The Masters......Redux

OK....This is a food-related blog.

Supposedly. I have been working like a dog.....three hours tonight on my Extebarri post. I am about three courses in. Stay tuned.

Tomorrow, Brendan and I.....plus Matthew from Prague.....are off to The Masters.....aka Pebble Beach Food and Wine.......to labor with the pros, for free. We have been doing it for years at the Highlands Inn, but now it has been captured by Pebble Beach.

At the Highlands, the entire resort was turned over to the event. The chef, Mark Ayers, somehow coordinated all the primadonna chefs and wine geeks, a full house of patrons, and floods of weird ingredients overwhelming his hotel and kitchen. Mark was some weird combination of Nurse Ratched and the Dalai Lama and The Highlands was for five days all Masters, all the time.

This year will be different. I called the switchboard at Pebble, and the girl had no clue what the hell I was talking about. Ooops. She referred me to Catering, who eventually gave me a phone number. When I called in to find out what time to show up tomorrow (Day One of The Big Show) the newly imported assistant to the Director......had no clue. She'll ask the chef. New chef, first time guy. Gary.

She'll call back.

Brendan drove by the site.

"We are in tents."

"Yeah, I know. I will try to mellow out this year. I get excited."

"No, asshole. Wigwams and teepees. Fucking TENTS! Not 'Relax you are too TENSE!' Great big fucking TENTS!"

I kind of knew this in advance. A couple of dozen high end chefs from all over, working in tents in a field.

"There are horses and shit.....All around, bro."

We deal with this all the time. The last two days we were ecstatic to be working in a garage in the pits at Laguna Seca for a Lexus shoot. Ecstatic. There was electricity! No water, but walls and floor and power....and relief from frost, dew, sun, wind, dust, sand.

Big time, in our world. There was fucking WiFi! I emailed the invoice for our work to a chick twenty feet away! Who needs water, or sewage, or septic?

I'm not sure how Thomas Keller....or Hubert Keller for that matter....are going to deal with tents and horseshit. I have seen 3Star Michelin chefs melt down over a dented half-sheet in the middle of a high-power modern kitchen run by the restaurant the Dalai Lama.

It should be interesting.

"Relax, Chef. You are too tents......."

I will try not to use this joke more than twenty times....