Mistakes I Made While Running My First Station at a Fonda in Mexico City

I still vividly remember the moment I placed six chile guajillos on the comal and kept telling myself "just a little longer" even as smoke rose from them. When a bitter smell began wafting from the blackened skins, the senior cook at the next station said without even turning his head, "Hey, toss those." That was the start of my first week.

The kitchen at Fonda was far narrower, far hotter, and far faster than anything I had imagined. I had learned things in culinary school, but standing on an actual line was an entirely different kind of work. Timing, heat control, the speed of your hands handling ingredients, and above all, a sense of taste. I made mistakes in every one of those areas, and each of those mistakes shaped the person I am today.

The Day I Eyeballed the Salt

The first thing that comes to mind is the day I was making salsa roja. A case of tomates, chiles de árbol, garlic, and salt. The recipe was simple. The problem was that I decided to add the salt by "feel." I had watched the senior cooks pinch salt and toss it in, and I figured I could do the same. But their fingers remembered the exact amount through thousands of repetitions, while mine were trembling with nerves.

The result was devastating. The chef tasted the salsa, squinted, and said, "Is this the ocean?" It was no exaggeration. It was so salty my tongue went numb. I tried to dilute it by adding more tomates, but the chile ratio was already off, and I ended up throwing it all out and starting from scratch. It was 40 minutes before lunch service.

If I could go back to that moment, I would use a scale without question. No matter how simple the recipe, no matter how casual the senior cooks make it look, measuring is your only safety net until you build up experience. Salt, especially, is irreversible. If there's too little, you can add more, but if there's too much, no amount of extra ingredients will bring the flavor back. For nearly a month after that, every time I made salsa I added salt in small increments, tasting between each one. Now my pinches are mostly accurate, but only because of that month of repetition.

Chiles on the Comal, a One-Second Difference

Let's go back to the chile guajillo story from the opening. Toasting dried chiles on a comal is the most fundamental of fundamentals in Mexican cooking, and I failed at it spectacularly. The problem wasn't the heat level, it was my attention. Chiles on a comal only need to be pressed down for a few seconds on each side, but I was chopping onions at the same time. I thought I could multitask. The gap between the moment a chile starts releasing its fragrant smoke and the moment bitterness begins to set in is incredibly short. I was slicing onions and missed that gap, and by the time I looked back, the chiles were already charred black in spots.

When the senior cook said "toss those," it wasn't cold, it was the right call. Salsa made with burnt chiles has a bitterness that overwhelms everything, and nothing can mask it. I pulled out fresh chiles and started over from the beginning, but this time I didn't do anything else while the chiles were on the comal. I just stood there, tongs in hand, watching only the chiles.

What I learned from that experience is simple. Multitasking on the line is not about doing two things at the same time. It's about arranging two tasks so their timing doesn't overlap. During the 30 seconds the chiles are toasting, you watch only the chiles. Once the chiles are done, you chop the onions. At first I thought this would slow me down, but when you factor in the time lost to wasting ingredients and starting over, it was actually faster. To this day, I don't do anything else when I'm working the comal. That's not laziness, it's respect. For the ingredients and for the fire.

The Day I Made the Onions Cry

During my first week, I was mostly assigned to mise en place. Peeling onions, trimming cilantro, squeezing limes, cutting tomates. Simple tasks, but the volume was staggering. Some days I had to peel over 20 kilos of onions. My knife work was slow, and the slower I was, the more I cut myself. I remember working with bandages wrapped around three fingers.

The problem was that I abandoned proper form in pursuit of speed. The angle of my knife hand, the shape of my guiding hand, the height of the cutting board relative to my elbows. I had definitely learned all of this in school, but chasing the pace of the line, I forgot every bit of it. Even the basic technique of curling your fingertips inward would come undone when I moved fast, and every time it did, the blade grazed the side of a fingernail.

If I were starting over, I would completely give up on speed during the first week. Slow is fine, just cut with proper form. Even if the senior cooks scold me for being slow, I'd maintain my technique. Once correct form becomes second nature, speed inevitably follows, but if you get fast with bad form, fixing it later is exponentially harder. And getting hurt makes you even slower. You can't chop quickly with bandaged fingers. I only understood that after I bled.

I Wasn't Tasting

Above all these mistakes sat one even bigger mistake. I wasn't tasting enough. Checking the flavor as you cook is the most obvious thing in the world, yet I wasn't doing it. Because I was embarrassed. I worried that spooning up my own food in front of the senior cooks and going "Hmm, is this okay?" would make me look unsure of myself. Instead of tasting, I trusted the amounts written in the recipe, and as a result I sent out salty salsa, bland bean purée, and unbalanced adobo sauce.

One day the chef pulled me aside and said, "If you wouldn't want to eat what you made, the guest won't want to eat it either." That hit the mark. Tasting wasn't a sign of insecurity, it was a sign of taking responsibility for your food. From that day on, I started tasting everything. The moment salsa came out of the blender, when the beans started to simmer, right after adding piloncillo to the adobo. The more often I tasted, the fewer mistakes I made.

And the more I tasted, the more my palate was trained. At first I could only distinguish "salty" and "bland," but a few months later I could detect whether the acidity was lacking, whether the balance between the chile's heat and its smoky flavor was right. That's not something you can learn from a book. The only way is to repeat it with your tongue.

Now there are always several small spoons at my station. I taste once, drop the spoon straight in the sink, and taste again with a fresh one. I go through an enormous number of spoons during service, but that's how I protect the quality of my food.

If I could say just one thing to my first-week self, it would be: "Taste more often, and taste earlier." It's the cheapest and most reliable way to prevent mistakes. The burnt chiles, the salty salsa, all of it could have been caught with a single spoonful tasted sooner. The most important tool in the kitchen isn't the knife, it's the tongue. I realized that too late, which is exactly why I never forget it now.