Full House

Today was madness. Worse than we anticipated. We didn't have a dinner rush, we had an all day rush. The orders came in non-stop for all the ten hours I was there. We ran out of a lot of things, not because we didn't have time to prep but because we didn't anticipate it would be that busy.

We ran out of berries to use in the Sonoma Salad. Apparently nobody cared because they continued to request for it, even without the berries. We ran out of calamari. All out. I had a box ready to prep if needed but there was not a spare second to go back to clean and cut it. We almost went through all the Romaine lettuce. We were down to the last insert with no Romaine left in the fridge to even cut so we would have had to eliminate all our Romaine-based salads. We had cut and washed two cases of Romaine lettuce and we went through them in just those ten hours when normally a case can last us for three days. We ran out of bruschetta mix even though we started with three inserts (and we never use that much!). Although it's not hard to make the mix, we didn't have diced tomatoes to make more and it would have taken a person a few minutes to wash and dice tomatoes so they can be turned into bruschetta mix. We were down to the last two bags of fries as well. For the hot side, grouper was out and I think when it ended we had only two more tenderloins left. Anyway, you get the picture. We nearly sold out of food. In order to spend their allotted amount people ate in the restaurant then ordered more take-out upon leaving. They drank a lot of wine and one table even bought cases of Powerade and sparkling water before going home.

The kitchen staff was all there, as were all the servers and their supervisors. All this and we barely could keep up. At the end of the night when we were closing there were a lot of empty containers on the line and nothing to put in them. The two people who have the misfortune of being scheduled to work today will have a lot of prep on their hands.

I'm glad it's over. I will be going in maybe 20 hours this week, probably even less next week. I wish I could stop going altogether as of next week. The 20-hours a week are an obstacle to me starting my other job on November 2nd. Because both jobs are evening kitchen jobs and I never know my schedule in advance at the club, it is impossible for me to do both jobs at the same time. My friends are looking for me to tell them what days I can work and I find myself unable to do so. We might just have to wait till the 15th.