If you’re a culinary student and you’re going on your internship or extra. Find the highest quality most difficult kitchen you could find and go and see if you can really do it. Day in and day out and day in and day out and day in and day out and you’ll be fine. You know you just put your head down and you work. You don’t know anything when you go into a kitchen. Take a step back and lose the ego and listen and just put your head down and work. The cream will rise to the top. One thing that people need to understand and I tell my staff all the time is you might be learning some things that you don’t like just as much as you do like and then you need to be conscious of that. Just keep your eyes open and your ears open. Cook with your ears!

Chef Jonathan Zaragoza – Birrieria Zaragoza

It sounds cliche but let the ingredients for themselves and maybe if you have a good relationship with your local butcher they may serve you some aged meat. Maybe you could ask him or her to save you some of the ground fat from their butchering and you can get a leaner meat and then fold that fat inside your burger or if they weren’t willing to give you some ground aged fat you could you could render that. Just ask him to save the scraps for you and you could render that. Then season with whatever you want. At Boeufhaus, they come out of our cast iron pans and they’re resting, we seasoned rendered beef fat with some garlic and paprika, a little bit of mustard powder, herbs and we and we sort of paint onto the meat as it’s resting. So you could render that fat and you could cook your burger in that if you wanted to use a cast iron pan. But I would mix the burger yourself and opposed to buying a preform Patty you know and just just enough to just sort of let it keep its form after you mix them you shape them into whatever size you want and then just put them in the fridge just to sort of set up and then, seems counter intuitive, then let them set out to get to a little bit more room temperature right before you grill them. But just let the product speak for itself. Really high heat and not much more over medium. For sure not over medium.

And any excited sauce that you can put the burger and the bun. You could take some of that beef fat and making an aoili out of it, or you could caramelize some onions and puree them and then fill that in, or you could make your own steak sauce. You know I like to bite into a cheeseburger and have a little bit of mayonnaise or aioli on the side of my mouth. And then you know you could make an herb butter or something intensely herby butter that you used to you know to pain on the roll as you toast it because I don’t know if I consider a burger, a burger unless the bun is toasted.

The pay inequities between the front and the back of the house. It’s just outrageous to be quite honest.

Maybe some young cooks don’t really know what it takes. They see the stuff on TV or they see the awards. They don’t see the day to day nitty gritty.

Just keep your eyes and your ears open. Cook with your ears! Pay attention to what’s going on around you. There are opportunities to learn at every corner in a restaurant.

Chef Brian Ahern

Boeufhaus

Boeufhaus

Chef David Burke

Chef Michael Pirolo

Lilia restaurant

Elske restaurant

Rootstock restaurant

Sportsman’s Club

Toons Bar & Grill