My Experience as a Chef Apprentice

    Perhaps this is my most disappointing day when I learned the fact that my NZ L5 Cookery diploma can't beat a NZ L4 young student!

    I just walked out of my ex-chef school, met a young girl who has not even finished her NZ L4 cookery course, but after she just finished her apprenticeship in a 5-star hotel in Auckland for just 10 days, she was offered a part-time job. I asked her why after I tried to work there every weekend for 3 months but the executive chef’s Filipino assistant told me there was no on trial job for me but there was a part time job for her who hasn’t even finish her L4? She told me, “Oh, must be you have a bad PR!  Because I drank beer with the bald head big boss and also my section bosses.”

   Oh Yes, what’s the use of my academic awards? What’s the use being knowledgeable? What’s the use that I could cook many countries’ cuisines at ease? What’s the use I worked so hard as an apprentice for any kitchens? What the use being serious at work?  Miss China, surely, in this case, I got bad PR than you and also, I am not as young and as voluptuous like you from the point that I was never invited to any of your so-called “staff parties!”

    What I learned from this revelation is, older chefs never like old chefs in the kitchen, unless he or she is very experienced and could be helpful. They only want young, beautiful or handsome and inexperienced chefs in the kitchen that could provoke silence chemistry to elevate their EQ so they won’t swear those F words or swear without thinking twice on an older apprentice like me!

    You deserve it, “Bald head man! You prefer young and inexperienced chefs? This is your nickname young chefs have given you, at least I have more respect for you and I didn’t realize that your head was bald! But I always remember you swore arse this and arse that on me blamed that I was too slow, rationally it was not entirely my fault at all, I was just an apprentice trying to be helpful when my CPD was missing on the action!”

    If you want to be a chef, before you attend chef school, you better learn from my mistakes that no one without an NZ PR would tell you to jeopardize their future job hunting here in NZ!

    

1. If you never have any work experience in a kitchen before, start as an FOC chef apprentice right on the first term when you attend chef school. Don’t expect to work as a paid kitchen hand or apprentice, unless you are super lucky, you are a white, Asian speak perfect kiwi accent, Pasifika or you have a boyfriend who is a white boy. If you worked as an FOC apprentice, as long as you were not suspected by the management that you planned to steal their recipe, you should feel lucky. That’s my first apprentice experience in Mt. Eden, I was being treated as a recipe thief suspect by the management just because I asked the CPD too many questions. My chef tutor called their head chef to book the work experience appointment for me, it was actually the head chef’s off day, I only found that out after waited there for more than an hour before started to work. After 5 hours, the management got paranoid if I was a spy! When I went to the second café in the same area to work, as the first café wasted my whole week work experience break, I requested to work for ten hours a day, I worked very hard, the head chef was not the owner of the restaurant, there was a CCTV, the Asian boss knew there was an apprentice, but there was never a meal provided for me no matter how hard I worked, I remember the café was always busy, during some of the days I worked none stop and I didn’t know I was entitled to have a break. When I returned to chef school after the break, I was the only apprentice who was abused obviously, the rest of my classmates were all bragging how well they were treated by the hotel, café or restaurant’s head chefs or owners. I took a look at the mirror, I didn’t swear in the kitchen, didn’t mess up their prep food, didn’t break a single plate or cup, didn’t show my tantrum, didn’t cut myself. According to how I was treated perhaps due to my lacked confidence look caused by other reason, I wonder if New Zealand will be the last stop of my continuous sojourn, oh Lord, I am getting tired of moving, where will be my permanent home on earth?

    

2. I would advise ones to seek an apprenticeship in a hotel or large scale catering company, where you will be exposed and learn to handle more commercial equipment,  but if you work in a café, you won’t be able to see equipment that you could find in a large hotel’s commercial kitchen. But in another word, if you work in a cafe, you probably will have the opportunity to get involved in cooking faster than a hotel.

3. If you work in a hotel as an appreciate, again start right in the first term when you attend chef school since all chefs in the hotel kitchen will think all apprentice knows nothing, it’s very hurting when you already finish your level 5, yet they treated you like you didn’t know anything. Again, don’t expect the hotel to employ an Asian unless the boss is your chef tutor’s buddy friend. As now most hotels in New Zealand are “infested” with Asian chefs, and if these stereotype Asian chefs are God damn talented, good and studied hard enough for their culinary interest, I wouldn’t have such bad experience like what I mentioned in this article.

4. Working in a hotel environment, no chef there will treat you as a friend from day 1 to day last, as an apprentice if a CPD asked you to do something, but the minute another higher-ranking chef walked in to ask you do something, you just say yes chef, if you told him CPD asked you to do it this way, he would ask you sternly, “Who is the boss?” I had been confronted twice in this manner, eventually, I learned that’s the big kitchen hierarchy game went on probably since the 19^th century, everyone wants a change but not those who could exercise authority!!!

5. As an apprentice, your CPD just told you to prepare the food, you better don’t ask too many questions, I learned a lesson from my first apprentice’s rule 1: Don’t ask too many questions, or else someone might think you want to steal their recipes! Most of the time, they won’t tell you what’s the time you had to finish the prep or how many people the food was going to serve to. It happened once when my CPD left, and I just got my ingredients and serving plate less than 2 minutes ago, and a waitress was waiting next to the door. Again, it was my mistake, as an apprentice, you shouldn’t act as a busybody and being too helpful! Rule 2: Mind your own business because you are an apprentice, forget about the “be initiative rule!” I tried to be helpful when CPD was not around, so I went to look for his big boss. Immediately, I got bombarded that I was slow with the food that I actually just started to plate. It’s definitely not nice when you had a head chef who acted like a barbarian who started to swear at you %&*&$## ass this and ass that, except Fuck not coming out from his mouth yet, again he asked me, “Who is the boss?” I was not paid sir to work for your institution, so you are not my boss unless my status as an FOC chef apprentice is slavery-like here in NZ! In short, anything you did before was quick and efficient, they would keep quiet, that's their silence approval.

6. As an FOC apprentice, nobody cares about your background, immediately what it came to their mind was “you have no experience!” I personally saw them how slow they tried to roll some small roses, I remember I was being scolded unreasonably as a slow apprentice, could I mock at all of them were really slow? After an hour, I saw less than 20 small roses on the small bowls, where two most experienced chefs were trusting on a Japanese CPD, they let an artist-in -resident who stood beside them slipped off. Also, as an apprentice, they won’t trust your taste buds, even the minute you looked at the food they prepared, you could tell what’s wrong with it, although you have a very good taste buds, surely you had eaten more gourmet food, but as an apprentice, they would ask you to do plating only. Remember the rule 3: This is what will happen if you work in the hotel, they take hierarchy too seriously. They wouldn’t make friends with any apprentice if they targeting their future within the same kitchen wall unless they wanted to "drink beer" with you! My Burmese buddy can’t cook very well, but she is raised in a most notable Burmese family. She never needed to cook, but she has developed very good taste buds, she only could prepare a limited dish, but the taste was simply awesome, that’s how I learned taste buds has to be cultivated under prolonged exposure to gourmet food, thus one knows what the best taste of an ingredient should suppose to taste like. If a head chef could decide an apprentice has no good taste buds due to he/she has no work experience, I know that I would waste my time in this kind of environment, with my past experience in other arena was being treated like rubbish.

7. As an apprentice in hotel, I was asked by a Pasifika CPD if I knew what was called al dente, I almost wanted to reply her that I ate al dente pasta even before she was born. I was the one who asked my CPD if the pasta had to be cooked al dente, yet after she heard it she still asked me if I knew what was al dente? Is really stereotype Asian apprentice looked so dumb to her just because our English carried Asian accent? Does English carried Asian accent could lower a class for an Asian?

8. Acquire your apprenticeship as early as possible, never expected your chef tutor to arrange the apprenticeship job for you, unless you were lucky like me when my L5 chef tutor put me for a month to work and got paid in his catering business for work experience which he thought would be good for me. It was the first time I got paid to work as a chef assistant or apprentice here in New Zealand.

9. Don’t let some café to take your advantage.  I was asked me to go for an interview after I worked as a kitchen hand for 5 hours --- only washing dishes and prep jobs, then the minute the two foreign chefs found out I am an NZ PR, they asked you to pack and go. I was told they would call me, but I never heard from them anymore. WINZ would pay me if I don’t have work, I could read their minds! Also I learned that if you had chef school school certificate, you know what is called D4, but these "experienced" chefs who snubbed at you actually didn't know what was called D4, and when they asked you to cut julienne they expected the baton size!

10. I was the best student from level 4 to level 5 chef courses in both practical and theory, but if I was placed in a commercial kitchen, Asian chefs would even look at me really like a third-class citizen, they really thought I didn’t know anything, I learned a fact of life, if they were once a real lousy apprentice, they would think the rest of the apprentice must be as innocence and as lousy as them. Some of them would ask me why I would choose to become a chef as I didn’t need an NZ PR, but they needed NZ PR that’s the reason they became a chef. I did two things recently that I never regret in life, one is attending chef school. I don’t care what the stereotype looking at me that I got no experience, the time I spent in kitchen since a child was not summed up, but if a chef who never even cooked a meal when he was young, if they started to work in a café even without attending any chef school, such working experience would be summed up as working experience, then why there is a point of opening a chef school? Before I attending chef school, I went to look for a kitchen hand job as my sister suggested but they told me they wanted a chef, then when I completed chef training, they told me they didn’t want an inexperienced chef. The fact is: If they don’t want to employ you, they could give you 100 excuses. You better be smart enough don’t believe anything they told you, they don’t owe you anything, thus they were not obliged, to be honest with you.

   11. Apprentice is the lowest ranking in a commercial kitchen, not even a chef yet, Asian chefs would love to see apprentice so that they would have a free maid to boss around, they simply love to act like a boss. But I found out European chefs wouldn’t treat me like a maid, they would clean their own work bench or just asked you to clean your own space, if I saw that one of them was busy, when I cleaned it for him, he would say thank you to me, but most Asian chefs would expect you clean out the whole area but they never said a thank you for the work you assisted them, I am very sure if I was not there, they had to do the cleaning themselves. My most humiliating experience working as an apprentice for such a 5-star hotel was suddenly a Korean CPD jumped over from her working bench to tell me off that I was lazy all because when I cleaned the working bench, I didn't dare to move the prep food done by other chefs left on the working bench, so I thought of cleaning a section first, then move the food to the cleaned section of bench. I tried to explain to her that I was not lazy, instead, she said that I shouldn't "argue" with her as an "apprentice", she told me I had to apologize and always replied, "Yes chef!" if this was the case happened! She was the only Asian female chef dared to yell loudly in a usually quiet 5-star hotel kitchen, so as an apprentice, you would be the bullied victim for this kind of moody low EQ barbaric chef! Then another Japanese snobbish chef would give me a food safety education lecture whenever he found a chance. And I personally saw how he took up the D4 sprayed openly on the work bench and how its mist moved to other prep food on nearby benches! I bet I have an extra food safety certificate than him!

   12. Like the young apprentice, be a big flirt obviously could get you a job in the kitchen if your old bosses preferred a kitchen with fashion models walking around with chef uniforms but in a young version! If you are over 40 years old, please go for plastic surgery and please don’t tell anyone about it, or else they will call you as a plastic doll!

    13. Although I love the weather, environment, stabilized economic and politics of NZ, I want to do something for the good of this country, but when I write to this point, I felt very sad as an older Asian starts all over resided in NZ, I felt the general foreigners and Kiwis’ CQ are still very low. I remember there was a barely 18 or 19-year-old Kiwi girl in class, she really thought she could cook better than anyone of her foreign classmates, she asked me to grill a thin salmon medallion under the salamander for 20 minutes, when I returned less than 10 minutes, she was mad at me, and she turned every piece of the medallion checking the base to see if they were cooked. At the end, among the 4 teams in the class, the rest of the 3 teams' salmon were all overcooked, except our team’s salmon was almost overcooked! And during the cooking preparation time, she didn't agree with the ingredient amount I suggested, she asked me, “Do you know how much is 100g of mint?” Dude yes, it is a lot, but are you going to throw in all the stem to prepare the sauce? I tried not to provoke conflict, just let her decided what she wanted, at the end the sauce supposedly was green ended up was pale whitish green. Do I have to blow my trumpet that if I didn’t sell more than 2000kg NZ air-flown salmon before, at least I had the experience to sell more than 1000kg of NZ air-flown salmon before I attended chef school. Normally, I could estimate the weight of a salmon by a look at it. I remember first time I worked as an apprentice in a hotel, its pastry chef was counting the desserts, she treated all apprentice like pests and was yelling at all apprentice when blocking her way (all apprentices were doing the plating) while she was counting, I wonder if she chose to yell, why didn’t she just say, “Excuse me!” By right, nobody would like to block her way if she was doing her counting. We didn’t even mind to help her if she was nice and friendly enough, so I learned one more thing, these senior chefs never trust any apprentice, they only trust ranking! Also, I found out that low EQ people whenever they got a little busy, they started to scream, regardless in what profession they engaged! All because they are not capable enough to handle something more than in their head. The best to test a person's capability is during the busiest time.

   14. If you are Asian, start young in chef school and start young in any commercial kitchen.  If you are old, you are a natural loser first to go interview as a chef or even work as an apprentice, because no one in the kitchen will invite you for any staff party, they won’t even mention in front of you that there would be a staff party!

    15. Another experience I got in NZ was during my L4, there was a chefs’ headhunter came in our class trying to look for part time jobs for everyone, he found jobs for everyone he signed up, except not me even I tried to email and SMS him many times. When he saw my fashionable young Indian classmate, he said in front of the whole class, “I like your look, you are what a restaurant wants!” So, I don’t have a look, I don’t have the character, I don’t have the style, I am too old, I am too inexperienced, that’s why I was not being employed? I got the outstanding culinary school results, I was never sick once during my two years’ chef course, I can cook more dishes and better than average chefs, I can speak English better than most Asian, I know western food better than most people because I studied in Europe, studied and worked in British colonized countries, studied in the USA before, and I am still not good enough than an L4 still in school student who was offered a part-time job by a 5-star hotel? Please don’t tell me there are not enough chefs in NZ, perhaps you should consider why executive chefs in 5-star hotels rather want to recruit European culinary school graduated chefs than NZ homegrown chefs! If you don’t believe me, please go to the immigration office and WINZ take a peek! 

16. Lastly, if you ask me if there is racial discrimination happens in NZ chef scene, I will tell you my personal experience, I know an executive chef of a hotel towards the end of my NZ L5 Cookery study, I asked him if he wanted to employ me, he asked me sternly, "What is the reason you think I should employ you?" Just a month later there was a white Kiwi girl from L4 was employed by him, and she was still a student. Also, as an apprentice, I was asked by a European executive chef that if I knew what was called portioning and tested me if I knew how venison looked like. Is NZ L5 cookery diploma is such a low standard to provoke such an executive chef asked me this kind of questions? Or because I am an Asian girl, so these senior European or Kiwi chefs really thought I didn't know anything about western food even I had completed my NZ L5 Cookery Diploma?