The lovely Yellow Deli restaurant to which I am interning at functions far from ordinary. In the kitchen, workers don't follow the order of a traditional professional kitchen environment. Outside of the workplace, workers are like family to each other. I always imagined the kitchen of a busy restaurant like the Yellow Deli to be loud with lots of workers bustling about to get everything on a plate. But the flow is different at the Yellow Deli. Workers are rarely stressed out, everyone is calm, and it is quiet enough to still hear the folk music that plays through the dining area.
The Yellow Deli is a chain restaurant run by people of a certain religious community. Now, I don't know much about their community, but I do know that family and friendship are at the highest of their values. The fact that their community built the Yellow Deli Businesses from the ground up (literally. They hand-built the building themselves) and continue to run it together is what keeps it running and keeps everyone happily working. The relationship you have with your co-workers means everything--especially as chefs who have to work as a team--so to have such a strong relationship with each other like they have is absolutely amazing to me. I am currently working as a prep worker at the Deli which means I am doing various tasks to prepare core ingredients for the rest of the workers to make meals of. I am chopping produce, bending butter, slicing deli meat, etc...etc... While this may not seem like a whole lot because I am not, say, cooking soup and baking bread, it is a great experience for me, as a 17 year-old. By working in a restaurant, I am not only learning by doing, but I am learning by watching. In a busy kitchen with lots of workers working around me, there's plenty to watch and plenty to learn from. For example, I was cleaning some bell peppers (removing stems, core, and seeds) today at the island counter in the kitchen. In front of me was another worker and she was chopping apples, but before she was putting the chopped ones in a container, she was dunking them in a bath. I asked her what she was coating them with and she told me it was lemon juice. Lemon juice keeps apples and many other fruits from turning brown as fast, so by coating them in the acidic juice, she is ensuring that all the fruit salad they serve will be fresh and pretty. Little things like this is why I am so happy to be interning in a kitchen. Even if i'm not doing something that challenges my abilities and teaches me something new, I can learn by watching people with more experience than me do the things they do.
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Rayna Chavez
5/15/2018 10:41:01 pm
Hi Carly,
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Rayna ChavezHello, welcome to my 11th grade internship blog! I've had a passion for cooking since I was 9 years old, so I knew that for my school-required internship I wanted, more than anything, to intern at a business in the culinary field. Fortunately, I was able to land an internship at a health-conscious restaurant in Vista, CA called The Yellow Deli. Read about my once-in-a-lifetime educational experience here. Business Info:My MEntor: Laura Franks (Neviah)
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