Creativity

This is a very personal post (again) BUT

We are in the midst of a massive pandemic and shutdown of most of the restaurants in Philadelphia, including my day job. Unfortunately,my conscience won't allow me to book private dinners either, so I'm without work! For the first time in my adult life!

For people like me who have solely worked in restaurants since their first job and done a great deal of it in fine dining, this kind of free time is extremely weird. I'm used to 12 hour days, 5 days a week, being too tired on one of my days off to do anything but sleep and eat, and generally rushing to catch up with pretty much every aspect of life outside of work. That's not a complaint, that's just the life of anyone who works in fine dining. We work from noon to 11:30 and spend all day rushing to complete a dozen projects that must be absolutely perfect in every respect.

So this leisurely life is different. Waking up at noon,doing whatever I want, eating what I want (at any time i want!) But more better than the rest, is the time for creativity. For someone like me, even though you all see my post beautiful food all the time, I rarely have time to work on my personal food. It might take me a week to make 3 components for a dish and then another week to have time to sit down and really taste it, and another week to revise it, and then another week to figure out how I want to plate it, and then another week to have time to photograph it. It honestly annoys me haha. I have a thousand ideas for food going through my head all the time. New dishes. New sauces, component ideas. Things to improve. I might have time to do ONE thing a week.

In the time of quarantine i've had time to work on over a dozen new dishes and revise a bunch more. I hate to admit that actually working in restaurants hinders my creativity but, honestly, the kind of food i want to make isn't food I can learn about from anyone. A lot of my ideas are unfortunately, kind of original. So I have to do research and test and do math to figure out how to make the food I want to make , and unfortunately, there's not a lot of time to do that in a 60+ hour work week.

I think constantly of quitting cooking so I can have time to do the thing I really want to do: cook. I wanna cook and i can't while I'm cooking for a living lol. Because as nice as many of the places I've worked at, either they were very progressive but not vegan, or they were vegan and not trying to make contemporary food or push the limits. Some day I'll have my own spot, hopefully. Hopefully.