5 Disgusting Truths About Every Restaurant...

Our thoughts about the famous Cracked.com.

Re: 5 Disgusting Truths About Every Restaurant...

Postby blehblah » Sun Apr 05, 2015 8:15 pm

At a very young age (not long after being born, as a matter of fact), I was a busboy.

I had a good relationship with the servers and kitchen staff. To be effective, I had to. There were times when I'd pitch-in in the back (dishwasher is overwhelmed, time to help) or in the front (breakfasts are high-interaction... run around with the coffee, more OJ and water, etc.). I was young, it was a long time ago, but I learned quite a bit. Also, I got that job after being a 'cook' at a Pizza Hut for a few months... what a contrast.

First, the corporate place was run very strictly. Part of a running fast-food joint is dividing labour into simple chunks that any schmuck can perform. The food is predictable because it's manufactured via assembly line. The control of process also includes cleaning routines and turning-over stock. Big corporations industrialize how their outlets are located, staffed, supplied, and operated, for man reasons. Avoiding bad PR is one of those reasons. This is possible because the menu is set at head-office. Outlets operated as franchises don't scurry around finding the right mushrooms at the right price. They arrive on a truck, along with everything else.

The place where I was a busboy was a on-off restaurant. Mid-level food, attached to a hotel; not gastronomic, and not crap. In my time there, I encountered a lot of different characters.

On the wait-staff, some folks are pro's, others are there because it's the best-paying job they can find. I've watched wait-staff take an order, drinks, app's, main-courses, for a table of twelve without pulling-out their pad (they would write it out in the back) and get it right, every time. I've seen other wait-staff screw-up orders for a table of two at breakfast because they were still shit-faced from the night before.

Likewise in the back. I marveled at breakfast cooks who could keep track of huge volumes of orders. I'd watch dinner cooks juggle between ovens, grills, microwaves, pans, sauce... you name it, creating multiple meals simultaneously. More complicated than breakfast, not quite the same volume, but still - the same non-stop motion maintained over a few hours. Yes, dinner volume can be just as high - but, this wasn't that sort of place.

On the other hand, I saw terrible cooks. Ones who would yell at the wait-staff when they fucked-up an order, bitched when a customer returned something (the wait-staff are the messengers, except when they've screwed-up), and others who were simply incompetent.

The owner of that place was cheap. It's a low-margin business. On the other hand, he treated his staff well (they were his business, after-all), and didn't cheap-out on ingredients. If meat was turning, it went into the bin. It's a tricky balance - ordering versus selling. High-cost specials can be great successes, or dismal failures, financially. What that owner understood, though, is that you may be able to fools some customers some of the time... but if you keep it up, you're out of business.

All that leads me back to the article (finally, Bleh, fuck you Blah a whole lot... *collective sigh as newcomers 'get' my username*), specifically, "Your Food Might Suck Because of Waiter/Chef Relationships". Yes, that's quite true, and it's up to the owner/manager to deal with it. Shitty cook? Well, that's a problem. Shitty wait-staffer? Yup, that's also a problem. Combine the two, and you have a whole shitty-shit of shitness.

Yes, I did watch good cooks utterly snap with crap wait-staff. A good cook will do that, and instantly convert back to a superhero with the very next (competent) wait-staff. Good wait-staff will snap on a shitty cook, and likewise turn into angels when talking to a quality cook. That's, ya know, how life works.

Restaurants are brutal. Good restaurants are good because (and it doesn't matter if it's a greasy-spoon breakfast place or a high-end gastronomic experience), the people who work there, manage it, and own it, all work like maniacs. Top-quality chefs/cooks earn good money, and so do top-quality front-end staff. What I noticed is that the people who love it, who lived for the controlled chaos of it, thrived. The others... not so much.

Finally, why bother bugging someone involved in the article? What good could possibly come of that? Leave it alone. Someone who's a failed cook who pisses-off quality servers has a way of finding themselves cooking buffet food on a low-end cruise ship. Let restaurant Darwinism take its course.
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Re: 5 Disgusting Truths About Every Restaurant...

Postby Matthew Notch » Sun Apr 05, 2015 9:44 pm

Burn Inflict wrote:I notice someone is being conspicuously silent on this thread. Where you at Notch? It's Food Clobber'n Time!

Notch? Notc...

Spoiler: show
Image


Oh, oh god Notch. Don't tell me you ate the free staff food. Oh my god. Do you want me to call somebody?


Well I didn't read the article and sort of don't want to, so that's why I haven't said much. Besides, I really can't say anything that bleh or Shrooms or Krinkle haven't said really well already.

I would say this: just last night we closed to the public and hosted a Final Four viewing party for a rather prominent law firm. The budget for the party came to about $15,000, with near $4000 in food, several hundred in room rental fees for 7 hours, and the rest going to booze, glorious booze. We had three servers and two bartenders working the floor. In the kitchen was only my culinary school trained GM and myself, and we cranked out a substantial buffet of delicious, if a bit pedestrian, dinner and snacks. The servers and bartenders all collected the same amount of gratuity, which... well, 20% of $15,000, split five ways, you do the math.

However, the owner also promised us kitchen staff a smallish share of the grat as well. I suppose that may be illegal, but given that our service staff made hundreds of dollars doing, really, almost nothing on the floor, I don't think anyone was going to complain. And it would bother me that I worked so much harder than them and made much less, but to be honest, since I also put in a twelve hour day at a much higher hourly rate, I didn't really make that much less. And besides, on nights when we have one table come in all night long (it has happened more often than I really care to admit here), those servers make a grand total of $10 for the entire night, all from their piddly hourly wage.

It all sort of balances out, then, but even if it didn't, for frick's sake, people should take some pride in the work they do. I know for a fact I don't get paid what I'm worth, but that doesn't mean I reduce my quality of work accordingly. I want to make food that tastes like the guy making it was making $100 an hour. I want to do that because that's how people SHOULD approach their work. So if that guy in the article was doing completely the opposite, and that's a for real thing, then there's no need for vigilantism against him. Karma catches up with people like that real quick.
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Re: 5 Disgusting Truths About Every Restaurant...

Postby Tesseracts » Sun Apr 05, 2015 10:04 pm

Matthew Notch wrote:It all sort of balances out, then, but even if it didn't, for frick's sake, people should take some pride in the work they do. I know for a fact I don't get paid what I'm worth, but that doesn't mean I reduce my quality of work accordingly. I want to make food that tastes like the guy making it was making $100 an hour. I want to do that because that's how people SHOULD approach their work. So if that guy in the article was doing completely the opposite, and that's a for real thing, then there's no need for vigilantism against him. Karma catches up with people like that real quick.

I feel the same way. I know I'm not paid enough for my art and likely won't be for years. That's mostly my fault for my lack of business acumen, but it's also because it's just hard to get established. That doesn't mean I want to make my work worse. I began drawing because I enjoy drawing well. Not badly. Nobody goes into a creative field, whether art, cooking, music, or writing, and expects to land on a gold mine. At least not without years of dedication and some good luck.
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