Instructions: Dicing tomatoes and celery, plating baby greens and asparagus salads, clarifying butter, making tuiles, pear charlottes, pot stickers, pizza, tortellini, tagliatelle and agnolotti, and finally learning how to pronounce gnocchi - these were just a few of my learning experiences when Spago Palo Alto Executive Chef Michael French consented to allow me to ruin expensive ingredients as an unpaid trainee in his kitchen.

For 56 hours in August and September, he and his jovial executive sous chef, Jason Seibert, who has a happy face tattooed on the back of his left hand, gave me a peek behind the proverbial swinging kitchen door as a stagiaire, someone learning by doing. It was not my first time to do this sort of thing. But it had been several years since Id volunteered my one-day-per-week services in the kitchens of Spago West Hollywood, Campanile and the now-shuttered Rex and Eureka in Los Angeles.

Let me demonstrate dicing Roma tomatoes, Seibert said on my first day. A California Culinary Academy graduate who had once been a stagiaire in Norway, Germany and the Netherlands and later cooked at the Golden Door near San Diego, one of Americas premier spas, Seibert had a few tricks up his sleeve.

Id never diced this way before. Taking the whole tomato, he sliced around it in one long strip, separating the outer meat from the core in one piece. He then squared the edges, slicing the resulting rectangle lengthwise into julienne strips and finally slicing crosswise to create even little squares. He set aside the core for soups or stocks.

The task seemed a no-brainer the first time I tried it, once I traded my not-so-sharp chefs knife for Seiberts razor-edged cleaver. But when I tried the same feat on my second day on the job on tougher-skinned Romas than the previous weeks, it took me the better part of two hours to fill a decidedly small container.

If you were paying me $8 per hour, these tomato dices would have cost you nearly $16 in labor alone, I mused. If I were paying you $8 an hour, you would have finished that job in 15 minutes, Seibert responded. Theres little room for hubris in a professional kitchen.

Dicing exercises continued when I helped Alexis Lexie Bernard, a California Culinary Academy extern, on the salad line by dicing celery stalks: First she peeled off the outer layer, then julienned and cross-cut each stalk into perfectly even dice.

Everything I did at first was too big, too small or too uneven. Bernard went through my first pile of celery, picked out what could be salvaged, and, with a pained expression, discarded the remainder. After mixing the supposedly good pieces in thoroughly with her own, it occurred to her to ask, Have you been peeling all your celery stalks?
The look of horror that crossed my face soon crossed hers. Who would have thought a simple little celery stalk could hold within it the seeds of such deep shame?

Despite the inauspicious start, I warmed up to the tasks at hand, and soon Seibert had me join pasta maker Alberto Salgado, promoted from dishwasher less than a year ago, in making the agnolotti to be used on an elegant pasta special, truffled corn agnolotti with wilted arugula, roasted ricotta salata and sage-hazelnut brown butter sauce.

Considering how unusual the finished product looks - a long cigarette of stuffed pasta - the process turned out to be remarkably doable: Lay out a piece of rolled-out pasta dough on the work counter, use a pastry or pizza cutter to cut the dough evenly into 2-by-4 inch rectangles, brush them with beaten egg, then put ones filling of choice into a pastry bag and pipe out short lengths of filling in horizontal lines.

Next, Salgado folded the top border of each piece over to form a seal with the bottom border, and folded over each end again. Finally, he used the pasta cutter to trim off excess dough and cooked by boiling for about 3 minutes.

To the extent that I could do so without slowing down the work, I gabbed with the employees. After all, as in the entertainment and dot-com worlds, you can never tell where the person youre working next to might end up.

At Spago West Hollywood, Casey Hayden, then the pastry chef, went on to open the successful Caseys Bakery & Cafe in Sacramento last year.

At Campanile, I was once shucking oysters with a young line cook when he declared that he was deciding whether to attend the Oscars that year.

I believe you have to be invited, I tactfully informed him.

Hasnt anyone told you who I am? he replied. Im Harrison Fords son. Ben Ford has just opened his own well-received restaurant, the California/Mediterranean-themed Chadwick, in Beverly Hills.

To provide a taste of life in the perpetually manic display kitchen, executive chef French, a French-trained chef who was chosen by Wolfgang Puck to open Spago Palo Alto in 1997, assigned me to occasional stints on the line at the salad, pizza and saute stations.

Against a backdrop of cooks calling to the prep kitchen for ingredients, dishwashers belting out their favorite songs and various employees calling out their favorite sayings - against this and more, an expediter calls out to the sous chef first to start a dish and later to fire it off, timed so all the dishes for any given table will come out of the kitchen simultaneously, followed by urgent calls for pick-up so that dishes arrive at the tables hot.

A few moments on the line might sound like: Green salad to the line!
Green salad to the line!
Ive got a medium followed by a medium rare! Two well and medium well!
We need more braising mix!
43 and 15!
Olive oil!
Volare, oh, oh!
Put some gremolata on the fish!
Snapper 2, pork chops 3, 43! 81 is ready! Special pasta with the veal chop 3! Stool 2 to the bar! Stool 2 to the bar! Chicken saute fire! Sashimi shared 93! Six green salads, one split; thats five regular, one split!
Ohhhhh noooooo!
Pasta to the line!
Pasta a la linea!
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!
After a particularly raucous Sunday night of such non-stop activity, Seibert was just beginning to wind down, when a waiter came running up. Did you create tonights tasting menu?
Yeeees, answered the exhausted chef, cautiously.

Then table 41 wants to talk to you!
Uhhhhhhh, what about?
Theyve come for a lot of tasting menus before, but they think tonights was awesome, and they want to thank you! Oh! And suddenly Seibert, who has been known to lighten the prep kitchen mood by tying a towel around his face with parsnips sticking out of his head, is all business, receiving kudos on behalf of the entire kitchen staff.

And, gnocchi is pronounced NYOH-kee.

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