Chef’s night in

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 01:01:00 +0000

We asked members of our Kitchen Cabinet to briefly share some of their holiday memories with us, and we're sharing them with you all this week. Today, two chefs spend the holidays pretty much alone, and that's alright by them.

From Michael Laiskonis, executive pastry chef, Le Bernardin:

It was a turning point in some way, 15 years ago, when I separated the holidays of youth with the ones I experience now. It was my first Christmas season as a young cook, deep, as we call it, in the shit.

There are busy days in the hospitality industry that are like hard sprints, Valentine's Day or Mother's Day, but the weeks that fall between Thanksgiving and New Year's Eve comprise one long, grueling marathon. As waiters and cooks we subconsciously plan for the "season" all year long, but it's always still a little shocking when it hits.

I was a baker at a small outfit in the outlying suburbs of Detroit. We were producing around the clock for over two weeks. By Christmas Eve, it was all flying out of the shop as fast as we could fill the cases. I was feeling that deep, to-the-bone kind of tired, surviving only on what little adrenaline I could summon until we finally locked the doors at 4 p.m.

Salon.com > Amanda Cohen

Chef’s night in