Currently, I’m on 100 Day Chef Stage, touring different Michelin starred restaurants in the World. Read about chef life; the mistakes I make, the lessons I learn and the characters I meet, as I learn from some of the best chefs in the world. (My journey so far.👉)
Chef Stage: Day 4
Restaurant: El Monastrell, Alicante, Spain (1 Star Michelin)
Chef de Cuisine: Maria José San Roman::
Website: El Monastrell
Location: Google Maps
Chef Stage: Day 4
Chef Stagiare, Why work for free?
We are gutting moray eels.
I am watching Victor, El Monastrell’s sous chef, as he grabs the eel by its head, his fingers dug firmly into the gills.
“Cuidado con el
Be
“That’s what I’m talking about,” says Victor, looking at my finger, his face deadpan.
Half worried about getting some weird eel infection and half annoyed with the silly mistake, I pull the hook out, douse my finger with antiseptic, tape up and continue.
Chef Staging at El Monastrell
It’s day four of a month-long chef stage. I am a Chef
What is an Olympian doing in a kitchen? Well, it’s a longer story, but read more about why I am doing a chef stage, if you have more time.
An hour before service
Larger than your typical eel, more like a sea snake, moray eels lurk in the shallows, hiding in the rocks, shooting it’s head out to capture small fish. They taste better than they look; their skin is soft and gelatinous skin, and the meat delicately flavoured.
We have a lot of eels to get through before service begins. For every eel, I nervously break down, Victor has chopped up five.
His knife skills are impressive. Now and then, when he sees me struggling, he reaches over to my chopping board and whacks his cleaver through a particularly tough bone.
The first few are fun, but by eel number seven, my hands are blackened and my board is covered in a slimy goo, and three half digested sardines – the remains of the eel’s last supper. I clean down. I get that this could get old, but right now, I’m loving it.
What do you do on a chef stage?
There are probably good and bad Stages. I don’t yet know enough to be able to qualify that, but I have read enough of the late, great Anthony Bourdain to know that kitchens aren’t always places of sugar and smiles, lobsters and laughs. I’d been prepared to spend the first few weeks of this stage peeling mushrooms, picking herbs and obeying orders, Si Chef Si! However, my first few days haven’t been like that at all.
So what do you do on a chef stage? If you are reading this post, about to begin your first day as a chef
- Peeled a crate of cigala (crayfish)
- Blanched and refreshed codium (seaweed)
- Helped prepare a salad for the staff meal
- Trimmed about 150 (maybe more, I lost count) artichokes
- Deveined, ballotined and sous vide a foie gras
- Made orange rice
- Removed the roe from dozens of sea urchins
- Boiled lobsters
- Julienned leeks
- Deseeded tomatoes
- Made a black garlic paste
- Plated the foie gras starter, slicing the foie gras, rolling it in lapsang tea, placing it on squash puree and finishing with salt and a tuile.
- Chopped hard-boiled egg white and onion for a steak tartare
- Collected various items from the cold stores.
- Helped to set up for service and clean down afterwards
And now I can add task number sixteen: Gutted moray eels to make an eel stock.
Life of an unpaid Stagiare
In most cases, one of the other chefs shows me what to do, then leaves me to complete the task, now and then returning to check my work. So far there has been no shouting, no bullying, nothing resembling Gordon Ramsay or even a tense episode of MasterChef. Perhaps those days are a thing of the past? Perhaps this is a great kitchen? Or, perhaps it’s because I’m not even five days into this stage and tomorrow all hell will break loose?
No doubt there are bad and boring, and bullying stages out there, but thankfully I’m not on one. This is an excellent stage. One that allows you to participate. Expects it. That looks to teach and educate and is generous and transparent with their recipes.
And I think that is how it should be after all a chef stagiare is an unpaid position. Staging is very much an accepted part of the Michelin restaurant hierarchy, with thousands of candidates applying yearly to get into some of the three-star restaurants in Spain like Quique DaCosta, Mugaritz, Arzak, Martin Berasategui or Celler de Can Roca.
While chefs accept it as part and parcel of the learning process, most people find it challenging to comprehend.
When I tell people I am working 14 hour days for free their expression changes, they take a small step away (perhaps concerned whatever I have might be contagious) before they check again if they’ve heard right. You, work for free? Are you saying you work hard, long hours and you don’t get anything for it?
Yes, and no.
Yes, there’s zero financial compensation (£0.00)
No, there is something I get back in return. This is not a one-way exchange.
In return for my time, I get knowledge; I get the chance to work with ingredients that are impractical to buy for a home cook; I get taught techniques used by professional chefs and to me that is a fair trade-off.
I prefer to work for free than for low pay. Give me minimum wage, which is more or less what a chef straight out of culinary school would get, and suddenly all the intrinsic motivation, goes down the sink, along with the eel entrails.
Suddenly it becomes work and you are being paid to clean the shit out of the sink. Something is lost.
As it is unpaid, this is an experience.
After all, how many times do you get to pull a fish hook out of your finger, and remove half
That’s priceless.
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El Monastrell, Alicante
Day 1 – What’s an Olympian doing in a kitchen anyway?
Day 4 – Why work for free?
Day 7 – Knife Skills, go as fast as you can but no faster
Day 10 – Mugaritz: You don’t have to like something to like it
Day 12 – The best paella recipe, in the world
Day 14 – Chef Life, it’s not all liquid nitrogen and lobsters