Restaurant industry thread. - Like r/KitchenConfidential except we can say the N word.

[oramge cat]

I don't see a thread like this but I figure there must be more of us here. If this gets traction, I might post a weekly question to stimulate discussion. I'm mostly doing this because I'm like, ultra mega banned on reddit for fucking with the admins too much so I can't post on any of their subs for restaurant workers but I would like a place to discuss the industry that isn't the various dive bars I frequent with the rest of the service staff after work.

First question, what is the dumbest mistake you've ever made at work? Mine was the time I hooked up the wrong chemical to the dishwasher (degreaser instead of that nasty commercial dish detergent that will burn your skin off) and flooded the server alley with foam.

Or just bitch about our shitty jobs, whatever.

REMINDER: Avoid powerleveling too much. "I'm a line cook at one of the highest rated restaurants in X city" really, really narrows down who you are, like there are maybe a dozen people who fit that description. "I work fine dining" makes it much harder to pin down who you are. Posting a dish exactly as it's listed on your menu makes it really easy to find who you are. This is still Kiwi Farms, don't forget that!

 

[IrishGuy088]

I no longer work in restaurants but I did spend a lot of time in the field during my youth. Years ago I watched one of our Mexicans pour the fryer grease into one of those giant plastic pickle containers. I knew what was going to happen but I just watched. So to that end, I suppose it was a dumb mistake on my part. It all went about as you would expect. Oil everywhere and the container split just before he was able to run out of the back door. The employee parking area probably still has that oil stain on it.

 

[Orange Tabby]

God I do not miss cleaning a deep fryer. I’ve spilt my fair share of oil.

My dumbest mistake was setting a paper liner on fire in front of a customer. It was covering food on the hot bar (because we weren’t fucking open yet but this lady needed her chicken) and I pulled it away only for it to catch the top of the bar on the lights.
I didn’t realise I was holding this flaming paper until the customer said something and I freaked and dropped it. She was weirdly unfazed. Or just high.

 

[56 others]

I washed dishes and hit it off well with a waitress but found out she was a single mother.

That's the only story I have, nothing happens in the dishwashing corner

 

[Buck Mullet]

Dumbest mistake? I was cleaning out a deep fryer and accidentally spilled a bunch of the water/cleaning solution we used to boil out the residue and sludge all over the kitchen floor. To make it worse we were still open and out of nowhere orders had started coming in on an otherwise slow night, I was just trying to get an early start on closing.

So there's guys still working while trying not to slip on the mess I just made, so I rush to the utility room and grab the first things I see, a couple of stacks of freshly delivered clean aprons and run back to the kitchen and start laying them down to soak up the mess. My manager who's obviously already pissed at me dryly says "So you took the new aprons instead of the soiled towels and aprons in the outgoing bin? Smart move..." I felt like a fucking retard, but I guess I learned some kind of lesson from it.

 

[oramge cat]

Dumbest mistake? I was cleaning out a deep fryer and accidentally spilled a bunch of the water/cleaning solution we used to boil out the residue and sludge all over the kitchen floor. To make it worse we were still open and out of nowhere orders had started coming in on an otherwise slow night, I was just trying to get an early start on closing.

So there's guys still working while trying not to slip on the mess I just made, so I rush to the utility room and grab the first things I see, a couple of stacks of freshly delivered clean aprons and run back to the kitchen and start laying them down to soak up the mess. My manager who's obviously already pissed at me dryly says "So you took the new aprons instead of the soiled towels and aprons in the outgoing bin? Smart move..." I felt like a fucking retard, but I guess I learned some kind of lesson from it.

Your boss's response sounds like something my boss would say. One time me and my busser were both having a really bad day (our fault) and he just laughed and said "you guys are a trainwreck". I told him that we prefer the term "beautiful disaster" and somehow that moment like, unfucked us and we killed it the rest of the day and made fucking bank.

I washed dishes and hit it off well with a waitress but found out she was a single mother.

That's the only story I have, nothing happens in the dishwashing corner

Depending on the location of the dish pit, the dishwasher can know all and hear all. I've learned so much about work gossip shit by virtue of being pretty good friends with the dishwasher. He's the intersection between FOH and BOH. But if your station is in some back corner away from the action, I imagine this doesn't apply.

 

[56 others]

Your boss's response sounds like something my boss would say. One time me and my busser were both having a really bad day (our fault) and he just laughed and said "you guys are a trainwreck". I told him that we prefer the term "beautiful disaster" and somehow that moment like, unfucked us and we killed it the rest of the day and made fucking bank.

Depending on the location of the dish pit, the dishwasher can know all and hear all. I've learned so much about work gossip shit by virtue of being pretty good friends with the dishwasher. He's the intersection between FOH and BOH. But if your station is in some back corner away from the action, I imagine this doesn't apply.

Dish pit was its own room in the corner of the building, next door to the salad prep station.

 

[Sapphixys Shitty Panties]

I really hate having to deal with Uber Eats drivers.

 

[A-Stump]

Ever wanna know what Hell is? Working at a fried food cart mid-summer at a county fair. I'd sooner do asphalt jobs again than that, wouldn't wish it on my worst goddamn enemy.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

irl buddy worked kitchen at a bar so I've heard plenty of random "and then everybody sucked" stories
I sporadically have to remind him when he's cooking at my place that this isn't a commercial kitchen and he can't blast everything to a billion degrees on five burners at once

I'm often told I'm a good cook and occasionally told I should go into cooking but I like dicking around at my own pace and wasting food bugs me, so I understand that professional cooking isn't up my alley.

 

[oramge cat]

Ever wanna know what Hell is? Working at a fried food cart mid-summer at a county fair. I'd sooner do asphalt jobs again than that, wouldn't wish it on my worst goddamn enemy.

I had the opposite, was a kid at some festival in the winter pulling beers and sodas out of a gigantic tub of ice in a food trailer. And something similar, brick oven pizzas in summer somewhere where 110F isn't an unusual occurance. But yours is worse, because the grease. The goddamn grease.

 

[Magical Abductor]

Some retards managed to convince another retard to put all of the fryer grease into a large garbage bag to take out to the trash in a mop bucket, he actually made it all the way out to the trash and then it exploded on him when he tried to pick it up to get it in the dumpster. This was at the beginning of the shift and he asked to change his clothes, but the manager told him he had to stay at work so he just spent the whole day in fryer oil soaked clothes, he said "At least it happened early so my clothes could dry out."

 

[W00K #17]

I worked for years in fry cook and other positions during my teenage years and I remember next to none of it because I was always really, really high.

I do remember getting fired from one because I got caught smoking from a bubbler in the freezer. I'd been caught smoking in the freezer several times before which wasn't a big deal, everybody smoked dope in the freezer.

The manager got all pissed off though cuz I'd been late or forgot I had a shift that day a bunch of times in the last few months and I was also sorta drunk but like who gives a shit.

Dude almost yelling at me about how alot of people get stoned in the freezer but most people don't bring in a friggin bubbler and they don't also do shots, which is bullshit lots of people drank at work. And bubbler or one hitter who gives a fuck? It's both dope either way.

Long story short that dick canned me.

Nothing but 5 star days since though.

 

[Dyn]

Serious question ; why do people take jobs in food service when you can get paid twice as much for half the work in heavy industry?

 

[A-Stump]

Serious question ; why do people take jobs in food service when you can get paid twice as much for half the work in heavy industry?

Job availability/lack of relevant experience needed? Heavy industry jobs are also shrinking with further pushes toward automation and unions clamping down on the balls of hiring practices. Union leaders can demand everything from full healthcare to childcare and then turn around and make sure only people they know get hired on. If that isn't the case the company itself has likely been cucked to offer jobs to minorities first regardless if they're qualified or not. I used to work for the city and an example would be we'd just randomly have black women assigned to our work patrols who literally did nothing and were qualified for nothing. So they'd be given a flag or sign and be told to go stand somewhere and look productive.

 

[oramge cat]

Serious question ; why do people take jobs in food service when you can get paid twice as much for half the work in heavy industry?

I make $50/hour talking to people and carrying trays of food around, a server at the right spot makes more than a nurse.

Job availability/lack of relevant experience needed? Heavy industry jobs are also shrinking with further pushes toward automation and unions clamping down on the balls of hiring practices. Union leaders can demand everything from full healthcare to childcare and then turn around and make sure only people they know get hired on. If that isn't the case the company itself has likely been cucked to offer jobs to minorities first regardless if they're qualified or not. I used to work for the city and an example would be we'd just randomly have black women assigned to our work patrols who literally did nothing and were qualified for nothing. So they'd be given a flag or sign and be told to go stand somewhere and look productive.

This too, also criminal charges, unwilling to take a drug test, plus I know some line cooks who are genuinely passionate about food and want to move up the ladder and eventually become exec at their own spot.

I worked for years in fry cook and other positions during my teenage years and I remember next to none of it because I was always really, really high.

I do remember getting fired from one because I got caught smoking from a bubbler in the freezer. I'd been caught smoking in the freezer several times before which wasn't a big deal, everybody smoked dope in the freezer.

The manager got all pissed off though cuz I'd been late or forgot I had a shift that day a bunch of times in the last few months and I was also sorta drunk but like who gives a shit.

Dude almost yelling at me about how alot of people get stoned in the freezer but most people don't bring in a friggin bubbler and they don't also do shots, which is bullshit lots of people drank at work. And bubbler or one hitter who gives a fuck? It's both dope either way.

Long story short that dick canned me.

Nothing but 5 star days since though.

This is why I made this thread. 5 star post. I showed up obviously drunk to cover dish last weekend and the bartender wouldn't make me a shift drink, like nigga I'm the fastest dishwasher that has ever worked at this restaurant the fuck I need to be sober for?

 

[LaxerBRO]

Would servers prefer to be paid a minimum wage of $15/hr with no tips or received a tipped minimum wage of $5?

 

[Shart Attack]

First real job was as a line cook at a mom-and-pop place. Dumbest mistake I ever made was poisoning a customer who had celiac disease. This was back when the gluten-free fad was just taking off. People would ask about gluten with every order, and you knew it was just fad diet bullshit, because they had no idea what gluten actually is. They'd ask shit no one with a gluten allergy would have to ask a waiter, like, "Is your olive oil gluten-free?" "Are your carrots gluten-free?" "Can we get some gluten-free whole-wheat bread?" Eventually I started tuning it out, getting careless about cross-contamination. I had a regular customer request his pan-fried fish gluten-free, didn't pay enough attention to it, and dredged it in flour before frying it. He ended up getting really sick from it, like vomiting all night. I felt terrible about it.

 

[MS Paint Gigachad]

I'd worked part-time in fast food for a 3 month stint sometime back, was quite alright until I got transferred to a shitty understaffed outlet where they were demanding I put in a full-timer's hours, but in all the peak hours (unlike the real full timers). I'd asked that my hours be reduced, and when straight-up ignored, I resigned. Also I had a micromanaging shithead for a shift leader.

A story I have about that shitty understaffed outlet was the "vranyo" going on with the Kitchen Management System and the resulting chaos. However, I feel it needs some context to be understood properly. You see, upper management gave us a target to complete orders within a certain time limit. So my manager ordered us to mark everything as done the instant it came in. As a result, our only way to know what was done and what was merely marked as done was by memory.

Now the KMS also printed out little stickers out for each order. On them there'd be printed something like

73
Large Fries
3/5

Let me explain what it meant: 73 wouldve been the number on the standee we gave the customer to put on their table; Large Fries would be the thing they ordered; 3/5 would mean they ordered 5 items and this was item #3. As you can see, there was no way for us to tell what order the orders came. Obviously they'd be printed in the order they came in, but my managers didnt like the sticker-paper sticking out of the machine like a long receipt, so they had us stick it on the shelf below the printer. We'd stick them more-or-less left to right, but grouped by type, but sometimes we'd just have so many stickers that the latest stickers would actually be on the left.

And so, chaos. The lunch crowd shuffles in, and a dozen and a half orders for fries come in, with half a hundred more on the way. They all get marked as done and the order of the stickers gets jumbled up. We don't know what was ordered first, because we stuck everything in the jumbled order and we don't know if it was already done. The result: some people wait 20 minutes for their fries; some wait 20 seconds. Add that to the chaos of understaffing; one man would be server, cashier and also in charge of the KMS and grouping items to be delivered; the other cashier would also be packing delivery orders; and the two people at the line would be furiously and continuously assembling items, barely holding the weight applied.

I really hate having to deal with Uber Eats drivers.

Can relate, one time one of them got mad at us for taking too long (understaffed and peak hour). Ended with my boss shouting at him, and him shouting back

Serious question ; why do people take jobs in food service when you can get paid twice as much for half the work in heavy industry?

I don't have the skills for it; nor am I studying those skills

 

[ryuichi]

never again will bend to anyone's will.