Friday night, August Bank Holiday
Friday was a strange evening at the Paternoster Chop House. It was deathly quiet, the normal sounds of London’s pin-striped bankers tipping back expensive cocktails and chatting each other up in Temple Bar were eerily absent in light of the August Bank Holiday weekend. Service was slow, even slower than the standard Friday night which is, admittedly, exceedingly slow with the exception of the bar menu, an eclectic combination of mostly fried things, but even our fryer stayed relatively untouched. It’s just an odd feeling to be fully set up for service and to look out from the open kitchen and see a mostly empty restaurant with waiters milling around looking for something to do. It’s that forlorn sense of purposelessness that strikes seaside summer destinations in mid-winter, boarded up, void of life and desperately waiting for the snow to melt, the temperatures to soar and the laughter to return.

Somewhere near the middle of that incredibly dead service, one of the sous-chefs called across the kitchen to me, “Alyssa, some of your friends are here.” My friends? It could’ve been anyone (except, perhaps, for my actual friends) and my mind, as I crossed the kitchen, was warily running through a list of potentials. It turned out to be an American couple who had dined with us earlier and inquired about the plant origins of the caper berry. As to how they came back to the kitchen and how my name/nationality got dragged into the whole story, I’m a little foggy on the details but I found myself face-to-face with two people I wouldn’t know from Adam resuming my role as an ambassador for the Culinary Institute of America. As an institution, the Culinary receives a quarter of a million visitors each year which is one of the many reasons for our incredibly conservative rules that encompass dress code, postering and general student life. As a student, you’re expected to maintain a high level of hospitality which can be difficult to do as your trying to carry an impssibly heavy tray of meat through the hallways crowded with slow-moving, awe-struck and, yes, more than occasionally geriatric tourists who don’t really understand the urgency with which you need to get by them NOW. As a student, you become used to living in a fishbowl, having people peer in the classroom windows at you while you go about the daily minutiae of kitchen life. It’s not unusual to be stopped and asked questions by little old ladies as you weave your way to or from class and from your first day at the Culinary, you have stock answers to the most frequently asked questions drilled into you. It’s a mind-set you adopt on campus. But I haven’t been on campus for nine-weeks. But quite suddenly I was faced with not being a lowly extern there to pick parsley and perslaine, but a representative of the Culinary Institute of America, a tour guide, a spokesperson. It was odd, standing there in my whites, funny skull cap and ugly, ugly shoes, to resume my old role of Public Relations Manager, touting the “party line” and explaining the befuddling idiosyncrasies of my program at the best institute for culinary education in the world (at least according to Julia Child). It took me a beat or two to recover that other person. The one who can do more than slice radishes and cucumbers. The one who is seen as knowledgeable and fully able. The one who is considered a “high-impact leader”. It was fun, if even only for five minutes, to slip into that old persona before I was called back again to my present reality as a common extern in a slow kitchen on the August Bank Holiday Friday.