Restaurant Widow

My Life in Bistro Aprons::part 4::Brief Kitchen Overview and Staff Relationship Tutorial

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.

My Life in Bistro Aprons::part 3::Wounds

It's funny. the idea for this topic came to me this morning when I was lying in bed, and then it came up in real life at work later that same day, when My friend and coworker Madison (not her real name) sliced her finger while cutting limes.  This, of course, started a discussion on the best way to proceed.

Should I go to Hospital? This is pretty much a no-brainer.  You should never go to the hospital.  So you just sliced your index finger down to the bone with a 10" chef's knife?  And you want to leave the restaurant at 8pm on a Satuday night when we're overbooked?  Yeah, you're pretty much over.

One night I was polishing glassware - actually, I was at Husband's work, helping him polish glassware so that we could get out and go get some gin, when I broke a glass in my hand. The stem shot through the fingernail of my pinkie all the way down to the first knuckle.  I didn't really think anything of it - I just wrapped a napkin around it and kept polishing, and it kept bleeding and bleeding.  It wasn't until a few weeks later, when I discovered the stem had cut so deep it had split my fingernail, which took about 6 months to finally grow in straight, that it occurred to me that I might have thought to go get some stitches.  But if I had gone to get stitches, Husband and I would never have made it out for a cocktail.

Where a normal person might rush to the emergancy room when they nearly slice off a digit, this would never occur to a line cook.  When a line cook or apprentice cuts themselves, they will receive a derisive laugh and be tossed a tube of super glue from the chef.  The chef will also instruct the employee to scour whatever he'd been cutting to make sure there's no blood or other biohazards in the carrots or whatever he was cutting.  The apprentice will be granted a cigarette break, during which time the other cooks will complete his task and clean his workstation, and when he comes back to the line, the super glue had better have dried, and the cook will then proceed through the end of service without ever mentioning his inability to properly handle a knife.  

No amount of super glue-related hubris will hold a match to what I saw a line cook Mr. Darko do.  Mr Darko (who, by the way, was tall and skinny) cut himself while chopping something.  The cut was bleeding prolifically.  With a perfectly straight face, Darko lit the blow torch used for creme brulee (this is a reall blow torch - a chef would never, and I mean never ever, use the sort of creme brulee torch you buy in specialty kitchen stores) and held it to his Global paring knife.  The blowtorch was held to the paring knife until the stainless blade was glowing red.  Darko continued with his stoney face, he set the blow torch aside and held his rocket hot paring knife flat onto his wound.  The entire staff seemed to be wathing him in amazement, in awe, as we listened to the audible and palpaple sound of his skin searing and shrinking and frying under the heat his knife.  The blade stayed on his wound for at least 30 seconds, at which time Darko set down the paring knife, held his cauterized wounded hand under some cold water, and turned right back work.  The staff still seemed to be dumbstruck, watching as he returned to normal and continued working.

"Actually, it was pretty hot," I say to my coworker years later, as I recant the story."I've never seen someone cauterized their own wound with such determination and confidence. Yeah, that was pretty hot. I have respect for that boy." 

My Life in Bistro Aprons::part 2 in what may or may not be a series depending how lazy i get

Dishwashers. Frequently the most interesting people in the restaurant are found in the dish tank.  

Years ago, when working at a Cajun restaurant (my second serving job), we had a dishwasher named Bill Knapp "just like the restaurant" he would say when you met him.  Despite the fact that his job required little equipment other than a plastic apron provided by the restaurant, Bill Knapp came to work every day with a brief case.  I'm not sure anyone ever discovered the contents of the brief case, but Bill Knapp carried it in every day and set it on the Metro Shelving in the dish tank.  Bill Knapp enjoyed his job; particularly because it allowed him lots of free time to mumble to himself and eat leftovers off of diner's plates.  Bill's behavior was so odd that it became a running joke that he would one day breeze through the front door wearing a suit and introducing himself as Dr. Knapp, a psychologist who was conducting a real-life experiment on the lives of those in the restaurant underbelly.

Other fun dishwashers in my life: 

Darwin, a 38 year old father of 13 - yes, 13, who had, as he told me "4 baby mamas, working on a 5th."

Clayton, who was actually a sweet man trying to do his best to stay out of trouble after doing time for dealing crack.  Clayton told me that he cried every night he was in prison but told the other inmates he had really bad allergies. 

Jacinto, a Cuban refugee who claimed to have, while in Cuba, eaten his neighbor's cat because he was starving; Jacinto also said that he had spent some time in Cuban prisons where he and his fellow inmates were forced to dress as women and perform pageants for their captors.  After some anti-Castro tagging around his neighborhood, he traded his house for a place on a raft headed for Miami.  While drifting in the Atlantic, Jacinto told me he was rescued by some US marines who bathed him because he was too sunburned to move.  

Wilfredo, a flamingly gay Puerto Rican who managed to get himself mixed up in some sort of drug-related gang nonsense. When people came looking for him at the back door of the restaurant one day, the chef used his own money to get Wilf set up in a sister restaurant in another city.
One dishwasher Husband worked with used to drink water from the spray hose in the dishtank, where the water comes out with the force of a power washer and is typically set to 180 degrees.

The dish tank might be the worst job in a restaurant. Imagine standing in a steaming pit where you are constantly wet and servers come along tossing their silverware into the soaking water, which will inevitably splash back into your face.  The dishwasher is always the last person working in the restaurant, and makes less than everyone else.  It is for this reason that the dishwashers are usually treated to the best meals cooked just for them by the chefs - good food and free beer are almost always part of the dishwasher's salary.

My Life in Bistro Aprons::part 1 in what may or may not be a series depending how lazy i get

**to avoid personal drivel, please scroll down to the next set of : ******* First of all, a little intro.  I've been going through a little - I don't know what to call it - writer's block? Lack of ideas/inspiration? Midlife crisis? I'm not sure but lately my brain just hasn't been coming up with any food-related ideas.  In the last 4+ years, this has rarely been a problem for me so I started freaking out and then decided to take the advice of a friend and just write about things which came more easily (easier? see, everything's hard). 

I have decided to blame my new job for this lack of inspiration. They are always plying me with yummy things to eat and so for the past month I haven't had to think of what to eat on my own.  At any rate, I thought I would document some stories from my life as a server while I wait for food-related inspiration to come back. Hopefully it won't be too long...

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I probably got into the restaurant business a little too early for my own good. The thought had really never even occurred to me until I was a sophomore in college and my well-meaning friend Liz suggested I join her at her job in an old school fine-dining restaurant somewhere in the Virginia countryside.  

My first day there, marveling at things I had never heard of like foie gras torchon and crabmeat imperial, the other waitresses warning me how evil the chef was, trying to remember my high school french well enough to decipher the labels on bottles of wine, I thought I was just supplementing my meager student loans enough to keep myself in combat boots and manic panic all the while learning how to write the great American Novel or become Poet Laureate. 

If you would have told me I would still be a waitress at 30, well, maybe I would have taken my Critical Theory professor's offer of a letter to a friend at Berkeley. But instead I was making enough money that when I finally got my degree I could see no reason to ever sit through another Shakespeare class.

It became something which would define me more than my education. So began a lifetime of yelling at and being yelled at by chefs, of  learning to flip the bird at half a second's notice, of never going to bed before 2am, of learning to swear like a sailor, drink grown boys under the table, antagonize arrogant sous chefs, and engage in the practice of quitting smoking and taking it back up again on a regular basis.  It solidified my future as a lifelong slacker who could spend 10 hours a day playing Guitar Hero and live for weeks on nothing but caffeine and beer.

I don't possess the math skills to calculate how many pieces of flatware I've polished in my lifetime, but I remember the first time I ever stood around a dishtank polishing endless flats of silverware with white kitchen aprons, because it was at that moment I ever had my first crush on a line cook.  His name was Jason; he was tall and skinny (the top 2 requirements for any boyfriend of mine at the time) and half Korean with long black hair that always hung in his eyes and he looked exactly like James Iha from the Smashing Pumpkins.  He had a penchant for wearing his full-length pajamas underneath his clothes even in the summertime.  I didn't realize he had a crush on me until Liz pointed out that polishing the silverware with me was absolutely not one of his duties as saucier.  

I thought old-school checked chefs pants were the hottest piece of clothing I had ever seen on a boy.

Jason's life was amazingly unencumbered.  He had skipped out on college altogether and even though he was a year younger than me, he had a "career" and had been everywhere.  Every few months he would take off to Savannah or Charleston or Atlanta and do a stage in some amazing kitchen where he spent hours creating tiny garnishes for restaurants where the kitchen staff outnumbered the dining patrons.

He would come back from these kitchen adventures and call me up and we would sit in the restaurant bar and he would tell me all about the dishes he created and the things he had learned, the chefs he had worked for, the famous people he had cooked for.  

Aside from my lifelong infatuation for kitchen boys, it was at this funny old restaurant where I started to develop what would later turn into my passion for food.  It was where I learned to love spaetzle, where I tried my first 50 stunningly delicious Austrian pastries, where I first filleted a trout tableside, and learned to decant wine, where I had my first Irish Mist (I was 19, give me a break), where I tried my first Bombay Sapphire martini (which I hated), where I learned that there was real crab and krab stick, where I had my first glass of red Burgundy. Where I learned how to bleach and strach a white shirt within an inch of its life, where I learned to be nice no matter how I felt, how to properly structure an argument with an egomaniac, how to be bribed by line cooks to keep them out of trouble when they did something wrong, and how to ply them with beer to get my way.  It was where I learned how to make perfectly dainty salads for ladies who lunched, with seeded cucumbers and grapes cut into halves. 

And it's where I learned that every once in awhile, you just need to sit in the walkin and eat some chocolate buttercream for a few seconds. If there happens to be some duck confit in there, well, it's a bonus.

Yeah Me Too Coffee

I have this theory about choice. Well, since a book has been written about it it's really Barry Schwartz's theory now.  The theory is that I am too lazy to make an informed decision about every single possible thing.  I realize it's good to be informed and all that, but sometimes I want someone else to make most of the decision for me.

I know I'm not alone in this, because there are lots of times when I am waiting on people (usually men) who tell me they don't want to look at the menu, and can't I just pick something for them?

There are many people who are completely intimidated by a wine list, especially if they don't recognize anything on it.  A wise person would ask an informed 3rd party for assistance. 

And this is why I like Yeah Me Too.  At one point in my life I was something of a budding coffee snob, but then I turned 21 and that all flew by the wayside when it was infinitely more fun to investigate the delights of beer and wine, and coffee just became a necessity after one had done a little to much investigating.

Of course I can tell a good cup of coffee (one I make) (ooh! or the pour-over method from Stauf's!) from a bad one (Tim Horton's) (don't get all up in arms, I know lots of people love TH but I find their coffee weak and bitter).  

But when I want to buy beans for home, I don't always want to stand in a sea of barrels trying to remember if it's the Tanzanian Peaberry I love or the Monsooned Malabar (they're both good, by the way).  Since most of my coffee purchases are made very shortly after I discover that I'm out of coffee, and I'm still bleary eyed, my brain just doesn't work enough to think it through.

Fortunately for me, there are folks who are coffee snobs, from the origin of the bean to the perfect roast for said bean.  Yeah Me Too is the perfect kind of tiny business for my little neighborhood; the people who run it are passionate about one thing, and that's coffee (I'd wager they're also passionate about music and art, but for this article those things are neither here nor there).  

The only thing one can buy at Yeah Me Too is coffee.  You can buy beans or a cup of french-pressed coffee.  Usually there are 2 types of beans on offer - a dark roast and a medium roast.  That's all the decision you have to make. It's the most beautiful thing.  They roast the beans according to their origin, letting the terroir speak for itself (if you really want to get snobby about it). You state your roast and you're in and out just like that.  If you desire more of an education, you can receive one.  But if you just want to get your beans home while you still have enough energy to grind them, well, you can do that to.

Info: Yeah Me Too 3005 Indianola Ave (south Clintonville)

Things to do in Columbus::July 1st Edition

Of course, the number one thing to do tonight and over the next 24 hours is to visit Dirty Franks Hot Dogs downtown! The newest Liz Lessner joint features lots of hot dogs, original artwork, local music, and great cocktails such as whiskey with draft Frost Top root beer (oh yeah).  It was really great. You should go.

At any rate. It's summer. It's full on summer.  This weekend is, um, already the 4th of July. When I received my issue of Costco Connection this week, there was an advert in it for freakin' Back to School supplies!!! Stop the train! Or at least slow down!

All of that to say, if you've been putting off doing exciting summer activities, GET OFF THE COUCH!!!

As always, please feel free to write any additional events in the comments section!

• This Saturday is Gallery Hop in the Short North! Parking meters are free on holidays, just so you know.
• As a side note, most restaurants will be open on July 4th, since it is a Saturday.
• This weekend is Patriotic Pops.  Support the Columbus Symphony, people. We should be resistant to losing culture in our fair city. The Pops will take place this Saturday on the lawn at Chemical Abstracts.   
• Spider Man is coming to COSI this weekend!  
• If you've never been to Schiller to see Shakespeare in the Park, you should go! The Tempest begins today and goes throughout the month. 
• As always, DooDah parade will take place July 4th at 1pm! DooDah always features the best in satire and always has a humorous take on politics and current events. 
• The Wexner Center has some great events going on, including an awesome lineup of classic American movies - Saturday Night Fever, Purple Rain, American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused
• Thursday is Cockatils at the [Franklin Park] Conservatory, and the theme is Daisies and Daiquiris! Also, remember that Blooms and Butterflies continues throughout the summer; new butterflies are released at 1pm and 3pm.