06.25.07
The Recipe for a Rough Day
In general, Sundays are rough days for me anyway. I have to open the restaurant, but also set up the sauté and pantry stations, and then work them through lunch. So in essence, Sunday mornings have me doing the work of two people normally. I don’t mind the extra work – it’s what helps keep a restaurant profitable, gives my line cooks their much needed time off, and also helps to make me better at working in kitchens. If I can handle it when it is rough, I can surely take care of anything when it is slow.
 This is about how sick he better have been, or he’s really going to be dead! |
But yesterday was a step even further down this path - one I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to handle. My phone rang at 7AM; it was Javier, the guy who works the grill station at lunch on Sundays. He sounded terrible, and of course was calling in sick. There was nothing I could do to force him to come in, but I instantly knew my day was going to be a mess since this meant I would be two people down on the line. I was going to have to perform the work of three people in the all-too-brief morning hours to get the restaurant cracking. I jumped in my car and raced to the restaurant to give myself as much lead time as possible to make sure all the stations were set up.
It was about this time I was happy that I had chosen not to go to the party some of the people in the restaurant had thrown the night before. The “theme” of this party was to get together after the restaurant closed and drink a lot of beer. But as the morning guy, I usually have to be in bed right about the time when the night crew is getting off work and gearing up for such parties. I had decided to sleep instead of stay out late, and I now knew I had made the right choice.
 “OK, so the tomatoes go here, and the cucumbers there… and wait, which one of these things is kohlrabi?…” (photo from My Bountiful Life) |
Adding to the challenge of being a man down for the day, the set-up for the stations were unfamiliar to me thanks to our recently launched summer menu. This was the first time I was setting up these stations since this menu was introduced. This meant I was not 100% sure what all the ingredients I needed on the line were. I had a pretty good idea of what to do though, so I jumped right in to prepping sauces and heating soups at my sous chef station, filling in all the salad ingredients into the pantry station, cooking pasta and portioning fish for the sauté station and building a fire with charcoal and wood in the grill station. There were times I was working on so many things at once, I was shocked that I wasn’t burning everything I tried to cook.
That’s not to say I didn’t burn anything mind you. One half sheet of filberts and one pot of Cheddar Ale soup shuffled off this mortal coil due to my over-exuberance in trying to cook too much at once. But still - given how much else I was working on and prepped for service, the losses to the restaurant could have been much worse.
The first servers started to arrive around 10:30 to begin setting up the front of the house. From the looks on their faces and the enormous bags under their eyes, it had been one hell of a party the night before. Again I thanked the lucky stars I had chosen sleep over beer. (Did this mean I was getting old?…)
The other sous chefs finally rolled in around 11 (I’d already been cooking for 3.5 hours at this point) and I explained to them that I would need one of them to help me man the grill through lunch. They of course agreed to help out as working the pantry, sauté and grill stations alone is too much for almost anyone to handle. But all the same, they had their own prep work for dinner that had to get done, so I knew working the lunch line would hardly be their A-1 priority. In light of that, this basically meant I would have to work these stations on my own as much as possible, and only call them in when there was too much to handle.
 For the record, I make awesome frittatas. |
Example: An order for a salad and a frittata comes in, so I can handle that since it is all on the sauté/pantry station. Then an order for two burgers comes in - no problem, just throw them on the grill, and let them sit for a while. Back on the sauté line an order for a rockfish comes in - no problem again, I could get that started while finishing off the frittata and dressing the salad. Back over to the grill to flip the burgers and see how they are coming, and an order for two pizzas arrives. The pizza guy - Erik - is actually at work today, so I can ignore that. A quick follow up to that order has two more salads - now things were getting dicey as I have to finish a fish and the burgers while making the salads. I drop a large handful of fries into the deep fryer, throw buns onto the grill to toast them, pull the fish out of the oven to finish it off, plate the salads, pull out the fries, plate the burgers, and just as I am thinking I have it under control the order printers suddenly go ballistic.
Two chicken salads, one melon salad, three burgers, one tuna gyro, one frittata, two grilled cheese and some pizzas.
“Andrew! Help!”
It is perhaps not especially dignified to call out for help in a professional kitchen. But at the same time, it is even worse to fall into the weeds to the point where the quality and/or timeliness of the food’s preparation suffers. There’s only so much one human can do - and this was more than I could handle. It’s not as much about admitting weakness as much as it is recognizing one’s own limitations. I’m not going to let the customers have a bad lunch for the sake of protecting my machismo.
And so it went through the day. Andrew would come bail me out on the grill when things got hopping, but otherwise I was running 2/3 of the line myself. It was a long 3.5 hours for sure. When it wrapped up, I suddenly realized just how tired I was. But with lunch over, the dinner crew was now filing in the door. I was relieved of my post and could carry on with my other managerial duties. For the first time in this very long day, my job was returning to normal.
Somewhere in the back of my head, I was half-expecting Chef and Javier and everyone to show up suddenly and say something like, “Congratulations! You passed the test! Way to go, that was a rough batch of work, but you pulled it off! Good job!” But of course that never happened.
This wasn’t a test. This was just life. Life in the kitchen. On the good days, it’s hard. On the bad days, it’s almost impossible. But if you’re lucky, somewhere along the line, you realize that every day, it’s incredible fun.
As I drove home, I knew that tonight would once again be a night where I would be choosing sleep over beer. And again, it would be the right choice.
Stumble it!
Eize said,
June 25, 2007 at 6:10 pm
And I thought preparing for fiestas was tough–oh, wait, it is!
Can you post a good recipe for frittata, por favor?
Olivia said,
June 26, 2007 at 7:12 am
I can relate . . during the summer months, on fridays, my entire kitchen got hauled out on the patio, by non other than me alone, and I would then throw a barbecue for 200, right down to the 4 large deep pan cobblers, perpared earlier, by me, all different combos of fruit. I remember falling in to bed afterwards, too tired to poop, but mind still reeling from the day. They were wildly successful. Then yesterday, on a small private job, multitasking as usual, I stupidly grabbed a hot pan by mistake. I felt so stupid and juvenile, right out of culinary school mistake. Oh well, my blister and I will just take it easy today. I hope you can as well.
Billi-Jean said,
July 23, 2007 at 9:58 am
The kohlrabi is in the centre on the bottom between the beets and the carrots