What, you don’t deep-fry your pasta for fettucine alfredo? (I’m scratching my head at that one, too. Best I could come up with is there was a miscommunication at some end.)
Between that and possibly not being held at safe temps and the potential of that giant pot getting thrown into the walk-in at closing and finally getting cold just before it goes back on a burner at the next opening . . . frozen/refrigerated/even canned soup is the much, much, better option.
The waitress told us right up front when we came in that their fryer was broken so some things were not going to be available. She took the order and then came back and said the alfredo was one of the things they couldn’t do. I repeated back to her what she’d said to make sure I understood, so I dunno.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, let’s not get crazy … you had me until “canned.” (But yes, if the option is food sickness and canned soup, I’ll begrudgingly take canned, though I may need a minute to think about it.)
There’s just really no reason that soup needs to be on a burner for the whole shift at a restaurant other than maybe because it makes it immediately available to serve (and perhaps storage issues). Soup is ideal for reheating and it doesn’t taste different reheated on the stove vs the microwave.
I’m saying more that maybe she misunderstood the kitchen or something. I literally cannot even fathom a guess, unless they were doing – I dunno – some sort of deep fried alfredo balls a la arancini or something, but I doubt that’s the case, as I can only find a few mentions of it on the internet, and it would be called something more descriptive than just “fettucini alfredo” and probably found on the app section of a menu.
It shall forever remain a mystery. We didn’t go back after that and they closed a year or so later.
Count me as another vote for this being a completely mundane statement and situation.
That’d be my guess, too. I could see that she was told, “we can’t make anything fried,” and either confused fettuccine alfredo for another dish (which was fried), or just didn’t understand what fettuccine alfredo was, or how it was prepared.
Maybe there were fried things in the fettuccine like bacon.
I thought in that direction, too, but – issues of what “fettucine alfredo” is aside – you don’t need a fryer to make bacon. You just need a pan (or, hell, any vessel) and heat source. And if you don’t have that, you just don’t have much of a functional kitchen. (Unless you’re microwaving everything and, well, the microwave’s broken.)
Fettucine al fried-dough?
I laughed out loud at that one.
I’ve been casually looking for different things I could do now that I’m retired, and if that’s the job description… hey, I could be a chef!
I’d just have to avoid telling people where… [bad french accent] “Oh, eet ees nothing, I am merely a sous-chef at l’Homard Rouge… but, c’est triste, not the one in Belgium.”
I don’t think chain restaurants have chefs, at least not working at the individual restaurants. But you could be a cook, and IIUC you’d be filling a role that there’s a fair amount of demand for.
Exactly. The head of the kitchen at an Applebee’s (or whatever) has a title along the lines of “Kitchen Manager;” their staff are cooks. (At the corporate level, the chains do employ chefs, who do recipe development, but that’s a different animal.)
There was a steakhouse in our area that had a sign by the front door that they sometimes used a microwave. I asked my mother about it, and she said some people would think that their “baked” potato would come out of the microwave (they weren’t). It was the 1970s so microwaves were still relatively new.
I think there used to be a warning about microwaves and heart pacemakers…
This isn’t a new phenomenon. Before the turn of the millennium, I went to school with a girl whose dad’s company made a massive portion of the bagged soup for restaurant chains, many of which were sit-down restaurants. At the time, I think he had at least 30% market share. It may have been more like 70%.
Incidentally, there is now a concern about the magnets in recent iPhones, AirPods and other Apple devices possibly interfering with implanted pacemakers
There’s some strong elitism and policing of what “real” cooking is going on in this thread - a microwave is a perfectly reasonable tool to use to heat something. What’s so inappropriate about soup heated in a microwave? “If it’s not heated in a pot over a fire I don’t want to hear about it! You’re not even really a restaurant if you use a microwave to get things hot!”
I mean, really?