Woolworths_Taste_July_2017

#TASTESLIKEMORE
CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’
Food always brings people together says former chef Ilana
Sharlin Stone, feeling a pang of nostalgia for the staff breakfasts she
shared in LA kitchens with her Latino “family” of waiters and chefs
PHOTOGRAPH JAN RAS PRODUCTION HANNAH LEWRY
44
Recently, I’ve become a morning
coffee fly at Foxcroft Bakery, located
inside Foxcroft Restaurant in Constantia.
You’ll often find me there before 10 am,
drinking my Americano (my country
of origin and drink of choice) at a table
with a view of the restaurant’s inner
workings, a view that’s slightly obscured
by the hanging chorizos and bresaolas
in the glassed-in charcuterie room,
and shelves of Foxcroft-made merch:
flavoured salts, poached quinces and
other edible goodies.
Sure, I love the coffee (Tribe) and
the occasional flaky pastry I give myself
permission to devour, but to me the
greatest attraction is the morning
restaurant kitchen vibe, which injects me
Find Ilana’s recipe for transformative LA kitchen
huevos at taste.co.za.
with a dose of pure sunshine nostalgia.
The sounds and smells of prep work,
charcuterie and patisserie in progress,
and the sight of smiling chefs balancing
whole fish on trays as they make their
way upstairs from the basement to the
line, really peel away the layers. They take
me back to before I left the chef business,
and long before I moved from one CA
(California) to another: Cape Town. Back to
what was my happy place for many years.
In a kitchen, the beginning of the day
shift is the magic hour. Before the pressure
of service. While everybody is quietly
doing their thing. When the only sounds
are the happy buzz of knifework, mixers,
food processors, occasional chit-chat and
a distant espresso machine; and in some
kitchens, music. In Californian kitchens,
Latin music from local Spanish-language
radio stations was blasted before service
by food-speckled, beat-up tinny
radios. The songs, mostly from
south of the border, were a mix
of guitar-driven, wrist-slashing
ballads and get-up-and-party
salsa, and they were interspersed
with cheesy adverts for hit-andrun
accident lawyers and the
news, delivered en Español
at la velocidad de la luz (the
speed of light).
In the LA and San Francisco
restaurants where I worked, many
employees were Latino. This
meant predominantly Mexican,
but also Guatemalan, Ecuadorian
and Salvadoran. All spoke
Spanish, and anywhere from very
little to fluent English. Working
side by side, I tried to expand my
command of Español, which was
limited to one year of high-school
Spanish and the kitchen Spanish
I’d picked up on the job. I could
say lechuga for lettuce, ostras for
oysters, bien cocido for well done
(as in steak), caserolas limpias,
por favor for “Clean pans, please”,
“THESE HUEVOS
(EGGS) ARE A KICK-
ASS BREAKFAST AND
WAY TO START THE
DAY. IT’S ALSO A DISH
THAT MAKES ME BRIM
WITH GRATITUDE”
and chingadera, a too-rude-to-be-literallytranslated
word for whatchamacallit, used
when a word or name of an item eludes you.
Besides this useful vocabulary, I learned
the proper method for shaping and
wrapping tamales in corn husks, that the
inner translucent skin of an onion, when
applied to a hectic finger cut, could stop
the bleeding, and that the Latino men
I worked with were sending much of their
earnings back to their wives and children
in their home countries.
In the morning, this mix of cultures all
regularly converged into a Latino hybrid
staff breakfast concoction of scrambled
eggs with sautéed onion, tomato, cilantro
(coriander), avocado and hot sauce,
piled into fresh corn tortillas, consumed
communally an hour or two after the shift
started. It was a no-brainer to make, yet
transformative to eat.
Just as it’s impossible to be unhappy
when you’re working in the kitchen doing
something you love, there’s no way you
can’t have a big smile on your face when
eating these huevos (eggs). A kick-ass
breakfast and way to start the day, it’s also
a dish that makes me brim with gratitude,
to have experienced the commitment,
camaraderie and teamwork of chefs from
many places. We’ve shared so much more
than huevos. W
Ilana Sharlin Stone is a Cape-based freelance writer.
Find her online at findingumami.capetown
PORTRAIT SIMONA STONE FOOD ASSISTANT CAMILLA REINHOLD