Miles Collins

The Life of a Veg Chef

I remember calling myself an entremetier, it was that or veg chef and the French version won hands down. In the chef world admitting you are a veg chef is like telling your girlfriend you have syphallis; you want to hide it but the truth always comes out. When you’re young titles mean everything, start as a commis, then first commis followed by demi chef, chef de partie, senior chef de partie, junior sous chef, (draw breath) sous chef, senior sous chef and finally Head Chef/Executive Chef. The higher up you go the less they mean, a false sense of power and responsibility turns into real power and responsibility which quickly manifests itself into a real pain in the a**e.

For most young chefs doing time on the veg section is like doing time in a young offenders institution. You are banged up in a confined space for hours at a time with no fresh air, little food and your spirit routinely broken by wardens wearing big white hats. You look at the other inmates and they’ve got it easy. They’re doing ‘fancy’ stuff, you’re soaked through with sweat and dirty potato water and there’s still a bag of carrots to do.

Downwind I can spot a veg chef from fifty paces, they’re the ones who smell of chip fat and onion peelings, they’re young, skinny, spotty and hunchbacked from carrying spuds by the sack load, bent double over a low sink whilst cursing the sous chef for having to peel a rope of garlic because he knows you’re going to the pub later to meet a girl you’ve fancied for months.

The veg cook absorbs the jobs others hate with a glowing naivety, ‘Chef says he’s going to let me cook staff dinner’ ‘Chef lets me put all the veg away in the fridge when it arrives’, etc etc. This is the section were the young cook performs mistakes of heroic proportions and I’ve seen a few. I recall with fondness the Bavarian dinner for 250 when the veg chef didn’t put any vinegar or red wine in the red cabbage and cooked the lot to a daytona blue whilst the Chef turned a Ferrari red.

The veg section gets a bad deal in the kitchen, young chefs don’t appreciate the significance of serving well prepared vegetables, food is food I always tell them but it usually falls on deaf, young and overly ambitious ears. I was that young, spotty veg chef with two eyes on the sauce section, cooking the main courses was the ultimate in street credibility even if I was bloody awful at it. To my credit I did give it my all on that section, I made it my own and wanted to raise the bar so that others could see that it was just as good a section as any other. Obviously the minute the Chef told me I could go on the sauce section I dropped it like a hot brick.

On the odd occasion, when work load permits I like to go over to the veg section and help out. It allows me to switch off for a short while and I often recall younger days as a terrified commis praying the Chef would be in a good mood upon his return and making sure I got the gammon and egg right for staff dinner.

Last night, ten minutes into the start of service I lost my temper with some of my chefs, those closest to me got it, those out of the immediate firing line didn’t. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my most junior chef trying desperately to look as busy as possible and in an instant I thought about a recent blog post recalling my earliest days in a kitchen and how I dreaded the Chef losing his temper. That pulled me back in and I couldn’t help but smile.

Henceforth, whenever I pull myself back from the brink of mutually assured kitchen destruction it shall be known as the ‘Gammon and Egg Moment’, when I don’t it will be known as ‘bloody unlucky’!