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.

Days Off

My days off are Wednesday and Thursday not to bad. Its two days that most people don't have off during the week. Restaurant and Food service works are almost on an entirely different schedule from the rest of the world. Most people have Saturday and Sunday off which most of us in the food business can only dream of having those days off. Friday through Sunday is the money making days of the week. It is the busiest and craziest time of the week for most food establishments there for we never get those days off. Unless the boss is feeling nice or you happen to request those days off in advance. Most food service professionals like myself come to the realization that we'll never get weekends off and we don't really mind either. For most of us our Friday is Sunday or in my case at the moment my Friday is Tuesday. Along with the crazy days of the week we get off comes the fact that it almost never stays the same. Our schedules and days off can change daily, weekly, monthly or what ever the business trends call for. So as you can see if your entering the restaurant business and your not flexible with your schedule or you want the weekends off you might want to try something else. My experience as a restaurant manager with hiring if you can't work weekends we most likely won't even interview you. Some times we can work around the non flexible availability of people but the ideal hire would be someone who can work anything they are scheduled to work.

The Real Deal

As you can see from my pictures I'm the real deal. But you can have all the skill in the world and if you can't land a position where you can realy show your stuff what good is it? Well you can wow your relatives at family functions. If you want to make it in this industry you have to work hard if you really want to make a living working with food. Although I'm a bit discouraged with the speed in which my career is progressing I love this business and I don't want to do anything else. Right now I'm busting my but for Bob Evans restaurants gaining management experience and then I'll shoot for those kitchen management/ sous chef positions. If you can't truly say you love the restaurant business and you don't like to work hard you won't make it in the restaurant business.

Just Another Day at The Restaurant

Another Day of work we are short staffed. Whats new the same thing happens at almost every restaurant at this time of year. Every one goes back to school and you end up short staffed. How dose this keep happening year after year. It dosn't change!!!!! I am working on my second year of management and I already know how to fix the problem but it is the bosses above me. We're fine we don't need to hire we'll slow down when school starts but we can't even run a simple monday or tuesday shift because the retaurant is short staffed. It takes the area director to come in to make the GM realize we need more staff. Although it dosn't take a big brain to figure out when you only have one cook on saturaday and sunday mornings at a restaurant that is famous for breakfast that we need to hire more staff. How hard is it to continuously hire towards the end of summer to ensure you are fully staffed when school starts back up? Aparently pretty hard since it seems to me no matter what restaurant I've been in it is always done at the last minute after customer complaints rise and every shift is rocky. Although after numerous shift covers and people are where they need to be the shift will sort of run ok but how can we stop the cycle?