From a Happy Gourmet to a Frustrated Restaurant Cook

We started getting busy at Zelis Ciftligi in Sapanca on Friday. Shopping at the Friday market, serving dinner, doing prep for the Saturday morning baking and prep for the meze we would be serving on the weekend. Then the weekend when my day kicked off with 7 am baking, orchestrating the buffet preparation, then making staff lunch, then mid-term cleaning, skyping with my sister and parents, prep for dinner, serving dinner, cleaning up and closing down around 11 pm. On Sunday when I brought to anne - still in quarantine after her cancer treatment - a piece of wonderfully moist chocolate cake I baked that morning she said, “This is the first time I left the kitchen for so long and I am so relaxed”. And I have never been more exhausted.

On Sunday as I tidied up the kitchen after the brunch buffet and staff lunch I walked in our veranda, an Ottoman styled tent, where we spread old curtains on the flour to dry tarhana - soup of fermented dough. Tiptoeing not to step on the fine grounds of the dried soup I walked to a low divan, long soft seat pressed against the wall, grabbed two pillows and curled. To the sounds of cars passing the road below our property and carrying Istanbullus from their weekend houses back to the city I felt asleep.

I dimly remember I woke up once - in the middle of a dream - when a helper brought me a blanket which I rejected. And then I woke up when Özgür - very much surprised by his own discovery - found me sleeping on the veranda. I think now I was dreaming of serving food to indefinite number of known and unknown people. Which he brutally interrupted, “Canım, it is 7 pm, time to serve dinner to the guests”. I seemed to live that dream when you are trying to get somewhere but with all the unexpected impediments and delays don’t ever make it. It looked as if I am never going to get out of the chain of making food, plating it and then cleaning the working space. I got stuck at the kitchen without proper help as a visaless traveler gets stuck in the transit zone of an airport.

Later that night I was sitting at the kitchen before the entree service, munching a piece of leftover mücver, Turkish zucchini fritter that we serve as a hot starter for dinner and purposelessly staring at a set of appetizers we prepared for the guests that have not arrived. I noticed how in the eggplant cooked in olive oil juice of cooked tomato separated from the denser olive oil indicating that the dish should have been cooked longer for the tomato juice to reduce more. With as slight relief I realize it was not me who cooked the dish. But then I eyed a pot of dolma I cooked and recalled how I - only when reminded - took it off the stove top and by doing so rescued many (but not all) stuffed green peppers from burning slightly on the bottom.

With tiredness my worries turn into a paranoia. Mainly about three things:

1) Screwing up a dish - which is next to impossible with our cooking process and scale. Because we have dogs to feed. Because I am not so bad. Because setting multiple reminders at my Ipad help.
2) Cutting myself - which, if I exclude scratching from a grater and tiny burns taking place almost every day don’t happen so often. Cutting yourself ones makes you paranoiac for a bit but you quickly forget the pain and terror.
3) Mismanaging the cost - which happens all the time anyway irrespective to my efforts. Two weeks without anne at the kitchen meant planning the menu, deciding on quantities, shopping and managing leftovers. I am sadly looking at the dishes which have passed their point of acceptable freshness and blame myself for being too optimistic about the weekend forecast. On the other hand as a restaurant you have to be prepared to serve guests at any point of time.

These fears of mine make me recall my early days as a strategy consultant when I wanted to be top performer and did not know whether my effort was sufficient. I remember how I spent a week turning 3 days of meetings into the 15 pages of notes with table of contents (which touched but mostly shocked my project manager back then). I also remember my first end-of-the-year assessment that stated the development goal of “learning to ask for help” which for any Soviet-raised kid would equal acknowledging your defeat. So here I am staring my kitchen career with the same development goals - learn to draw the line and get help (kind of hard when our helper excuses herself for deep depression and leaves us to handle the kitchen at the end-of-the-day-mess).

Yet just like in consulting my learning curve is at its steepest - there are so many things I am cooking on a given day (and many of them for the first time). Yet because of the huge volume and less help I just don’t have time to take notes to document the recipes to rely on later and reach more consistency. Instead I grow my kitchen confidence through sheer volume and learn to rely on the subtle notions of taste, texture and color rather than a on recipe. Which means I adjust salt, spices and oil as I taste. And of course sometimes there is no recipe like in the poğaca case or like last night when a recipe in the anne’s journal specified quantity of butter for 40 cookies and the rest of the ingredients for 80 which supposed to be apparent to me but it was not. But then most of the time there is some kind of critical proportions you have to keep - mostly in mind.

Excited with the learning but too tired to appreciate it I am comparing what I do in Sapanca with the effort I put and returns I get from my own venture of Istanbul cooking classes and food tours and I can’t find much rational justification to my Sapanca kitchen feats. The question I have to myself and to the world right (and I hope some of you, my readers, may have a hint) is why would anyone in their sane mind choose to work at a restaurant kitchen? Ok, our case is different - this is a family property, the place where we live and do our (lifestyle) business, it is organic development from a small B&B to a place where we serve 40-60 guests at once and maybe we just need to get enough help which reflects that growth. It is me having married a man who made the choice to step in the business started by his mother, it is me feeling I can learn a tremendous lot from her and to give back I should help. But if none of those reasons are at place I wonder how can anyone-anyone-anyone in their sane mind choose to work at a restaurant kitchen?