The Mecca of Chefs

Banquets settled down, so I started to search for a way to serve better food. Takashi would come to work every day at 1:00 PM and the first thing he would do was go pick up his food from the storeroom. He was the shit. He ordered stuff that I had never heard of like Turbot, Brill, Loup De Mar, and my new favorite fish John Dory (aka St. Pierre). I would show up in the storeroom everyday at one just to see what he ordered. I would also spend my nights off in Takashi’s kitchen. I would just stand there and ask him not only what he was doing, but also why he was doing it. It was a fun little game to him, because he would never tell me. He would just make me guess until I got it right. His answers were short and simple: If I was right, he would say, “That‟s correct.” If I was wrong, he would say, “No.”

He would cook anything he felt like for his guests. Whenever I was there, he would pass me a small plate to try, as he went along with his evening. I remember the first time I tried John Dory.

The Line Brigade

When I got back to the hotel Roget had already put the word out to everybody to not say a single word to me in regard to the food show. He could be kind like that sometimes. I guess he had figured that I had been embarrassed enough for one day. It didn’t last long.

A couple of days later Dorothy Hamill was in the Hotel for Ice Capades. You would have thought she was Mick Jagger by the way Roget was going off. She ordered a Seafood Louie salad. You don’t see it very often now, but in the seventies that salad was on every menu.  Roget had told me to make a perfect Louie. Tom quickly jumped on my station to try to hog some glory. Roget had gone to his office to get this book that he had famous people sign whenever he fed them. When he got back to her table with the book, we had already served the salad. Right after she signed it, she took a bite and quickly spit it out. We had served Dorothy Hamill rotten crab! Roget calmly walked back to the line.

Conference

It’s funny when I think about those days now.  All I remember is the food, and it was the bomb.  The food that was served at the Hotel Utah in the late seventies was as good as or better than anything I have seen to date.  Learning how to cook there has been the gift that has kept on giving, my entire culinary career.  Everyone was French, and it was exactly like learning to cook in France.  One thing about the Mormons is that they can afford to hire the best, and they did.  My training was regimented, complex, and diversified.  The kitchen brigade commanded respect, even if we were stoned all the time.

I was nine months into my apprenticeship when the Conference buzzes starting infiltrating the kitchen.  Conference is a four or five day period held annually in the Spring.  Essentially, Conference amounts to vast amounts of Mormons, from across the world, converging in Temple Square to eat, drink, and listen to their prophets speak.  The hotel would do over a thousand meals a meal-period through four different avenues: The Coffee Shop (called “The Coffee Shop” despite the fact that it didn’t serve any coffee), banquet halls, room service, and the gourmet restaurant at the top of the building, appropriately named The Roof.  We would start prepping four days in advance of the five-day conference, totaling nine days of continuous eighteen-hour shifts.  I was intimidated just thinking about it.