Front of the house

Plated dishes ready to hit the tables

Again, a long absence from the blog—I apologize. We had summer break from culinary school, albeit a very abbreviated version of the summer vacations I used to know. However, I got to spend my week off in Lyon, France with my family, so I have little to complain about. We spent a wonderful week eating and drinking our way through Southeast France. You can view my photo gallery of the trip here. Warning: my photos are relatively light on the people and scenery and heavy on the food shots!

Now I have entered the final phase of culinary school: The Restaurant. This is what we've been hearing about and working our way towards since we entered Skills 1 with our shiny new knife kits almost a year ago. First, we spend three weeks in the front-of-the-house as servers, hosts, managers, and bartenders. Then, we move into the open kitchen in back to cook for real live paying customers.

I've never been a server before, or worked in a restaurant at all, for that matter. In high school, most of my friends had part-time jobs either in restaurants or retail stores around our suburb. I wasn't really a foodie yet at that time, but I played tennis, so I worked in a shop called Racquet and Jog. Incidentally, what I remember most from that job is the really good bakery next door—our manager would buy us these delicious oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies when we reached a certain sales total for the day.

But I digress. Last week at Lumiere—the name of Le Cordon Bleu's in-house restaurant—I served my very first table. Our school is in a big office-park complex, so many of our lunch customers are employees from the various businesses, but the rest are retirees. I presume these older folks love it because since we are a student-run restaurant, the prices are dirt-cheap. I'm talking nothing over $8, and the menu includes pretty tasty stuff like crab cakes, flat-iron steak, shrimp and white-cheddar grits, fried oysters. Before service, our counterparts in the kitchen plated up most of the menu items for us to see and taste.

Pan-seared crab cake with corn-and-pepper succotash at Lumiere

Mixed green salad, fresh mozzarella salad, fried oysters with remoulade

My very first customers were an adorable older couple and the wife was celebrating her birthday. They loved the she-crab soup, fried chicken, and the chocolate dome I brought over as their free birthday dessert. They asked me questions about the food and the program, and I managed to answer charmingly without spilling coffee on either of them.