Second steps

This afternoon sees me off for my first job interview in something like 20 years. Then, it was for a position as a reporter on the Yellow Advertiser series of newspapers in Essex, which was as horrible as it sounds and ended very badly when we all worked out just how much we'd been lying to each other.

So I've been writing my CV and that all important Letter of Motivation to take to a secret location (secret from you, not me - details on written application) at 16 heures this afternoon. In case anyone is ever interested in what these sort of things should look like in France, I've put the CV here and the Lettre de motivation here.

The Secret Location is a Traiteur in Nimes; Traiteurs don't really exist in the UK, apart from a few stupidly-expensive corners of London. Deli(catessen)s don't really do the same stuff. Traiteurs have the cold cuts and cheese but also go wild with the plats préparées, which believe me are nothing like those you'll find in Sainsbury's. Essentially, it's stuff you'd expect to find in a top-class gourmet restaurant, chilled and ready for you to take home and boast to your friends about how you made it yourself.

This Traiteur has a small restaurant too - a couple of dozen covers or so, lunchtimes only - and, it turns out, a giant 'laboratoire' where they turn out a few hundred covers a day to send out sous vide to big companies for lunch and dinner and so on.

Now, this all sounds very interesting to me, for lots of reasons. Weekends off - mostly, anyway; no evenings; lots of different areas in which to gain experience. What's more, the nice Monsieur who interviews me keen to talk to the ANPE to see if I'm eligible to do some sort of formation, training in a catering college an afternoon or so a week.

Hmm.

Downsides? Well, it's a small restaurant and I won't be spending much time there, at least to start with - my work would be in the laboratoire. However, in many ways this isn't a downside - my only cooking experience so far has been in a mid-sized restaurant doing 100-150 covers a day. Having the chance to see how this works with only a fraction of that number of covers and at the same time two or three times more covers a day will be interesting.

And at the moment I really want to get as much experience in as many different environments as possible - after all, I didn't know how much I was going to love or hate restaurant work, so all this stuff can only be more useful to find out about.

The interview goes on for half an hour and we chat about my experience. The job's available because, apparently, they'd engaged an English chef who was getting divorced and with whom things didn't work out when his divorce went bad and he buggered off back to the UK.

Hmm.

Anyway. We'll see.

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