Done at Zinnia, had a great time

I was so busy over the past couple months that I forgot to blog about my experiences at Zinnia!

Chef Sean is a great guy, and he was very accommodating in letting me take the reigns and make some stuff for the restaurant that I have never made before. When I started, the restaurant was buying their bacon, smoked salmon, and pancetta and paying a pretty penny for what I consider mediocre ingredients. I started a little charcuterie program at Zinnia after my first couple of weeks there and now all of those products are made in house.

No restaurant should buy bacon - it's incredibly easy to make, it's much cheaper to buy fresh pork belly and do it yourself, and it tastes much much better. The only things you need that you don't typically find in a restaurant kitchen are pink salt and a log of wood, and both are easily attainable. I would estimate that with the method I've developed, it only takes about 15 minutes of actual work to cure and then smoke (without the need of a smoker) a pork belly and turn it into delicious bacon. The bacon that Sean was buying was around $7-8/lb and the fresh pork belly they get in is only $2.05/lb!

The smoked salmon was the typical store bought stuff you find at most restaurants, and it was also very expensive. A few weeks ago, there was a salmon entree on the menu, so I occasionally would take some two day old peices or one whole side of that product, cure it with citrus and fennel, and then cold smoke it over fig wood. This, like the bacon, also tastes miles better, is much cheaper, and has an appealing vibrant reddish pink color that the store bought stuff lacks.

Conclusions about working at Zinnia:
1) Upscale fine dining is not the type of food I want to cook for the rest of my life. The food at Zinnia is great, but food at this level and price point aims to "wow". I want to chef at a restaurant that I would want to eat at frequently, and that means simpler, moderately priced food in a friendly, relaxed atmosphere.

2) The people at Zinnia were a bit too focused on the media's impact on their restaurant, i.e. newspaper reviews and magazine blurbs. In my opinion, attention should be focused on pleasing each and every customer that walks in the door, not on reviewers, Zagat, and the like. If you please everyone who walks into your restaurant, and a reviewer happens to walk in, then you are going to get a good review.

3) Organization and communication are of utmost importance in the kitchen (and in the front of the house too). If a problem exists, it can usually be fixed by better organization and communication, and everyone should work as a team to find the solution.

4) The valuable employees are not the ones who just do their job, but the ones that are constantly thinking, "How can I/we do this better", figure out solutions, and communicate their findings to the chef, manager, and everyone else.

5) It is important to provide an environment for free exchange of ideas - where the people in charge will at least listen and will not react negatively to an idea that sounds strange. Chef Sean at Zinnia provided this environment better than any other restaurant I have worked at.