aGreatChef.com Blog – Food Blog of Chef Robert Conaway

When the days are long and blend seamlessly into night is when I think back to times long ago. This evening, on the edge of the holiday season I looked back to Lark Creek Inn, where I worked when I was a noob…yes, I was there at one time.

One night back in the early ’90’s I was working the roasting station. Working the roasting station was a job of repetition. First, put 10+ pounds of red potatoes into a stock pot and get them working to a boil, next butcher the chickens. Remove the backbones, season, sear and then into the oven. Then the green beans, snap, blanch and shock to cool down. Pick the stems off the spinach, carefully brush the forest floor off the newly delivered Chanterelle mushrooms, make the sage dumpling batter. Some of the tasks like the mashed potatoes were a daily chore, others like the dumplings were not, a part that we as cooks looked forward to eagerly as we never really knew what the daily specials would be until we arrived. As we quickly learned, sometimes it is not what special creation you can coax out of your head that people will remember, but cooking an everyday item to perfection.

And so it goes, another night at Lark Creek. Ron Boyd on grill, Lindsay Bonner in the partry, Jeff on saute, me on roast, John Mitchell as our sous. Another busy service with the usual array of Marinites and splattering of some well known guests. Linda Ronstadt was recording an album, so her recording crew + Dolly Parton were in house. Mr. Cub Ernie Banks eating at the bar, and I am sure many many more that I do not remember were there too. One of the pluses of working the wood burning oven was that it was in the dining room, so you could experience the nightly spectacle, tonight was not my night to do so, I just working away in the back.

With the noise and chaos of a kitchen one filters out every sound except that of the printer. The printer is the lifeline of any restaurant, as it is your communication with your servers and it doubles as a scribble pad when they inevitably make a mistake and have to come back and offer along winded explanation of why they hit the wrong button. Filtering…oh what a joy! So all a cooks focus is on the sound of the little black box that spits our orders, sometimes sporadically, sometimes incessantly. It is the sound one always hears, besides the voice of your chef. Your chef or sous calls out the orders, and you respond by calling it back. So John calls an order and I laugh and then question, do you really want a platter of mashed potatoes? I was kinda bewildered, who in their right mind would eat almost 5 pounds of mashed potatoes, I mean I know they are good, cause I made them but really, a platter? Just as I was going to question, and as we were kinda chuckling about it the server ran back into the kitchen to explain ‘they are for Dolly Parton’s table”.

So now this is serious. This was one of the first times that I got nervous as a cook. Would she like them, are they seasoned, why so many. It never dawned on me that she had already had the potatoes with dinner. So the potato spectacle passes and we finish up dinner service without a hitch. Now come breakdown. Those who cook professionally know this time, the time between service and having a cold beer or drink of choice. This time if you have kept your uniform clean was the time that it would get dirty. Cleaning the stoves, the hood, the stainless and the floor are all part of breakdown and finding that beer. A server comes back and asked John a question we all can’t help but hear, Dolly would like to meet the kitchen. We all look at ourselves and wonder why. We looked like we had just come out of a war zone, filthy, smelly and just run down. So how do you say no…

5 minutes pass and Dolly enters the kitchen. For those who have not met her, she is awesome. proper, thankful and down to earth, someone who you can actually talk to one on one. So, it seems that I had made the best mashed potatoes she had ever had. She asked who made them and I came forward. I am, contrary to what anyone says, a quiet and somewhat shy person by nature, especially when it comes to people I do not know. I own up to the potatoes, make a funny about being from soCal and so on. As we leave the restaurant 20 minutes later we hear the Ronstadt people ranting about the food, the service and those mashed potatoes. Then comes the well deserved cold beer down the street, mmmm……

Some time later I find myself in Chicago, having a birthday dinner at Charlie Trotters. A friend offers up a wrapped box as a gift and I eagerly open it, who doesn’t love an unexpected present! In the box was a picture frame, and in that frame was a photo of Dolly, signed and mentioning the mashed potatoes. Amazing, and now I am wondering how the heck he got this (click here to see it). No matter, he had it, I now have it and know that there will be other days like this, where a moment in time, a chance encounter can and will set you on a path yet imagined, as long as you pay attention to those little details or in this case those tasty mashed potatoes.

chefRob