Thursday, September 13, 2007

Long wait to be seated and Long wait for food

Have you ever been to a restaurant and waited thirty minutes or more to be seated and then once you were seated it took another thirty minutes to get your food? Of course you have almost everyone who has ever dined out has. As a restaurant manager you always hear "We only ordered ............ how long dose it take to make" or "We ordered ...... it doesn't take that long to make it." What most people fail to realize when a restaurant is packed is that their order isn't the only order being made in the kitchen. It also depends on what is ordered to determine how fast it comes out. If you order a steak well done that is 1.5 inches thick your looking at a minimum of 15 to 18 minutes before it is done cooking then by the time the server delivers it your total wait time could be 20 minutes. It also depends on how many orders are in front of your order. For instance if there are 10 orders in front of your order it depends how efficient the cooks are on starting the checks as they come in. If they get behind on starting checks or have to run to get to much product this slows the whole process down. A good cook will start all the items on checks that take the longest to cook then the cook will focus on the first few checks to sell them in a timely fashion. Then once the check is sold it is up to the server to deliver the food as fast as possible. The biggest problem arises when you are short kitchen staff and the orders are coming in faster than you can start them and sell them. This is what causes the 30 to 45 minute wait for food in most instances. Another cause which is a big one is incompetent kitchen staff. One more cause of this which happens alot is running out of cooking space which is when your fryers are full, the grills are full, and you have no more cooking area to start incoming orders. So you can see there are alot more factors involved as to why your order is taking so long. This is probably why most people who work in the restaurant industry are more understanding when they go out to eat and their order is taking a long time.

Wednesday, September 5, 2007

Labor Day Weekend

Labor day the weekend almost everybody has off. Four days off the last vacation everybody takes at the end of the summer. One of the biggest money making weekends of the year for the restaurant industry. A weekend thats hard to get off on if you work in the restaurant industry. Of course most holidays are hard to get off on unless it is Christmas or Thanksgiving . Although depending on the restaurant you might be working. After a while this is pretty easy to get use to because most of the time you get the days after off when everybody is going back to work or school.

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Crazy Restaurant Industry Hours

Its like 3:50 am and I'm getting ready for work. Way to early but when you work for a restaurant that serves breakfast at 6:00 am its not. The restaurant use to open at 7:00 am which makes more sense since most of the time we don't even get our first customer until 7 or 8. Even still I have to be at the retaurant an hour before we open to let the staff in and get set up. Although when I was a pastry chef for a small time restaurant called Zest I use to get to work at like 4:00 am just so I would have plenty of time to get bread making done and work in the kitchen without being in the chefs way because it was a small kitchen. The good thing about geting to work at 5:00 am is that I get off around 3:00 in the afternoon. The Bad part is that by the time you get home eat dinner and watch a hour or two of T.V. its time to go to bed. Of course there is another side to the crazy hours in the restaurant industry world. The closing hours. I've worked in restaurants that by the time you close the doors at mid night and get cleaned up you don't get home until 2 or 3 am then you sleep all day and you don't have to be back to work untill like 4 or 5 pm the next day. Then there are not just the opening and closing hours there is the mid shift when you work in between the day and night shift. Kind of like a 9 am to 7 pm shift where your whole day is tied up because you can't do anything before work or after work. So as you can see in the restaurant industry the hours are different than most other industries. If you wan't to work a simple 9 to 5 job the restaurant industry is not it. You have to be able to work long weird hours that constantly change according to the needs of the restaurant.