Day 6

Today I started my first day of internship at the restaurant. I was there on time..10 am, despite the fact that I only slept about 4 hours. Of course we just have the first day stuff, getting acclimated to where everything is in the restaurant. Luckily working in the kitchen for classes at least got me a general overview of where things are kept. They had me start by helping with some prep for lunch and dinner service. I cut up about 30 red onions and then we braised them in red wine and balsamic vinegar. The finished product, especially making so much at one time, takes a long time, but the result is something I would eat with anything. Then I helped prep some spinach that had been boiled and then we bake it with garlic, salt, red pepper flakes and olive oil. After that we made a family dinner for the cooks and the front of the house staff. Lunch service started shortly afterwards and it was a pretty busy day because of Easter. I mostly worked the dish station, while getting some good inside info from my trainer IP. He is an intern that was part of the last Arts Institute group that stayed in Orvieto with chef last fall. The Chef liked him so he invited him out to work for a while and hes been here since early March. So IP has a lot of knowledge of the program itself, where we are staying, and about the restaurant itself. He gave me the menu in Italian and English, because if I do get the opportunity to work on the line, if we get a ticket in the servers of course write it in Italian. Of course the first step is just to learn the dishes themselves, so I watched as much plating of the food as possible. All the pasta is made fresh here, they have a pasta machine to cook it in as well that is essentially 2 small sinks that can be drained, refilled, and heated to boiling temp quickly, with multiple baskets inside each of them for easy removal and separation of portions. Wild boar is a popular dish and they had a lamb dish that was selling very well today. Of course I liked seeing the grilled sheep's cheese with a black truffle sauce that they then shave black truffles on top of. Still, mostly I just did dishes, its an easy job, but gives you time to watch whats going on, learn, and still help a lot. If we had a slow time I did have time to talk to a few of the other interns working in the pantry station. I got to see some of the desserts plated like a marscapone mousse with a cherry grappa sauce, the sauce was excellent. We kept pretty busy for the most part, they said it was an above average day for business, but we never got behind. It should be even more interesting in the next few weeks because so many of us are doing internships. Tomorrow alone we will have 7 students working during the lunch service and 7 others taking over to help for dinner. That is in addition to the regular full time crew. I left around 4 and came back to our place to relax, I ended up starting to get ready for classes to begin Monday morning by reviewing the recipes we would be covering the first day. Before long it was time for our group dinner. Since it is Easter the Chef decided to make the meal more special. We had 4 courses, the first was a polenta with the same black truffle sauce and shaved black truffles on top. It was very good. The second course was penne pasta with a fresh tomato sauce and italian parsley which I could have eaten all of but I knew there was more coming. The third course was a roasted lamb stuffed with herbs and sundried tomatoes. It was overcooked for my taste, the cooked it well done. However it was very well seasoned and still moist and there was a good brown sauce and sauteed zucchini that came with it. For dessert we had a traditional Easter cake with a chocolate sauce, which was a nice dessert since it was very light. After dinner we had a short talk about some of the expectations as far as class starting are. Such as don't be late, don't show up drunk, the usual stuff you have to worry about of course with our group. Class begins at 7 am tomorrow with World cuisine and we will start with Spanish tapas, something I have some familiarity with. Hopefully this will be the first night I make it through the whole night of sleep uninterrupted.