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

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.

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. 💖

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.

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.

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

JFC those could choke somebody to death!

Yall fucking wit da potato square or nah

Is he ready to be sous chef?

EDIT: it's for bolognese

Our flattop caught fire around 6 this morning and spread along the wall over to our broiler next to it. Nobody in the kitchen and the Ansel system didn't automatically trigger as it should have. Got to spend my shift today cleaning up the aftermath and trying to scramble to get the place open. We did get it done and were able to open for our last 1.5 hours. Why we pushed for that at all instead of getting a more thorough clean confuses the heck out of me but I just do what I'm told.

I’m aware this may be a silly question BUT I’m currently studying to get the certification and I’m stuck on what the person did wrong here.

Me: I have hot chilli in my car would you like some?

Her: oh really hot chilli?

Me:oh ya.

Her walks to my car and sees a pot of hot chilli in my car.

Her: I can't do today.

Chef wasn’t happy

I took on a position as a "Kitchen Manager" a couple of weeks ago, my first time in charge of an entire kitchen. We're serving pizza, beef/chicken/plant burgers, hot dogs and loaded fries.

I'm running the entire kitchen myself. I've worked jobs where I'm the solo chef all day, but always with someone else in charge. Thankfully, we have a main kitchen that does a lot of the prep work and sends stock to us, keeping prep down to a minimum.

The exec chef works across multiple restaurants, so I've not seen him much, and it's felt wild just being left to my own devices.

I'm in the UK, and we had EHO come in today, much earlier than expected given how recently we had opened. We had expected a few more weeks at least.

But we got a 5-star rating, and all the issues flagged were things outside of my control, so I felt great seeing that sticker go up on the door, confirming our standards.

I know a lot of chefs see it as meeting the basic standards of hygiene, but it felt good to get the sticker on our door.

Sorry for my rambling, I just wanted to share a positive moment with my community of fellow workers :)

Does anyone have any experience working with Toast to do inventory for you? Was told last night we’d be switching to this for the future. Apparently we upload our recipes, sales, and invoices to Toast and it’s supposed to be able to track the inventory of individual items. I can only see this ending badly. I just can’t imagine it ever being truly accurate especially when it comes to things like waste. We keep a waste sheet of most products that need trashed, but how are we supposed to keep track of someone using an extra egg here, or throwing out some rotten produce there. Overall it just seems unintuitive and like a pain in the ass.

I can get obsessive... I’ve always worked non-stop, jumping from task to task, especially when getting slammed, as most of us do. Working in kitchens where leaving the line for even a second didn’t feel possible, and if I had a few moments, I would take a smoke break instead of a bathroom break.

Eventually, I trained my bladder to not need to empty during a shift. The moment I walked into the kitchen, just nothing.

Anyways. Only a few short years of this, and I now have severe issues with my bladder & pelvic floor from chronic tension. Likely irreversible damage. Just a whole host of brutal symptoms, pain & discomfort.

So, chefs, take your damn bathroom breaks ‼️ You’re not saving lives by skipping them, but you are walking your way right into a whole world of health issues.

So I started this job about a year ago in the kitchen. I open and I know the whole opening VS closing arguments. I’ve worked front and back of house. Opening and closing. So I feel like I have a well rounded knowledge of restaurants not to say I’m not always growing. My big beef with this place is that they act like all restaurants leave it this messy for their openers. I’m gonna be showing pictures. As a previous closer at another restaurant I would never and have never. I don’t know maybe I’ve just happened to work at really clean places. I actually tried to put my two weeks in today and they asked me not to be “hasty” and it would happen to me no matter where I worked and let them fix it but this is not the first time this conversation has happened. I am tired. I am over it. Besides me we have 10 cooks. Every single day I’m coming in to dirty flat tops, floors, beer buckets. Dishes, silverware, gross mostly empty containers the meat slicer is dirty and they don’t even dump the mop water when they do mop. And I get hit hard for breakfast. Today I couldn’t even use the stupid cutting board cause it was gross. I am tightly wound about it. I worry about cross contamination and peoples food. So I feel like it has to be clean before I really get started and of course I was slammed right away today. I would say it’s like 50/50 I don’t know what I’m gonna get if it’s gonna be decent or if it’s gonna be a shit show disaster. I open 5 out of the 7 days. And the days I don’t work no one seems to clean up so my Mondays are really tough. And it’s even on days when the sales are really really low. Cause I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt but then I just kept seeing none of my prep was being moved. And they print out food sales and usually my breakfast has higher sales. They also have 2 of them all the time plus a dishwasher on weekends. Which I do not have. They also don’t do prep (unless they’re really busy and something is low but they do so little prep they don’t know how) so the whole thing is just cleaning up. And I’d say that’s fair if they actually cleaned. I just feel gaslit all the time. And I’ve offered to go to closing many times but they brush me off. I need a clean workspace. When I cleaned the bar bucket there was like swamp water at the bottom and the flattop made me gag. I’ve been off the last two days so my worst day is always Wednesday. Just containers hanging out they didn’t want to wash. I checked and we had 11 shifts since my last shift on Sunday. So I need to know is this normal at your place like my boss is telling me? Or would you be out?