others. Specific, directed, efforts such as La Cocina can (and LC should be commended for doing so, though I am still wondering why a incubator kitchen for minority women has no minority women on their staff page), Community Kitchens can’t.

Especially today, things have changed and need to be re-evaluated. The number of single parent fathers has gone bu exponentially in the last ten years, making it vitally important to have classes on healthy infant and child nutrition available to them. The economy has crashed and buried everyone it could, the Wall Street disaster had, at least, a very equal opportunity backlash to it – homelessness and unemployment rates are up across the gender and race board. For the first time in twenty years, every open job for a minimum wage prep/washer position, gets as many female as male applications, spanning all ages, races, classes, and experience level.

Outside the Community Kitchens, which often function as service operations through food banks and cheap/free meals, the demographics have changed, as well. Men or woman, single parent or head of a six-person household, our “old” clientele has changed.

Today, we have a unique challenge and a unique opportunity. Community Kitchens not only feed those who can not afford to feed themselves and their families, they also teach valuable courses on home cooking, shopping cheaply, and allow many attendees to enter the world of food service, a $16BN, 9 million employee, 1.4 million organization strong field of work.

For this, we need to have open, non-judgmental, non-specific, and free Community Kitchens. We must attract chefs from around the Bay Area, create volunteer efforts, link with food banks and charitable organizations, and open up Kitchens that are accessible to anyone inside the community.

That’s easier done than you might think. At a quick blush, the Silicon Valley East Bay sports close to twenty five shuttered restaurants in need of a new owner. Taking over one of these properties should be a breeze, especially in a climate where opening another restaurant might not be the smartest thing to do. Hey, we had a bundle of tax payer millions to throw at the failing Yoshi’s, why not use some of that money to actually benefit the community and not just a private enterprise?

We have a chance and a choice – to keep meandering the way we are, ignoring or providing a major disservice to the communities that would benefit tremendously from Community Kitchens, or to build the framework for a healthier, more sustainable, cheaper, and more accessible eating and cooking landscape. Or, to quote my old Chef: “Buy someone a loaf of Wonder Bread, and they’ll eat crap for a week, or teach them how to bake great bread on the cheap and they’ll be healthy for little money for a lifetime.”

Community Kitchens give us a chance, rather pragmatically, to alleviate some poverty, create opportunities, bring healthier, more sustainable, diets into our communities, and are, usually, places for anyone, rich or poor, chef or culinary apprentice, to come together and make things happen. We need that. We need REAL community kitchens.

It’s everywhere. It’s on TV, in our foods, in the supermarkets, on posters, books, DVDs, and in the minds of millions. The substance I think of? Extra Virgin Olive Oil, or “EVOO” in Rachael Ray’s twisted little universe of culinary mediocrity. Thanks to Ray’s ubiquitous presence everywhere, this slimy little bastard of a cooking ingredient has made it big. And, yes, made it into everything.

Contemplating to throw a dinner party? Saute some veggies? Make a stew and need to brown the meat? STEP AWAY from that bottle.

Contrary to what Rachael Ray and the quick-witted EVOO lobby would have you believe, cooking with this oil is a bad, bad, bad, idea. Really.

It’s 5pm, do you know where your Olive Oil is?

Unless purchased from a local press, EVOO is a little like Madonna – not very virgin, despite the label. Italian and Greek olive oil manufacturers peruse a small loophole in modern trade and labeling agreements, allowing them to mix as much as sixty per cent of virgin or simple olive oil into the “extra virgin” first press. Extra Virgin / Virgin / and non-Virgin are designations based on the oil’s oleic acid content, a monsaturated omega-9 fatty acid which, in very small doses, has some anecdotal health benefits but is, in larger concentrations, quite unhealthy to lethal. EVOO contains less than one per cent of free oleic acid, but saturations can be up to eight per cent for non-Virgin oil.

Aaah, that's why! She's selling the stuff.

Smoke and Mirrors

If that isn’t enough, EVOOs smoke point is very, very, low. Useful as a salad dressing, the oil’s internal structure begins to break down at as low as 150 degrees (F, 65 degrees C), destroying what beneficial properties are ascribed to it. EVOO’s solid matter, sediments and rudiments, burn at temperatures as low as 220 degrees F, much lower than even a home plate can manage. Which, in turn, results in carcinogenic matter, burned food, and – since we have to keep the heat low – much fattier and less healthy foods.

Coming to a stage near you: The “Free Radicals” in concert

Olive Oil’s positive properties, such as the combat of “free radicals” in our body through its antioxidant values, is a double-edged sword with EVOO. If heated above 320 degrees (160 degrees C), the oil itself will break down enough to develop free radicals and cause quite the opposite effect. 320 degrees is when your onions will sizzle and turn into those nice sauteed onion bits we find on many foods. It’s also about thirty degrees too low to make bacon crispy, and just about enough to make a very runny sunny side up egg. Few, if any, home cooks have that much control over the stove to not exceed this temperature.

It burns easily, it’s not always “virgin”, it’s rather unhealthy after being heated up, and it loses all its healthy properties when warmed up… so, why again are we using it?

It’s not hard to imagine the path EVOO took from healthy salad dressing to Rachael Ray’s kitchen. Harder, though, would be to believe that no one on her staff, which – hopefully – consists at least partially of employees with a true culinary and food science background, ever warned her about the sauce she uses so liberally.

To fry, sautee, heck anything requiring heat – help yourself to some peanut, walnut, or vegetable oil. When making salads, sure, use extra virgin olive oil, but sparingly. It’s not like it needs that much. Sure, fat is a required component in breaking down some of the essential vitamins in garden greens, but … hey, that’s what a bacon drizzle is all about, no?

I want a unique name for chez Geek’s fan page on Facebook. I am one lame ass self-promoting kid, that way. So here’s your mission, brave web surfer. Should you accept it, we’ll require you to head over to Facebook and become a Fan of chez Geek. Help save the world from EVOO, miserable mise on place, mushy mirepoix, and Food Network Foodies. Should you be discovered, we’ll deny any knowledge of this overt solicitation but will buy you a beer or some fries next time we meet.

Please? Insert random puppy eyes, here.

Via the prolific Jon Bonne comes this link to a rather interesting conversation starter on restaurant reviews in 140 characters or less. I was silently hoping someone would call them “micro reviews” so I could come back and yell at them, but I guess people are smarter than I hoped. Good example of smart? The linked article.

Rebekah Denn makes it clear whet she thinks (and she is right, in my opinion) – the twitter conversations are in no way “reviews”, but more or less an electronic version of the conversations we have been having before – chatter between us and our 3,478 closest friends about dining somewhere. But then, why do Yelp reviews, many of which offer about as much or less meat than a 140 character conversation, qualify as “reviews”.

Or do they?

As a chef, I am fairly acquainted with the power of conversations. Sure, a Bauer or Bruni review gets us the big crowds for a few days, but sustainable traffic comes from different sources, most notably the same word of mouth twitter has brought into the Intertubewebs. A week of 300 cover nights, as exciting and financially rewarding as it might be, can quickly lose all its attraction if the following weeks fail to put butts into my chairs. Likewise, an imperfect Bauer or Bruni review, as frustrating as it is, can be quickly offset by a good word of mouth campaign.

In that regard, I am more concerned about twitter as one of the many word of mouth mediums than my Michelin rating. If, before iPhones are shaken and Android map searches are performed, someone in that undecided group of six remembers my name, I win. If it takes an iPhone shake, I might lose – not necessarily due to a bad review but also thanks to imperfect search algorithms and incomplete databases.

Make no mistake, a “went to House on Hill, oysters were sandy” conversation piece can, and will, have a much deeper impact than Michael Bauer’s measured juxtaposition of damning and redeeming qualities. Which, let’s face it, makes it even more important for restaurateurs and chefs to become Twitter savvy and immerse themselves into the conversation, rather than remaining outside, dispensing unidirectional wisdoms.

What’s your take? Do conversational fragments (not necessarily on twitter) inform your dining decisions more, equal, or less than Bauer or Bruni? What makes for a good recommendation?

Since my comment is #2,720 of 3,000 or so, and half of the replies are about as … challenged … as the original author, here’s my response to “13 things your waiter won’t tell you“. A sensationalist piece that makes waiters and cooks out to be unprofessional buffoons who simply hate, hate, hate, their diners, take short cuts, disregard safety and laws, and will do anything to get “up” on the paying customers they serve… Seriously, if you’re a chef or server or cook, go there and let Reader’s Digest and Shine know what you think…

Starts:

I’ve worked both FoH and BoH for way too long to care to remember. This list, funny as it is supposed to be, is about as wrong as it rhymes with nullwit.

1. Avoid eating out on holidays and Saturday nights. The sheer volume of customers guarantees that most kitchens will be pushed beyond their ability to produce a high-quality dish.

#1 – sure holidays and Saturdays are high volume days. Sometimes we even get into something we call “the weeds”, a state of utter chaos that seems unrecoverable. But, alas, believe it or not, the guys and gals in the back of the house are professionals and this isn’t their first holiday or Saturday. In fact, there’s a good chance it’s not even their 100th or so. Chefs and GM compensate by scheduling more staff and by a more elaborate Mise En Place, the trick that allows cooks to make dishes that take you an hour in 12 minutes or less. If anything, most food purveyors have special delivery schedules for the mornings of holidays, and we have a schedule for Saturdays, which makes them good days to have fresher foods if you can brave the line in.

2. There are almost never any sick days in the restaurant business. A busboy with a kid to support isn’t going to stay home and miss out on $100 because he’s got strep throat. And these are the people handling your food.

#2 – it’d bode well on the writer to familiarize themselves with U.S. food safety regulations and Serv Safe training. Any employee with a communicable disease marks a potential million-dollar lawsuit for restaurants. This isn’t just paper wisdom, google Marler and Clark and you’ll see what I mean. GMs, Maitre d’s, and Chefs learn over years to spot the sick employee trying to conceal it – and we relentlessly remove those people from staff for the duration. I can not, and will not, take the risk of bankruptcy due to that. In fact, most of my staff know, that their job is safe as long as they have a doctor’s note (we even pay for the visit) but will lose the job if they come in and we catch them. Anyone eating at a shady restaurant that doesn’t do this, deserves what they get (that’s true for all points on this list, I don’t speak for Applebees or Carrows, I speak for real restaurant dining).

3. When customers’ dissatisfaction devolves into personal attacks, adulterating food or drink is a convenient way for servers to exact covert vengeance. Some waiters can and do spit in people’s food.

#3 – again with the “professionals”. Do you really think, that service staff and food handlers have that little respect for the food they serve? Really, no matter how rude the diner, we take insane pride in our food, and would never “alter” it. Does it happen? Yeah, in those restaurants you shouldn’t be eating at, anyways. If someone abuses my service staff, they’ll be looking at the menu we post outside – that’s as far as they’ll get. My staff knows that, and most staff knows that. Spitting in food is insanely rare and never happens at good places.

7. Don’t order meals that aren’t on the menu. You’re forcing the chef to cook something he doesn’t make on a regular basis. If he makes the same entrée 10,000 times a month, the odds are good that the dish will be a home run every time.

#7 – a diner asking for an alteration to the menu or asking for something else will be accommodated as well as possible. Again, we’re professionals (I sound like a broken record), and we are in the service business. We work to make our customer happy (and have the come back, which earns us money), and we strive to do this for anyone. No matter how much I personally detest the vegan khmer rouge or “dressing on the side” cop-outs, there’s no reason to treat someone like this any different than any other diner. You want your steak well done? Sure I’ll hate you for it, but I’ll work my butt off to make you the best well done steak you’ve ever had in your life. You’re a vegan? I’d never, ever, cross the street to piss on you if you’d be engulfed in flames, but I’ll work harder than ever to make you the best vegan varietal of whatever dish you ordered. It’s my job, my professional pride, and it’s what I charge for and make a living with.

4. Never say “I’m friends with the owner.” Restaurant owners don’t have friends. This marks you as a clueless poseur the moment you walk in the door.

#4 – what a B.S. I am friends with more than one Chef and/or GM. If I dine in their restaurant, I’ll ask the waitstaff wether either is around and will make sure they know I am. Yes, this is in part to elicit the same favors and gimmicks I extend to my friends coming into my kitchen, but it’s also because I want them to know that I value their food and am happily paying for it. Guess what? In a world full of Yelp buffoons and wannabe foodies with Food Network education, it feels good to know that there are actual industry insiders who come and eat at my place, this gives me more validation than any restaurant critic review could.

I’ll skip a few, they’re just as dumb as the rest, except for:

13. Never, ever come in 15 minutes before closing time. The cooks are tired and will cook your dinner right away. So while you’re chitchatting over salads, your entrées will be languishing under the heat lamp while the dishwasher is spraying industrial-strength, carcinogenic cleaning solvents in their immediate vicinity.

#13 – my kitchen goes cold at fifteen past closing. Unless there’s still stuff to be sent out. My guys and gals are paid for that, my staff knows it, and – again – if you decide to eat at a place that cuts corners or peruses heatlamps as hot holding area, you’re at your own. Good restaurants will accommodate diners until the very end with the same professional zeal they served the first diner. And, let’s just say this, restaurant critics are known to do the “10 before closing” thing, too. We’d be stupid to send out sub-par items.

All in all, one sensationalist piece that has no place anywhere. I hope the writer, whomever he or she is, will never, ever, get a job in a good restaurant. We don’t need such unprofessional refuse, and we usually spot them quickly and send them back to their 24 hour truck-stop gigs.

Back in the good old days, before Top Chef and Throwdown with Bobby Flay, life was much less complicated. The front of the house consisted of bartenders, sommeliers, servers, captains, bussers, and a host and Maitre d’, the back contained dishwashers, prep- and line-cooks, chefs the partie, sous chef, and chef. And above all that loomed the GM, the General Manager.

Between front and back was the expo window, a tiny hole staring down into the bowels of the moloch that is a kitchen. Out front were the well dressed, well spoken, well paid, face of the restaurant while the back, with its underpaid, overworked, under-appreciated, riff-raff became its voice. But for the grace of the kitchen gods, a deep dedication to food, and hard, hard, labor, did we make it sing.

“Chef” was a four letter word. The demon master in the fiery, steamy, hell, that was best kept from diners and critics. His counterpart, the Archangel Michael to the kitchen’s Beelzebub, waltzed light-footed-ly around the dining halls, mairing this, and deeing that.

Of course times have changed. Chefs are stars, chefs are important. Suddenly, the very same mishpoke that would not have been caught dead in a kitchen or would have seriously considered using an icepick on whomever called them “chef”, wants a piece of the pie. Latest example – the bartender.

“The preferred term now is ‘bar chef,’ ” says Ria Freydberg, who runs the bar at Restaurant 3 in Arlington, Va. “It means, literally, you are the chef of the bar. Or ‘mixologist’ — that’s acceptable.” (emphasis mine). “Bar Chef”? Give me a fucking break. “Mixologist”? Sure, add an -ology to any quack theory and it has the potential to become a well-to-do religion or movement. What’s next? Servers are “Hospitologists”? Bussers re-arranging plates and cleaning tables are “Feng-Shui-ologists?”. And “Chef”? When did becoming a barten, pardon me, mixologist, involve working ten years from cleaning sippy-cups to finally running a brigade of shakers, stirrers, lemon- and lime-preppers, and ice-crushers? When did tending to a bar not translate to “bartender”?

That’s it. From now on, my dishwashers shall be known as Food Safety and Hospitality Experience Chefs, my prep-cooks will be Dining Advancement Chefs, the line shall be known by its jobs, “Assistant Executive Griddle and Saute Chef“, “Bakeware and Cold Dish Chef“, and so on. I’ll demote my chef to “Kitchentender“, because we don’t need that many chefs, and I’ll keep my Sous title, because I like it.

Know thy place, bartender. It’s out there, shaking stuff with stuff in it, and selling the expensive drink option to married guys trying to impress their soon-to-be mistresses with casually flung car keys bearing a German auto-maker logo. It’s not anywhere near the Toque. And it’s not an -ology. Oh, maybe one, an apology. That’d be peachy. Apologize to the guys and gals you looked down upon for decades and whose title you want to co-opt now.

Today was a special day in many ways, but the most special moment would have been to observe four distinct representatives of various food related disciplines describe the same thing. Neither has much experience with the world of either of the others, and I did not significantly change the conversation.

All four attended the same event and spoke to me separately about something I love to make – mushroom cream sauce.

The Foodie: “Yeah, man, I can see that. I had this canard at [restaurant], they serve it with these microgreens and a mushroom cream sauce that had this very distinct flavor of ….”

The Home Cook: “Yeah, so I take two tablespoons of butter, three tablespoons, by weight, flour, and progresso makes this great stock…”

The Cook: “Dude, what?”

The French Chef: “Roux blonde, creme, vin, champignon saute, voila”

In the interest of science, Theresa Sous Vides some cigarettes. Watch the clip on blip.tv for a better resolution and subscribe on iTunes for the full goodness.

The trainwreck that is The Next Food Network Star pushed into its third installment yesterday, containing predictable outcomes (everyone loves Jeffrey, Debbie can do no wrong) and eliminations. All that is kind of what we’d expect.

But the crown of the evening was, all things considered, Bobby Flay’s “a little bit of kitchen chivalry goes a long way”. What the radish is this man smoking? Chivalry is the presumption of one person’s lowered abilities and need for protection in situations where another person can render protection and perform tasks. The kitchen, especially a competition kitchen, is no place for chivalry.

Let’s set aside the insanely sexist assumption that women need protection in the kitchen – my female chefs, sous chefs, line cooks, and GM/Owners would happily use a Microplane on anyone’s privates perpetuating this sort of bull manure. Let’s set aside, that Flay obviously hasn’t been in a real kitchen, at home or in business, for a long time or he’d know that.

Let’s instead focus on the neutered state of chefdom, female and male, Food Network chefs present to the world. We’re not glamorously well spoken individuals who will happily demonstrate a dish over and over. We’re callused, burned, cut, foot and leg injured, often burned some more, and sometimes drenched in grease. We talk a certain way (for the record, Eddie was way nicer that I’d been to a stay at home mom trying to cook dinner for a discerning crowd) and we value the difference between home cook and chef. We consider, for the record, both to be skilled and able jobs, but we also know that there are differences. Most chefs make rotten home cooks (I am no exception, here, the small kitchen, the weird pantry arrangements, the cookware, the lack of sinks, the unpredictability of stoves and ovens, I can’t cook to my potential inside a home kitchen), and home cooks wouldn’t last an hour in a commercial kitchen without changing their attitude and approach.

All that would be no issue, really. Food Network has its demographic, and TNFNS is designed to recruit more TV actors to draw and bind this group. Food Network doesn’t want, and shouldn’t show, the rolled eyes, the hierarchical system, or the short cuts we take every day.

But… Food Network intentionally then blurs the lines between home cooks, the actors performing for that demographic, and chefs. Which, in the minds of hundreds of thousands of viewers, leads to a twisted perception of real chefs. And that, I am here to say, hurts the 1,000,000 businesses and chefs in the United States more than it helps.

At least once a week I have to explain to customers why there’s a difference between Rachael Ray and me. Why I don’t use the “healthier” E.V.O.O for cooking (for the record, it’s less healthy than what I use, much more expensive, and it’s not a cooking oil). Why, unlike Bobby Flay, I am inside a kitchen and not entertaining the masses.

I have to deal with culinary school externs who expect kitchens to look and act like the fantasy stories concocted by Food Network actors, or – worse – Gordon Ramsay. I have to deal with customer complaints about perfect dishes because a week ago the Barefoot Contessa told America that a certain way to make dough was wrong and not Italian (my pastry chef comes from Napoli, born, raised, apprenticed, got his Master Baker, in Italy – he hates the stuff they sell in the U.S. as Italian).

And above and beyond all that, I now have to deal with the idea that, as a chef, I am like them. Which I am not. Unlike them, I run a kitchen, I cook, I work 16 hour shifts and make a tenth of the money they make per episode in a year.  Unlike them, my food is eaten by many, not just by myself while smiling into a camera. Unlike them, I work with diverse individuals from many backgrounds. And, Bobby Flay, the last thing they don’t want to see, is chivalry.

So, next time you call someone “Chef”, ask yourself – do they act like someone who knows kitchens and food, or like someone Bobby Flay would want on TV? If your answer is the latter … don’t call them Chef, they don’t deserve the title.

(or starting work in the industry).

Here you have it. The question most asked (after “how do I become a chef“). “What’s the worst thing about going to C-School?”.

The answer – your dining experiences will begin to suck. Suddenly that small bistro restaurante you were so fond of starts to make less and less sense. Those onions aren’t julienned properly and just slapped on the plate. The mashed potatoes oxidized and became brown, something even the cowboy butter/cream approach can not fix. The skirt steak is cut the wrong way, the sauce separating, and the salad is tossed without love for its ingredients.

Can you find the six plating sins committed in this picture? Click for a larger version.

You’ll expect more from your food, and you’ll notice those things you never really looked for previously. Dirty plates, for example. Leeks or basil that isn’t chopped properly and sits on top of food like an afterthought. Mandoline cuts where knife cuts would have been much more gentle on the food’s texture. The sauce supreme that could have used a little less flour and a little more stock. A cooks’ futile attempt to revive wilted or overcooked vegetables.

Your palate will develop slowly (and make no mistake, even if you can’t taste for crap right now, come a year on the line you’ll be a tasting superstar), but your eye for technique and execution will wake almost immediately. That’s the single worst thing about becoming a cook or chef – you’ll become way more critical of food and realize how often those $80 meals are, more or less, not worth the expense.