Well, the big day finally arrived.

I had feared terrible traffic, but it wasn't all that bad, but only if one followed the directions on the parking pass. Those who didn't ended up wasting a lot of their time in various road blocks. In any case, I got there at the time recommended by Kitchen Academy, which meant an hour's wait before going up to the kitchen.

Where we waited some more.

Kitchen Academy had told us to bring two things to this job: a complete uniform and our knife roll. Upon arrival we learned that security wouldn't be allowing us to take our knife rolls to the fifth floor. Apparently, we wouldn't be able to find any knives or dangerous implements in the kitchen, should we be criminally inclined. This is known as "security theatre".

The security theatre resulted in one humorous episode in which one of Wolfgang Puck's leading chefs was demonstrating some plating to a large group of eager culinary students and asked for a knife to cut something. We all stared blankly back at him. Luckily, a knife was eventually located. Imagine that, finding a knife that had somehow made it past security into a kitchen.

Unlike the "training" days (Day 1, Day 2) where there was generally a steady pace of activity, on the event night itself there was a great deal of waiting in between short periods of intense action. Patience is definitely a virtue in such a situation. So is bringing something to read, preferably culinary related, since noise and talking is somewhat discouraged.

So, I spent a good deal of time standing around studying some notes I brought (wish I had brought more) and trying to stay out of the way until we were tasked with doing something. Then, one got assigned a task and worked very hard until it was complete. Then, one stood around some more.

My first task was taking the excess fat off some poorly cut prosciutto, which would be used to wrap some green and white asparagus. Immediately following this, I was involved in the biggest task of the night: putting together the antipasti plates.

Everything had been prepared already; it was simply a matter of plating. I say "simply," however, it was anything but. We had to concentrate a great deal on good presentation and precise placement of the various items: 1 row of 3 green and 2 white aspargus, a layer of prosciutto, another layer of asparagus, another layer of prosciutto; 4 crab-stuffed peppers; 7 slices of grilled, sesame-encrusted tuna; etc., etc., etc. All of these items had to be placed properly and positioned to look their best. For example, some of the tuna had brighter red centers than other slices, so you had to be sure that the best looking slices were on top of the small pyramid. There were similar standards for the other ingredients.

The plates were assembled assembly-line fashion, one ingredient at a time. It took a few ingredients to get organized and have everyone working as efficiently as possible (working from one end to another, doing an entire column of plates before moving on to the next in order to avoid plates missing ingredients, etc.). It took a couple of hours to get the hundreds of plates ready, mostly because of the many different ingredients that had to be added.

After this I got sent to the main kitchen to work on plating the entrees. While there, Wolfgang Puck came through with a film crew and we also got moved into the ballroom itself for a "chef's picture". While we were in the ballroom, they were making announcements of who had won the Academy Awards. They were already to Best Actor and Actress as we got photographed, then moved out to work on the food.

Never did the entrees, however, as I got shifted to working on the dessert plates, which were assembled in the same place and in the same manner as the antipasti platters: 5 raspberries, 5 strawberries, crumbled nuts, etc., etc., etc. I never saw the antipasti platters go out, but I did see the desserts leave the assembly area. It takes some effort to do everything so quickly. This was especially true with the dessert plates, which included ice cream.

We were able to assemble the plates sans ice cream, with a nice cushion of time. However, the ice cream couldn't be plated until the last moment, for obvious reasons. Once you started plating the ice cream, the ice cream teams had to work in a precise order so that they were staying just a couple of minutes ahead of the serving staff. It was important to plan where the ice cream teams would be working so that they wouldn't get in the way of the serving staff who were getting the plates.

It all worked out pretty well. During the service, I mostly worked on breaking down the tables we had assembled the desserts on, getting them out of the way once they were clear.

With the last of the desserts served (around 10:45pm) and class at 6am the next morning, I was finished for the evening and given permission to leave. As I headed for the elevators for the parking garage, which weren't too far away, I had my only celebrity sighting of the evening, but it was a good one: Best Actress winner Reese Witherspoon, who was about twelve feet away from me as she walked past the elevator banks.