Aargh…this thread has taken quite a turn since the last time I visited it.
Cooks vs. servers. The debate is more intense than the liberals vs conservatives debate. I have done both, so (as usual), I think I can offer a fairly moderate opinion.
Servers are directly in control of how pleasant a diner’s experience is. Yes, cooks do make mistakes. I was the kitchen manager in a large Denny’s for five years (after spending five years as a cook/server). I worked a minimum of 60 hours a week for those five years…I would sometimes go months without a day off. I made damn good money doing it, though… I was the highest paid employee in the restaurant for the last two years I worked there.
However, I have done a wide variety of different jobs. Some sucked more than others. However, there is only one job on this earth that I have ever experienced to be worse the being a line cook. That is the life of a dishwasher (I’ve never, say, mined coal before). There is more stress in a line cook’s shift than one who has never done the job could possibly imagine. The thought process:
ok…I gotta drop two eggs over easy and two scrambled…gotta put toast in the toaster…get the bun ready…grab this ticket…steak over easy…drop some hash browns…get the fries ready to drop, save time…the fried chicken is done, but I can’t get to it yet…eggs need flipping, but I can’t get to it yet…damn, I’m out of chicken strips…damn, two more tickets coming up…flip the pancakes…run, flip the eggs…shit, toaster didn’t pop up, have to drop new stuff…flip the three burgers…eggs are done, hashbrown’s are done, bacon’s done, but the damn toast isn’t because the damn toaster malfunctioned…shit, the mozzerella sticks are oozing all over the fryer…gotta get that fried chicken out…damn, manager’s bitching about the toast not being done…damn, burgers are done, but I forgot to drop the fries…shit, four more tickets are coming through “I NEED SOME HELP BACK HERE”.
The life of a line cook is hell on earth. The typical shelf life of a line cook at Denny’s is about a year and a half. Believe me when I say that servers have it easy. All they have to do is ring the ticket in correctly. If I could count the times when the cooks saved the day because the server screwed up, I’d be a mathmatical genius. My all time favorite was when a huge table would come in, all wanting seperate tabs. The server would go to ring up the order, but would forget to push the magical “chain-check” button that makes all the seperate orders come up on one ticket. Ever wonder why your food is cold when you eat in large groups? Because the first order the server punched into the computer is done cooking by the time she has finished entering the order.
And, as a final thought…I never sent out a sub-par product unless the managers demanded it.
I’ll never forget my last day. Busy as hell that day…we served 1400 people between four cooks in less than three hours…our restaurant is only “rated” to serve a maximum of 350 customers an hour. A server rang in a special we had at the time…it was an english muffin topped with two sausage patties, chopped onions and peppers, and two poached eggs with country gravy. It was a pain in the ass to balance all of that, not to mention the fact that poached eggs are the absolute biggest nemisis to any line cook. Luckily, I had two poached eggs that were extra and were just getting done when I received the ticket. I did the balancing act, and voila, perfection. Add a hashbrown, and thank God that mess is out of the way. Now I can tend to the other 120 people in front of me without having to worry about this anymore.
The server came up to the window and yelled, “I forgot to say ‘no onions’ on that sausage benedict order” and walked away.
So did I. From the profession. For good. I’m not really sure if that customer ever got his “sausage benedict without onions” or not.
