Hawaii Kai restaurateur
learns what it is like
to serve 20,000 meals

Invited last month to mentor and boost the morale of the cooking crew aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in the Pacific, Bruhl will return next month at the Navy's request.

While the title is unofficial, bestowed by your columnist, Bruhl is looking forward to the next time he can visit the ship.

He was first invited aboard after the ship's commanding officer, Capt. Kendall Card, and other officers and their wives chose the restaurant for a sunset dinner.

"They were so impressed with dinner, the environment, the setting and service," that they asked him to "consider coming on board the ship to work with the kids that serve the meals," Bruhl said.

"These are truly kids, there are 17- to 19-year-old kids doing all the work."

Yeah -- kids who wield 15 one hundred-gallon tilt pans and prepare 20,000 meals each day in a massive shipboard galley and in the admiral's mess.

"I couldn't touch what they do down in the regular kitchens," Bruhl said, intimidated by the volume of the kids' work. By comparison, BluWater Grill serves 150 to 200 meals a day.

The ship's pantry is loaded by hand. The walk-in refrigerator is about as big as Bruhl's restaurant. Oh, and the fridge is not a few easy steps away from the ship's kitchen, either. "They all carry it upstairs by hand. They'll grab two cases of No. 6 cans of whatever and they just carry it up," he said.

The main kitchen crew had little culinary training, so Bruhl passed along some tips including how to shred instead of chop lettuce for tacos, making the dining experience more pleasant for shipmates.

He also taught them "fun stuff" such as how to make "onion brushes and tomato flowers to make their plates more special. They took such pride in that. They already did (take pride in their work) but to take it to the next level was pretty cool," Bruhl said.

A little consultation for the smaller admiral's mess will help keep the food hotter for serving. Senior Chief Dee Dee Ward, chef of the admiral's mess, was stoked with the recipes Bruhl shared and ideas for "things they could do in the mess for the admiral to spice it up, make it fresher, hotter, tastier and just better," he said.

"What they do is basic and rudimentary, culinarily, but I think it has to be. If I get a chance, we're going to do things a lot differently. They could do some great, great food up there," Bruhl said.

Flattered to be asked to come in to boost morale, Bruhl also gained from the "incredible experience."

"They're entering harm's way for us. Just to go out there and meet and speak with them was a rush for me."

The work ethic also impressed him. "They work 17 hours a day and get no days off. They have to do their jobs and be sailors," Bruhl said. "There's a discipline there that we try to instill in our crew each and every day."

He also got to keep his eyeballs.

After the two-day morale-building, consulting trip, Bruhl was flown back to Oahu via a small cargo plane that took off from the flight deck.

"It went from zero to 160 miles an hour in two seconds. I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head."