The Big Sort: 8 - Dolmas
Istanbul Modern
Russian Hill, San Francisco
2018.03
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I used to call myself a foodie.
I'd go to restaurants and make comments like:
Too salty. Pretty unremarkable.
How are they charging $28 for this main? So not worth it.
If this were in Japan, they wouldn’t have a star.
In other words, as my friend Eric put it, I was a snob.
That all changed when I spent a few days with Laura and Sayat, who were running an Eastern Mediterranean popup restaurant in Russian Hill. I’d romanticized professional cooking and was curious to see what it was like behind the scenes. They protected my idyllic image by letting me do all the fun stuff: going around with a tasting spoon, julienning carrots, blowtorching wood chips in service pans to smoke yoghurt, supreming oranges, rolling rice stuffing in grapeleaves.
But what surprised me more than my incompetence was that it turned out to be an operational beast. They were doing pop up dinners 2 times a week as well as brunch on Sundays. They had 1 person help with prep, and then another show up for service, but did everything else themselves. For dinner, they were serving 4 courses, beginning with a mezze starter of 5 different plates.
To translate it in corporate terms, it was like running 8 waterfall projects with different scope and pace in parallel that all needed to finish in a 1 hour window with changing team members throughout the day.
Except there were only 2 portable induction hobs.
And they only had the exact number of simit sesame bread and portion of meat for the guests count so there was zero margin of error.
And it took one person to announce, “Um, excuse me? I’m vegan,” to throw the flow into chaos.
After that, I swore that I would never eat ungratefully again, and I would certainly never go vegan.