Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I was starting to settle in, I was working under Michi in Patisserie. There was a routine: start the day by running all the homemade ice cream through the pacojet machine. We would look through the fridge and make sure everything was less than three days old. If it was more, it went out as Trax’l (a sweet amuse sized dessert composed of two or three different things) sent to our traditional restaurant with the check. Each station had about three hours to mise em place before lunch service began on the average day.

I was focusing on the little accomplishments, since ice cream scoopers were forbidden to be used, it took quite some time before I was able to make a passable Quenelle. One of the tricks that got drilled into my mind was to always use a good shaped…