Chef of a popular restaurant group. Try to be as consolidated as possible. Blessed with huge space.

Nacho cheese sauce, below and on top probably a medium 6 pan of shredded cheese melted on the flat top and another few giant handfuls on top.

Somehow my overworked ass managed to fit this flash pan we use a lid got trapped after using the pot for a while. How do I get it out? I've tried placing it over a hot burner for a while to expend the metal and throw ice cubes to shrink the pan, no bueno

Been ordering food for a pretty large campus dining hall for over 15 years, we serve 1500+ daily. I have seen trends change over time because most of our meals are new college students getting outside of their home/high-school food environment for the first time. This current group will pick chicken nuggets over literally any other food option. In 10 years they are going to be the ones ordering catering events. The days are numbered for fancy lunchables.

Sorry for the bad pic I’m not the person they pay to pump the socials, I just work here. But I was giving out multiple sharpies per day, labeling them, etc. finally they are just running their natural course, running out of ink, and needing to be replaced. No one has asked for a sharpie in months.

It’s offseason, so time to stay busy but was curious if yall had any tricks to getting this off besides degreaser and a scrubby.

I have no idea where to post this. I’ve considered making a YouTube video essay but thats a lot to do.

Anyway.
I have been seeing job posting after job posting for chef/supervisor/management positions, pretty regularly its like 60% of my indeed/facebook etc feeds when I’m looking at jobs. Ive also been watching kitchens become more and more reliant on chopping tools, on microwaves, on hand mixers and the like.
Maybe I’m daydreaming, but what happened to knife skills? Im working with people who are confused about why im choosing to chop an onion by hand bc it takes a few extra minutes.
We aren’t training our next wave of chefs, we are actively stunting peoples culinary growth and understanding.
My manager should not have to ask me for basic knowledge of how food science works. My supervisor should have the understanding to explain why we do things a certain way.
Again, maybe im thinking about this too much, but I feel so helpless, like im watching someone drowning and i cant swim. All this, on top of the fact that the NRA lobbies endlessly to keep our wages low and to keep our labor classified as unskilled.
Not even fast food is unskilled labor.

Anyway, all of it boils down to money and power and that fucking sucks ass. Thanks for reading if you did.

Tl;dr Im existential as hell about my career path.

After being unemployed for exactly 3 months I got hired at a daycare as a prep cook. It's great because it's the kind of kitchen I wanted, not a restaurant. We prep food for the other daycare locations and for the one we're located at.

But the clearance involved is kind of expensive. Police clearance is around $70, TB test is $40, thankfully it's one step, two step is $70. And then I don't have a copy of my safe food handlers certificate and they charge $10 just to email it.

I start Monday so I'm trying to get everything together asap. They let you start as long as you can prove you applied for the police clearance and my sister is upset about that because she just had a baby and would be pissed if she were at a daycare where someone didn't actually have clearance before working there. She had to wait a month for hers before working at a retirement home.

I am excited though. No delivery apps, no actual customer interactions, no more night shift or split shifts. And the pay is higher than what I was making before.

I turned In my two week notice and got a phone call ten minutes later arguing with me about my reason for it. My reason was that the business isn’t ran professionally and isn‘t managed well, the owner called me ready to argue and push the blame onto me having a “personality issue” because I find the way she texts inappropriate for an employer and I don’t think that the employees should be given the excuses of her being a teacher, or that it’s a family business.

She constantly mentions these things like she’s a martyr and refers to herself as a “small business superwoman”. The shop isn’t managed at all and I really don’t care that it’s a family business because I’m still one of her paid employees, and I think that we should be addressed with some level of respect. After trying to argue with me, and basically saying that there shouldn’t be professionalism in a small business anyway I told her to fuck off with my two week notice, I’m not opening at 6am tomorrow.

I’m gonna cut my rant short to say that a big part of her failed management is that she texts weekly about employees not cleaning well enough, but has failed to address an ant infestation in the room where open ingredients are kept. I was given a “talk” about pouring out this exact caramel bottle and cleaning it because it’s a waste of product, the owners daughter told me she knowingly served people stuff with ants in it because they can’t afford to pour out full containers.

I’m reporting this to my local department of health and I wanted to share this because it bothers me a lot, customers have drank these things without knowing, and it‘s the responsibility of workers to report these things when owners and managers won’t take care of it. I’m also pretty young but I feel like I’ve grown up 10 years in the past couple of days dealing with this situation, if you’re in a more experienced position please consider taking younger and inexperienced people under your wing in a sense, Reddit discussions about other stuff with this situation is what convinced me to quit in the first place, I’m already so glad that I did. 💖

What can you tell about this place based on this “smothered chicken breast” monthly special?

Context: I met my sister-in-law at an old, local institution, fast-casual-masquerading-as-brew-pub (not a chain) near her work in our mid-sized NW US city. I’d never been to before. After waiting 40 minutes for this to arrive, I told her that her plate tells a story about BOH and management anyone who’s worked BOH can read. I told her what I thought that was. She said “there’s no way you can know all that from some mashed potatoes.”

Ahem. Y’all?

Edit: Did not expect this to blow up and my comments are getting buried, so here’s what I said you can tell from the plate (which was almost $30):

*Someone with power who knows fuckall about being on the line got a visit from the Good Idea Fairy and decided “piping mashed potatoes is fancy!” after a trip to Vegas or Disneyland or a cruise in 2001. They refuse to let it go.

*That same person micromanages plating appearance (but not the process) and other random things they think hide their ignorance, so they feel like they “managed” something. 

*The person isn’t BOH or even in the restaurant all the time. But they’re there often enough that BOH can’t change anything. It’s an owner, owner’s spouse, GM, etc.

*The kitchen did not come up with the specials. This shit is imposed on them by aforementioned person with power.

*BOH is doing their best, but tickets still go out late on a slow Tuesday night because of micromanaged shit like this overcomplicating their lives. 

*BOH could get tickets out on time if left alone. But can’t get management to let go of any of the unnecessarily convoluted shit.

*Onions are this places “thing” (it’s all over their menu how “famous” their mid French onion soup is). But the onions weren’t actually in the gravy/sauce for this dish. The gravy was really thick, and then there were watery onions and broth sloshing around on top. To the point that the sauce was separating into globs of starch in the runny broth. That tells me that they didn’t cook and reserve onions for dishes like this. They add all of their onions to the soup. Then, they scoop some out (maybe with a slotted spoon? Maybe not given how much broth there was sloshing around) and dump it on top of the chicken breast and gravy. The temperature difference between the chicken, the gravy, and the watery broth/onions shocks the gravy into separating.

*That’s a process and prep issue that anyone on the line knows how to solve (just reserve some onions or drain them in advance so the broth doesn’t break the gravy). But they can’t, because someone else dictated the special and dictated that they had to use the soup onions.

*There is no expeditor checking dishes before they go out. Or expeditor has lost all will to even try because no one fucking listens. Or expeditor was on a smoke break/crying in the walk-in.

*This wasn’t someone on the line having a bright idea. If the same person who thought it up were doing the piping voluntarily, it would have been neater. This is the piping of someone whose boss cares more about you doing it their way than doing it well.

So management  is likely failing to support their BOH people actually on the line, in prep, doing expo. This is a place where you breakdown doing expo on a random slow Tuesday because you are so goddamn tired of trying to find ways to put out good work without any support and with active micromanaging sabotage from owners/KMs/GMs/investors/etc who don’t know shit.  If this is getting out of the kitchen, expo (and everyone else who can get away) is taking a lot of “smoke breaks” to cry in the car or the walk in. And no one blames them. This isn’t expo’s fault. It’s not the line’s fault. The buck stops with management.

These universally make the food look worse from all that ive seen.

It was on practically every pallet

Meals used to be 50% off no matter what. This is after we started closing 1 day a week 1 month ago, then 2 days a week 2 weeks ago. Also my hours got basically cut in half when we closed for 2 days.

It is the nature of this industry that we are subject to petty tyrants who use and abuse workplace policy as it suits them. It is a recurring pattern at my (now former) job that loyal and hardworking employees are either 1) alienated into quitting or 2) discarded after manipulation of the "coaching ladder". I'm sure this will be a recognizable situation to many others in this sub.

It is the nature of artisanal pastry that you'll often be managed by someone who is used to pinching pennies at a Village Inn™️©️®️, and they'll decide that you and your products are just too expensive for their bottom line. I hope our guests enjoy the frozen product they're about to stock.

One month shy of my two-year anniversary at this company, I was termed for "job abandonment," because I left early yesterday. I previously had an agreement with my managers that I could leave when my work was finished for the day, even if it was before my scheduled out time. I guess someone decided that they wanted to get rid of me, and this was the mechanism they chose to carry that out. (Last week I got written up for something I did a month ago, which was the point where I started getting weird vibes.)

Anyone want to hire me? You've seen my resume. I'm in the Omaha area. I'm a really good pastry chef, but I'm not too proud to do something else. I have resting bitch face and an intimidating aura, but I promise I'm nice.

I think our Chief Cook is out to get us, but I just cant prove it yet.

JFC those could choke somebody to death!

Im the main prep guy at the restaurant and my halibut order was running a day late. I don't work Wednesdays, its pretty much the only day I get to spend entirely with my son. Anyway the halibut came in and instead of having the guy I trained skin the halibut our "head chef" decided he could do it..... Not only is this the worst I've seen, but the portion are also fucked. Dude probably didnt even attempt to weigh anything and just went with what he thought was 7-8oz cuts, almost everything was around 5oz. The only saving grace is he stopped after 2 bellies, and left me the other 30lbs to cut.

TLDR: My head chef sucks

1st and 2nd Pic are the portions I pulled from the line

3rd Pic is one of the bellies i skinned this morning.

Edit: I do work service, I do not work at place of post. I did let them know.