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Mu Zeta posted:Just wondering how many of you guys work in open kitchens? That's all I've been seeing recently around here. And is it intimidating? A lot of the kitchens I've worked in have been open or semi-open and it's fine. Usually all I'm looking at is the ticket rail/my station/the food so it's pretty easy to forget the dining room even exists. It'll probably reinforce Good Habits like spending every free second wiping your poo poo down, not pretending stuff that looks like a dick is your dick, and not cursing or really saying anything loudly except "heard" or whatever. What's most awkward IMO is doing banquet events for hotels, especially when they make you wear the big stupid hat. quote:Of course, that doesn't change the utter disaster that is the inventory freezer. I'd love to ignore it, but I'm pretty sure I'll need things from it before the 8 hours of my shift are up and I can foist that job on the much larger night crew. 6 people can do the job of 1 person a lot faster. Especially when that involves unpacking some 2 tons of inventory and putting it back in a way that not only makes sense but is easy to get to. Now, I'm not saying that your situation is anything like this, but it was really loving cute when this would happen to me as the night crew. In my case, it never really worked out like that because 2/6 people on the night crew are volume shifts and leave at 9pm, the other 2 people have kids or church or are faking having kids or church, and the last guy and me get stuck opening boxes of poo poo that have been in the freezer for 6 hours already and organizing/rotating for an extra hour and a half. So (in my case) my already stressful busy dinner shift turns into a shift + 1.5 hours in a freezer putting away poo poo that the morning shift should have done but didn't because the AM lead cook wanted to shoot the poo poo with the servers or gently caress around on his phone. Not that your situation is even remotely similar, of course. In my opinion, regardless of circumstances, it's just unnecessarily sloppy to put boxes of anything in the freezer/cooler and just let them sit there. You should have staff on hand for receiving shipments and you should organize and rotate as you're putting it away. There's already a law, food has to be kept at least 6 inches off the floor, that law still applies when it's in the box so get that poo poo off the loving freezer floor and put it on the shelf. While you're doing that, open up all the boxes, organize and rotate the food, break all the boxes down you lazy shithead, and put them in the cardboard recycling. I'll handle all 6 of the lunch tickets we're about to get while you do it. I briefly worked at a Romano's Macaroni Grill after moving here and it wasn't uncommon to have the truck arrive at like, 7am, the AM Manager not show up until 9 or 9:30, and then they would schedule 1 person to open up the entire line, clean the restrooms (why the gently caress the closing servers/hosts weren't doing this, I have no idea), put a 60-80 item truck away which has been sitting at room temperature for about 3 hours now and is mostly dairy and meat, and then do his daily prep like pastas, lemon buerre blanc (which by the way, sat in a steam well that they never loving fixed, so enjoy your lemon butter that's been a tepid ~93 degrees since 9:30 am). So it's no loving surprise that half of the heavy cream in the cooler went bad last month and the freezer is a series of bare shelves with a mountain of wet, frozen boxes in the middle. I honestly can't decide if having your lone morning prep cook also be the same dude who cleans last night's dirty shitters is more or less disgusting than just having an open toilet right next to the ice machine. e: A few months after quitting Macaroni Grill I interviewed with a huge international foodservice corporation at a local college campus cafeteria. Apparently one of the hiring managers or food/beverage managers I "interviewed" with (there were like 4 of them, so) was a high up at Macaroni Grill corporate. She was interested in my experience at Macaroni Grill before we had really talked, so I gave her a shorter version of What Went Wrong and she dropped that she was test kitchen/regional/whatever the gently caress and I was just like "Well, it was pretty much a sick joke". I did not end up getting a callback, unfortunately. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 09:17 on Aug 29, 2013 |
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Aug 29, 2013 09:09
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bowmore posted:I need some ideas for baked eggs for my cafe menu We did some kind of eggs, prosciutto, spinach, buffalo mozzarella, and tomato sauce at a restaurant I used to work at. Can't really tell you much more than that since they threw it into the pizza oven and I was working saute, I can't say I was super wild about it since the 800 degree oven usually cooked the yolks all the way through and cooked yolks + tomato sauce is kind of gross. breadingbutter posted:I like berserking in the dish pit: cooks love it because it keeps them from double-duty as my backup In my experience keeping the cooks from bitching about how they always have to hold your hand in the dishroom is the #1 way to get promoted out of the dishroom, just remember your original plan to get out while you still can. After 7 years I'm almost out, and it would've been a lot less painful if I listened to the first guy who told me to get out while I still can.
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Jan 5, 2014 08:01
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pile of brown posted:You've worked a dishpit seven years trying to be a cook? If this isn't French laundry or something you've made a terrible mistake Haha, yeah dude I was promoted out of the dish pit in like 3 months. I accepted another job eventually and washed dishes there for like 3 weeks before they pulled me out. I attribute both to not needing to be babysat and also making it pretty clear that I had better poo poo to do if they were going to keep me in dish indefinitely. Don't get me wrong though, I was absolutely That Chump at the first place. I ended up working there for like 3 years, got promoted into a supervisory role and it turns out that yeah, I had made it pretty clear that I was line cook material on like day 3 of dishwashing but they strung me along because nobody else wanted to do it. I didn't make that mistake again at the second place. Looking back it's pretty funny/sad how awesome I thought it would be to finally work the line, and then how awesome it would be to get promoted to _____ station, and then how awesome it would be to work the window as a supervisor. It's not, it's poo poo all the way up.
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Jan 6, 2014 10:24
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I'll never forget the time I watched my "supervisor" carefully re-toast a hamburger bun in the broiler because he was concerned that the flat-top was contaminated with gluten from other foods and the order said "GLUTEN FREE". Then I watched it get plated in front of the sous chef, fly right past the other sous chef into the server's hands who promptly said "what the gently caress, seriously?" and threw the whole thing in the trash. Some of my favorite coworkers have been servers who used to cook. Either way it didn't matter because the hamburger patties almost certainly contained some form of gluten as a binder, the guest probably had no loving idea what gluten even was or why they might have an intolerance to it, and apparently nobody but me and the server knew that BREAD = PROBABLY GLUTEN MAYBE CHECK THE BOX.
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Jan 9, 2014 03:47
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It sounds like you need to just throw that poo poo in the dumpster and get 2-3 printers and ticket rails. A positive side effect of this change will be that you'll weed out every idiot who doesn't have the presence of mind to manage his/her ticket rail. If someone can't handle organizing slips of paper into the proper sequence, you probably don't want them preparing food for people either. However, I didn't really notice this until the end of my career as a cook, it is pretty much loving impossible to find a decent expo so you might end up shooting yourself in the foot here. Also, I don't really think it's that important to care about ticket times, and especially not % of tickets completed on time. Sometimes poo poo just gets all hosed up, and you need to be aware of that. You also need to be aware that sometimes people are just fuckups and, as a kitchen, you have to refuse to tolerate that. I think most people know when someone hosed up without needing a litle machine blinking a red number at them - I feel like if you care about the ticket time itself you are abstracting the goal of "dont gently caress up and make someone have a poor dining experience" to a goal that is more akin to "get food out before X minutes", which makes you basically McDonalds.
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May 31, 2014 08:41
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Vorenus posted:This kinda thing might be verboten in the thread, ignore me if it is, but might you happen to work at a chain that is very serious about a certain type of cat? Is this the P.F. Chang's waving lucky cat thing? I worked everywhere on a P.F. Chang's line over the course of 2 years and change. I think if we ever had a lead ticket time of over 30 minutes our outside expo would have literally had a stroke and fallen into the rice. I'm not really sure how you could even get that far into the weeds considering the average cook time for every item on the menu that isn't the duck or some grilled thing is between 2 and 8 minutes. Unless this is another chain entirely, in that case pardon me! 
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Sep 3, 2014 02:28
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My biggest problem at The Cat Chain, as a wok cook, was lovely sous chefs trying to "inside expo" when in reality they only existed to take plates from drahma station and give them to me in the proper order. Ideally, they would also make sure the drahma cook wasn't handing me the wrong poo poo, but that was apparently optional. 99% of the time they hosed this up somehow so we would sell like 3-4 tables at the same time after 8 minutes, instead of one 1 table every 2 minutes like adults working in a real rear end kitchen. I was pretty confused when I started as a pantry cook and they told me about some pantry cook in Raleigh that had been working pantry for like 14 years or whatever. I said that sounds lame - I wanted to be a wok cook, turns out that dude was absolutely right and being a wok cook is horrible bullshit. Pantry is the chillest loving station all you do is grill poo poo and fry dumplings. I can see it being a consistent issue if you have lovely BoH "leadership". My store in particular seemed to promote to sous based on wok ability so every 6 months or so we'd take our best wok cook and give him a cheap chef coat and watch him stand around with his dick in his hand for 6 hours while he ran the line into the ground by giving the newly promoted wok cook 7 fried rices for 5 different tickets and expecting it to just work out. It's pretty loving simple, really - you got 4 cooks, 8 woks, and if you have decent drahma cooks everything is already organized for you. Make the poo poo in the order it comes in, combine like items if possible, sell whole tickets instead of dropping 6 tables on the runners at the same time. Apparently some people can't figure this poo poo out - we got by because our outside expos were loving fantastic and we generally had enough decent wok cooks to run at 3/4ths strength until the sous chef finished his "training" and then went to gently caress up another store. Sounds like you got all of our sous chefs, to be honest.
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Sep 3, 2014 07:55
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Black August posted:Try 20-30 minutes, bucko. That's how loving long it takes pantry to make those things most days. We're training lots and LOTS of new people because the old ones keep leaving, and they're all really slow! REALLY SLOW! IT TAKES FOREVER TO GET ANYTHING TO THE TABLE AND THE CUSTOMERS BLAME IT ALL ON ME AND I GET NO TIPS AND AHAHAHAAHHAAHAHAHHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHHHAHAHAHA So, not that it should be any of your concern as FoH because BoH should be handling their poo poo, but if the sushi is anything like their previous attempts at menu rollouts: none of that poo poo is ever prepped, the chefs forget to order ingredients half the loving time, and even if it were all prepped there is probably no way for the pantry cook to fit all of it on his station without needing 4 hotel pans of icebaths. We lost half of our pantry cooks to the original happy hour/small bites menu at my store, too, because it was just that loving bad. For a company with that many stores, staff, and logistics personnel you would think that somebody, somewhere would have said "Let's make sure all of this poo poo fits on the station before we add it to the menu". e: My favorite part of the last rollout I was there for, which included all of the new lunch bullshit that came with a side of "yuzu infused cucumber and tomato salad" (which, btw: was never prepped, and only contained any amount of yuzu about 10% of the time because nobody ordered it), was that if you actually attempted to prep the salad to spec, you ended up with an extra 6oz out of an 8oz portion. I guess basic loving math is setting the bar too high. quote:I miss it. More and more, though, I realize I don't miss it enough to take a $15 an hour paycut. I got called into work on saturday to make $30 an hour sitting around shooting the poo poo with a vendor technician until his parts came in. If I end up back in restaurants any time soon, it wont be because I want to be there.
12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 06:26 on Sep 15, 2014 |
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Sep 15, 2014 06:22
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Black August posted:Because I want to move to Seattle and I'm very interested in having a job ready for me there the second I hit the floor, rather than having to look for one and risking not being able to work for months at a time. It's too huge a gamble for such a distance, so I'm willing to swallow bile for a month or two more to secure a good reference and a job over there. Yeah that poo poo is outrageous. What location are you at, again? Boston? The regional KM we had for Southeast US (probably "Chef Nico") instructed me to throw out an entire hotel pan of those shotglass desert things because the prep cooks let them thaw too much before sliding them into the shotglasses and it made them look "streaky". Like $35 in food cost straight into the trash can because it wasn't pretty enough for him. It's loving unbelievable even if your store is only half as bad as you say it is. I saw this man pull a sous into the office for a "chat" because one of the wok cooks poured eggs into the egg drop too quickly. He would probably have a loving aneurysm if he showed up at your store. It was my understanding that Southeast only had like, 6 stores, so I saw Nico fairly often and he kept a pretty tight leash on poo poo. All of the food we served was spec-perfect, and the recipes were genuinely pretty good. We ended up going to a PF Chang's in Thousand Oaks, CA though and it was loving horrible. I particularly enjoyed my girlfriend's cold, flaccid, completely unseasoned grilled asparagus and salmon that stuck to the grill, only for the pantry cook to delicately peel off the offending layer and gently lay it back on the rest of the salmon. I've never been more upset at a restaurant in my life. If you want to transfer to Myrtle Beach or Raleigh, I know a/some guy(s).
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Sep 16, 2014 07:15
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Radio Help posted:Pick up some shifts as a dishwasher before you spend the money on culinary school. It'll help you see if it's something you can see yourself doing. This is absolutely correct and, expanding on it a little bit, if you can do absolutely anything else you probably should. I felt the same way when I was ~18 and started working in restaurants but it's probably one of the worst long-term career moves you can make if you consider things like "Retiring", "Having Insurance", and "Being employed from 50+" to be important things you'd like to do. Most of the people I knew in the industry that went to culinary school (generally this was Le Cordon Bleu or some other one I can't remember) worked the same positions as I did and got paid less for it. The only reason to attend a school (and this applies to hospitality and a shitton of other fields as well) is to make connections and get job hookups. If you want to work at a restaurant where the dishwashers bust out centimeter perfect 1/8" julienne for garnishes and you get laughed out of the building if you don't know how to pronounce "Chiffonade", "Accoutrement", or don't know what a "Coulis" is, probably take it seriously and spend money going to culinary school for the opportunity to maybe, if you're lucky, work an unpaid 6 month stage at <fancy restaurant>. If you want to work literally anywhere else - get a job as a dishwasher and see where it takes you. If you can, and your parents are rich and will pay for your poo poo or whatever, it's probably a much better call to shoot for FoH as a maitre d or sommelier. I have a buddy who eventually said gently caress it, left BoH, and had his parents pay for a degree from CIA + sommelier certification and that seems to be working out much, much, much better for him than for everyone else we knew that is still cooking. e: also you're probably gonna get fat as hell. Pretty sure I completely destroyed my cholesterol or whatever. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Oct 7, 2014 |
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Oct 7, 2014 06:42
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Probably "The Bread Baker's Apprentice" if you haven't read it already. I own a copy, don't do a lot of baking unfortunately, but it (seems like) a pretty incredible book. e: http://www.amazon.com/The-Bread-Bakers-Apprentice-Extraordinary/dp/1580082688
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Oct 23, 2014 04:11
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I worked with a Sous that they found passed out in the office along with 2 FoH staff who were also passed out in the office sleeping on chairs and the desk and poo poo, and he wasn't fired. His punishment was that instead of working as a split FoH Manager/Sous, he got demoted to "Just Sous". Guess that shows you how that company views FoH vs BoH staff.
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Dec 1, 2014 00:02
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A restaurant that I used to work at had an acceptable cheese sauce that was prepared in large batches and held at temp just fine throughout the day. IIRC it was provolone, american, filtered water, beer, swiss, and gouda in descending order of volume. Can't remember the exact ratios and tbh that dude would probably be pretty pissed if he knew I was handing it out, but I do understand they spent a large amount of time getting the liquid:cheese proportions just right so that it is appropriately saucelike (it came with fresh chips), cheap, and holds for at least 8 hours at ~145. I do recall that the american came in bricks and needed to be fed through a meat grinder w/ "cheese grater" attachment, so I imagine a lot of the consistency came from that. It was also a bitch to make. I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's possible, but probably not worth your time especially if you can just mix cheese, liquid, and sodium citrate together and have it work out fine.
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Apr 13, 2015 07:18
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My last restaurant job ever was a place where everyone made at least minimum wage and we did a daily tipshare based on % of hours worked that day. It was classified as only hours that we are open, to make it a little more fair to the servers, but it was a really great system and everyone was pretty pumped about it. It super loving owned to be a cook making $10/hr and then find an extra $20 a day, or more depending on how busy we were, in my little tips envelope. This was a 'pay at the counter and then sit down' style place, too. I could only see it working even better if you actually present the customer with a credit card slip that has a "Tip: _____" field on it. IMO you are really cheating yourself out of some excellent kitchen workers if you have the option to legally run a full tipshare and choose not to.
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May 12, 2015 15:12
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Typically because it means that, if management is spending ($10/hr - $2.35/hr) = $extra money/hr on the servers that is money that could have been spent on extra prep cook hours, extra dishwasher hours (these are the guys who clean the floor mats BTW), and extra hours and money for half-shift people to help out in the kitchen during huge rushes, while still maintaing a certain percentage of labor cost. The extra money going towards overstaffing your kitchen makes the entire operation run smoother at the expense of people who are already pulling down $Appropriate-wage, and who generally have less menial tasks and work shorter shifts. Obviously this is all completely overgeneralizing (hence the "Typically") and differs for literally every situation you can think of, but I've worked in CA (where servers legally are paid at least minimum, and typically make more hourly than the dishwashers for senior positions) and Non-CA states (and I've worked FoH and BoH jobs in both) and the difference in staffing, prep levels, amount of cooks on the clock during rushes, and even the staff culture itself has been completely drastic in every job. But again, I didn't work at every restaurant outside CA and every restaurant inside CA for every hour that has occurred, so your mileage and grains of salt may vary. Generally, IMO, if you are paying everyone evenly there should be a full tipshare. I worked in a place like this and everyone enjoyed it -- the only problem was that the cooks ended up taking way more of the tipshare than the servers (at first) because there were cooks in the building 3 hours before it opened and 3 hours after it closed, while the servers typically came in ~30 minutes before and left ~30 minutes after. e: the restaurant I worked in where the senior level servers made more hourly than all the dishwashers and most of the cooks in addition to taking home tips were terrible because everyone knew about it and it pissed them all off, including the other servers who were making $8.50 instead of $13.50 or whatever. It was also loving terrible cooking in that place because management aggressively cut morning prep and rushed everyone out the door at night, so you'd usually come in at 5:30 pm and have ~30 minutes to fill your entire station while also cooking orders for the start of the dinner rush. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 22:04 on May 13, 2015 |
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May 13, 2015 21:59
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FWIW my chef(s) generally expected the sauce to be abundant and be visible enough on the pasta to rise above it slightly, so yeah that generally included some level of thickness. The goal was, I believe, for the customer to see that all of the noodles are saucy yes but not every single noodle sitting in a flat layer in the bowl should be visible to them through the sauce. Naturally you gotta get in there and twirl poo poo with your tongs or whatever. Too thick is disgusting, too, in its own special way. quote:By the way from a chefs perspective what the gently caress does wine add to an Alfredo sauce? Some people I understand use lemon juice in a similar manner - so that something tastes good / "correct", but not "this has lemon juice in it". For me, wine is one of those things as well. The part I enjoyed most about cooking, actually, was learning what actually went into food. Like, jambalaya and poo poo - I know intellectually that it's onions, bell peppers, celery (+garlic), but it just smells like a bunch of hot vegetables until you add some paprika and some oregano and then you get this "Oh, poo poo, this smells like jambalaya now" reaction from everyone in the room.
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May 19, 2015 06:50
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Vorenus posted:Then again, I'll be giving up my only chance to petition for liquor sales and including liquor in employee meals. A man can dream, right? I worked at a place where BoH staff meal every night is 1 item from the menu under $10 (they credited you $10 if it went over), and and $1 beer/well liquor. It was pretty cool -- I don't drink, but it created a nice atmosphere in the kitchen where everyone was really chill and helped everybody else close, even the dishwasher, so they could all sit on the patio and eat/drink at 1am. To be honest I'd be surprised if your direct managers ever actually saw the results of the survey. For compliance/liability reasons, that seems like something that the HR department and the area directors (or similar) are going to be looking at, and then asking your direct managers why so many people are pissed off. Granted, that doesn't mean you can't (or wont) be fired for it, as we all know, but I think you're probably putting way too much stock into it. Most likely it gets compiled into a series of pie charts by somebody who sits at a desk and only exists to compile numbers into pie charts, then it gets pasted into a series of powerpoint presentations that are ultimately ignored or barely acknowledged by bored executives. Assuming you work at a chain, anyway. Also, re: whoever said they were going to offer 35k salary, that is exactly what I was offered the very same day that I quit restaurants forever. I don't know what it is about 35k, specifically. I guess 40k is almost a decent wage and 30k is too insulting? It doesn't seem to adjust for cost of living anyway, because I was living in southern california and looking at $1200+ for "studio without bullet holes or meth lab". The hours weren't so bad, especially considering my employer was already requiring me to work 8a-6p while taking a 2(+) hour unpaid lunch in there somewhere. Depends on the environment, but in my experience once you accept that you are going to be there all day every day forever it gets pretty chill. The bar is also really, really loving low for "generic manager at generic chain" so if you are even halfway competent you are already better than 80% of the talent pool. At PF Chang's I understand we paid the kitchen manager and general manager quite well (~80k), and the sous chefs and floor/bar managers were 40-50ish (on the way lower end for sous chefs, though). 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 05:33 on Jun 2, 2015 |
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Jun 2, 2015 05:22
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pentyne posted:Shockingly, some of the best rare steaks I've gotten have been from Outback, mostly because the servers will always specifically ask me about a "rare" and I tell them blood-red which they seem to laugh about and make sure the chef knows. It would make sense at a chain place that for something like rare the servers would make sure the customer is sure because so many people order. . I worked with a dude who put in ~12 years at outback back starting in the early 90s when they had just opened and were exploding in popularity. The way he explained it to me, they use a series of flat top grills and have them set at specific temperatures so that "rare" is "far right grill" and they just need to hit a timer button for each steak or set of steaks that were dropped for X order. They also usually pulled them like ~15 seconds early if they were ordered rare just because it's easier to cook the steak up a little than it is to completely remake it, if necessary. Also apparently there was one dude whose only job was to come in and making blooming onions for 9 hours a day. I've always liked learning about the specifics of restaurants and poo poo like that, to be honest. For example, I worked at a place for ~2 weeks where there was a station called "utility" and all you did was make baked loving potatos. There were like 30 ingredients for them on the menu so you had your own printer, your own window, and a series of ovens, holding trays, and 4-5 of those standing sheet pan racks just full of potatos. They had some ridiculous loving language where an order would print out with like, "1 BAKED POTATO BPsCchTu" and you would need to decipher that poo poo into actual ingredients and have it in the window when the food was ready. Every dinner entree came with a baked potato with whatever you wanted on it. That's probably the single least enjoyable station I've ever worked in a restaurant.
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Jun 3, 2015 21:48
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Do you usually par-roast sliced veg like that and then toss them on/into some kind of hot thing to heat for service? That was probably my least favorite part about my hotel job, felt like we were always par-doing everything. For example, I was excited that we might have to roll the non-flattop grill (usually referred to as "The Rock" - it has bars like a prison, also the restaurant industry and grill station specifically is a prison that you will never escape from) onto the line so we could appropriately char (with grill lines and poo poo) the sausages for some new sausage menu item. Turns out we are just putting grill marks on them twice a week and then they're sitting in my cooler until they are ordered, then I toss them into a pan and put them in the oven for a few minutes. Or they go bad and I throw them out 
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Jun 4, 2015 17:08
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Vorenus posted:I remember a PF Chang's Drahma person complaining one night- keep in mind, this position requires you to know 75-70% of the menu off the top of your head and you're the initiator for line orders so if you don't have wok buried in ready-to-cook plates you're hearing all hell. I worked Drahma for about 1.5 years at a changs. It's really loving awfully bad at first but, if you're good, you get used to it quick. I can probably still tong out exactly 10oz of various types of chopped meats, first time every time. Our store's tolerance for weight consistency was 0.1oz in either direction - if your chang's chicken measured out to 10.15oz you were going to hear about it. Apparently our store was also backwards, so, the Meat drahma person gets the tickets printed to them. This is really, really loving stupid because every diced chicken dish on the menu comes with 10oz of diced chicken. This plate gets passed to the veggie drahma person who needs to decipher what the gently caress it is from a ticket that has probably been stuck to a damp plate for 3-4 minutes and then assemble the appropriate vegetables and aromatics for it. Compared to, if Veggie dude gets the ticket first then he hands meat dude a plate with 6oz of broccoli, 2oz of green onion (white part only) with 1/2tsp ginger on it... meat guy knows that it Can Only Be Ginger Chicken and adds a meat plate with the appropriate ~10oz of sliced (not diced, strips, or ground) chicken. So yeah, in our store Veggie was the harder station that you didn't get to work at until you proved yourself with 8+ months of not quitting and not ridiculously loving up orders through 30k days. And yeah, if you don't have your entire station full of stacked orders for the next drahma person, who doesn't (in turn) have their entire station stacked full of orders for the chef to distribute to the wok cooks, you start getting poo poo about it. If it makes you feel any better, I eventually got "promoted" to wok cook and it's just as loving bad because you never get to see any of the tickets, are constantly drowning in plates to the point where you can't even ladle your sauces without moving poo poo out of the way, and asking anybody what you're supposed to cook next results in people looking at you like you are literally insane. The strategy is just to cook everything they throw at you as fast as humanly possible and let Expo worry about it. Make sure you talk a lot of poo poo to Expo at all times also. Because, I mean, if the entire line is banging out ~15 dishes per minute, chances are you're going to have whatever you need already up in the window to complete a given order. Even if it's not necessarily intentionally prepared that way.
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Jun 17, 2015 22:50
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twotimer posted:imo if you need dockets then whoever is working the pass isnt doing their job very well. some of the most well-oiled kitchens ive ever worked in had one docket for the guy on the pass and we all just followed his voice. Same, actually. One printer, one guy at the pass who was a cook working a station called "the window". If that guy is good, you're good. My first day after being moved up to that station, my trainer just said "here you go" and threw me right in. This was at like a, Chilis plus(?) sort of place. Local barbeque restaurant, smallish 13 store chain, surprisingly authentic and good barbeque but it was a pretty small menu. Most of the effort on window was coordinating the various Ribs + Thing combos with the guy in charge of cutting ribs. 6 possible sauces + a rub, 3 rib sizes, and then you had your "ribs + pork, chicken (wings/fried/grilled/smoked(light/dark)), or brisket" + two sides out of a possible 8 sides... that got hectic pretty quick. So generally we had cooks that would slowly Not Get Fired long enough to get promoted onto the window, and then gently caress it up massively and quit. My training was just loving it up until it got really bad, then he'd hop in and fix everything. Repeat for ~3 days until he didn't have to fix things anymore. Was a really fun gig. There's a huge sense of accomplishment and teamwork when you work together like that, but it can also cause some cook drama which is (IMO) the worst drama. People don't really like you being their boss, generally speaking, and I wasn't a very imposing or bosslike person at 20 years old, 5'5, ~120 pounds so it got pretty awkward when management would tell me to "crack the whip" and poo poo like that. My solution to cooks not wanting to close, or not cleaning their station enough was to say "looks great dude, we did an awesome loving job tonight" and then clean all of their poo poo after they left. mindphlux posted:I'm guessing "drahma" means like pre-assembling components so someone can cook them in a wok? pre-cooking meat? edit: I kinda sperged out and went into way too much detail. Most of the meat isn't pre-cooked, with the except of one drahma cook who acts as a pre-cooker and mini expo for the primary wok cook. The actual "drahma station" is a pair of ticket rails and very large lowboy coolers + cold tops. The butcher preps all of the meats and marinades them, you pull them out of the cooler as needed and pass perfectly portioned plates to the cooks, who should only need to throw the stuff you give them into their wok in the right order with the right sauces and then the dish is done. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 03:09 on Jun 18, 2015 |
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Jun 18, 2015 02:47
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Yeah it was kind of like that at that place, until I started being on the pass anyway. Kind of convinced me that I don't really have the type of personality for a management job in restaurants. It wasn't entirely my fault, but we did lose a bunch of really strong, older, "KM in training" types for various reasons and they were promptly replaced with... two little scrawny kids and a nepotism promotion. I tried to keep it going but eh, it's not really my job to manage the "kitchen culture" and a lot of our cooks had already been there way longer than me, at that point. I took it as: my job is to get the food out without loving anything up, and then oversee the closing of the kitchen to make sure we had meat in the smokers for tomorrow and everything was clean. As long as those two things got done, I didn't really care how and I definitely appreciated the overtime. Aside from changs, people ribbed on me at every single other kitchen I've ever worked in for having such short communication with expo. I'm "the 'heard' dude", all I ever say is "heard" or "x minutes". We didn't append the chef or talk in french because it wasn't terribly appropriate, but one of my regrets after having left the industry is that I never did actually work in a place where you say "yes chef". 
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Jun 18, 2015 03:17
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Vorenus posted:He spilled 2 pounds of melted butter on the grill. After gravity mated the butter to the open flame, it then consummated that union on the drip pans under the grill, which are supposed to be cleaned at night but haven't been in roughly three months. I can't be sure of the time frame because I can only measure it based on ash and flame, of which there were very much. At one place, the first time I flipped my burner grates over to "burn them off" (as instructed, and following what has apparently been done every wednesday and friday since the restaurant opened), I was a little surprised to find that the caked on grease on my range (2 saute cooks, 2 ranges) almost immediately caught fire. It's pretty alarming watching the entire backside of an 8 burner range just instantly go up in flames and start dripping actually flaming grease onto the floor. I'm always especially worried about the gas pipes connected to the back of things when poo poo like that starts to happen, but given the average intelligence of a kitchen worker I've always assumed that kitchen-grade gas piping has hella safety features and shutoffs and poo poo. Same deal, though. Pulled the stove away from the wall, put the grease on the ground out with salt, and then just kinda let it burn for a few minutes and it eventually burned away, was pretty loving clean too afterwards. Every wednesday and friday my rear end. e: quote:I'm being straight up with you guys. There is a smell in that kitchen that just isn't right... I've found that soda fountains can have similar issues and the insides are usually pretty nasty in general. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Jun 24, 2015 |
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Jun 24, 2015 23:53
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Depends on the situation, really. The only place that I can think of that's going to have that many plates of the same type is going to be a hotel or a cafeteria. If it's a hotel (our dish line looked exactly like that at my hotel job), he's probably cleaning up after a banquet so what he's doing is totally fine. It would be ideal, yeah, if he could slow down and look at what he's doing but realistically speaking there is going to be another dishwasher on the other end to double check, we frequently did banquets with 300+ plates so having 2-3 of those being "dirty" in exchange for it taking 5 minutes instead of 30 minutes is definitely worth it. Even on the line the first thing I do is pull a plate and check it, if it's dirty it goes into the bin. Takes me about 3 seconds. That being said I've also worked in places that do barbeque or have fresh batter on the line, and obviously that needs a lot more caution. But, for just dinner plates, sure that's fine. I'd bet money that over 95% of those came out perfect. e: It's probably the environment talking but I'm way more pleased that he isn't drunk, is actually at work, is actually washing dishes, and isn't going so slowly that I have to help him. That he's doing it fast is a nice side bonus, but the only thing being fast gets you is an extra 1/2 hour off of labor. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Jun 27, 2015 |
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Jun 27, 2015 01:44
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Errant Gin Monks posted:Dinner service menu has expanded a bit after contracting the menu, I removed about half the crap I hated and added some chipotle cheddar Mac and cheese dipped in IPA tempura batter and Panko bread crumbs and fried, dusted with a chili powder mix and served with an avacado ranch dressing. It was a big hit tonight. I will probably keep it. I worked at a sandwich place in southern california when I was still in the industry that did this, but as a panini. The cheese blend for the mac and cheese was our standard blend except with smoked cheddar and chipotle, then we'd cool it and pack it into balls so they could be battered and rolled in a panko + smoked paprika + chili powder mix. The sandwich itself was a french loaf we got from a local bakery, bacon, roasted onions, cheddar and swiss, and then a chipotle aioli. Cheap(ish), easy to prep, easy to hold on the line and cook. Think we ran about 20% food cost on the sandwich and sold it for 11 dollars.
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Jul 4, 2015 15:59
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Kenning posted:Expo'ing is easily the most fun job in the restaurant. Agreed, and I'm bad at yelling. You just have to have the worst pay imaginable and a couple years of experience at the restaurant in question, ideally where you started somewhere at the bottom like night porter or dishwasher and have worked your way up. Also, be absolutely willing to send someone home at the drop of a hat and do their job for them. It helps if you're just genuinely interested in doing a good job as a kitchen (not as an expo, or as a "line", these are different) and making everyone's life as easy and stress free as possible. When everything goes well it's a wonderful experience, haven't been able to find that feeling of satisfaction in any other job or industry. When things don't go well... you're in a perfect position as an unbiased, objective bystander to point out what went wrong and how to fix it. This is coming from my expo experience, anyway, where expo was promoted from BoH and acted as more of a shift leader or hourly manager and held accountable for poor guest experiences that involved the food, wait for the food, or similar. So, as expo, if a ticket takes too long it's my fault. If it goes out wrong or poorly cooked, also my fault. If we run out of ______, also my fault. If we smoked 6 cases of ribs and only sold 30 racks, also my fault. There's pretty much nothing that happens in the kitchen that isn't my fault and, IMO, that's a very important part of the job. We had a mirror role in FoH that was similar, generally promoted from bartenders. I think being able to say "clock out and go home if you don't want to be here" to an employee who is complaining or starting poo poo is very important. At the changs I worked at, expo was promoted from the food runners and it was a terrible shitshow because they were always really bad, had no authority, and all they did was fight with the wok cooks. I also worked at a macaroni grill and it was a similar situation, expo was a bitch role until you got tables. I don't understand the mindset behind that, or just throwing the cheapest-paid english speaking person you can find into the role. It's a very important station and, in my experience, loving it up is going to create a revolving door of employees on both sides of the line.
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Jul 6, 2015 15:58
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Turkeybone posted:(take all the orders at once, serve all the tables at once, clear all the dishes at once). It's easier for the employee who doesn't have the mental capacity to juggle tasks or the judgement to prioritize them. It fucks everybody else.
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Jul 6, 2015 20:58
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Willie Tomg posted:If a manager is getting credit for loving around on the clock while you do their job for them, then by all metrics that Actually Matter to businessfolk they're a good manager. Turns out the bad guys won the cold war. Namaste. This kinda got glossed over by the standard really hosed up poo poo continuing to happen in the restaurant industry, but I just wanted to say that I really enjoyed this post. Also that you should call out sick when you are sick because the one, single solitary saving grace of the restaurant industry is that you can walk across the street and get a new job whenever you want. e: and that if you still work in the restaurant industry, you should be doing your best to be no longer working in the restaurant industry. e: and that I think a man and his dog is an alright dude who maybe works in restaurants a little too much, but is otherwise harmless if maybe a little clueless. Definitely tenacious though.
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Jul 20, 2015 22:02
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Thoht posted:So! What are the things you all hate to prep the most and never want to see again? Probably turning squid hats into julienne calamari. Favorite thing to prep? For me, anything that used kaffir lime leaf when we had it, for whatever reason it was really satisfying to slice. I also got some strange, twisted satisfaction from making perfect little 1/4" cubes of english cucumber and tuna.
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Jul 24, 2015 15:17
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TheSnowySoviet posted:Seven weeks into the new job -- first one in fine dining after 8 years in the industry -- and so far I've gotten two 2-day weekends, but have shown up on days I was supposed to have off with less than 12 hours notice and worked at least a full shift 5 times. This happened with me at one of my jobs until it progressed to the point where the GM was scheduling me 4 days a week at 9a - close (~midnight) + friday and saturday night 4p to close. He eventually got fired and I'm sure that running one dude at 20 hours of overtime per week, every week, was a major contributing factor. It was really good money though and I worked a station that was basically "inside expo + other stations as needed" so I pretty much spent 14 hours a day shooting the poo poo and having a good time. e: I should mention that I eventually got fired for no call/no show when the new manager showed up and stopped scheduling me to be in the restaurant for about 75% of any given week. By that point I had completely lost track of things like "days of the week" and when she started giving me the usual blind-dartboard schedule of random loving days and times I just completely dropped the ball and thought it was a day that it actually was not. She was, at this point, chomping at the bit to give my job to a nepotism carryover from her old location so that did not end well for me. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Aug 4, 2015 |
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Aug 4, 2015 00:01
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nuru posted:As a customer, that's surprising to me. I know your margins are generally pretty thin (maybe 20% profit on food costs?). Do you still make something off the customers thanks to drink orders and such, or are you just eating it for good will at that point? The profit margin on food items is actually pretty loving insane -- the hotel I worked at we routinely sold cuts of meat/fish at like 900-1100% cost, but that is generally higher for hotels. It's the million other things you have to pay for that eat into your actual profits. The PF Chang's I worked at for a couple years back in like 2008 did about 4,000,000 in sales per year, cost of food was about 830k (22%). Actual profit after all expenses (inc salaried labor) was a little over 1,000,000. Still not really sure why they showed us this but it was kind of neat, anyway. The highest unexpected cost was probably over 300k replacing silverware, ramekins, sake/soy sauce containers, and other small misc. glassware. It might be different for alcohol, but with an entree for example it's going to cost the restaurant about 5 dollars to remake your ~28 dollar steak and give you some fresh sides. I don't imagine pouring an extra 2 fingers of ketel one is going to matter too much when you're gonna get $600 off that bottle by the time it's empty. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 02:41 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 00:16
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Chef De Cuisinart posted:e2: loving New Mexico and South Carolina are still using 1993 food code guidelines, that's pretty loving terrible. bet they aren't even required to sanitize work surfaces. I worked in south carolina for about 5 years. You are required to sanitize work surfaces. Thai food place in my hometown got closed down, though, for storing dry goods (flour, rice, etc) in old containers for cleaning chemicals with the tops chopped off -- I hope saving $20 bucks on dry goods containers was worth...losing your entire business? Myrtle beach is/was actually pretty cool because the paper usually runs a weekly article with the results of any serious health inspection infractions. We almost made it in there once when an inspector walked in and found one of our sous-in-trainings portioning noodles on an unsanitized surface, without an ice bath, without wearing gloves, and he was eating noodles when the dude walked in, that was like -20 points or whatever. Regarding gloves: I worked at a corner bakery once for about 6 hours. They weren't allowed to keep gloves at their stations because it would cause contamination, said the 3rd party company they have contracted to do periodic health inspections. You're also supposed to wash your hands and change your gloves in between preparing every single food item. The result of this is that nobody wears, or changes, their gloves or washes their hands because it is too much of a hassle to follow the rules. There's also one (1) singular saute pan in an establishment that supposedly serves hundreds of customers per day "fresh scrambled egg" sandwiches -- basically I am saying that if you eat at corner bakery in any part of your life you should seriously reconsider. There's a similar rule about keeping drinks with lids anywhere (literally anywhere) in the "kitchen", so instead of having safe/sane rules that people follow with some respect... they just dont drink for hours on end until someone says gently caress it and then suddenly there are opened cans of red bull sitting inches away from food that is actually being prepared. So, there should be some give and take. If your hands are dirty you don't touch buns, yeah, I get you there. Obviously you made the judgement call and given that you weren't immediately written up, you probably made the right one. But... don't turn into that guy. Personally I always wear and change my gloves but that's because I'm obsessive about not transferring oils or seasoning from one food onto the next and I usually need clean hands to plate things because I spent a lot of time on garde manger. It's faster to swap gloves and have a clean slate, also I don't like my hands getting dirty. Other people just wash their hands a lot, that's fine too. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Aug 16, 2015 |
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Aug 16, 2015 05:34
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I grew up in a rural part of a small state where a handful of regional highschools handled several different nearby towns. We had 3 choices: expensive boarding school, "standard" highschool, and a vocational/technical highschool. Standard highschool the only thing you do is follow baking recipes. Usually you spend about a week reading the recipe and watching the teacher demo it, then the class splits up into groups and they all make biscuits/whatever the gently caress. The technical school had a 2 week rotation where you would spend 2 weeks in standard Math/Science/English classes, and then 2 weeks in a "shop" class. The school offered a variety of "shops", but the big ones were basic web development, woodworking, metalworking, auto repair, office work, and learning to drive and operate machinery like lawn mowers, snow plows, safely cutting trees, and poo poo like that. They had a cooking shop that was quite good, as I understand, because you worked in the school cafeteria and the instructors were "real chefs" or whatever the gently caress. I understand that technical schools of that nature are something of a rarity. I haven't seen one in any of the other 5 places that I've lived. There was also a stigma surrounding the tech school where it was considered to be for "dumb kids". The idea was that you'd go there and pick up some interesting trade skills if you had no intention of going to college, and in my experience at least they liked to drill into our heads that if we didn't go to college we would be unemployable and poor forever.
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Aug 19, 2015 16:34
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Willie Tomg posted:NOTHING on that line is fully airtight. He's been chlorine gassing our ready-to-eat coldside since who-knows-when like its nothing. A better reason not to mix bleach and hot water is that really hot water actually fucks with the active ingredient in household bleach and makes it less good at killing the proteins and poo poo in bacteria, or that's what I understand anyway. Google can probably confirm, but if you can convince him or a superior that he is actually intentionally making things less clean for "the smell", you might be able to get him to stop. The worst part with people like this is that they genuinely believe they are doing the right thing, and especially that it probably started from some idiot walking in, smelling the bleach, and going "Hmm! Smells really clean in here!" and then suddenly we've moved the goalposts from "get things to actually be sanitized and clean" to "make it smell like cleaning supplies". The behaviors that we call out and praise are generally the ones that end up being repeated and ingrained as culture, which can have very bad effects on any organization but especially food service due to the aforementioned bleach-steam seasoning on all the cold stuff. As far as I know, making actual chlorine gas involves mixing it with an acid or ammonia. I've personally been present for some idiot making Actual Chlorine Gas and it is very obvious and very lovely smelling -- we actually had to evacuate the building briefly because breathing yellow poo poo in the air is generally not good for you. That being said, homie should generally not be touching bleach anywhere near the kitchen just in general because who is to say if someone spilled a squirt bottle of lemon juice or some poo poo into the drain and suddenly we're pushing actually lethal gas through the plumbing or up into the hoods. I'm of the opinion that, especially with dishwashing staff, bleach should be a controlled substance and locked in the office or some poo poo because a working kitchen/bar is probably the most likely place for an accidental Bleach -> Acid mix to happen. With bathroom janitors, pool people, etc you can generally train them to avoid it, not provide them with materials that could possibly cause the reaction, and other poo poo like that. A bar or kitchen just has food acids intentionally lying around and they tend to be pretty chaotic places in general. There are also, in my experience, plenty of cleaning solutions available for use in food service that don't have the side effect of creating literal poison when mixed with citrus juices, vinegars, etc. We had "orange poo poo -> scrub -> wipe -> pink poo poo -> wipe" and that got us through health inspections just fine.
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Aug 31, 2015 21:54
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Generally speaking the server has the least amount of care in the restaurant about the state of the Rail/Window/Whatever so it's usually not wise to rely on them to help manage it. There is a certain skill level that is reachable as an expo that makes the amount of tickets on the rail/in the window/whatever a non-issue. I worked an expo station for 2 years where my board was full and tickets are printing out onto the floor and our motto was "it's fine, relax". You just need to get used to working in a buffer because ticket time doesn't matter. It's good to set goals but it's also good to be able to zoom out for a second and realize that, theoretically, if you print the entire restaurant at the same time there is no way the last 5 orders are meeting your time goals -- so gently caress the time goals. Getting everything out in (more or less) the order that it came in as soon as possible is the goal, and you accomplish that by not loving up. Staring at the time on the ticket and constantly comparing that to the clock isn't going to help anybody not gently caress up.
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Sep 11, 2015 15:17
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Sorry. I didn't really read all of the original question. I don't really know what you mean by "run the wheel" but wheels are kind of lovely IMO. Get a rail, when it's busy make sure that if the cooks/stations have their own rails that nobody is using them and they are only listening to expo. Be really good at expo, this requires you to know your cooks and your stations and just about how much work one station can take before it starts to get lovely. Depending on the layout of your kitchen I've always found that inside expos work better than outside expos (sometimes you want both). A big benefit to inside expo is that if you see a ~6-7 ticket window where one station is just absolutely loving slammed, take the least slammed station and have that dude jump on the slammed station while you take over his. Careful cook juggling got me through ~$30k sales days and we were running a full service restaurant with actual cooking times usually taking around 2/3rds of the time goal. Ticket time goal there was 15 minutes and the only time we went over that was when the FoH staff got weeded and started turning entire sections at the same time. Whether you meet or don't meet your ticket goal time is relatively unimportant and depends mostly on context but If we're running ~15 minutes at a full service restaurant with ~$22 per person and you guys are struggling to keep it under 30... something is wrong. The only thing I can think of that I've ever worked with where 30 minutes is "normal" was a fatass double-cut broiled pork chop with veal demi, and despite our insistence the customer wanted it well done for whatever reason. Also pizza can get kinda silly but usually you have to gently caress up for it to be over 20. So, I guess some context about what the menu items are would help more. But in general I've found that, during extreme volumes, the less your cooks actually have to think the better off you're going to be. Finding/keeping good expos is pretty hard, though, and the way most places I've worked handle this is by promoting inside expos from, well, inside the kitchen and having them act in more of a supervisory role. Take your dudes that can work every station and give them a rail and a printer until someone stands out -- thats your dude. Usually you can get people to agree to shorter shifts under the guise of it being the side effects of a promotion, too. Should save you some money. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 21:10 on Sep 11, 2015 |
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Sep 11, 2015 21:07
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When most of my income was cash I paid taxes on almost none of it.
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Sep 12, 2015 02:54
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Crazy Larry posted:I realize that not claiming tips on taxes is a time honored tradition in this industry but I don't think people realize that it can come back to bite you in the rear end when it comes to getting unemployment/social security/a loan. I don't really see it to be honest, but I guess to be fair I wasn't a tipped employee for terribly long. Your taxable wages are at least minimum regardless, and at least in my experience you get about 50/50 cash tips vs credit card tips. Obviously credit card tips are reported 100%. It's your job to report enough of your cash tips so that your employer doesn't have to comp your check because that's when it starts getting dicey and people start asking questions. Secret Spoon posted:You should also claim all your cash so those who you tip out get paid. I don't even know how you would tip the bar based on your tips you got from customers that ordered bar drinks, and the amount of effort it would take to sift through your bullshit just to figure that out would be completely unreasonable. And you can lie, so, let's be honest here that would never actually work in an actual restaurant setting, and then you'd have to do it all over again for expo and food runners. I take my bar and food sales which are itemized on my end of day slip and move the demical over one. 12 rats tied together fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Sep 13, 2015 |
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Sep 13, 2015 02:05
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I think that's a little disingenuous. It depends on your restaurant, and you'd certainly need to express it as raising average check price by X gives you enough extra income to pay an extra X per hour. That's a very important distinction -- payroll expressed as an hourly cost to keep a restaurant open and making money instead of some idiot's payrate, as anyone who has ever held a supervisory role can tell you. That being said, at the places I have worked there is generally more than enough net profit lying around to give everyone in BoH a $2/hr raise and have it not be a significant percentage of net profit. That doesn't change that ($12/hr * 33 hours) still isn't a living wage and that everyone is still going to need two jobs. Sure they could raise prices to pay people more, but why? There's really no reason to, and honestly for a publicly traded company they could get into a lot of poo poo with their investors for intentionally making less money without gaining some kind of justifiable competitive advantage (which is against the law in our glorious capitalist society). The positions that actually matter in companies and that actually have an impact on making large amounts of money are well compensated. The completely interchangeable revolving door of FoH and BoH staff, obviously, get screwed. It's your job to make sure you are part of the first group instead of the second, and fortunately there are a bunch of ways to go about that. Willie Tomg posted:Turns out the bad guys won the cold war. Namaste.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:17
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Please also keep in mind that you can't often just "raise prices by 5%" without loving with your cash transactions. A lot of effort goes into making things 0.99, 17.95, and the "psychology" of menu pricing in general with respects to anchor items, the placement and pricing of good margin items, poo poo like that. You can't just start charging $1.03 for a mcdouble and expect the customer to understand that now they need to either pay with a card or bring pennies along with them. And then you need to worry about adjusting the cash you distribute to your 50,000 stores to make sure that you always have enough pennies on hand to make change for $1 bill + a nickel. And then you need to worry about lazy cashiers just not making the correct change anyway and accepting a $1 bill for a $1.03 menu item, which directly translates into lost money for you. You're generally working with things in blocks, pricing wise. You're looking at +/- $0.50 through $2.00, and you also have to make sure that when you bump up an item you increase the "perceived value" from the customer's end as well. There's no easy way to take a mcdouble and make it worth $0.04 more in a customer's eyes, but you can take a fancy burger and make it always come with bacon for +$1.00. That being said, I'm in the camp that minimum wage should be raised across the board under the assumption that giving the working poor more money to spend will, generally, benefit the businesses that the working poor are employed at. I also feel like tipping wage should be abolished in general so more places can adopt official tipshares like in CA, which own (I was averaging $18/hr as BoH). But, I also understand that I am not an economist and that making such a drastic change will gently caress over a lot of existing businesses. Also that, in general, it is kind of difficult to pass laws that gently caress over existing businesses unless you are a bigger business yourself.
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Sep 16, 2015 19:00
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