Denver Downer

Sorry I haven't posted in a while, but there hasn't been anything particularly exciting food-wise to write about. Lily and I were staying in Denver for about a month, earning more money for the road. She worked for her brother doing work on a house he is flipping. The plan was for me to quickly get a job at a good restaurant in the city for a month or two while she worked on the house.

I did my research and learned about the city's best restaurants and chefs, and spent the first few days in Denver making rounds at all those restaurants. I wanted to leave the city with a decent reference, so I told all of the chefs I could only commit to two months, but I'd work for cheap. I brought along my pretty good resume and a letter of reference from a James Beard Best Chef Northeast winner. Not one of them bit. Some of them sent me to other restaurants, thinking Chef SoandSo might need a hand. I went to 10-15 of the best restaurants in the Denver area, and nobody would take me on.

I realized I wouldn't get a job if I continued to tell chefs I'd only be there for eight weeks, so from then on I decided reluctantly to withhold that information. I was resorting to dishonesty as the only hope to land a job, and all the best restaurants in the city were off the board. Days go by. Each day, I am forced to be less and less picky, and the quality of the restaurants I submit my resume to drops considerably. I apply to a couple crappy pubs and sports bars who posted on craigslist, angry at myself on the way out the dooe. As the hunt goes on, I start to get really angry that none of these places have called me back. I nail a few interviews, talk to some seemingly cool chefs who seem like they're ready to hand me a job because I'm the most experienced person who's walked through the door resume in hand all week. Nobody calls back. NOBODY - and I'm pissed.

I'm pissed off, and depressed that I've been job hunting and interviewing for ten days with no job offers and only a few prospects from not very good restaraunts. I'm being led around in circles at some of these places. Each time I applied for a job in Boston, I was practically hired on the spot. I begin to realize a couple things about Denver. The first is that Denver isn't actually that great of a food town, and there really aren't that many good restaurants. The second realization is that a lot of the chefs in Denver are flaky, unprofessional idiots who have no idea what they are doing.

Finally I land a job at a restaurant with a laid back atmosphere, big closed kitchen, and a young chef who at first seems to be a cool guy. However, I failed to notice when I interviewed how filthy the kitchen was. So from day one, I scrubbed and scrubbed while the chef and other cooks took their cigarette breaks, read magazines, or stared at the wall. I volunteered to wash dishes a couple days when a dishwasher quit without noticed, and spent all my down time cleaning and organizing everything I could see. When I came back a couple days later, everything was a mess again.

The food sucked. The owner is stuck back in the 90's, still doing "fusion" stuff like sesame crusted salmon with wasabi mashed potatoes and tuna tartare (!frozen) with mango salsa, wonton chips, and avocado. I spent my time on the two man line like I always do - making sure everything was cooked right, seasoned right, and tasted good, but each time the guy cooking next to me was putting plates in the window a dog wouldn't eat, I died a little inside.

We ended up leaving Denver earlier than we originally wanted to. I'm not proud of it, but I skipped out with no notice right after I received and cashed my first paycheck. It's something I never thought I'd do, but I was fed up.

Well, at least I learned a lot from my Denver experience. First, I am not going to put myself in a kitchen where I have to lower my own standards. I'd rather be unemployed than employed in a dirty kitchen with subpar food, especially when there aren't opportunities for me to improve the situation. Second, job hunting sucks. From now on, I'm going to be much more selective of where I apply, and much more aggressive in landing those jobs. I am a good cook and a hard worker, and any smart chef would hire me.