ITC Intern Diaries: Hotel Kitchen

It has been about two weeks since I’ve been working at ITC Windsor for my summer training. And it’s true what they tell you - the hotel life is tough! To survive, you have to eat, sleep and breath the hotel life, because you spend most of your waking hours at work, and most of your sleeping hours having dreams (good or bad) about work! Life is quite literally work, work, sleep, repeat! And either you love it, or you hate it! if you’re in between you probably wont survive long…

I’ve been in the kitchen, my first department of training, for a week and a half now and that’s been my life. I wake up early and go to work. Work for about 11 hours and then come home with just enough energy to eat dinner and go to sleep! There have been days when I wish I could just have a summer vacation like everyone else. But that said, it’s been fun!

I’m working in the Garde Manger section of the kitchen, which is the cold kitchen. Garde Manger in French means the ‘keeper of food’. It is the section where all the salads, dressings, antipasti, hors d’oeuvres and pass-arounds are made. There is very little hot cooking that happens. Most of the food made here is for the buffets, but a few a la carte salads are made too.

To be honest, when I learnt about the Garde Manger in first year, I never thought much of it. I thought it was a relatively small and insignificant section of the kitchen. But I couldn’t have been more wrong! Not only do many other sections of the kitchen depend on the Garde Manger for sauces, dressings, salad accompaniments, condiments, this section also contributes a huge portion of the daily breakfast and dinner buffet and the Sunday brunch. Everyday 10 vegetarian salads and 10 non-vegetarian salads and antipasti are made in this section for the dinner buffet. And while there is a menu matrix as a basic guideline, the chefs usually use their own innovation and have to come up with dishes on their feet every day, in order to create new variety and prevent repetition.

Another interesting thing about the Garde Manger is that there is a lot of attention to presentation and detail. It is not enough for the food to taste good, of course. It must look and sound attractive too! And it takes practice and skill to be able to innovate presentations for salads on the spot and change it up everyday. You cannot present the food in the same way that you did earlier in the week. It must look different. The attention to detail is to such an extent that you cannot use the same herb to garnish more than one dish in each menu. I find that amazing!

In terms of daily routine, there is utmost importance on mise en place, which is preparation of all ingredients and individual elements, and on presentation and plating. Without efficiency in the first and skill in the second it is not possibly to run this section of the kitchen.

I’ve learnt a lot about the routine, the planning, the menu, the skills it takes and even some dishes and plating techniques (more on that last bit later, as I try to recreate some at home). The chefs always encourage trainees to learn, explaining what they’re doing and telling us to make notes later on so we don’t forget! I have only 3 days left in the kitchen. Has this experience made me want to spend the rest of my life in a commercial kitchen? I don’t know yet. But I sure have had a great experience, and I’m going to miss it!