#cleaned the kitchen and dining room | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

dragonslaved · 9 months ago

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I just had so many painful flashbacks reading this entire explanation, this isn't even getting into the big soup vats if the restaurant has any kind of soup or gravy. The number of times I (120lbs, 5' nothing) had to physically climb into the thing to scrape cooked and dried on bacon fat and whatever else may have been cooked in them (usually 2 or three vats, each one specific to whatever was cooked all throughout the day) was never less than 2 times a day.

and this isn't as simple as just cleaning the bowl itself. These big industrial ones also have a drain on the bottom that, because of fat and grease, gets kinda. Caked in there. So I'd have to grab some kind of scrubber brush with a long handle and really, really dig in from inside the bowl and outside. And pray I didn't have to rinse it out four or five times in one go. And because they are draining out the bottom, there's usually a physical drain built into the floor with a food trap you better remember to clean out and wash.

I was also a dishie for years and let me tell you, the two-to-three times a week to really scrub down those hood vents and stove tops took a long ass time. My specific kitchen had specialized chemicals to spray on and then leave on for a while. So you couldn't even just hop right in to scrub. You sprayed it on, set them aside because breathing in any bit of that chemical cleaner would cause you long term lung and throat problems, find something else to clean and then come back to rinse it all off with a hose, hand scrub it all, rinse again, and then somehow finagle the things into the dishwasher for one final clean and then get them somewhere to dry while you did everything else. So you've got the kitchen bringing you their dishes throughout that last hour and a half to hopefully not have to use again, the actual EQUIPMENT that needs to be washed and scrubbed for the night. And then the rest of the dishes used by patrons and things for the servers.

This isn't even going into what servers had to do to close up when I was a server too. While not as physically intensive, it was still a lot of nit-picky work. Refilling all those little salt and pepper shakers (yes my managers checked a specific amount), counting all the different sugar packets in specific orders (your pure sugar, brown sugar, splenda, whatever 4th alternative sugar your area has), of course wiping down tables and chairs. If you had a booth then you had to take the booth physically apart and clean underneath in case any food or crumbs fell through cracks. (If you ever sit on those cushioned booths and wonder why they slip a little? It's because they literally physically come off to be cleaned later). If the restaurant has carpet? Gotta be vacuumed. This isn't even touching on the restocking servers do as well. The last place I served at had us do back of house restocking of: bottle drinks (root beer, sarsaparilla), carton drinks (those little kid's cartons of milk, chocolate milk, orange juice, apple juice) all from the dry stock storage in the back to the front fridges on the line (again specific count and order). And also if anything spilled in those fridges? Clean it up first. Weighing out and counting sugar into bags (1lbs of sugar per bag, 15 bags was mine it's been 10 years and I still remember) and you couldn't just bring the big 25lbs bags of sugar up to the front. No, gotta do it all in dry storage and bring the small 1lbs bags up. And of course refilling any condiment square containers like the line cooks have in the pictures above and it could range from 3 standard (ketchup, ranch, thousand island) to.. so many more if your place had any kind of salad menu. Cleaning up and out all the pitchers, and empty dressing containers, the actual soda equipment which was its own kind of hell (fuck fountain soda machines honestly) and then any containers they used to clean in (the red buckets you always see everywhere for towels and the like). Cleaning floors and hope no one drops any of those dressing/condiment bags they're using to refill things with. And then the very bog standard counting out and rolling silverware which would only be in a timely manner if the dishie isn't backed up to hell and back from everyone else tossing their dishes at them trying to get done and clocked out.

The way restaurants I worked at handled it was you did front of house (cleaning tables/restocking table things) first, get checked out by management, then go do back of house restocking. One person walking in after it's been checked out? You have to do it all over. Please just go easy on restaurant staff in that last hour of operation.

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.

#restaurants #cleaning #sorry I was in restaurants and professional and catering kitchens for 20 years #I have SO MANY FEELINGS ABOUT IT #like I get if you're desperate and there is literally nothing else you can do but go in to a place as they're closing and pray but #please just have some grace to these folks #but please understand if you are an ass and make them work another 2 hours #your food is in fact made with hate #the entire staff will remember you #also lmao the people in the notes saying oh just close the dining room first #you think chain restaurants and district managers care about anything more than customer complaints and losing money?#the US is a capitalist hellscape and does not care #you get customers coming in saying OH BUT THE HOURS SAY THIS and do not care #sorry OP I just am SO HEATED sometimes about restaurant work and how restaurant staff are treated #and how willfully ignorant people can be sometimes even when presented with reality

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