#Service Industry

[weaselle]

it was too much i had to make my own post

line cook here. ACCURATE

if you don't get the hate, here's what you don't understand.

it takes up to 2 hours to close down the kitchen.

The last 60-90 minutes before closing time you do almost no cooking because the restaurant doesn't have many people in it and you've already cooked most of their diners.

So if someone walks in during, like, the last hour, the cook is in the middle of an industrial deep clean of the kitchen.

(these numbers can vary quite a bit from place to place but i have worked several restaurants with these actual times and the concept remains the same)

Say the place closes at 10. If you wait til the restaurant is already closed to start all your cleaning duties, you'll be there until at least midnight.

More than that your boss knows that on an average night you can start your clean up as soon as the last rush ends and get out of there around 10:45, even 10:15 on a slow night if you get lucky. That means there are plenty of restaurants where if you do take until midnight the manager is going to come up to you at some point that week and ask you what went wrong that night, and you'd better have an answer.

So this example restaurant closes at 10 pm. The dinner rush ends around 8:30, and shortly after that the cook is going to start getting every single dish possible over to the dishwasher because the dishwasher always gets hit hard and late, and the machine runs for 2 full minutes and only holds so many dishes, so the way that works out is if you wait an extra 30 minutes to give the dishwasher all your stuff it can mean adding like 60 minutes to the end of his shift. And you're gonna KEEP finding shit to send to the dishpit right up until you leave probably.

all these little square and rectangle containers in this cold table have to be pulled out and changed over into new containers, replaced by new full ones, or in some cases filled from larger containers in the back, which can result in even more empty containers to send to the dishwasher.

while it's all pulled apart to do this, you have to clean up all the spilled food and sauce and juices and stuff from the joints and ledges and shelves and drip trays

Once you get your line changed over in this way, and fully stocked, anytime someone orders something that makes use of a bunch of that stuff, you have to restock and re-clean it some. It might already be covered in plastic. Some of it might already be stuck in the back to make room to take apart your cutting board counter to clean. To cook a dish isn't TOO much of a problem at this point, but you're really hoping for zero orders because you still have so much other cleaning to do.

Meanwhile the salad bar and appetizer section and server station and everybody are all doing the same thing. Even the bartenders are stocking olives and lemons and sending back whisks and stir spoons and shakers and empty 4quart storage containers that used to hold the back-up lemons and olives and things. Every section is dumping their must-be-cleaneds to the dishpit as fast as possible because early and fast is the only thing they can do to to help that dishpit not absolutely drown into overtime.

The poor dishwasher is always the last to clock out, soaking wet and exhausted.

Around this time you probably scrub the flat top, which has turned black from cooked on grease and is still about 500 degrees. Line cooks are divided in opinion on water-based or oil based cleaning methods for this, but they all involve scrubbing with (usually) a brick of pumice stone using every ounce of your strength while you try not to burn yourself

you scrub it from fully blackened to gleaming silver and now if somebody orders something that needs the flat top to cook, you can either fuck up your cleaning job or fake it in a couple frying pans and pass that tiny fuck you down to your dishwasher (who usually understands, especially if you help them take the garbage out or clean your own floor drain later)

If there's deep fried stuff on the menu then the fryers have to be cleaned out, which includes straining the oil out into enormous and super-heavy pots full of oil so hot that if you spill on yourself then it's probably a hospital visit and if you slip and fall face first into it it'll be the last thing you ever do.

Then you gotta scrub out the fryer. Like you gotta take the (hot) screen out and reach your arm down into the weird rounded pipes and curved areas (so hot, burn you if you brush against them hot) and scrub off whatever is down there

Depending on your kitchen you might have to do up to four of these. Then you'll have to pour the (dangerously hot) oil back in

oh, and if you didn't dry the pipes and get ALL the water out of the trap and tank?

water reacts with hot oil in a sort of mentos and coke way that can send a tidal wave of oil past the open flame of the pilot light ...HUGE dangerous mess and/or burn down the kitchen if the oil lights up.

Unless! If the oil has been used too hard and needs to be changed, it's time to carry those open topped super heavy pots full of will-kill-you-hot oil and dump them in the barrel outside by the dumpsters so you can put room temp fresh oil in the fryers. whew!

The clean up is not just some light wiping down that can be easily interrupted, is what i'm saying.

You might have to do some kind of walk-in duty (moving around 50lb cases of lettuce and 50lb bags of onions to get to the stacks of five gallon buckets full of salad dressings and sauces to move so you can reach the giant metal pots and bus tubs full of prep and get it all organized and make sure it's all labeled and i have to stop now i'm having flashbacks)

THE POINT IS

by 15 or however many minutes to close, the line cook is doing an intense deep clean and probably has the whole stove taken apart to detail.

For some industrial stoves this means lifting off large cast iron plates that weigh like 20 lbs each and are still quite hot. Whatever metal burners are on there, you gotta take off and clean, you can see here the lines that indicate the large thick cast iron rectangles that sit on top of the burners to allow heavy pots to rest on. Those five (each has one front burner hole and one back burner hole, see?) have to be lifted off and cleaned with soap and a wire brush usually, and then the underneath area also has to be cleaned because a lot of shit falls through the burner holes on a busy night.

if you didn't do it when you did the flat top you have to do the grease trap (which can be like a full five minutes and is always disgusting).. You gotta clean out all the little gas jets in each burner with a wire or something so the burners all flame evenly, and sometimes you have to remove some of the natural gas piping that connects the burners to access where you have to clean.

you gotta clean out the bottom of the oven and the wire racks, and, oh gods, you gotta take down the filter vents from the hood fans above the stove.

See all the lined parts along the top of the wall?

those are hood vents, and as they pull air up they also pull a lot of grease and they have to be taken down and cleaned, then you gotta climb up there and scrub where they go before you put them back...

And then there's the mopping and floor drains and...

Anyway, that's what the line cook is doing when you walk in fifteen minutes before closing and order something that needs to be cooked on that stove. They are doing an entire industrial cleaning of a professional kitchen.

In some restaurants maybe one or two of these jobs will be every other night or even only twice a week, but in many, possibly most kitchens, ALL of these things happen EVERY night. You don't want to leave any food mess that might attract insects or rodents for one thing, so a really good kitchen is as close to brand new as you can get it every night.

IF YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO ORDER SOMETHING ANYWAY, HERE IS WHAT TO DO

open with an apology and ask the server to go ask what the cook would prefer you to order.

Any good server will already know what the cook is hoping for and what will make their line cook go into the walk in and scream. If it's significantly less than an hour to close and they say some variant of "oh anything is fine" they are either telling the lie their boss wants them to say, or they actually do not know what their line cook wants, and you can either use human connection and a conspiratorial just-between-us tone to get them to drop the customer-is-always-right act, or get them to actually go ask the cook.

It might be as specific as "the lasagna is easiest on the kitchen" or it might be a simple guideline like "nothing that requires the flat top" or "any of the sautés are easy" but a good line cook will probably have a system for if they have to make a couple of the most popular items after they start their close, so the answer is likely to include something most people like and you should be good to order that.

but for the love of all that's holy, please only do so at great need. Leave that last 30-60 minutes to the truly desperate and the crew's duties.

[animentality]

Obsessed with this girl. Queen shit.

[bitchesgetriches]

Read more:

All Labor Deserves Compensation. Don't Be a Dick About It. 

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

[dontmean2bepoliticalbut]

[thoughtportal]

Solidarity with Waffle House Workers

[child-of-icarus]

Having auditory processing disorder and working in the service industry is not for the weak y’all

Had a customer come in today and ask for a “squirt” (that’s what I thought he said at least) and I just really loudly went “You want a WHAT?”

He said it like twice more (and that’s what I kept hearing), so eventually I just had my coworker come over and take his order cuz I had no idea what the fuck he was asking for

Edit: I have been informed that Squirt is in fact a type of soda (which we also in fact do not have) and I wasn’t just losing my absolute shitting mind

[ohnoifallinreverse]

A bat off to her cave now 🦇

[glitchphotography]

Garçom  (Deluxe Paint IV // 2023)

[jadeestebanestrada]

Sorry, ma'am. This register only takes treats.

[loverboy1717]

Me, working retail/food service in November and December and seeing millenials and Gen z out with their family:

[saraharveypatrick]

That one barista who's always dialed in. 🔥☕

From "Persephone in Hell!" The goddess Persephone runs a coffee shop in Hades. A web comic and soon-to-be paper/digital copy (preorder til Nov. 1, 2023).

[bitchesgetriches]

All Labor Deserves Compensation. Don’t Be a Dick About It.

Contempt for “unskilled” workers should be replaced by respect for their time.

Time is a wonderfully democratized resource. Because while we all have the same amount of it, the rich are willing to pay a premium to take more of theirs back from survival tasks. This means that they understand just how valuable everyone’s time is.

The hours I spend on work are not hours I want to spend on work. I’d obviously much rather spend those hours on leisure. I’m certain that the same is true for most of my fellow humans.

But we exist within a global society seven billion people strong. And the whole labor-for-compensation-for-survival model is pretty well entrenched in that society. Barring obscene levels of inherited wealth, opting out is not really an option for most of us.

So here we all are, with the same basic resource (time) and working for the same goal (survival). Given what we have in common, it should be much, much easier to empathize with the service industry worker taking your dinner order than the heir to the restaurant chain who has never set foot inside it.

Keep reading.

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[datsomegaystuff]

[retroappaloosa]

i eat good folks

best of family these past few weeks

[whoreasaliteraryarchetype]

Working In The Restaurant Industry With Chronic Pain

Hey y'all, me again (no, really?)

So, I've been looking for a second job since my current one is only about 10 hours per week (which I intend to keep, I really love the environment and the people), and I could use a bit more money for tuition, taking care of my cat, existing in this capitalist hellscape, etc.

I have an interview on Wednesday to be a hostess at a new restaurant opening up in the waterfront district of my city, which is really appealing bc tourist money and all that good stuff. The thing is, I have fibromyalgia, which for me means that while I can manage fairly well with my knee braces and meds, I'll still need to sit down occasionally during my shift, and potentially ask for formal workplace accommodations. Even though discrimination in the hiring process is illegal in Canada, I know being disabled still makes me a less appealing candidate, and I also know that restaurant jobs are physically taxing, and that there is a stigma in the industry around disability. Does anyone have experience working in the restaurant industry with chronic pain, and has it been worth it for you?