Serving 101: The Beginners Guide to the Thunderdome. If you are starting as a server, thinking about it or just want to up your game check it out. Reviews: 18 Year old host “I haven’t read a book the whole time I’ve been in High School and I couldn’t put it down.” Younger Millenial “This is my new server bible.” The elder Millenial "It's okay."
Everything in life can be expressed on the bell curve, even restaurant customer service. You have a top 10-20%, a middle 70-80% percent, and a bottom feeder 10% to everything. Ideally, you want to be in the top 10%. This is usually reserved for family members, friends with benefits, weed dealers, and the lawyer that got us out of our DUI. The middle 80% is mostly everyone else. Civilians and random guests. You haven’t done anything to piss us off and being nice pays for our rent and cat food; we will probably be sincere about it too. The bottom 10%? Write us a bad review, we dare you. You say you’ll never come back? Is that a promise? Land in this category and after work we will be talking about you over shots for hours. Not a place you want to be. Here’s how to be in the top 10%.
Part of being a good manager in the F&B world is making sure your staff has the tools and the training to do their jobs. Part of being a good leader is conducting yourself as the standard to which you are holding everyone else. Fortunately doing both of these things consistently well in the service industry is as easy as herding cats.
Restaurants, taverns, bars, pubs, and café’s…these places are part of our community. When America was being settled the first building most towns would put up was a tavern; before schoolhouses, courtrooms, jails, or even a town hall, there would be a tavern. Whatever you want to call it, the house that serves fair-priced food and libations to locals and travelers alike is as American as George Washington, and celebrating momentous events with revelry is practically baked into our DNA. Proof? 2 days before the Constitution was signed, on the night of September 15, 1787, at City Tavern in Philadelphia, George and 54 of his pals threw a party and drank “54 bottles of Madeira wine, 60 bottles of Bordeaux wine, 8 bottles of old stock whiskey, 22 bottles of porter ale, 8 bottles of hard cider, 12 jugs of beer, and 7 large bowls of punch”…plus dinner, fruit, olives and relish, because even back then they knew when you’re going hard you gotta eat.
There are all kinds of kitchens, restaurants and food service venues but they usually fall into one of two categories: corporate or independent. It’s hard to say which is better to work at even if it’s like a pirate ship taking on the Royal Navy. Clearly there are some big differences. Let’s take a look.
Drugs and alcohol are the glue and the grease of the Food and Beverage Industry. They help us keep our shit together but also let us unwind and loosen up. The range of chemicals restaurant workers use to get through the day runs from aspirin to acid and many would be lost without something to help take the edge off. Sometimes people take it too far, on accident or on purpose, and the one thing we don’t hear a lot of is “Hey, you might want to get some help.”
In the restaurant industry stuff breaks ALL the time. Ideally you can call someone to fix things but if you have a vested interest in your kitchen or the operation as a whole you should know how to fix as many things as you can yourself, or at least be able to identify what the problem really is. Half because you need to get busted equipment functional again, and half because if you can figure it out yourself you don’t have to pay someone else hundreds of dollars to figure it out for you.
Everyone who has ever worked in food service knows about the Restaurant Gods. They can be fickle as fuck. They're the ones who send in the full board of tickets just when you finish cooking your lunch. They're the ones who pay attention when you shut off your grill or turn off your fryer 30 minutes before close and punish you for it with burgers and fries at close. They hear you when you are dead and complaining about not having anything to do. "Oh?" they say, "You want something to do?"
And as my old kitchen manager Lee would say "And then the tour bus pulled up."
A childhood friend of mine got a wild hair up her ass and she and her husband decided to open a coffeeshop in a little town outside of Madison WI and she asked if I had any advice. I told her I’d jot down a few things but I figured I’d share it with all aspiring restaurateurs…especially those with no previous food experience. Good god, where to begin.
My introduction to the restaurant world in a nutshell..."you suck as a waiter but come help us out in the kitchen. And here, have some shrooms." Let's get it on...
They asked me to cook a pig. How hard could that be? What could possibly go wrong?
What to do when someone hands you the keys to your first kitchen. Don't smash it.
Buffalo Wings are my home cooking. I learned how to eat them in Buffalo and I teach the gospel of Crystal Hot Sauce and Butter wherever I go. Amen.
Kitchen Pranks: The best prank I've pulled, and the best prank pulled on me.
Fathers Day on the line with a new guy and a man down. The Weeds approacheth...
OpSail: One Year Later and the greatest lawyer in Norfolk.
