#restaurant experience

[fieriframes]

[FIERI: That's 'cause this isn't Celeste Gingras and Cheryl Arsenault's first rodeo. We've got 75 years of restaurant experience between us. Cheryl and Celeste are just amazing cooks.]

[beingjellybeans]

Celebrating in style at Guevarra’s by Chef Laudico

As a true-blue foodie, celebrating my natal day somewhere with good food and good vibes is a must. So to commemorate my 46th trip around the sun, I took the fam to dinner at one of the metro’s most celebrated buffet restaurants: Guevarra’s by Chef Laudico. It’s not actually my family’s first time at this establishment. Over the years, together with our extended family, we have celebrated…

[idiotsonlyevent]

throwing my hat in the ring with my own cunty chilchuck amv that happens to push the slavchuck agenda w a classic russian club banger (and a companion to my yalla senshi amv!)

[serial-unaliver]

having conversations about restaurants with rich people is so awkward because when I mention a place they're like "oh do you recommend it?" ...how do I say "yes, but not to your income bracket"

[dimetrodone]

Listened to Crash (1973) on my recent plane ride and long drives really enhanced the experience i GUESS

[petoskeystones]

rip james fitzjames. you would have loved having a little tiny dog with a ridiculous name that you could carry around in a purse and brag about her silky fur and pedigree and run an instagram account for

[macrolit]

Would you lock your phone away for 10% off? 

[crabsnpersimmons]

How many dishes can the guys make? As robots, I can see that they would have a lot of knowledge due to the internet, but do they have any criteria as to the theme of the restaurant or the amount of time it takes?

great question!

the restauarant is specifically a cha chaan teng, a Hong Kong style cafe so the majority of the menu revolves around that cuisine

however!! the DCA boys often introduce new menu items, as well as weekly and seasonal specials!

Sun is the most adventurous in cooking new dishes. he is very interested in learning new recipes, new cooking methods, ingredient substitutions, etc! he takes it all as a personal challenge to experiment with new recipes

Moon will often try new dishes based on current trends—like he would totally be making variations of the Dubai chocolate bar and tanghulu and cucumber salads right now haha! honestly if he could, he'd love to travel and try all different kinds of foods around the world

As the barista, Eclipse also experiments with new drinks. along with their standard cafe drinks (like tea, coffee, ovaltine, etc.) he also has a seasonal drink selection to match the themes of the season. so it's autumn now, he'd have pumpkin spice milk tea, sweet potato latte, and mooncake hot chocolate for mid-autumn festival—all decadent, warm and cozy drinks that feel like a warm hug!

they have an ever-changing “surprise me” special, which is a unique meal that combines the dishes they've been experimenting on. it's like a very casual omakase. it's not a very popular set, since it constantly changes, but it is at a reduced price. the customers’ feedback also helps them improve the dishes. see, the boys can eat (as an alternative way to charge) and they do have taste and scent receptors, but they struggle with textures and mouthfeel because they don't have a squishy human mouth. so getting customer feedback on their experiments really helps them out. i imagine the "surprise me" special would be popular among students who are on a tight budget and are willing to try something new each time, cuz even though it's a mystery, they know it's great value for the price since the boys put all their effort into all their cooking

[familyabolisher]

god maybe becoming a sommelier IS the move for me

[phoenixcatch7]

Bingqiu is so funny to me like,,, you have sexy man turned into an idea of a tumblr sexyman and uh, some guy that watches instagram reels bc “he could never be a TikTok user”

Asdfghjkl that's exactly what they are. No wonder they're so popular on tumblr XD. Sqq is that one reddit user who swears every week that he's leaving this toxic hole for good and you know you'll find him mere hours later arguing pedantry on some incredibly niche sub reddit.

And he's somehow gay married to a guy who underwent an irl sans verse swap with his evil version. Who is his 'I can fix him' blorbo. His poor little meow meow. Lbh would have an aesthetic tradwife account, you know the ones where there's some scandal about them actually being insanely rich and in some weird marriage? That's him. His recording room that looks like an offshoot of a small cosy traditional cottage is actually a renovated spare room in his palace quarters.

They're that one meme about their braincells cancelling each other out. They're so stupid I love them.

Thanks for the ask :D!

[dramatic-dolphin]

Oh man, I am waaay on the other side of the "pronounce names correctly" debate. Not because I don't think you should, in general, attempt to pronounce names correctly, I do. But I'm trying to get people to stop trying to pronounce my name correctly.

I happen to have a name that's (for foreigners) Hungarian on Hard Mode. I'm talking umlauts, digraphs with y, just all the good phonemes that don't exist in most other languages. I've spent a lot of time abroad with people from various parts of the world, and I can tell you from hard empirical data: nobody can say it. And I'm cool with it! I just tell them the English equivalent and it's fine.

Mostly. Some people, especially those who are trying to be culturally sensitive, have a Really Hard Time™️ accepting that a) they are not getting it right b) continue to not get it right despite asking me to demonstrate over and over. And I appreciated it at first! How thoughtful, this attempt to engage with my culture. Cue several months of unsuccessful attempts, at the end of which they were (mostly jokingly) accusing me of faking it. Almost verbatim: "if we recorded you saying your own name and played it back to you, you would say it's incorrect".

(I get it though, the pop sci explanation that I've never bothered to fact check is that as you grow up, you're more attuned to characteristic frequencies of your mother tongue, so when another language comes along with different frequencies, you are quite literally incapable of distinguishing them. So their attempts may sound the same to them, but it sure doesn't to me. I tell them I have this with "bet" and "bat", and that sometimes puts an end to it.)

So yeah, attempt to pronounce everyone's name correctly. Unless they have asked you multiple times not to.

YES YES YES. sometimes you don't want to hear your name butchered over and over and again. like it can be funny when the entertainment is the hungarian gyöngyi and the czech přemysl trying to pronounce each other's name (actual thing that happened at an event my mom was at, everyone thought it was hilarious), but like. at some point it gets TIRING.

god do i hate those people who are like "well at the introduction i wouldn't stop trying until i could pronounce their name correctly!!" newsflash you were not pronouncing it correctly unless you also did a deepdive into the phonology of the language right there. what actually happened was that scene went on for so long and got so awkward they said "haha yeah that's correct!" to stop you from trying again. PLEASE stop. it is very awkward.

the pop sci explanation is sorrrrt of right, you're not really ever incapable of distinguishing phonemes, or phonologists would be out of a job! but your brain does become attuned to the subtleties that are important in your language and discards other phoneme differences that aren't used in your language because who even needs that. it's possible to learn to speak a language like a native and understand all the subtle differences so deeply that they come as instinct. it just takes a LOT of work.

(but- learning your native language took even more work. you're at an 8yr old's level of umderstanding in the language you're learning? well, how long do you think it took the 8yr old?)

also, relatedly, if someone - usually someone who's chinese in my experience - tells you their name, and then adds "but you can call me [english name/name in another language]!" it tends to be because they LIKE being called that name and possibly even prefer it to you butchering their name. they understand that you will butcher their name, because the language - which may or may not be chinese - is notoriously hard for outsiders.

[weaselle]

being a line cook is insane but people do it anyway

do you want to know the secret to why line cooks stay line cooks?

We're addicted to a certain aspect of the job. A sort of combination of Pride and Power.

See, most of what is going on in that restaurant comes down to you. If the restaurant was a dairy, you'd be the cow, everything is based on what you produce; how much, how fast, and of what quality.

And it's INSANELY hard for most people to do. It requires you to keep mental track of tons of stuff while doing complicated physical creation in a dangerous environment under intense pressure

Any line cooks reading this? let me recreate a moment most of us have had many many times

For the rest of you this will be a nice window into the line cook experience

you have a rail FULL of tickets, and the printer will NOT stop printing more.

You've got a stove FULL of stuff you're cooking, and half of it is for stuff you don't even have a ticket for, because of something on a table that already went out was wrong or missing, or a server forgot to put something on a ticket and needs it in a hurry, or...

the tickets you are working on are for tables that finished their appetizers 45 minutes ago, and it could be an hour before you even get a chance to read whatever the printer is currently printing.

You have a head FULL of stuff you're tracking: how quickly the sauce is thickening in this pan, whether the garlic is about to burn in that pan, how long before you drain the pasta in that pot before it over cooks. As soon as the thing in the oven for table 31 is 5 minutes from done you gotta put the other thing on the flat top to go with it, you're putting together Something on your board and you can't finish it because you need a refill of an ingredient from the walk-in but you can't go get it because if you leave the kitchen you'll burn the thing in the salamander. And you can't plate the thing in salamander yet because the Something you're putting together on your board is taking up all the room you had left in this disaster of a kitchen

Three people have just told you complicated changes to dishes you have to organize and keep in your head. Something like

"24 needs 3 gnocchi not 4, and 2 with no rosemary; 3 needs all 4 gnocchi to have extra rosemary, 2 with no garnish; 22 needs an extra gnocchi extra garnish no rosemary, salads are almost out you can go in 3 or 4 minutes"

The manager, assistant manager, about 8 servers, and a fuckton of people at tables are all waiting on YOU with an impatience bordering on fury.

right? sound familiar? okay that's not the moment, that's just the dinner rush on a night somewhere between bad and average.

The moment happens when, during this insanity, you reach an internal place where you become completely overwhelmed. Panic and frustration and over stimulus all rise up and wipe your brain completely clean. You can't think, you have no idea what to do, you want to run away, you want to quit, you can barely think of your own name, everything feels completely impossible.

And then. The Moment

You pull it back together.

You stop being overwhelmed, you stop panicking, you insist that it IS possible, and that you are going to do it. You decide what has to happen and you start. You clear all the clutter you can from your kitchen. You pull all your tickets as far down the rail as possible and scan through the tickets on the printer so you have an idea of how things are going to go. You write down a couple of times on tickets that you would usually keep in your head but you need the brain space. You group the tickets according to not only time but what dishes they have in common so you can do batches of things. You decide if you can just get these two things out of your way you'll be in a much better position and so you concentrate on getting those two things cooked and plated. You beg the dishwasher to grab you the thing you need from the walk-in. You call your assistant manager or manager into the kitchen and you tell them you need them to start you 8 gnocchis: 3 no rosemary one extra garnish, 4 extra rosemary two no garnish, and one normal.

Right? Okay so first of all, as you can see... The job is INSANE

and second of all. Not everybody is capable of that Moment. The moment you stare already-existing catastrophic failure in the face and tell it No. That moment.

and you have to be capable of that moment if you want to be a line cook.

Which means pretty close to zero other people in that restaurant can do what you can do.

So now let me tell you a story.

I was 19 years old. I was a line cook at an italian joint. We're slammed off our ass one night, and the manager is in the little galley kitchen with me, and he's just standing there because he isn't good enough to not be in the way if he tries to help

and he's over my should about everything, telling me to drain that more or turn the heat down on this etc.

Finally, I stop completely, look him dead in the eye, and say "Tony, i'm not cooking another thing until you leave this kitchen."

I'm 19. Ive worked here six months. Tony is twice my age and married to the owner's daughter. There is a heavy pause.

Then Tony turns around and walks out of the kitchen.

What's he going to do, send me home? Zero other people in this restaurant can do the thing that makes it a restaurant. If i go home the customers are going home too.

And that's the real reason most line cooks stay line cooks even though the job feels like a war you never win.

It's that interplay of Pride and Power. For those few hours, the restaurant is happening because of you.

That's the power.

For the other part, try pulling a cook off the line during the rush. You can't. Even if they are in the weeds. Maybe even especially if they are in the weeds.

Once i was working with a cook who, in the middle of the dinner rush, sliced is hand open - a cut both deep and wide, pouring blood. No bandage we had was going to be a solution for it.

So he popped a latex glove on that hand, triple wrapped a rubber band around his wrist to keep the blood in, washed with soap, and went right back to cooking.

Because it was the dinner rush and no one else could do the job, and he wasn't coming off that line.

30 minutes in he had to swap gloves because it had filled with blood like a water balloon and was making it hard to cook. Leaving the line was never even a question.

that's the pride

[julykings]

this week eek eek

[offorestsongs]

people who try to call out the tweels for being weird or violent or whatever else need to remember that, technically, they work in customer service

[honeypleasejustkillme]

wow another day already?? im not mentally prepared for this :,)

[captorations]

college dining hall pizza is a long-running experiment to synthesize the least edible combination of bread, cheese, and ambiguous red sauce