10.05.06

Slow Times on a Thursday Afternoon

Posted in The Story at 9:51 pm by Chef Matt

I guess I have talked up how busy the kitchen is at the Cafe, and it really is that way every day. The length of the rush varies day to day, but it is pretty dependable to be heavy from 11:30 - 1:00 and then there is usually a bit of a lull for 15-20 minutes and it then picks back up again.

I hate that lull. I would honestly rather have it be balls-to-the-wall busy from 11-2:30 (which has happened) than to have a breather in the middle of the shift like that. Looking at the line and seeing the number of tickets decreasing steadily is the best feeling in the world. We all know we are winning the war, and it always feels good to be on the winning side. And when that magic moment happens, when I turn around and look for the next ticket on the line, and there is nothing but a blank string staring back at me, that is the best moment of my day. I take a deep breath, drink some water (of course) and usually high-five one of the other chefs near me on a job well done. There is a total physical and mental decompression that begins to take place as the endorphin production center of my brain finally decides to knock off for the day.

Joel: “So, what do you want for Christmas Crow?” Crow: “I want to decide who lives and who dies.”

And right when I am floating at my highest, and have my station all clean, that is when the stragglers begin to show up en masse to the Cafe. Like a herd of hungry hyenas who come to the kill after the fact, they descend upon my clean work station asking for complex-to-prepare dishes and special requests. I hate these people. Well, “hate” is a pretty strong word, so now that I think about it, “hate” is not nearly strong enough a word. I loathe the fact that these people exist. If I ever build a time machine, it will be to go back in time and make sure these people’s parents never meet.

If you come to a restaurant late for a meal, please, for all that is good and holy, order something simple and quick, and no special requests. We never would do anything bad at Tirolo of course (seriously!), but I can’t speak for other dining institutions…

But what I really wanted to talk about today was how that second wave never came. Their absence was not exactly missed per se, but rather it was strange how everything just kinda stopped at 1:30, and never really got kicking again. So this all begs the question: What happens in a kitchen when there are no customers?

Well, the average kitchen seems to go through three stages when there are no customers to cook for:

Stage 1: Cleaning
This is the stage that seems most obvious to me, and is what all chefs do (or should be doing) when they are not immediately under pressure to be producing food for the hungry masses outside the kitchen. I am not talking about a deep cleaning here, but general wipe-downs of counters, washing knives, taking excess pans to the dishwasher and so forth. Basically putting things in order for the next horde of people coming in. At this stage, the chef is really assuming that at any moment a bunch more people will come in, so s/he is not committing to any major projects, rather s/he is just “tidying up” for when they rush in.

Stage 2: Bullshitting

It’s like this, only we are all wearing aprons…and we don’t have a water cooler.

In this stage, the chef’s station is clean (or clean enough), but it is still not apparent if this lull is here to stay or not. It is too soon to commit to any major undertakings though, so it is time to shoot the breeze, or play pranks on the other chefs. Shooting the breeze can be the usual water cooler chit-chat about what is coming up this weekend, or how we are all underpaid given what we go through, or talking about how everybody else sucks at their job but the people involved in the conversation - the usual workplace stuff. Pranks on the other hand are much more fun, and much more up my alley.

Mind you, this is a kitchen, so pranks where people are startled and so forth can be dangerous (no lit firecrackers into the cuffs of your co-worker’s chef pants people!). But pretending to burn yourself or getting someone to check on an exploding sausage in a microwave is just damn funny at times. A personal favorite, when someone closes the pizza oven door, hold your hand up with your fingers curled back near the door jamb and start screaming. Gets ‘em every time!

Stage 3: Might as well start prepping
Well, once all this fun wears thin - which it does really quickly - and it is obvious that you are in a full-blown lull, this is when the head chef/owner realizes that you might as well get some work done if they are going to keep paying you. Suddenly the kitchen goes from an empty (and clean) work area ready for the next onslaught, and becomes a full-blown working kitchen as cannelloni sheets are laid out on every available flat surface, lasagna pans are placed all over the kitchen for filling and baking, and every burner is instantly occupied with large stock pots full of soups and sauces to be cooked and stored for future use.

From a time-usage point of view this makes tremendous sense. The logic is infallible: just because it is slow now, doesn’t mean it will be slow forever, so you might as well use this time to get everything ready for the next crowd. Like squirrels storing nuts for winter, so too the line cook must make a batch of 50 lbs of tomato sauce for the next day.

However, there is one serious risk taken when stage three is reached. This risk is especially acute in a small kitchen like ours. If you occupy every surface place with raw food, and every burner with stock pots and sauce pans, then if a late customer DOES happen to walk in the door and decides that he wants his usual complex lunch order you are, quite bluntly, fucked.

Fortunately for us, this was not the case today when we hit stage 3. In addition to the aforementioned 50 lbs of tomato sauce, we banged out about 75 cannelloni, 4 pans of chicken lasagna (a really awesome and popular special we run occaisionally) a batch of cream of broccoli soup and sliced and grilled about all the eggplant in the western hemisphere. In this entire time, only three customers came in, and all they wanted were subs.

So yeah, it may have been a slow day today, but at least when those stragglers wander in late tomorrow, I will be ready for them. I was working on my “Oh my God, I just cut off my little finger” gag all afternoon. (Don’t tell my boss…)

Matt

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