This was not really an official internship. It kinda started out that way, but ended up being an actual job.
I completed (was forced out of) my internship at Colby Hill Inn, but while I started making preparations to return to NECI I realized that I had a medical issue that needed to be fixed first. There was an attempt to fix it while I was at Colby Hill, but the fix didn’t work. I contacted the doctor, who said there was a different procedure to be done but it would lay me up for about a month. No way I could get that done and also make it back to NECI in time for the June start of the second year. So, I contacted the school and made plans to return at a later date. I wouldn’t be with my class, but most of them were idiots so no great loss there. The student advisor suggested that after I had recovered from surgery I could find another temporary cooking job to get some more experience.
In 2005 I had applied to work at Stonebridge Country Club in Goffstown NH. I met with one of the owners and was told that the chef would contact me for an official interview. I never heard from anyone after that, so I made the decision to go to culinary school and try to make an actual career out of cooking. Since I had some time to kill before going back to NECI, I went back to Stonebridge once I was cleared to work again after the surgery. The owner remembered me, and said now with a year of culinary school under my belt I should have the basics down (stuff I already knew before attending NECI, but whatever.) I met with Chef Pete, who offered me the job of Sous Chef. I had gone in there expecting to work as a line cook for $11 an hour, but he was asking me to be second in command for $13 an hour. I accepted, but looking back that was probably the wrong decision.
The first official event was Easter Brunch. Trial by Fire - I knew my way around a kitchen, but this was a commercial kitchen with a convection oven and a steamer and a flattop and a char broiler and a six-burner gas stove. I just kept telling myself I would do fine, as did several other people who were rooting for me (Brian being one of them, although I think his initial comment was something like “Good job! Now don’t fuck it up!”) I learned how to make scrambled eggs, bacon, and French toast for 100, which is not just “make it for 4 in larger quantities.” I was cracking eggs into a 5 gallon bucket and stirring them with a giant whisk, then putting it all into several pans and into the steamer. Bacon was laid out on a large sheet pan and put into the convection oven. French toast was cooked on the flat top, which wasn’t that different then what I was used to. Sausages were cooked in the oven. I forget what else was prepared, but it was a LOT of food and there were only two of us cooking it all. However, I realized that as long as you have a good system in place, really one person could do it all. While one thing was cooking, you were prepping another.
Then the fun started.
First, the convection oven started to act up. The doors would not stay latched, which was turning off the convection fan. The steamer was literally falling apart. Every time someone would put in or remove a tray of eggs, there was the chance that the racks holding everything up would suddenly fall apart, threatening to dump everything all over the floor. Had a few close calls, but somehow we managed to keep it together. Pete was impressed enough that he didn’t boot me out the door... afterwards he congratulated me on a job well done and we talked about what was to come. We were still early in the season, so there wasn’t a lot of business yet. The schedule was such that I would work the kitchen myself Sundays and Mondays, Tuesdays I was usually by myself but I had a dishwasher, then the rest of the week Chef Pete would come in. Thing were going well, I was learning a lot, and I worked with a bunch of nice people.
Then the trouble started. Pete realized that we needed a third person behind the line, so he brought in someone who had run her own sandwich shop for a while but had to close it. She was also sister to one of the waitresses. She made it quite clear that she did not like me, and almost immediately started trying to make me look bad. Stupid childish stuff, like leaving a mess at the end of the night and blaming me for it when I wasn’t even there. When she opened, she did no prep, so when we came in later for dinner shift we were running out of stuff. Again, that was blamed on me.
Then her sister got involved. She went to the owners and told them I had made sexual passes at her. I denied it, it never happened, and was told that I was not being fired for it but a note was put into my record. This woman was a total drama queen. She loved to be the center of attention, and kept telling people she was an actress. If she was caught in a lie, well she was just practicing a role. Yeah whatever. A month later the owner called me back in and said the note was being removed because she tried to pull the same lie on someone else, but it was proven that the second guy she accused was not even working at the time she claimed the harassment took place. There were cameras in the room where she claimed it happened, but checking the footage did not back up her lie. Why she was not fired on the spot I will never know, but she was allowed to keep her job. I did my best to avoid her completely, but there may have been the occasional food order from her that was mysteriously delayed. One thing I had learned is that wait staff and cooks had a delicate balance. If either side dropped the ball, both sides suffered, but ultimately the customer’s tip was based on quality of food and service. If the food came out late, regardless of the reason, it was reflected in the tip. So, if by chance a club sandwich did not go out quickly because the cook didn’t see the order right away, or maybe ran out of something and had to go downstairs to get it, hitting the bathroom on the way, then stopping to talk to someone... you know. I don’t remember what happened to her, if she stayed on or not.
All of this was pissing me off to the point where I lost focus on what I was doing and started making stupid mistakes. It got to the point where Pete was taking her side of every confrontation (I suppose it didn’t help that she was also selling drugs to him) and I was demoted to line cook. She took the Sous Chef position away from me, which I guess was her goal from the start. I got tired of dealing with her shit so at the end of the season I quit. I was going to have to find another job for the winter months anyway, so I left.