The wheels on the bus go 'round and 'round... until they come off, that is. If we needed a dose of reality after Sunday, boy, did we get it last night! The girls decided to more or less pack the house with friends and coworkers to give the kitchen a fire drill, for lack of a better word. They're of course hoping that by creating a pretend fire we'll learn and be ready for the real one. Everything that could go wrong last night, did. The pizzas -- which patrons ordered a lot of -- started to break when getting slid around the oven. Took a while for Chef to figure out that they were all going to break, not just "that one". Turns out the oven got too cold and the pizzas started sticking. Who know that 30 degrees Fahrenheit would make such a difference. The 700F the oven should be at became 667F just from having the door to it open for too long stretches. Uhhh... yeah, we were busy putting loads of stuff in the oven and moving it around, you have to have the door open!
Then the guy on the hot side got hammered with all sorts of stuff and he's doing the sides and the mains. I'm supposed to help him plate and watch the oven for him but I was not getting anything coming my way, I ended up running to the fridge for a lot of the mise en place we didn't have ready.
To make matters worse (if that could be possible), the chits were printing separate things, on two different printers. So Chef would get half a table on his chit and the printer on the hot side is printing the mains. That'll have to be fixed, we don't have time during service to play the "match the chits" game. I can't have half of table #19 print on one side and half on the other. Why? Because I'll have a server coming to me for a salad that I haven't even seen print. "What Caesar salad?" Turns out the said salad printed on one of the chits but Chef and hot side guy were so busy figuring out their own mess that nobody told me there's stuff I am supposed to be making.
Then -- oh yeah, there's a "then" -- there were only three of us. No dishwasher in the house, so one of the servers is back there doing dishes as we're running out of pans and plates to put food on. Uh-oh.
Sure, it was a drill, sort of. I say "sort of" because there were still people at tables who ended up waiting a long time for their meal. To me, that's not a drill. Someone's still hungry there and watching you fall apart in your nice open-concept kitchen! They're friends so they'll be more forgiving and, after all, that's what they're there for in the first place, to make you sink so that you'll hopefully swim next time. It's just that sinking is not a good feeling, it fills you with panic!
Although I am supposed to be off today I'll be going in around dinner time for a couple of hours. Chef gave me and the Sous Chef the night off which leaves him alone with the two "juniors." He was a little worried about it last night and asked me if I minded coming in. I said yes. So I'll go in for dinner but I can't go and prep nor will I stick around for the cleanup.
Here's to a better day!
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