bacar

Staged tonight at bacar, in SOMA. apparently the old chef left there, new chef (from Jardiniere) been in place 8 days. the pastry chef there is leaving in 2ish weeks, getting married, going on honeymoon. i got a little more info from her and she says the ex-chef is her mentor and she doesn't want to work there without him, etc. which i understand. i'm jealous of that also--wish i had a mentor. but at least i have a new city to explore.

Plating was easy-we did maybe five or six desserts. I would need to do more quenelles. But that's the only the she didn't like about me, and that's easy enough to practice a lot. I liked the presentation a lot. It's funny; when I was staging at Range I was talking to the assistant about how I didn't like my boss's presentations...how they just didn't make sense to me. And he was talking to me about it, trying to figure out was it a rustic versus polished thing or what? Not so much per se-because Range's things were a lot more rustic than bacar's and I was fine with the polished restaurant-ness of it. But more the aesthetic of design, the way the white space is left on the plate.

I asked the chef if she had a favorite dessert on the menu. Not really, she said. Mostly she was just sick of her stuff, she said. As if everyone has an aesthetic or a flavor profile. She said she didn't wanna do restaurant stuff any more. She just wanted to go work in a bakery.

Almost been here two weeks. I wonder when it'll stop feeling so new. I'm learning my way around the town though and around Oakland and I've started giving people advice/directions when they ask. I figure if I talk California I might as well fake it, you know?