Liora Skyheart’s Shift Diary

Daily Shift Notes from Sweet Enchantments Manager, Liora Skyheart (Written by a real 37yo restaurant General Manager) Some notes may be true and names have been changed to protect identities.

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

A man was angry and said he was never coming back because no one told him the menu prices. That are printed on the menu.

[runa-amberthorne]

...Tamales?

Runa walked into the kitchen with an empty tray in her hand and a look of confusion and irritation on her face. She walked over to Nysa who was waiting at the service counter for her orders.

"Nysa... table 31... what did they order?"

Nysa narrowed her eyes at her senior, "Oysters, dragon roasted cauliflower and two kelpie caviar buns... why?"

Runa smirked, "Then you might want to go out there and talk to them. I just dropped off their drinks for you and they said they ordered the tamales."

"Tamales? What the fuck?" Nysa walked out of the kitchen, only to return with a face full of exasperation. "Roman, cancel the oysters... they thought 'Tomales Bay Miyagi with kimchi miognette' was somehow tamales... What the hell is a 'tamales bay' tamale? Like, what was the assumption on any of that?!"

Runa snorted, "Assume that everyone is an idiot and no one knows what the hell anything is."

[runa-amberthorne]

"I fucked up so you have to fix it"

Emeril stormed into the lounge and folded her arms in a huff as she threw herself onto the couch next to Zain.

"Something the matter?" he asked.

Irridescent curls seemed to ruffle around Emeril like feathers in her frustration. "If someone booked their reservation on the wrong day, after I confirmed it with them two weeks ago, why are they getting mad at me now because I don't have the table they want?! It's not MY fault that they don't know how to make plans!"

Runa put her coffee down and stood up, "Where are they? Want me to put them in their place?"

Emeril shook her head, "No, I took care of it. It's just so frustrating! They wanted seats in the patio, but since it's so nice out, we didn't have any extra tables I could just give them without messing up the table assignments for people who know how to book properly and check their calendars!" She sighed, "I just want a big shirt that says 'Your inability to plan is not my problem.' One girl even stopped me when I was trying to figure out how to get them to the patio and she said, 'Excuse me. We're still waiting for that seat in the patio. I just want to make sure you didn't forget about us.' When all I want is to forget about them and make them go away! They thought just because it's their birthday that they get special treatment!"

"Oh, it was THAT table? Yeah, those girls were super demanding and really high maintenance. Don't let it get to you, Em. We know you do a good job and those people can just suck it."

Zain leaned against Emeril and smiled, "Would you feel better if I made you a vanilla rainbow soda?"

Emeril's face lit up, "Yeah, I think it would."

"I'll go get a rose and strawberry crepe from Lucien. Nothing fixes an upset Emeril like sweets." Runa stood up and headed down to the kitchen as Emeril blushed, but smiled to herself.

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

I Ate The Wrong One

-Runa Amberthorne-

Right, so while Sweet Enchantments was closed, Liora got us permission to work part time in other places that were still open.

I ended up at a place that made burgers inspired by the human world.

Anyways, I had this guy who ordered for him and his friend. I’m gonna call him Mr. Onion because he wanted onion on his burger. And his friend? He’ll be Mr. Pepper.

Mr. Onion and Mr. Pepper order the same burger: cheese, peppers, sauce, bacon. They asked to add lettuce and tomato.

Mr. Onion doesn’t want peppers but he wants onion added. Cool. Easily done.

Mr. Pepper wants the peppers to be left in.

They want the same thing, but one without peppers and onions added.

You’re still following along, right? Great, because here’s the fucking idiocy moment.

When Mr. Pepper and Mr. Onion get their burgers and proceed to chow down, they stop after the first bite and asked to speak to someone.

As it turns out, Mr. Pepper took a bite out of Mr. Onion’s burger. While Mr. Onion, took a bite out of Mr. Pepper’s burger. They want new ones remade because they can’t just switch their burgers and move on. (It’s still a pandemic)

For the record, you can clearly see the peppers or onions in the burger when you get it. It’s not like... hidden in it.

They’re bright red and practically falling out of the burger, for fuck’s sake!

In any case, they still get their burgers remade because the manager doesn’t have a fucking backbone. Liora and I can run circles around these people.

BUT WHO THE FUCK JUST EATS SOMETHING THEY ORDERED AND SAYS “I ATE THE WRONG ONE CAN YOU MAKE ME A NEW ONE?”

LIKE WHAT??

Thank the fucking stars that Sweet Enchantments is back and I’m not dealing with that dumbassery anymore.

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

We’re Back in Business!

We’re back, vaccinated, healthy and ready to go! Stay tuned in for more posts as we rediscover food service in the twilight days of the pandemic.

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

To readers of the Shift Diary...

Currently the restaurant where I get all of my inspiration is closed due to the pandemic and Shelter in Place orders set in San Francisco.

I’m sure we’ll be back soon, but please support your local restaurants with take out whenever you can and practice good hygiene.

Stay Safe, everyone.

❤️🧡💛💚💙💜🖤🤍🤎,

-Liora, Runa, Zain, Roman, Lucien, Emeril & the Turnips

(In the meantime, please follow Runa on Instagram:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by The Girl At That Restaurant (@irl_runa.a) on Mar 18, 2020 at 12:31pm PDT

[runcibility]

“I am not an expert in immunology - I follow doctors for that. But I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place that paid better than average wages for food service. And I am terrified of #COVID19. Not because the virus is going to kill people, but because poverty might. / https://t.co/SNke4cD3dW”

Text:

I am not an expert in immunology - I follow doctors for that.

But I did spend 9 years as a manager at a pizza place that paid better than average wages for food service.

And I am terrified of #COVID19.

Not because the virus is going to kill people, but because poverty might. / Y'all, all laws aside, nobody in the restaurant industry goes to the doctor when they’re sick.

There are health code rules about what symptoms exclude you from work - you have to go to the doctor and get cleared, or be symptom free for 24 hours.

And they are *never* followed. / The people making your food do not have health insurance. Restaurants almost never offer it.

They do not have paid time off. Benefits like that aren’t imaginable.

They do not have enough people in the schedule to cover an absence. “Lean Staffing.” It’s more profitable. / The average age of a fast-food worker is 29. The average income is $8.69 an hour. I was taxed around 21% on paychecks.

The average doctor’s visit w/o insurance, costs $300-600.

43.7 hours. At minimum, more than a week’s take-home pay.

Going to the doctor is an *insane luxury*. I have watched people PRIDE themselves on working through illness and injury. I had a driver break his foot by stepping on a tennis ball in someone’s driveway, and then work another four days on a broken foot on ibuprofen and spite.

Flu-like symptoms?

Fuck out of here. MOST fast food workers are already on some kind of public assistance.

Many of those are “means tested” and require them to keep jobs.

laborcenter.berkeley.edu/pdf/2013/fast_… This means that

1) Fast food workers literally cannot afford to go to the doctor. They will do what we’ve always done - dose up heavily on DayQuil, puke in the bathroom, explain things away as being “hung over” or “tired,” and their manager will pretend nothing is wrong. 2) Fast food workers literally cannot afford to miss work. The median age is 29 for christ’s sake. These are people with bills, families, responsibilities.

Median 2-bedroom rent is ~1,194/mo. That $8.69 wage is ~1,190/mo take-home pay.

Even w/ roommates, that’s HALF YOUR MONEY. You can’t afford to take off work to go to the doctor, much less take off work when the doctor says you need to be quarantined for three weeks. You need every hour.

Otherwise you lose your job, then your housing, and anything else that keeps the wolf away from the door. When this happened to me, the doctor said I needed to be off my feet and resting for two weeks, light duty for another two.

I took 4 days. It was one of two times in nine years I missed work, both of them involving a trip to the emergency room.

   https://twitter.com/NomeDaBarbarian/status/1092296791595216897

People who work food service are less likely to have reliable transportation - so they ride mass transit, exposing themselves to more people.

They live together in tight spaces, ensuring it spreads between folks.

They have poor diets, poor sleep, and weakened immune systems. ~14mil people work in food service in the US. They’re in every community. Everyone has to eat.

They live and work in conditions that make the spread of disease inevitable.

They won’t go to the doctor until it’s a crisis, long after they’ve passed things on to others. The Flu is bad enough, going around a kitchen.

#COVID19 is substantially more easily transmitted than the flu.

And we’ve created a situation where food service workers’ SURVIVAL depends on doing THE EXACT OPPOSITE of anything that could fight a pandemic. And these are the people making your food. The average food service worker is a millenial. 62% of us live paycheck to paycheck.

And it doesn’t have to be like this. In our parents’ lifetimes, it wasn’t.

God Bless the Conservative movement and their deregulation, pro-business legislation, and “choice.” Poverty is a public health crisis, y'all. Wage Slavery kills.

And if you can’t be bothered to care about that out of your basic human dignity, maybe the fact that the servile class you’ve been supported by can’t afford to not make you sick will fucking help.

Eat the rich. /end

https://twitter.com/NomeDaBarbarian/status/1232922661740613634

[socially-awkward-velociraptor]

I’m a barista at a very large and famous coffee company (y’all know the one) and we are, technically speaking, supposed to have it lucky. Because we get paid time off and some of us do have health care.

Except paid time off doesn’t kick in until you’ve been with the company for a year. You are only eligible for health care if you work over twenty hours a week. And even with all this—at my store, the “work through the pain” mentality is SO STRONG, y’all.

I have gotten sick because supervisors have come to work sick; we pass it back and forth to each other, and try to blame it on the cold or the changing weather. I have had to call out maybe twice—once because I was new and sneezing and coughing and my friends were all telling me that it was irresponsible to go in, and once because a cold had ravaged my voice so badly I sounded like Kermit the frog’s evil twin. Both times I did exactly what I was supposed to do: called my manager with plenty of advance notice. The first time, she guilted me into coming in anyway, saying that she would try to find coverage for me but that it wasn’t likely she’d be able to. I struggled through four hours of that shift before my nicest coworker showed up early so that I could go home and get some rest. The second time, I got the day off, but had to cover 8- and 9-hour shifts the next two days to “make up for it.”

This is how we are staffed: we don’t have enough people to cover absences. If any of us is sick we will absolutely come into work—and I am stunningly, immensely privileged in that I was able to try to get out of working: most of my coworkers have kids and families that they need to provide for.

If Coronavirus spreads in the US, your friendly neighborhood baristas will be behind the counters. We will be smiling, stifling coughs, making drinks that we’ll be trying not to sneeze on, and running to the back to blow our noses, wash our hands, and get back out there, because you can’t run the floor with just two people during peak.

Eat the fucking rich.

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

Those of you who follow me know my stories come from actual experience.

I spoke with my staff today about practicing good hygiene and calling out when sick. They have sick time. Our company pays for sick time. It’s mandated in San Francisco.

HOWEVER, with the cost of living so high, no one can afford to live in their $1200 rooms (not apartments or houses), pay for groceries, commuting costs, college fees (a lot of my staff are students) and utilities. If they’re not students, they’re parents. They have children to take care of, school fees to pay, more food for more people.

Meanwhile at work, they have to serve prime rib and king crab and $65 whiskey to people on leisure travel.

What’s worse is that CoViD-19 is restricting travel for good reason. But it’s making things difficult for people who rely on travelers to come visit and eat at our restaurants.

No travelers, no business, no hours, no money for living expenses.

And when they run out of sick pay? They’re shit out of luck.

[kingkumaaa]

When the whole party is down but your bard is up

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

True fact about restaurants: It takes you 3 hours to eat a meal and every meal is cold after your third bite.

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

Yo! Runa here, checking in.

We’re getting ready for Valentine’s Day, which is a ridiculous human “holiday.”

And dropping a sample of Lucien’s special chocolate cake for today!

Let’s see if we’ll be back tonight with basic bitch stories!

[automatic-caution-door]

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

So apparently humans have the same problems we do in restaurants. Idiocy is contagious, it seems.

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

It Wasn’t Cooked

We received a very nice note from a recent guest who enjoyed some of Roman’s experimental dishes. However they were unsatisfied with the steak tartare. It is a steak tartare served with rich bone marrow and horseradish crème frîache.

The comment read, “The dishes were lovely, but the bone marrow was so undercooked, I couldn’t eat it!”

The menu reads:

Steak Tartare - served with bone marrow, horseradish crème frîache, and Titania Farms’ pixie chives

It’s not a bone marrow dish to begin with. It’s steak tartare. It’s supposed to be raw.

Roman cried in a corner.

[alex-cyprin]

The banner was enough convincing to play it quickly

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

Although it seems strange to be posting this in the shift diary............. this wasn’t on shift!

[runa-amberthorne]

“Something changed in her that day. Thinking back, it was the first time she used her magic to defend others. I remember seeing her back, rigid and full of strength, power seeping from her skin and making her shine brighter than a star. The world seemed to stop around Helena, drawing itself into her body and becoming a radiant shield that resonated with the desire in her to do good with the gifts she had been blessed with.”

[runa-amberthorne]

“And it was in the endless vacuum of space, that I found a moment of utter security. Her expression was emotionless, but there was safety and a calmness that grounded me, even after the fear had taken over my body. Nova was a stalwart anchor against the uncertainty of the present. In the void of the cosmos, she was the quiet center amid the chaos, keeping me from drifting.”

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

“Runa burns bright like the sun. Her kisses are like fire, searing every part of me. I can still feel the heat in my face, on my arm where she held my wrist. It was like feeling ‘passion’ manifested into existence. I didn’t want her to stop. I wanted her to keep going until every part of me echoed with her intensity.”

[lioraskyhearts-shiftdiary]

“Her touch was warm and gentle. It was like being touched by a goddess and her blessing brought color to my world that I didn’t know was missing. Everything became brighter, sparkling... I want nothing more than to be washed in the color of her presence.”