Bruised Flesh

Not mine--I'm speaking of the flesh of the two heirloom tomatos and the one not-quite-ripe peach that got a little bruised in transit Saturday and had to be consumed Saturday night; it was a tragedy, I tell you. I ate the tomatos with a sprinkling of sea salt and the peach with a sprinkling of brown sugar (no, not honey, surprisingly enough).

For an interesting post, as opposed to the drivel I put up, go check out the Brazen Tart's description of the dance on the line at a high-end restaurant (i.e., a dinner check of somewhere around $100 per person). For those of you who don't visit such places, note that you actually get three desserts: the "predessert," the actual dessert you order, and then some cookies (probably not of the fortune variety) or some other kind of sweet with your check. I have worked in restaurants (though never anything high-end, and not in a million years), and I have worked service jobs where I had a lot of direct contact with the public, but I've never done anything like worked a line in a good restaurant, and even from the Tart's description, you can tell that the pace is different from the work that I do. In my case, the time pressures are more from the fact that the night guys will be coming in (at 6:00 pm), and we have to be out of there, plus the croissants have to be on sheet pans and ready for baking and such, rather than that the customer is waiting for sweetness to arrive at his or her table in a timely fashion. There are exceptions, of course, in both directions: Tart has a lot of prep work to do, as she noted, which is similar to the stuff we're doing, and I occasionally have an order for which someone is waiting. Both of us have to get a lot of work done in the hours allotted.

For example, for a catering order on Friday, I assembled 10 large tarts, and garnished a total of 14: four Tartes du Sous-Bois (ground hazelnuts in crust, filled with hazelnut-sour cream frangipane and fresh raspberries, blackberries, blueberries, strawberries, and cherries; glazed after baking and garnished with raspberries, blackberries, and candied lemon peel), four chocolate mousse tarts (someone else had made them; I garnished them with raspberries), and six fruit tarts, for which I had to bake the crusts from the sablee dough I'd made the day before, fill with pastry cream, then arrange strawberries, blackberries, kiwi, raspberries, and mandarin oranges in a pleasing pattern, then glaze it). The sous-bois tarts and chocolate mousse tarts were marked so they could be sliced into eight pieces, and I garnished them so the garnish was on each slice.

Meanwhile, Lole was in a macaron-making frenzy. Over Thursday and Friday, he made caramel, pistachio, and chocolate, plus the fillings for each, plus the filling for raspberry ones, to which he didn't get before his week ended. (The cookie part of the macaron doesn't have a flavor--they're all made with, basically, almond flour, powdered sugar, and italian meringue--but each is colored appropriately, so they must be made and piped and baked in separate batches.) And, let me tell you, he definitely has the macaron mojo goin' on: they were beautiful and delicious.

You'll note that no mention was made in the previous two paragraphs of croissant-making. We managed to squeeze in the butter-shaping (Lole) and making room in the freezer by putting 40 dozen plain croissants on pans and hauling the cabinets down to the walk-in freezer, then cutting up the day's dough (me), slicing ham and cheese (Lole), and, eventually, after the tarts were done, laminating (me), but we didn't shape a single croissant until nearly 3:00 pm, IIRC. We cruised after that, however, and got out of there around 6:00.

The Tart observes that the pay in the industry is a sad joke, and that's one of the things that makes me a little crazy about the whole thing. What she doesn't point out, and what you may not realize, is that waiters and waitresses in her restaurant can take home more on a weekend night in tips than she makes in a month: Front-of-the-house staff can make serious bucks in this business, but the people who actually make the food, not so much. (Similarly, because of something I completely inadvertently saw at work, I believe that a couple of 20-somethings who kind of manage the store staff make about two bucks an hour more than I do--not quite the gap that Tart experiences, but it would result in about $400 more a month in take-home pay for me, which would be a substantial increase and would substantially reduce the pressure to do the extra work.)

I should point out that if I were willing to do work more like the Tart's, and could find a union job, I could make a little more; in part, it's my lack of interest in the fancy plating and working a line that holds me back. This may sound like orneriness on my part, but I would like that work a lot less, and the pay isn't a lot more, i.e., the trade-off isn't sufficient, and it still wouldn't lead to a longer-term solution that I'd really like. The Tart can be a superstar pastry chef, if that's the direction in which she wants to go--she certainly has the talent, and the background, and is young enough to spend some time getting the experience in fancy places, and did I mention her talents? (If I'd started the bakery, she would have been one of the people I'd have tried to hire or get involved as a partner.) Throw together the monetary and physical factors I've detailed here, and you're starting to get some serious difficulties--difficulties that eventually cannot be overcome by loving the act of making the food or the love of the food, at least not by me, and at least not at my age. (That doesn't stop me from feeling like a failure, however.)

That's something that makes me a little sad about my bakery dream going up in smoke: one of the things I wanted to try to rectify was that imbalance between the monetary rewards for the people who make the food and the monetary rewards for the owners or front-of-the-house staff. I don't know how I would have done it--or even if I could have run a business successful enough to execute such a plan--but it was definitely one of my goals. Profit-sharing, for example, could have been a way to do that; the more you work, the bigger your share of the profits. Or something. The reality is, if making lots of money is important to you, you certainly don't go into a business where the profit margins are non-existent or vanishingly small and where the only people who make serious money are the superstars. (Even mediocre lawyers make more than I do, for example, and I make the best croissants in the midwest.) If what you want to do is make money, you don't become a pastry chef. Hell, you don't even buy a restaurant; more than 90% of restaurants fail in the first two years. In short, I didn't expect that going into this business was going to make me rich.

It's not all monetary, though, it's a combination of factors. More bluntly, I also didn't get in this business to work long hours for low pay for someone else's profit. I was trying to find a combination of challenges, and work that I liked, and an opportunity for success, and maybe the opportunity to do these things in an equitable way, and starting my own bakery seemed like an excellent combination of those things, given that Chuck was going to support me for a little while (hah!). Well, it's spilled milk now, and the best I can do, I think, is figure out what to do next. I detail the issues with the current situation as much as I do not so I can whine and complain but so I can figure out the pieces. For example, I DO love a lot of the aspects of being a pastry chef/baker, and I'm good at it, and I'm continuing to get better, so there is a certain amount of satisfaction, but it turns out there isn't enough satisfaction to compensate for the low pay/long hours/for someone else's profit combination. If I can't have my own business, I'd rather work at a less satisfying job, for more money/fewer hours/paid days off. If I were making, say, $14/hour instead of $10, working exactly where I'm working, the choice would be only a little less clear. I suspect I'd still want to get out of it, though, if only because the work would be just as hard, the hours would be just as long, the paid days off would be just as non-existent, the profit would still go in someone else's pocket, and the long-term viability of the work would be just as tenuous.

And I don't think there's a single "right" combination, for me or anyone else. For some people, making a wad of money is the most important thing, and they don't care what the work happens to be or what they have to sell, or how much of their souls are included in the bargain. For other people, loving what they do is the most important thing, and they don't care if they have to live in a hovel or eat only Ramen noodles to do it. Some people have others depending on them for food and shelter, and they can't afford to be picky about either thing. Some people need a job with benefits. Some people get lucky or unlucky at a crucial moment, or make a decision at a crucial moment that leads one way or the other. We're all just muddling along here, I guess.

Anyway, I have to finish making my gallons of tea for the week, I should go to the post office if the rain stops for long enough, I have to apply for a couple of jobs, and I have to shuck, boil, and roast the dozen ears of corn I have, so I can use some for a corn/beans/tomato salad to take to the Aretha Franklin concert tomorrow. Which is likely to not suck.