***SPOILERS***

I have a slightly different take than Jay and Beth and it comes from having worked in a commercial kitchen setting - both at culinary school and during my internship.

Culinary school involved preparing and serving food for various functions at the school including receptions for graduating classes that occured every eight weeks. If I remember correctly, we prepared food for about 300 people for these graduation functions.

My internship was a month at Young Life camp where I was an AM cook (breakfast and lunch) and we prepared meals for up to 400 people everyday. This was not cafeteria food, but very good food that was served family style to the tables of campers and camp staff in our dining hall. My parents and the Cooties can attest to the quality of the food and the service in this camp setting.

I was middle management of a sort while I was there. I served under the Food Service Manager and the two sous chefs (one was the AM sous, the other was the PM sous). I was sort of like an assistant sous chef with the volunteer college (2 people) and high school kids (we had 5 for the AM shift; PM had more because their food was more complicated) as the line cooks. Not that I didn’t do my share of cooking on the line - we all did. However, for one week of the month, the two sous chefs were away from camp and I was the AM sous chef for that week - I learned quickly how important it is to have and be a good leader in the kitchen when guests are counting on delicious food served all at the same time because of our tight program schedule each day.

We had the same menu each week, but the change ups came with the random number of vegetarians and food allergies we got with each new group of campers. As such we had to accommodate those special needs with each meal, depending on what was to be served. Also, the AM cooks had to prepare the breakfast kits for what we called the “canoe breakfast” - leaders would sign up their cabins for canoe breakfast, which meant that they would canoe out to a remote spot on the camp property where college volunteers would prepare a great campfire breakfast for this small group. We had to make sure we had enough food for each group every morning (they were never the same size) and we had to make sure we have enough hot beverages if it was a cold morning, too.

So our mornings started anywhere between 4:30-5:00am, depending on when breakfast was to be served that day. Breakfast was different each day - pancakes, French toast, breakfast pizza, scrambled eggs, Egg McSaranacs; each served with sausage or bacon, hash browns, fruit, cereal preset on the tables. There’s nothing more tedious than standing at the griddle for two hours flipping pancakes or French toast. I would go back to my room reeking of breakfast.

Then came lunch. No kidding, as soon as breakfast was done we started work on lunch. We worked on that until about 11:00am when the PM cooks would come on shift and they would take that over. At that point we would start prepping for the next day’s breakfast. For French toast and pancakes, that meant making the custard and the batter. Do you know how many eggs go into a custard for French toast for 400 people? A lot. We would have two people cracking eggs for about 90 minutes. Everyday we cracked huge quantities of eggs. We would prepare the bacon or sausage onto sheet pans so that all we had to do in the morning was slide them into the ovens. The potatoes were always made from leftovers from dinner the night before - we would dice them, mix them with peppers and have them ready for the griddle in the morning. Breakfast pizzas meant thawing the pizza crusts overnight. French toast meant cutting the Texas toast slices in half to let them get stale overnight. And also prepping the canoe breakfast pizza stuff, which meant more eggs, potatoes, meat in a separate storage area. On a good day we were done prepping by 2:30. On bad days it took until 3:30. Doesn’t seem that late until you remember that we’ve been working since 5am.

OK, all that to get to my perspective of the happenings on Monday’s HK episode. I think Keith got a bad rap when he was expediting. Sure he could have been stronger in his orders to Virginia and Heather, but I don’t think you need to shout to be heard or to berate like Gordon does to get results. In my experience, the week that I was the leader in the kitchen was our best week in production and it all came down to leadership differences between our regular sous chef, who was a bit gruff, and I, who was firm but kinder. The kids all told me that they loved working for me that week and wished I could be their boss for the last week. In that week things ran smoother than they had the previous two weeks - there was no bickering, they were focused on their tasks, they were motivated, and we were able to end most days early because of that.

That said, I do think that Virginia did very well at expediting and she deserved to stay over Keith for her great performances at that stage. But overall I think that Keith is still the better chef of the two.

Who do I think will win HK2? I have no clue - it’s a complete toss up.