The best Damn Sandwich in Vancouver...and it's alive.

Upon a whim I decided to visit a place not far from my school and right in Gastown. So.Cial is a neat little place since it is the first restaurant that I have visited to have a separate lounge menu. Lounge menus are usually quick and dirty little plates that you eat with your beer or wine, generally smaller fares meant to either snack upon or share amongst friends. It also has a dining room menu and most impressively a deli/butchershop that features one of the best sandwiches that I've eaten EVER.

I truly mean that too. It shits on Subway and even with Quizno's in all it's toasted glorly, it only uses heat to mask the sub-par quality of their sandwich. As my friend Rob long ago said, a Sandwich is only good because of the bread. While the sandwich he made me wasn't exactly the most mind explodingly awesome, (sorry Rob) his advice has never been so accurate until this sandwich.

Now the filling and garnish were all top quality. However it certainly was the bread. A huge round of bread that is like foccacia however with the herbs. A crispy crust that isn't a shell or almost brown glass shield protecting the inner doughy-ness. It's part of the bread, much like how the grill marks and crust on a steak is part of the meat. The actually innards isn't doughy at all, soft to the touch but firm to stand up a healthy dose of either aioli, mustard or both on it's nearly 1" thick slices.

However as I discover something new, I also rediscover something lost. The feel of machinery and of art in my hand. I used my SLR camera for the first time in years and it will be interesting to see what develops from the roll of pictures that was last left before I locked it away in some dusty cupboard. I forget what was the first picture I took with it, however I will not forget the feeling of motors whirring and the shutter blinking. That solid click of the gears and screws dousing years old film with light. I daresay it made me feel young again, younger that I've felt in a long time and perhaps even a bit sad. I set out to use my SLR as a form of higher quality picture taking, something more genuine and tangible in nature for the wedding I attended. Mike and LeeAnn deserve that much. I might be investing into a Digital SLR in the near future, what with the entire world of photographic adventures that I can embark upon in the lower mainland. The biggest hurdle to adjust to the old SLR is to look at the digital display after taking a picture only to realize that you're staring at the back of the camera casing, with the unknown idea of whether or not the picture will turn out. It's so exciting to wait and wonder how the picture will develop and more importantly almost a grade of your skill as a photographer.

I don't exist.

It's been a weird half decade for quite a long time for me. Ever since my life deviated from being an artist to being a student of commerce to being just a spoiled wanderer and now a cook, I still haven't gotten a true sense of myself. Perhaps because I've never struck out on my own (and with the prices of rental and my current situation it isn't coming nay time soon). One of my traits that I'd like to think that I can do is that I'm adaptable. I can adapt to most things that doesn't require a total personal commitment by me nor the risk of me getting hurt. However as adaptable as I am, I'm still a person who is a jack of all trades and master of none. It's always been like that, whether because of my natural lack of commitment or the fact that I get bored quickly due to being stuck in one place, I'm still very much a person insecure with his placement in any circle of friends...not being knowledgeable enough to be considered and equal but know enough information to keep any one person's interest for long enough. Basically said everyone is smarter than me in a multitude of ways.

It's interesting that my own fear of abandonment is offset by my own sub-conscious denial existence of my own needs and body. In reviewing the pictures of my best friend's wedding, I appear in only 2 of the dozens of photos I shot, which hails back to my old art school days where I took dozens of pictures at our parties and hardly any of them have me in it. In fact I think entire rolls were taken without me in it. While the idea of being an anonymous photographer is great, it makes me wonder if the lack of record of my pictures will just lead me to realize how much of a pathetic life I lead. That I'm not even good enough a person to be recorded in anyone's sort of memory even to the point where I deny my own existence.

I don't know why I have such a history kick for having to know the details of everything and everyone. I never exhibited such a pattern when I was a child and it's strange that it should manifest now. In the end I'm just feeling a bit sad when putting my own life into perspective. No man is an island to himself but I think I'm doing a pretty damn good job about it right now.

Block 2: Day 6: Now I know how my bosses feel

One question that a lot of people ask cooks is "So you want to open up your own restaurant?" While someone might be a great cook it does not make them a great leader. In that respect we come to something that I personally dread: dealing with people. Not only that dealing with people in a situation that will no doubt lead to confrontation and dispute. Running a kitchen could be a real problem if the crew you're handling is just a mishmash of gears and cogs that don't fit together. You might want to try and suggest something for a vision of efficiency or change but it's up to the nature of that person to have to change. And with something as egotistical and passionate food creation is; we're bound to encounter people who have their own ideas of what is perfect.

So here I am; we are short one person in our group and we are handling our very first "to order" station. Customers come up to the station, place their order and we cook it for them. Me personally I was calm as a bomb but whether that was due to me tending just to grill and only grill is probably more the case. Everyone else was just buzzing around me in anticipation, obviously loosing their cool and the worst thing...compromising their role and position. The worst thing you could do when you're fucked in a huge backup of bills is everyone banding together in some desperate ditch effort to make one single dish in order to just "get the damn thing out" because that's when you withdraw from the big picture to focus on that one dish as your salvation ticket out of there.

So here we are, two people toasting bread and garnishing it while one person is doing fries. No one taking orders, a few bill orders up and me on grill. It wasn't the worst showing on earth, we didn't set the kitchen on fire but there were screwed up things that happened. First of all there was a switch in station which should never happen but I guess the stress of asking people what they fucking want on their sandwich was too fucking much. Secondly what happened was one of my classmates "Corey" decided to take over the bread station and hold up my other classmate P2 to just holding bread and talking to her about the order. If she made some room they could have made two sandwiches at the same time. If they thought out a bit clearly they might have actually not messed up the order of the bills and gotten their shit together. I was pretty frazzled a bit myself and I admit I could have taken up the slack a bit more as well. However when it came down to it we all failed from lack of communication.

There were sandwiches being made for the wrong plate, bills were not taken down when they should have been and ultimately we were wasting so much effort into making so little it felt like I was in a yard full of headless chickens. I told this to Corey and she talked back...big time. I expected it, not the complete earful that I got but it was so typical of her to run off gather her thoughts and return on the offensive to tell me off. The worst thing is her idea of pulling rank. One of the worst things in a kitchen is called "crossover" That is when on the production line, a cook goes behind or in front of another cook on the line in order to grab something or perform some duty. That is just inefficient and even worst dangerous because do it just at the wrong time and you could get burned, stabbed or worst. I brought this up and she talked about working in a bar where that type of stuff occurs.

I'm sure that she was probably a good bartender or her years of experience makes some sort of sense. However the problem with experience in a kitchen is that most of the time...it boils down to how the kitchen is run or feels and what the chef fucking wants. Now I don't claim that I should be the leader of this group of amateurs. But I will *not* ever pull rank on someone on my experience alone. What I only know is experience doesn't mean SHIT if it doesn't apply to the current situation and environment. Why should Corey's experience in a fucking bar even matter when my experience in a kitchen is just as equally useless? Corey we have to work here...NOW...not at whatever bar you poured drinks for. Not for the kitchen I work for. Our egos shouldn't exist because when you base your performance on that...then you only perform because of that. Not because of our kitchen.