What do you mean the fridge isn’t working?!?

I was Chef de Cuisine at this restaurant In Montreal where I was finally finding my groove. We had a great team and we were elevating dishes everyday. Coming up on the weekend, we were mostly ahead of our MEP. I had some rabbits to prep, nothing major. It’s about noon when I’m chatting with one of the owners about how our Montreal Canadiens are doing, which was not great at the time. Things were good.

I walk over to my station, grab my clip board of lists to make sure I'm not forgetting anything and open my fridge to get started. And it is hot. I mean, it’s so hot I feel like I should be having cocktails on the beach inside it hot. The room does that thing in movies where the camera focuses in fast on the main character’s face, in silence, with everything around them fuzzy.

This is everything. Multiple sauces, portioned steaks and fish, rabbits to prep, deboned and marinating quails. We only have a small fridge for everyone to share so each station kept most of its prep "en place". There aren't really any back ups. It's starting over. Starting EVERYTHING over. I didn't know if we could open.

I walk back into the dining room, coffee and sports teams long forgotten, and quickly turn everyone's smiles into shocked, open mouths. The Chef looks at me and says.

"Ok. I know this is bad, but what do we need?"

"We need everything! I don't even know where to start! It's days if not weeks of work, all gone!"

"Ok. Let’s take a breath outside and talk about it."

We step outside to fight some garbage and recycling bins that are clearly at fault for my broken fridge. After about 15 minutes of that, the Chef says to me:

"Do you think we can open tonight?"

"I don't know. Maybe? I don't know…I don't think so. Maybe? Let me see if I can figure it out."

I walk back in, see my team's shocked faces, looking to me for answers.

"What do we do?

What’s the plan?

Are we opening?"

"I don't know."

I grab a new prep list, start throwing things out and start marking off what we need to do to just get through tonight. I'm mumbling to myself:

"Man we’d have to debone all these quails again, it’s so popular. Maybe we just serve apps and pasta? .....”

“Ok we have some stuff in these other fridges, why are these sauces in that other fridge? Whatever.”

“Hmm if we have most of the sauces…..I could do this as a pan sauce….maybe….just maybe….”

The Chef comes over. It's about an hour at this point.

"So? What do you think? What do you need? Can we open?"

I look at the list. It's huge, but not impossible. IF we can get the ingredients.

"If we can get everything in here within an hour, we can open like normal at 5:30 pm. We'll have to do this for the next couple of days but yea, I think we can open. Here's a list of what I need. But I’ll need help."

The owners take off into the city to get what we need. We're at the end of the week so a lot of our suppliers don't deliver or they've already left for the day. I look at the team:

"I need you guys to finish only what you need for tonight. You have about an hour. Then I need your help."

Somehow all the meat, fish and extra veg show up. And it is a non-stop team effort to pull it off. I don’t think I’ve ever deboned, stuffed, rolled, wrapped and cooked rabbit saddles so fast in my life. I’m not sure quails have ever had their bones removed so quickly either. Whole Halibut? Cleaned and Portioned. Bavette? Portioned and Marinated. Are we actually going to pull this off?

We get almost everything done by the time the first table sits down. There’s a couple things we will have to do “a la minute” but 5 hours ago I didn’t think we could open the restaurant. Honestly, I'm not even really sure how we did it.

The kitchen is in this kinda chaotic good place all service long. We’re all running around but everyone is so focused on working together as a team. And the front of the house? Not a single guest could pick up on what our day was like. They were enjoying great food and wine, served to them by calm and welcoming professionals.

At the end of the service there were quite a few cocktails, glasses of wine and long hugs. "Wow. We did it." was all I could think about. An absolutely incredible team effort. Sometimes I think a lot of industry professionals think they can do it alone. But you can do so much more as a team.

Here’s a photo of me just after service, drinking a negroni inside that broken fridge. It’s not my first one and wouldn’t be my last one of the night.

What a day…