Restau-Rants: The World at $3.25/hr

20+ year veteran of the restaurant industry, sharing stories, advice, insights, and thoughts on all things restaurant

[the-restau-rants]

Highlights from the group work chat this week:

A: To all staff: We will be open on Friday July 3rd, closed Saturday July 4th, Sunday July 5th and Monday July 6th. Enjoy a nice, well deserved long weekend. U: Hallelujah V: U____ you were going to call off on the 5th anyway U: That's not funny J: "That's not funny" Yes it is U: 🖕 D: V_____ just called your ass out dude U: I don't like any of you for the next hour

L: I am running a little late J: Have to wipe away the tears from that embarrassing tie? B: Lmfao B: He was mad U: You leave him alone! M: It's gonna be a really long World Cup if you continue to back the wrong teams

C: Who wants these cats? N_____ promised he'd take one but it turns out he's full of it. Someone take them. N: LOL sorrryyyy they're cute though V: They are kind of ugly J: V______ thinks that the pussy is ugly? Well, it is still pride month... 🌈

[the-restau-rants]

It's been about a month since the new summer menu rollout. Our GM decided to drop a pop quiz on the servers, to see how well they knew the new items on the menu.

And... It did not go well. It went badly. It went very badly. (Which, to me, wasn't really a surprise; after all, the servers come up and ask me dumb ass questions about things constantly.) But I don't think that the managers thought it was this bad.

And what was especially jarring, I'm sure, was that a lot of our GM's golden girls/boys, the servers he favors and protects above all others, did the worst out of everyone. His favorite, R______, the Bane Of My Existence, did the absolute worst out of any of the servers. She barely knew anything. And later in the shift, one of the owner's sons (the one who likes to pretend that he knows how to run a kitchen) was severely pissed at her for the sheer amount of fuck-ups she had made during the shift, and he was chewing out our GM about her constantly making mistakes.

With how pissed our GM is at all of this, there might actually be some much-needed staff changes around this place.

(When the dining room manager handed me the test, I asked if I really needed to take it, given that I'm the one who writes the training materials for the staff; he told me that the GM said everyone needs to do it. So I sat down and started in on it, and I was on the last page when the GM saw me and said, "What are you doing? You don't need to take that." And I was like, You couldn't have told me that fifteen minutes ago?)

[the-restau-rants]

[the-restau-rants]

My favorite thing about new menu rollouts is that, for a solid two weeks, I get to say "No" to almost any request.

Ostensibly, it's because we need to give the guys in the back time to learn the new menu items to spec before we start changing things. In reality, though, I just love telling people "No", and having a valid, legitimate reason to do so.

[the-restau-rants]

Ho-lee FUCK did tonight suck.

I was probably about 25-30 tickets deep for the better part of an hour. There were times when I literally ran out of room on the rail for more tickets. Chef asked, "Today is Wednesday, right? It's not actually Saturday?" We did more than 300 covers on the night, cranking the whole time.

And apparently, one of the owners has recently told Chef to cut the hours of the guys in the back. Like, fuck that noise. If anything, we need to hire more people. We are barely scraping by on the staff that we have right now, and you want to cut people? Fortunately, our GM is backing Chef up, and is going to tell the owner that if we cut people in the back, we're going to need to cut our reservations almost in half in order to handle the workload.

Either ownership is trying to make this place look more profitable so that they can sell it, or the other Italian supermarket that opened up down the street is drawing away enough business that they feel like they need to make up the money somewhere else.

Either way, fuck you, J______. You come in and look at my rail and then tell me that we need to cut hours in the kitchen.

[the-restau-rants]

New menu rollout today. And it was met with the busiest lunch that we have had in weeks. We got our asses absolutely handed to us, especially with all the new items we were still figuring out the logistics on.

Dinner went a lot more smoothly, with one exception: We had an appetizer on the last menu that was vegetarian. This time, Chef updated it, and added prosciutto, making it no longer vegetarian. He updated the menu to reflect that, removing the little "V" next to it. It was correct on the version that we sent to the printer. When we got it back, though... The "V" was back on there for some reason. And, of course, people don't read the menu, or they see a word they don't recognize and just assume that it's something that they like. So when it reached a table of people who don't eat meat/pork for religious reasons... Well.

It's too late and would be too expensive to get all the menus reprinted, so we're just going to have to roll with this.

[the-restau-rants]

A server came up to me and asked, "Hey, can we take <item> out of <dish>?"

The item in question has been on the menu for six months. He has sold dozens, if not hundreds, of these in the past six months. It is coming off of the menu on Tuesday. And he still doesn't know it.

So I told him, Of course you can take that out.

You can't take that item out.

Chef yelled at him.

Learn the fucking menu, my dude.

[the-restau-rants]

Summer menu rollout coming up in a few days. Chef got me a preliminary copy of the new menu a couple weeks ago, to have me go through and fix any errors in spelling, which I did.

He passed it on to our GM, who would then pass it on to the printing company. And somehow, the version that he gave to them had even more errors than the original version that I saw. So, chef and I went through and made a lot of requests for changes. It got approved, and it's off to the printer, ready for Tuesday.

Except.

Right now, I'm putting together training materials for the staff to ignore. And as I go through it more closely, line by line, holy SHIT are there a lot more errors than I originally thought. And it's too late to fix them now.

Welp.

[the-restau-rants]

"A guest at my table has a lot of food allergies. He can't have gluten, dairy, garlic, or onion. What can he get?"

"Out."

[the-restau-rants]

Server rings in a gnocchi with pesto. Okay, no big deal. We had that on our lunch menu in the last update, we still have gnocchi, we still have pesto; it's not going to get all of the various add-ins that it previously had, but it'll still be gnocchi with pesto.

Except.

The server then brings it back to the window, and says that she didn't want that. He had heard, "Gnocchi with pesto sauce"; what the customer had said was, "Gnocchi with pasta sauce".

What the actual, literal, genuine fuck is "pasta sauce"? ALL of these sauces on our menu are pasta sauce! Bolognese is a "Pasta sauce". Vodka sauce is a "Pasta sauce". all'Amtriciana is a "Pasta sauce". One of the managers went to the table to ask her what it was she was hoping to get.

Marinara. She meant marinara. She didn't know that "marinara" was a word, or that it meant "tomato sauce". Despite, you know, it already being on the menu. And despite her table getting an appetizer that came with marinara.

"Pasta sauce". Tell you what: We're going to cook off some pasta, put it through the robot-coupe until it's the consistence of a sauce, and then toss some gnocchi in that for you.

"Pasta sauce". Fuck off.

[borzoibabe]

did you know?

- the menu at a restaurant is not an ingredient list you can use to create new dishes we could hypothetically make for you instead of the choices on the menu

- we do not have omelets on the menu because we do not make or serve omelets

- yes, i know we have eggs on the menu, but we still do not have omelets.

- yes, i realize omelets are eggs, but not all eggs are omelets, and the eggs we serve are not omelets.

- you cannot out-logic me so that i cave in and ring in an omelet for you. i am better at arguing than you are.

- there are no omelets here. there have not been, and will not be, omelets here. if you want an omelet you will need to go somewhere else.

- i can also promise that you do not want an omelet cooked by line cooks who have not been trained how to make omelets. because we don't sell omelets.

- no, i am not going to single-handedly put service on pause for the next twenty minutes while three cooks google how to make an omelet and then proceed to fuck up multiple omelets that our kitchen is not set up to prepare, so you can have an omelet.

-and we both know you'd bitch if it takes longer than six minutes to come out anyway.

- no, you may not just go back into the kitchen and make yourself an omelet. the line cooks do not take kindly to trespassing. also, what the hell.

- i hear that you want an omelet. that does not change the fact that we do not offer omelets. if you want to eat an omelet, you will need to go to another restaurant that does have omelets on the menu. this is not negotiable.

- i am the manager.

- yeah, alright, go fuck yourself too, bob.

[borzoibabe]

literally today a woman came in to the restaurant i work at, looked at the menu, looked around at all the tables eating, watched us take orders, watched us run food out to table. and then she approached me and asked "is this a restaurant?"

i thought for sure i misheard her, but no. she was asking "is this a restaurant?", almost as if maybe she had heard of the concept of restaurants but had never experienced one for herself, and she needed to get confirmation from somebody else.

i could not control my face. i had to walk away and another coworker had to step in to kindly explain that yes, the restaurant is a restaurant.

i would never lie to you.

[the-restau-rants]

One time, a customer read over our menu, wrote down a list of things that he saw on the menu, tore off the list, and handed it to the server, saying, "I know you have all of these things. Just tell the kitchen to make that for me."

[the-restau-rants]

This is literally two couples at my job. I showed it to the cooks, and they thought it was funny as hell.

The servers... Less so.

[beardedmrbean]

[the-restau-rants]

We do this on purpose.

If your mouth is full, you can't ask us for anything.

[the-restau-rants]

Until you work in a restaurant, you never realize just how many literal, honest-to-goodness alcoholics there are in the world.

The restaurant closes between lunch and dinner, but the bar remains open; this is ostensibly so that all the old Italians can come in and get a coffee. But what happens, especially on the weekends: The restaurant opens for dinner at 4:30. People will have a 4:30 reservation. They will arrive at the restaurant early, maybe ten minutes or so. And their first instinct is, "Let's sit at the bar, and start ordering drinks at 4:25 for our 4:30 reservation". Because the idea that the might have to wait ten whole minutes before they can start pouring booze into themselves is so horrible that they don't even want to contemplate it.

Or: Occasionally, we will host wine dinners in the banquet spaces. We had one last week. Five courses, seven glasses of wine. And after the event ended at about 8:30, I'd say about 20-25% of the people who attended the event came into the restaurant and sat at the bar and started ordering cocktails. They had just had roughly the equivalent of two bottles of wine, per person, in about two hours, but no, that wasn't nearly enough. These are genuine "you have a problem" people.

(And, of course, this is to say nothing of the service staff. You ever eaten out at a restaurant? I guarantee that at least one person involved in the preparation or service of your food was three sheets to the wind.)

[the-restau-rants]

What the fuck happened tonight.

We did almost 350 covers, on a fucking Wednesday. There are Fridays and Saturdays where we do not do those kinds of numbers. There was a period in the middle there where we ran out of menus to give to tables. I was 25-30 tickets deep for almost an hour.

[the-restau-rants]

Highlights from the work group chat this week:

U: Looking to pick up any shifts this week, lunch or dinner M: Did you lose all your money at the casino again? U: Shut up. U: Also yes.

V: You need to remember to clock out between shifts. When you don't, I get yelled at by the accountant. J: Don't be such a drama queen. V: I literally have the power to fire you. J: Case in point.

C: Stuck in traffic. Going to be a few minutes late. V: You're not scheduled to work today. C: Shit.

[the-restau-rants]

Today, right off the bat, I got double-sat, each table being a couple with a very small child. And less than ten minutes later, as I'm still trying to wrangle drinks and bread and tell my tables about the specials, one of the hostesses asks me, "Hey, are you okay if we seat you your six-top right now?"

I said, "Since when has anyone not being ready to get sat again ever stopped you?"

Well, I guess that the hostesses decided to declare war on me for that comment, because for the rest of the day, I got nothing but foreigners and small children in my section.