Sep 10

Sep 10 How-To Series: An Exercise in Futility, aka, Restaurant Scheduling

I have been writing food service schedules off and on for more than 20 years. I’ve written one for a Whole Foods Prepared Foods Dept. with I want to say 85 people that took me a full 8 hour workday one day a week to write…and for a crew as small as…just me.

Writing the schedule is, for lack of a better word, relentless. Time doesn’t stop and either does the ever present need to post when everyone is working next week, and the week after that, and oh shit did I remember so and so’s day off? And its Martin Luther King Day…oh crap 3 day weekend and I only have the regular amount of servers on. Its a beast, I’ll show you how to tame it.

Sep 6

Sep 6 How to Guarantee Great Service in the Modern Restaurant Industry or "How I Learned to Shut Up and Tip 20%"

Jim Wade

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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%.

Aug 5

Aug 5 When the Shit Goes Down...

Jim Wade

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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.

Jul 29

Jul 29 Restaurant Gods: A Closer Look

Jim Wade

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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."