Posts Tagged ‘laurine wickett’
Adaptation
©Marianne Jackson
As a catering chef, I have cooked in all kinds of kitchens, with all kinds of equipment, and nevertheless, it is always expected that I will deliver great tasting food on a pretty plate at an appetizing temperature. In catering, there are no constants. Things are always different and often unexpected. If there is any one thing that catering has taught me, it is how to cook anywhere.
When the show this week asked us whether we could cook anywhere, I know a lot of the other cheftestants didn’t expect that to mean over a fire pit in the middle of the desert. We’d been told we would be spending a night on the ranch and that we’d have to cook a high-end lunch for the ranchers. Thinking back to it, I have to chuckle; so many people were really thrown by the change of scenery. I was okay with the plan, but I know I was one of the few who didn’t find the cooking environment and the sleeping arrangement outrageous. Having lived on a ranch in Colorado years ago, I had an inkling of what to expect and the possibility of outdoor cooking had occurred to me. I realize now how that early experience adapting to a rustic ranch kitchen prepared me well for catering, and more recently, this challenge. Read the rest of this entry »
Together in Pasta Salad: the Integrity of the Team
The morning of the air force challenge, I woke up a bit tired (it was still dark out!) feeling really excited about our day. We’d be preparing food for 300 men and women stationed out of Nellis Air Force Base, and we’d be working all together, as a team. Preeti and I both had catering experience, which seemed advantageous for the challenge where we were cooking for the Air Force. As a group, we had planned a strong lunch buffet with plenty of variety for the military crowd.
I quickly realized that we were actually cooking for the judges, not the service men and women. Turns out this was a team competition, whatever that means, not a team-building exercise, and even though we did well as a team, one soldier–or, chef, got left behind anyway.
Before seeing any of the products we’d be working with, the group decided that the Preeti and I would prepare a cold salad of some sort to round out the rest of the menu on what would likely be another blistering Las Vegas day. Upon arrival in the base’s kitchen, however, we found the quality of ingredients to be very low. A tricky hurdle to jump, when you’ve planned to make a cold salad. Although pasta salad seemed like a good choice initially, the pasta itself was so generic that it lost its shape and looked more like wrinkled rectangles than bow ties in our finished dish.
We were competing for Top Chef and had just made shapeless pasta salad. I was embarrassed. And Preeti was a total team player through all of this. As I was growing increasingly doubtful, she pointed out how well-suited our dish was for the time of day, location and weather. We could be thankful for at least one thing: at least we weren’t serving hot bowls of clam chowder in that heat.
What’s In a Kitchen
Watching Eve go home last night, I was thinking back to a conversation we had the day of that elimination challenge about the competition. Even before that day of cooking poolside, I know she’d been thinking of resigning the competition because the whole Top Chef thing wasn’t for her. I remember her telling me how happy she was with her life and her career in Ann Arbor, and how much she loves to keep learning about food and about cooking. Eve already has a successful restaurant and a cookbook under her belt, and didn’t feel like she needed to prove herself to Bravo or to the judges.
Of course some of the chefs, like the Voltaggio brothers, were more competitive. At this stage in the show, I for one, wasn’t thinking of the elimination challenge as a competition among the chefs but instead as an opportunity to cook great food for the groom and his friends. That’s probably the caterer in me. I suppose I was a lot like Eve on this challenge–I just wanted to cook alongside talented chefs to craft a great experience and make the guests happy.
There is obviously quite a difference between a top chef in the real world and a Top Chef on Bravo. Bravo seems to think that a chef should be a highly driven, hyper-competitive badass with the ability to create well-executed food in any kitchen, on any day, in any amount of time, to meet each week’s unexpected challenge. Can I say, that not in 20 years as a chef have I had to pair food with a shot? Great food and boozey shots have never gone particularly well together, in my experience, but I suppose the scenario makes for good television. And what do I know? I’m just the chef.
Bacon Donuts, Flying!
© Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE
Waking up this morning, I can’t tell you how relieved I was to have the first show under my belt.
The build up over the last few weeks has been one thing, but yesterday was entirely nerve wracking. My phone ringing off the hook and my email exploding with well wishes from friends and family members and it seems, every person I’ve crossed paths with over the course of my life. And amidst all of this anticipation, work was super busy. We were cooking for an event, the food came out well and we were on schedule…until I got a call from my driver, Juan, to tell me that the clutch in our van was out. Of course! Luckily he was only a block away and we were able to get another van, transfer the food, and still send him on his way in a moderately timely fashion, but a close call to be sure.
Watching the show last night was totally wild, to put it lightly. It’s still hard to believe that the experience I had in Las Vegas is at all related to the neatly packaged television show that debuted last night. The experience of it all was so emotional while we were living it. But with the buffer of the screen, it now seems so separate from being there and in many ways it is. The show you saw last night is such a small fraction of the whole, that the product hardly resembles what I remember feeling.
At The Beginning
© Henry Dombey/FACECOLLECTIVE
My name is Laurine Wickett and I own a company called Left Coast Catering. Welcome to our blog! Here, I plan to chronicle the ins and outs of our kitchen in San Francisco and my recent dallying as a chef competitor on Bravo’s Top Chef.
Some of you are likely wondering how a person ends up competing on national television for such a lofty title. Truly, it feels like an accident. One night, during a launch dinner for my private dining venue 2150, a guest and food writer suggested I go to the Top Chef Season 6 casting call the following day, with a promise to expedite me to the VIP list at the call. I honestly hardly heard her. I’m not an avid watcher of the show and I’ve never wanted to become a television chef. I enjoy cooking food in my own kitchen for people in real life. For some reason, despite all of this, I mentioned the suggestion to my staff later that evening. They chimed in to echo that initial encouragement and set to work convincing me to go; after a few drinks and much persuasion, I set my alarm clock and decided I’d go.