Dining a the Ritz

The EDR--Employee Dining Room--operates on a noxious schedule: hamburger on Saturday, meatloaf on Sunday, chicken stir fry or fajitas with chicken in barbecue sauce on Monday, sloppy joes on Tuesday, beef enchiladas on Wednesday, lasagna on Thursday, and on Friday either "steak" or beef stir fry. Side dishes consist of frozen veggies sauteed with a lot of butter and either no seasonings or a puckering amount of salt.
Sometimes, we're graced with "top shelf" food: hors d'oeuvres brought down from the private lounge or quick-grab market. These are generally fantastic--taboulli, cous cous, grilled veggie wraps, lobster croquettes, and a smattering of desserts ranging from divine cookies to tartlets that could almost stand up to those baked in the Alps, topped with gold leaf.
The only problem is that sometimes we get the chance to track our food from day to day. At least with the beef, you can pretend it's a different product from steak to burger to meatloaf to sloppy joe to beefy enchilada to "meat" lasagna. But when they do something special and it flops, we get to see it day after day wearing different disguises.
They once did a tortellini dish--tricolor tortellini with capers and chives or somesuch. It hit the top shelf and I was surprised by its quality: packaged noodles boiled in unsalted water in an ill fitting dressing. The next day, we had tortellini with red sauce on the steam line. Followed by "lasagna" made with tortellini in red sauce coated with colby jack cheese and baked until the edges crisped up. And then we had tortellini soup, and by the end of the day, the pasta was mainly dissolved into a glutinous slurry in the bottom of the tub.
Generally, the soups are the best part: whichever chef is allotted to EDR duty is given a bunch of leftovers and told to do something, so he gets to futz and tinker with the process and come up with something that tastes like someone wanted it to taste that way. (Meanwhile, the entrees bubble and rehydrate in hotel pans desperate for flavor.) But, as with the tortellini, sometimes the soups fail more spectacularly than any chef could rectify.

Last night, there was a duck and beef stew. Dubious at best, but it looked somewhere between a minestrone and a goulasch, and I had to try it. I was famished, and it had a pleasant bite with fairly discernible protein. I also had a hamburger, since it's about the last shot at EDR beef without a guaranteed caferia dash 45 minutes after eating.
Bad, bad move.
Half an hour after eating, I was running for the john. At least once every fifteen minutes. For a good three hours.
By the end of service, I was dragging in a bad way--incredibly hungry and remarkably dehydrated.

At the end of service, as I was clearing plates from the kitchen, I saw one of the cooks holding a bizarre plate: one of the large oval platters (11X17), mounded with layers of fries and a thick gravy that looked like it had shortrib in it, under a dome of melted cheese.
"That, that... um... wow."
"It's a poutine," he said. "French for serious gut bomb."
"Is that shorty with cheese?"
"Yeah, I took some shortrib, cooked it down with a little of the red wine braising sauce and thickened it with the mac n cheez stock."
My eyes got wide, and there was enough noise to cover the sounds coming from my GI tract, so I'm sure he took it as a compliment.
He scraped--ladled, maybe?--a few plates for the kitchen guys, then took the platter to the back, where floor staff dove on it like hyenas on a holstein.
Meanwhile, as I sidestepped the frenzy, I saw a supervisor hanging out with Chef, who had been off the line and working a special chef's table for some time (chef's tables being something like $200/person events at which the chef creates one-off dishes after discussing taste preference with the guests, and this particular one being a $1000 4-top, plus wine). Chef was explaining the dishes--I had just missed the salmon.
"People eat this shit up. Salmon with bacon and eggs. They know it, but they feel challenged because it's not what they're used to, it's on lacinato kale with a meyer lemon beurre blanc. It's something any one of my guys out there could cook, and who hasn't done bacon and eggs? The difference is challenging people just enough but not so much that they loose their footing."
And I stepped up in time to try the roasted quail on lentils with upland cress and foie gras, followed by fillet with a roasted potato and black truffle jus.

Generally, I'm not a fan of fillet--it's like reading a story in a 6th grade reader: pleasant and sweet but without much depth or character. Frankly, I'd rather gnaw on an old mutton joint that's been boiling with scavenged roots; it might not be my favorite flavor, but at least it has character.
But this was fantastic--it had body and texture and tasted like grass and tannic soil in a way that made me realize most beef tastes like high-protein feed product.
And black truffle jus? It could probably make dog doo taste pretty damn good.

"Chef, how did you treat the fillet? I think this is the first I've met that seemed worth knowing."
He looked at me like I was speaking nonsense.
So did my supervisor.
"Well, usually fillet has no fat, no gristle, no character, no flavor but whatever it picks up from a marinade or sauce. This wasn't, well, boring."
"Product. All I did was trim the tenderloin, hit it with Maldon salt and pepper, and grill it properly. It all goes back to the product. It doesn't matter how much truffle oil you use, if your product's shit, that's what your bottom line will be."
And somehow I recognized this as something I knew but did not want to admit without external validation.

Which really makes me wonder: when it gets around to Wednesday or Thursday and there's the hotel pan of ground beefy byproduct, would I have the wherewithal to turn it into something not just caloric but enjoyable, or would I look at the week-old ground Grade C and think, "I was told to just follow the recipe, and doing otherwise will earn another lecture for keeping costs down and not wasting product, so I'll just follow the instructions and make the appropriate motions until it's time to go home."
I'd like to think I'd rise above doctrinal mediocrity, especially when feeding my friends and colleagues, but it's hard to say with the main kitchen. Most of the guys in it are work release inmates, which is nothing surprising in the culinary world, but they're the sort who actually miss the comradeship and respect they used to get from guys a helluva lot better than any of us prettied up Ritz Carlton gentlemen.
Hmm, that's not a bad idea: guaranteed the food would improve immeasurably if the cook responsible had to share a cell with me and the aftereffects of eating EDR food. Maybe I should propose that as a path to institutional harmony.