Welcome to The Chef Apprentice. For at least the next six months, this blog will provide an intimate portrait of life inside a restaurant kitchen, seen through the eyes of a novice. On April 1, I started interning at Oliveto, an Italian restaurant in the Rockridge neighborhood of Oakland.A recap of my first few days in the kitchen ran today in The Bee's Food and Wine section. You can also find a copy of it in the entry below. The Bee's Carl Costas also produced a superb slide show of life within the kitchen. You can find it here.
Along with chronicling my trials and errors, I plan to profile the chefs and employees at Oliveto and the farmers who supply the restaurant. I also will offer regular cooking tips from the pros, and recipes that are suitable to home chefs, such as myself.
This is going to be a wild and unpredictable journey. I hope you'll join me on it, five days a week. Send me your thoughts and questions. When I'm not chopping, stirring, cooking and sweating, I'll answer them as promptly as I can.
