Block 2: Day 6: Now I know how my bosses feel

One question that a lot of people ask cooks is "So you want to open up your own restaurant?" While someone might be a great cook it does not make them a great leader. In that respect we come to something that I personally dread: dealing with people. Not only that dealing with people in a situation that will no doubt lead to confrontation and dispute. Running a kitchen could be a real problem if the crew you're handling is just a mishmash of gears and cogs that don't fit together. You might want to try and suggest something for a vision of efficiency or change but it's up to the nature of that person to have to change. And with something as egotistical and passionate food creation is; we're bound to encounter people who have their own ideas of what is perfect.

So here I am; we are short one person in our group and we are handling our very first "to order" station. Customers come up to the station, place their order and we cook it for them. Me personally I was calm as a bomb but whether that was due to me tending just to grill and only grill is probably more the case. Everyone else was just buzzing around me in anticipation, obviously loosing their cool and the worst thing...compromising their role and position. The worst thing you could do when you're fucked in a huge backup of bills is everyone banding together in some desperate ditch effort to make one single dish in order to just "get the damn thing out" because that's when you withdraw from the big picture to focus on that one dish as your salvation ticket out of there.

So here we are, two people toasting bread and garnishing it while one person is doing fries. No one taking orders, a few bill orders up and me on grill. It wasn't the worst showing on earth, we didn't set the kitchen on fire but there were screwed up things that happened. First of all there was a switch in station which should never happen but I guess the stress of asking people what they fucking want on their sandwich was too fucking much. Secondly what happened was one of my classmates "Corey" decided to take over the bread station and hold up my other classmate P2 to just holding bread and talking to her about the order. If she made some room they could have made two sandwiches at the same time. If they thought out a bit clearly they might have actually not messed up the order of the bills and gotten their shit together. I was pretty frazzled a bit myself and I admit I could have taken up the slack a bit more as well. However when it came down to it we all failed from lack of communication.

There were sandwiches being made for the wrong plate, bills were not taken down when they should have been and ultimately we were wasting so much effort into making so little it felt like I was in a yard full of headless chickens. I told this to Corey and she talked back...big time. I expected it, not the complete earful that I got but it was so typical of her to run off gather her thoughts and return on the offensive to tell me off. The worst thing is her idea of pulling rank. One of the worst things in a kitchen is called "crossover" That is when on the production line, a cook goes behind or in front of another cook on the line in order to grab something or perform some duty. That is just inefficient and even worst dangerous because do it just at the wrong time and you could get burned, stabbed or worst. I brought this up and she talked about working in a bar where that type of stuff occurs.

I'm sure that she was probably a good bartender or her years of experience makes some sort of sense. However the problem with experience in a kitchen is that most of the time...it boils down to how the kitchen is run or feels and what the chef fucking wants. Now I don't claim that I should be the leader of this group of amateurs. But I will *not* ever pull rank on someone on my experience alone. What I only know is experience doesn't mean SHIT if it doesn't apply to the current situation and environment. Why should Corey's experience in a fucking bar even matter when my experience in a kitchen is just as equally useless? Corey we have to work here...NOW...not at whatever bar you poured drinks for. Not for the kitchen I work for. Our egos shouldn't exist because when you base your performance on that...then you only perform because of that. Not because of our kitchen.