Monday 6 June 2022

Gleneagles Part one: The Birnam

 How’s it going everyone this is Cian Rockett from fourth year checking in from Gleneagles. I’m going to be here for 6 months and I’m in agreement to work 2 months in the Birnam Brassiere, The Dormy Clubhouse and the Strathearn. Each of these restaurants has different offerings so I plan to learn as much as I can in my time here! 


The first restaurant I started in was the Birnam on January 24th The first section I experienced when working here was the Garden Café. Working this section had me responsible for making soups, salads and sandwiches. The soup allowed for my own personal creativity and intuition because the soup had to differ day by day and the head chef accommodated and critiqued ideas that I had for new soup ideas. The common theme of ideas that I had was that “they sound tasty but just not for the general café clientele”, which makes sense because  the soups I suggested were often spicy and the clientele of the café are usually elderly who have little spice tolerance and would prefer a more “boring” soup as put by the head chef himself! The salads that are on the café menu have quite an Italian influence due to the head chef being Italian, salads such as a Panzanella  salad made with Heritage tomatoes, focaccia croutons and roasted red peppers, or the Ortolana salad made with red pesto, sun-dried tomatoes, artichokes and cous cous are two of the best sellers on the café menu. 

Finally the sandwiches are quite simple to put together but the ingredients have some element of luxury to them to justify their place on offer in Gleneagles. For example the San Daniele sandwich consists of sourdough bread, buffalo mozzarella and prosciutto from San Daniele that is bought in as a whole leg and sliced in house. Another offering is a cheese and tomato croissant using Isle of Mull cheddar which is a native cheese producer so this justifies the price point of the sandwich.

Working the café section is enjoyable but being on it for a whole week without a section change did get boring.

 

The next section that I worked on was the cold larder section, which took care of cold starters and salads for the main Birnam restaurant. One of the chefs described this section as the easiest section to serve but the  hardest section to prep. As each dish has 7-8 components each, mise en place is vital to have correct or else you’re in trouble. Working this section showed me flavours combinations that I never thought would work and also ingredients I had never seen utilised before.

For example, cold larder utilises the same prosciutto the café uses but for the cold larder dish the prosciutto is paired with burrata, port and vanilla poached figs and a smoked beetroot and greek yogurt purée. The smoked taste comes from smoke powder which I’ve never seen utilised before so this was very interesting to me. Another flavour combo that interested me was the goat cheese starter with  goat cheese mousse, blackberry gel and pistachio purée. 

Working the cold larder section was a lot more enjoyable for me than the café but it’s a section where they need me to be more experienced to run by myself so it was seldom that I worked this section.

The final section I was on was fryers. The fryer section also has responsibility of the hot starters in addition to giving fries with the grilled main courses. This section taught me how to multitask because I was never used to keeping my eyes on orders for starters and main courses simultaneously, so this was difficult to do initially but I soon got the hang of it and thoroughly enjoyed working that section. The only issue was this section was one of the most annoying to clean after service!

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed my two month stint in the Birnam and am sad to see it come to an end but it’s now time to move to the Dormy for the next two months and learn as much as I can here!











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