What I Learned Staging at Canlis

I just finished up a two week stint as a stage (intern) at Canlis, Seattle's landmark fine dining restaurant. Chef Franey was incredibly generous to let me spend time in his kitchen; Patrick, Stacy and Jin showed me the ropes on garde manger, and every single person including third-generation owners Brian and Mark Canlis, the sous chefs, cooks, pastry chefs, captains and servers, food runners and dishwashers were kind, fun, professional and just altogether great to spend time with.

After I worked at Cafe Flora for a few months, I wrote a post summarizing what I learned. I thought I would do the same as I leave Canlis.

Fine dining is an altogether different beast; that is probably the single biggest thing I got through my thick skull. At a normal restaurant, you should reasonably expect a tasty, well prepared meal in a pleasant environment. The food will probably be something that a good home cook could manage, but the cooking and cleaning will be done for you and someone will bring it to you with a smile. 

At a fine dining restaurant, the goal is perfection. Nature is taken apart, idealized, and put back together as if there really was a god that micro-managed every leaf and drop of sauce. Very few home cooks have the equipment, ingredients, patience or skill to make this level of food. In the dining room, your every need is anticipated and met. For a few hours, you get to feel like the most important person in the world, with every care lifted away. At Canlis, the valet even makes your car re-appear magically when you get up from the table, without even having to ask for it or present a ticket. They just know which one is yours.

Based on what I saw at Cafe Flora, I'd estimate that there are about 15-20 kitchen-minutes of labor invested in prep and final cooking per diner served. Not so different from home, where one person cooking for an hour can make a nice meal for four people. At Canlis, I'd guess it is about 5 times that much labor. These are just back-of-the envelope guesses, but I bet the ratio is about right. So you can see why a fine dining meal costs as much as it does. One kind of restaurant isn't fundamentally better than the other. They are just different. One is utilitarian, the other utopian.

Many of the prep jobs at Canlis require a lot of precision. For example, on the Restaurant Week menu is a smoked cauliflower soup. One of the garnishes is three little flat squares of cucumber with the skin on, 1/2" by 1/2", and about 1/4" thick. They all have to be identically sized and precisely square, and lie flat. It isn't the easiest thing in the world to transform an unruly cylinder into perfect squares. The first time I needed to make 100 orders (300 pieces), it took me 2