Cook and Hold

A chapter in my life as a chef

I had been cooking in restaurants for a while when I found myself unemployed for the first time due to the closure of a business, this was the first but it wouldn’t be the last.

Soon after, I started collecting unemployment and began looking for another job. By this time I was absolutely convinced my skills were better than any other 24-year-old male out there and even if I couldn’t outperform my competitors I knew that I could outwork them.

After going on several job interviews that I may or may not have been qualified for, I was hired on the spot by an independent retirement community as a cook.

Although I had never cooked in this type of setting before I knew that I could probably do this with my eyes closed.

When I showed up for my first day, the work was as I assumed, very simple, just a few prep tasks, making a few sandwiches, and of course, a soup, like I said, very simple stuff.

My boss, who was the lead cook at the time kept saying, “We do cook and hold here”. Ok, every time he said this I was thinking, “What the hell is he talking about”?

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Cook and hold, I get the cooking part but the hold concept was foreign to me even though anything on a steam table is “hot-held” and I was familiar with that, I had never heard it put that way.

After we spent the morning making soup and sandwiches I found myself with some free time, this was a foreign concept because restaurant life is non-stop balls-to-the-wall work, unless you're a smoker then you can break just about every hour or whenever anything goes wrong….or right, thankfully I was a smoker then so….but anyway non-stop work.

During this free time, I managed to prep that evening's dinner, and the next day's lunch! My boss came back from his hour-long break and told me that I was working too fast and I needed to “pace” myself, what were we going to do for the rest of the day?

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My answer to that was, that we clean and clean some more. Needless to say, my boss didn’t like that answer very much, but once again this slowing down or pacing yourself was unheard of to me at that time, I had one speed and it was fast.

After lunch, we prepped the only thing that I hadn’t already done, dessert. Prepping dessert meant making a couple of cakes from a box as well as a glaze to go on top, I tried to slow down a bit but you probably already know how that went.

At this community, dinner was served around 4:45 PM but usually, people didn’t start rolling in there until a little after 5 o’clock. When I say rolling, very few of them were in wheelchairs but you know what I mean.

We started cooking dinner right after lunch and I don’t just mean a main course that may have required a longer cooking process, I mean everything. The 2 entrees and all of the accompanying side dishes were all cooked about 3 hours before dinner was to be served. What were we doing?!

Cook and hold is what we were doing. My young line cook brain couldn’t fathom why the hell we were cooking everything so many hours ahead of time, I was thoroughly flummoxed by this sacrilegious and utterly anti-culinarian behavior.

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According to me, everything that is cooked and served in a dining room should be cooked to order, right? Wrong!

I came to realize that this practice right here was the reason that the food in any kind of cafeteria was usually horrible, this is why all-you-can-eat buffets are substandard, and so on.

I was having a culinary revelation right there and I did not like it, it was against everything I knew at the time and I wasn’t going to cook this way….unless I wanted a paycheck that is.

Once dinner hit I had another realization. We couldn’t serve 100 seniors in under an hour if we cooked everything to order, it just wasn’t possible, and if I had tried to do that we would have been there for hours and the entire staff would have had no idea what was going on.

Not to mention the residents would be pissed!

Over time, I began to understand this cook-and-hold thing a little better, after all, I was experienced in holding prime rib in the Alto-Shaam, which certainly wasn’t cooked to order in the steakhouse I had worked prior. Neither were most of the side dishes, mashed potatoes, rice pilaf, etc.

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After that first day, I was determined to become the best at this new cook-and-hold technique. It was kind of like cooking at home for a really large family and instead of cooking to order we could do something that I call serve to preference.

Do you cook to order? This was a question that we would get from family members who would visit the community from time to time and my response was, no, we don’t cook to order, we serve to preference. It sounds like bullshit, but that is what we tried to do.

A couple of years had gone by and we had burned through three kitchen managers and the administration was asking me if I wanted to “take over” the kitchen. I said no, and then after I made a few demands and they agreed, I said yes.

In the next four years, I was able to make my vision of a kitchen where we cooked the freshest meals possible, made from scratch with real ingredients into a reality.

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It required a change in staff, hiring people with similar experience to me, and most importantly recruiting people who were willing to hear me out and make an attempt to turn that kitchen into an environment where we could foster talent and succeed in our vision.

This was my first major culinary accomplishment, it took over six years to complete my vision but we did it. It showed me that I was far more capable than I had realized and now had to move on. My work was done, for now.