I have worked in all kinds of restaurants. Well, never fast food or fast casual, thankfully. I've worked in restaurants with big bright kitchens, I've worked in restaurants with tiny, dark, cramped kitchens. I've worked in silent kitchens and noisy kitchens.
Strangely enough, I've only ever worked for one kind of chef, but we'll talk about that later...
I thought I'd provide a little information about the workings of the restaurant behind the scenes for those who don't know.
Past the kitchen doors is a world of mystery. Usually when one enters the kitchen, the dish tank is up first. As we discussed in part 2, the person in the dish tank is usually someone very strange, if they are American, and very normal, if they are of Latin origin. I hate to use such stereotypes, but after 100 years in the industry, it seems to pretty much hold true.
Aside from the dish tank, you will typically have 2 major portions of the kitchen - the hot line and the cold line. In many restaurants I've worked, desserts and salads come from the cold line, which is called "garde manger," (typically pronounce gar-muh-JHAY). This is just one of those words that everyone in the restaurant industry knows, and then when we take people on kitchen tours we throw it out and the guest gets this dazed and confused look on their face. It's kind of like when I use words like amuse bouche and people thing I'm being pretentious. I don't know what else to call it, it's an amuse! Something a special person gets when they sit down! Garde manger literally means to "keep the food" or "keep the pantry," and can sometimes refer also to a piece of antique furniture similar to a pie safe, which was a precurser to the ice box.
At any rate, garde manger is pretty much where the new guys work. You learn salads and desserts first, and hope that someone on the hot line walks out, gets fired, or ODs, so that you can move up. These are usually where the only nice people are found in the kitchen. They have a tendency, these days, to be rather stupid, slow, listless and arrogant culinary-school attendees. Sometimes, though, they are the only people in the kitchen who have retained any bit of humor and tolerance for the Front of the House. In typically misogynistic kitchens, this is where girls might linger until they get tired of having their assets pinched with tongs and either learn to pinch back or retire altogether.
And then there's the line. In most kitchens, the Chef no longer does any cooking. He is usually the expediter, calling out the tickets as they arrive and timing the line cooks so they can get a complete table's food out at the same time. Of course, things vary with each restaurant, but on the line you will then have your vegetable guy, your pasta guy, your fish guy, and your meat and/or grill guy. Depending on the restaurant, the most senior chef or the sous chef will be the grill guy or the fish guy. Fish is a pretty difficult station because of the tricky nature of cooking it properly, but because meat takes longer, it's usually up to the grill cook to set the pace for the rest of the cooks. If the meat guy has a lamb which takes 20 minutes to cook and the fish guy has a walleye on the same ticket, which takes 3 minutes to cook, it's typically the meat cook's job to tell the fish guy when to "fire" his dish.
In a kitchen, "fire" means "cook it already." The front of the house fire their courses when they are ready, and the cooks tell each other when to fire dishes to get the whole table out at the same time.
From this point forward, FOH will mean "front of house" and BOH will mean "back of house."
Typically, the BOH hates everything about the FOH. They hate our light hours, our laziness, the amount of money we make, the special orders we let our guest make, pretty much everything about us.
This means it can be a battle of wills for who gets what they want. It's usually about the FOH's ability or desire to butter up the fragile ego of the BOH person, lauding their grand accomplishments and their hard, miserable job. If proper respect is shown, the server will usually get "their" way. I say "their" because the server doesn't really care if the dish has onions or not, but if the guest doesn't want onions, it's the server's job to relay that message to the BOH in such a way as the guest gets their way.
I usually have a difficult time with this buttering up process, because I find it extremely difficult to kiss booty, which has been a millstone around my neck since I was about 2 years old. At the job I recently left, the BOH so hated me that it was nearly impossible for me to get my guests what they wanted. I'm still not sure whose fault this was, but I was constantly informed that the guest's wishes did not fit the "artistry" of the dish, and would not be granted. I was then told I was a loose cannon in the dining room and reminded that the CHEF'S name was on the door, and NOT MINE. To which I mumbled "thank the good Lord in heaven" under my breath and walked away.
I might sound like a bitter waitress, so I'll leave it up to you to decide if I am a reliable narrator or not.
Every once in awhile, servers will try to win over a line cook by buying the kitchen a case of beer, pack of cigarettes, or by providing some other services which don't really fit the rating level of this website (it's a lot like prison). This usually works for about the first 2/3rds of the shift, until the excrement hits the air conditioning (yes yes yes, t's not my phrase, it's Vonnegut's, but once again, appropriate for the rating), and then all bets are off.
In a kitchen where there is some level of mutual tolerance between the FOH and BOH, fights during intense situations will flare up and then die down very quickly. Adrenaline runs high throughout the night, and good staff members will be able to laugh off their squabbles by the time the night is through and the first post-work beers are being shared. If this didn't happen, there would be many, many more servers ducking pans and Chef's knives, believe me. And there would be at least one Chef out there with my corkscrew stabbed into his eyeball.
I have tons to say on the topic of FOH/BOH relationships, so this will be a recurring theme. Be prepared.
