#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
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