Kitchen vs. Servers

 I chose Kitchen vs. Servers as the title for this post because I knew it would draw your attention.  If you’re taking the time to read this, you’re probably working in the hospitality industry.  As far back as I can remember there’s always been some kind of animosity between the kitchen staff and the front of house staff.  I’m not going to try and solve that problem for you, but I hope to show you how to think about it a little differently.

I have never been able to figure out how this rivalry started.  Maybe one side did something to the other side during the middle ages and the fight began and is still ongoing today.  Maybe it’s been passed down for generations and generations until we all just thought was part of restaurant life.  Maybe it’s like a dog and cat thing and we’re genetically wired to dislike the other side.  I don’t know, but whatever it is, we can change it and you can help figure out how.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I’m a retired chef.  I’ve worked in many kitchens all over the place and have seen this rivalry everywhere and even participated in it a few times.  I’ve also worked as a food server and have participated in it from that side of the fence.

I’ll speak to the kitchen side of it first.  If you’re a cook or chef, the whole process of selling food is not all about you.  You play an important part, but not the only part.  You don't sell food.  You are overhead.  Those servers that you constantly harass or demean have to go to the table and convince the customer to order the food and then after it's served and eaten  they have to get money for it.  In essence that’s the function of a restaurant – to buy, prepare, serve and get paid for food.  Your primary role ends when the server takes it to the table.  From there it’s up to them to do everything else.

As a cook or chef, you have to realize that the restaurant owner doesn’t have a magic money tree growing somewhere that he harvests every other Friday to give you a paycheck.  The money for your check comes from the entire process of buying food, cooking food, serving food, and then getting the customer to fork over some money to pay for it.  That money will go toward your paycheck.  In the simplest terms possible this means that if the restaurant can’t collect money from the customer, then you don’t get a paycheck.  It’s a super simple concept when you think about it.  No sales, no paycheck.  The easier it is for the servers to sell, the more money there is.

Where this becomes important is when you think about how all this happens.  You cook the food, but the server takes it to the customer and makes sure he/she’s happy enough to pay for it.  Like it or not, you are dependent on the server for your paycheck.  With that in mind, you can see that anything you do to make their job easier is also good for you.  On the other hand, anything you do to make their life harder is not good for either of you.

Keep this in mind the next time you have the urge to throw a ripping hot dish up under the heat lamps and choose not to warn them that it’s hotter than the Earth’s molten core.  Or when you berate them for making an error on an order.  People make mistakes and making one shouldn’t result in a punishment from the Dark Ages.  Just give them what they need to make the customer happy and then move on.  You can get with them at the end of the shift and straighten out the point-of-sale or discuss what went wrong.  You can work together to figure out how to prevent it from happening again.  After all, it’s not you vs. them.  You’re on the same team.

On the other side of the coin, if you are a server then the kitchen is probably not really out to get you even if it sometimes seems that way.  They’re most likely not even thinking about you, much less plotting against you.  They’ve probably been back there sweating their balls off all day and they’re tired, stressed out, and maybe even a little hungover.  When they get behind they get frustrated just like you.  Help them out a little bit by slowing down service if you can to help them catch up.  They’re not behind because they hate you.  They’re behind because something probably went wrong back there and they’re trying to recover from it.  A good cook’s worst nightmare is to get behind on orders.  Do what you can to help, even if that’s just staying out of the kitchen for a little while to help ease the noise and confusion.

Look, I can write these little pearls of wisdom all day and there are hundreds of them, but you should get the idea by now.  The point of all this is that servers and the kitchen are working for the same thing and fighting among each other holds everyone back.  A little care and cooperation goes a long way toward a successful restaurant and makes for lifelong friendships.  I decided a long time ago that helping the servers whenever I got the chance made my life better too.  And guess what?  The servers started doing the same for me.  When we all started collaborating before, during, and after the shift everyone had fun at work again.  Sales went way up and we all started making more money.  You see, we’re on the same team.

The False Prophet

This is the story of a chef who wasn’t what he claimed to be.  As some of you know, I’ve bounced between two completely different careers all my life.  My passion is the restaurant industry, but Information Technology pays the bills.  I would work as a chef until I got tired of being dirt poor and then go back to IT for a while to make some real money.  This story is about one of those times when I was working in a restaurant.

About 3 years before this took place I had bought my first restaurant.  It was a neighborhood place that had once been the gathering place for the whole neighborhood.  The owner had gotten older and was suffering the ravages of old age, alcoholism, and a long and colorful cocaine habit.  He was burned out and ready to retire.  As you can imagine, the factors I listed contributed to the restaurant’s decline and staying open day to day had become a challenge.  I was sure I could return the place to its former glory so I decided to give it a go.  I won’t go into all the details because it’s a long and complicated story, but basically the obstacles were more than I could overcome in the 3 years I owned the place and I eventually closed it before I lost my house and everything else.  This doesn’t really have anything to do with the story but I felt it was important that you understood my state of mind when this odyssey started.

Ok, so back to the story at hand.  After my Italian place closed I was burned out and really had no motivation to work anywhere.  A lifelong friend called me and asked me to take a position as Sous Chef at a locally owned French restaurant as a favor to him so I reluctantly agreed without really investigating the condition of that business.  On my first day I learned that the restaurant was losing about $40,000 per month and the Executive Chef was feuding with the owner.  On top of this they had a restaurant consultant there who was offering some really bad advice and bleeding them dry for about $4,000 per week.  Morale among the staff was very low and sales were terrible.  We had some nights in those first weeks where we had only 10 or 15 customers all night.  This was a larger restaurant and could seat almost 200 customers at a time.  After I started I learned that the owner had hired me after the Executive chef had offered the position to someone else and it had caused lots of hard feelings and bruised egos.

The restaurant was a high end place in Omaha’s Old Market District.  It had been a fixture of the district for about 40 years and was widely known as Omaha’s finest restaurant.  Unfortunately this was not the case anymore and it quickly became evident that the food was only marginal, the restaurant was in disrepair, and the service staff was, with a few exceptions, not qualified to serve fine food.  I didn’t know any of the politics at the time I accepted the position, but the owner’s plan was to push the Executive Chef out and move me into that position.  I started moving us slowly back to classical preparation techniques and improving the quality of the food.  The Executive Chef saw that as a direct assault on his authority so my efforts were not well received.  I decided to just put in my time and look for another position.

There is a lot more to the story, but about a month after I started working as Sous Chef the owner called the Executive Chef to the office in the middle of Saturday night service and promptly fired him.  After service he told me that I was the new Executive Chef and he gave me a small raise.  At first I wasn’t excited about this development but soon warmed up the idea and resolved to continue returning that the restaurant to the high quality dining eperience it was known for.

After a couple of months of retooling the menu, the kitchen staff, purchasing procedures, and service procedures, we started to see stronger sales and a much better product.  Things continued to improve over the next few months until we were seeing nightly customer counts of 120 to 150 and about 250 of weekends.  A great review in the local newspaper also helped immensely.  During this time I continued to look for a Sous Chef, but wasn’t having much luck finding one that was a good fit.  One morning the owner called me and told me another Omaha chef had recommended one of his cooks who was ready to move on to a new opportunity.  When our owner contacted him and told him about the open Sous Chef position, he said that he wasn’t interested in a Sous Chef title but would consider it if the title was Chef De Cuisine.  The owner interviewed Keith and was immediately captivated by his enthusiasm and drive to produce great food so he scheduled a time for me to meet him.

If you’re familiar with the structure of a restaurant kitchen you probably know that the position of Chef De Cuisine is a step below the Executive Chef and a step above a Sous Chef.  Not all kitchens have a Chef De Cuisine, but when one is present his/her primary responsibility is to work directly with the kitchen staff to prepare the best quality food possible.  In a kitchen with a Chef De Cuisine the Executive Chef is still ultimately responsible for every aspect of the kitchen’s operation and food preparation, but he/she spends more time on administrative activities than in hands-on food preparation.  Our kitchen wasn’t really big enough to need a Chef De Cuisine, but Keith wanted that title instead of Sous Chef so we just let him have it.

I met with Keith at a Bruegger’s Bagel restaurant to see if we would have the type of synergy needed to work together.  Keith told me his favorite chef was Thomas Keller and it was immediately obvious that he had no patience for anyone who did not also idolize Thomas Keller.  Keith had a huge Thomas Keller chip on his shoulder.   I knew of Thomas Keller as the owner/chef of The French Laundry and Bouchon, which are both known worldwide as among the best restaurants around.  I appreciated this, but still didn’t know too much more about Thomas Keller.  I was just happy that Keith’s idol was not Colonel Sanders.

During the interview Keith said a few things characteristic of an inexperienced chef who doesn’t know much about the financial aspects of kitchen management or the practical side of actually being able to prepare food, serve it to a customer, and accept payment for it.  Since I would be handling the operational part of our kitchen I thought this was worth noting but not serious enough to disqualify him from the position since most of those functions would be my responsibility.  I had previously worked with Keith for a time at Omaha Country club and knew that he was very, very good at food preparation and presentation.  I also knew at that point that the owner was completely sold on this young man and ultimately he would overrule my decision if I rejected him and I would end up working with him anyway.  So Keith was hired.  Sorry for the long lead-in, but you needed to know all that stuff to understand what came next.

He started on a Tuesday night and that’s when this story actually begins.  As I showed him around he just shook his head and sneered at everything he saw.  It began with the chef coats.  Keith was outraged that they didn’t have knotted French buttons rather than plastic ones.  I listened to him rant about this for about 5 minutes before cutting him off and moving on to aprons.  The aprons we used in the kitchen were also wrong.  We apparently needed bistro aprons in order to serve fine food.  Keith and I were to share an office just off the owner’s office.  Keith insisted that he needed his own space to plan and create and couldn’t be bothered by me being in the same room for the 10 minutes each day when I was placing orders.  We had a restaurant cat named Tigger who had been a resident of the downstairs area for about 12 years.  Ketih declared that Tigger had to go.  And he needed his own computer, but it had to be a specific brand and model.

After the initial shock of showing Keith around, I needed to get in the kitchen with the cooks and prepare for service.  Keith decided he would go through our spice rack and then see what was in the freezer.  I told him I’d like him to spend some time observing the line and see how we prepare food and send it out.  He told me that our food was terrible and he was going to change it all anyway and teach us all new preparation techniques so there was no reason for him to observe.  We were all mildly amused by his assessment and he took off, nose held high in the air, to go check out the freezer.

We had an unusually busy night and I was glued to the line for the duration of service.  I could see the freezer door opening and closing occasionally and I hoped that Keith was straightening it up and organizing it a little bit.  We had a very small freezer.  French Café ordered almost everything fresh and we rarely bought anything frozen, with the exception of some New Zealand lamb, Dover sole, and some hash browns for brunch.  We used the freezer when we had small amounts of something left over from fabricating steaks or perhaps fish trimmings or shrimp shells.  We would accumulate them in the freezer until there was enough to make a nice soup or maybe make something for an employee meal.  By using it for this purpose were didn’t waste anything and we were able to keep things in our inventory for longer periods of time instead of having to throw out spoiled products all the time.  At that time we probably had about $8,000 worth of food in there, none of it more than a few weeks old.

At the end of the night as things calmed down on the line I went back to the freezer to check on Keith.  He told me he had cleaned out the freezer.  I was impressed and asked to take a look.  When I looked inside it my heart stopped for a minute.  All that was left in there was a case of lamb racks and a box of hash browns.  When I regained my composure a little bit and made sure there were no knives or other sharp objects nearby I asked him where everything went. 

“I threw it out,” he said.  I asked why.  He answered by starting to spew out an endless list of reasons:   It was labeled with masking tape instead of freezer labels.”  “The date was written in pencil.”  “It wasn’t wrapped properly.”  “We’re no longer going to use that product.”  “I don’t like that product.”  “They would never use that at The French Laundry.”  “I don’t like that brand.”  And the list went on and on.

I managed to control my urge to crush his skull with my bare hands and told him that before throwing out anything else he needed to consult with me first.  He was not happy with that plan and said he didn’t want to do it because I was part of the problem.  I told him he would be required to consult with me before throwing anything out if he wanted to keep his position.  In a classical French kitchen the Executive Chef is the Supreme Ruler and disobeying a direct order is the kitchen equivalent of murdering a young child in a terrible and painful way.  You simply don’t do it or you might lose a body part, be blacklisted in the restaurant community, or maybe just disappear completely one day.  It is the worst possible kitchen offense.  The worst thing that can happen to a kitchen employee is for the Executive Chef to have it in for you.  If this happens you might as well just give up and move on because it will not just simply blow over and everything will be fine one day.  Keith grudgingly agreed to my demand.  I started to think about how I was going to tell the owner that we were going to take an $8,000 hit to our food cost.

The next day I got to the restaurant about 10:00AM.  We were not open for lunch so this left 7 hours before service.  I usually spent the first couple of hours of this time to handle ordering, scheduling, costing parties, and other administrative tasks. By the time the cooks started to roll in all that stuff was out of the way and I was able to be in the kitchen working directly with them all afternoon and through service.  Normally I would be the only one in the kitchen until the cooks got there, but on that day Keith was already there when I arrived.

He had been there for about 2 hours when I arrived and had spent that time throwing away all of the prep items from the saute and pantry stations.  His rationale was that in order to serve the highest quality food we needed to prepare these ingredients on the day they will be used.  One day old will not work because the ingredients will be of lower quality.  I was stunned.  Another $800 into the dumpster.  In most kitchens he would have been out the door at that point but I knew the owner would just bring him back immediately and that would only embolden him even more.  I reminded him of our discussion from the night before when I told him he wasn’t allowed to throw anything out without consulting me first.  He just sneered and smiled.  I resisted my urge to pound a butter knife into his face and resolved to just let nature take its course when the saute and pantry cooks showed up for work.

In a professional kitchen one of the rules is that you don’t mess with another team member’s station.  If you need something from their station you must ask them for it and they have the option to tell you no with no hard feelings from either party.  That’s just the way it is.  The Executive Chef, Chef De Cuisine, and Sous Chef have more access to a cook’s ingredients on his station.  You still have to ask for something, but the cook will never tell you no.  If you take something before the cook gets to work, you must find him immediately right when he gets to work and tell them you took it.  If you are a real team player you will replace the item(s) before he gets there and notify him what you did or offer to prep that item for him before service.  This is true even if you are the Executive Chef.  Again, that’s simply the way it works and there are no exceptions to this rule.  Keith broke this rule and I knew he was going to pay dearly for it.  And he did.

When the saute cook, Carlos, got to his station he began to see what he needed to prep for the evening.  The saute station is a particularly complex station and is only for experienced cooks.  It requires a high degree of accuracy, consistency, speed, and most of all preparedness.  I had watched Keith work the saute station at Omaha Country Club and I knew he was very good at it.  Carlos was better.  Anyway, Carlos immediately noticed that many of his items were missing.  He asked me if I had used anything.

Carlos and I had a good working relationship.  If I really, really got into a bind and took something off his station then he would cut me some slack with the rules of the kitchen as long as it didn’t happen all the time.  This only happened once and I made it up to him with a brand new and very expensive chef’s knife.  Yes, it’s that important.  I told Carlos that he needed to talk to Keith.  He did and a loud argument immediately ensued.  I let it go for a while and decided to end it before Carlos gutted Keith with a boning knife.  In the end Carlos agreed to prep smaller quantities of everything and prep all the items in small quantities every day.  Keith agreed that as long as Carlos followed through on this he would keep out of Carlos’ stuff.  The pantry guy just prepped all his stuff over again and didn’t say anything.  Later I helped him take his trash out to the dumpster and assured him I would try to keep Keith off his station before he got to work.  He would need to prep enough product to get through service but no more.  He was ok with that plan and thanked me. 

We had all come to an agreement that worked for everyone, but now Keith had 2 cooks seriously pissed off at him.  I understood where Keith was coming from about fresh ingredients, but one day in the life of a minced onion doesn’t really make a difference, especially if you’re going to saute it anyway.  Having 2 very good Mexican cooks mad at you is never a good thing no matter how good you are.  They will hold a grudge forever until you apologize and promise never to cross that line again.  I explained this to Keith but he refused to do it.

Keith’s next personal mission was to reorganize our dry spice rack.  We used some dry spices, but we mostly used fresh herbs.  He declared that the spice containers wouldn’t work and he wanted deli containers for everything and he wanted them that day.  We had no use for deli containers so we didn’t have them.  When he was through telling everyone in range about this perceived deficiency I offered to let him go over to the restaurant supply place a few blocks away and pick some up himself and charge them to my account.  I got our sales rep on the phone and handed the phone over to Keith to explain what he needed.  They had all 3 sizes in stock and Keith told them to bring over a case of each size.  They told him all the trucks were done with deliveries but he could come pick them up before 5:00.  It was almost 4:30 and it was a 2 minute drive to get there.  He promptly told them to bring them to him immediately or we would never do business with them again. 

When the restaurant had not been doing well some of our vendors extended us a lot of credit -- way more than they should have and the restaurant supply place was one of those vendors.  We were still paying off a sizable balance with them.  I took the phone away from Keith, apologized, and then told him Keith would be over shortly to pick up the deli containers.  He made his way out the back door mumbling about how everyone was against him.  I think this may have been the only thing he got right during his employment there.

In about 45 minutes Keith got back with the deli containers with his wife in tow.  The spice rack was near the station I was working that night so I listened to him tell his wife about this asshole and that asshole all night as they transferred all the dry spices from their airtight factory containers to semi-airtight deli containers.  During the process Keith found some spices that were obviously very old and he rightfully disposed of those.  He and his wife finished up about the same time as we sent out the last order on the line.  His only comment was that all the food served that night belonged in the dumpster rather than the dining room and we would be making some changes the next day.  We all adjourned for the evening and went our separate ways.

By now you might be wondering why I, as the Executive Chef, didn’t just can this guy and move on.  I did consider that but decided on a different strategy.  Our owner was a prideful man and I knew if I gave Keith the boot then he would just be hired back immediately.  If this happened then he would come back knowing that he had free reign to do anything he wanted and there would be nothing I could do about it.  I would still be responsible for food cost and kitchen operations even though I would be powerless to do anything about any of it.  I decided to let him hang himself.  At the rate he was going I knew it wouldn’t take long.

The next day Keith started “improving” some menu items.  He made a basil olive oil cake that was phenomenal.  He changed our house salad from a handful of spring mix with a few candied pecans to a delicate sculpture of organic butter lettuce and a beautiful vinaigrette and a few small embellishments that I can’t remember.  All these were really good changes and we needed them to freshen our menu.  The only one I didn’t like was when he offered a dessert of 3 sugar cookies.  That was all that was on the plate.  He called it a “playful interpretation of a classic.”  The only thing that made the cookies unique was their very small size.  We didn’t get may takers at $9 per order.

Keith made a number of small changes to the menu that were welcomed because of their simplicity, ease of preparation, and quality ingredients.  For example, in our Caesar salad that we had made tableside for many years he switched out the regular anchovies for some special order (and very expensive) white anchovies.  They were somewhat less salty and didn’t have a strong fish taste like the regular ones.  Very nice.

We had several discussions about the saute oil we were using.  He wanted to switch from the high temp saute oil to grapeseed oil because it had a higher flash point and didn’t impart any unwelcome flavors to foods cooked with it.  I thought that was an excellent idea until I found that grapeseed oil was $105 per gallon and was next to impossible to find in Omaha.  Keith also wanted to upgrade the olive oil, which I thought was a great idea.  I found some organic first cold pressed olive oil and we quickly switched over to it.  We didn’t cook anything in it but it was used in Caesar salads and for some finishing and flavoring on a few dishes so the better quality oil greatly improved the taste of some of these items.

Keith’s next project was to start overhauling entrée items.  His first victim was the Duck.a l’Orange.  Our method of cooking duck was called confit (con-FEE).  This means slowly cooking a highly seasoned food in a bath of pure fat.  It sounds disgusting but it yields a fantastic result if you do it right.  Keith didn’t like this idea so he decided that the duck should be a single breast braised in red wine instead.  He opted for a medium quality cabernet sauvignon from our wine list.  Our cost of this wine was about $30 per bottle and it took 6 bottles to braise a batch of 6 duck halves, so the cost of cooking a duck was $30 even before the cost of the duck.  Of course the duck had to be from a boutique duck farm somewhere in Vermont.  Then there was the sauce.  Keith insisted that we use a highly concentrated duck stock to make the orange sauce.  He started with a case of 6 whole ducks and made a stock from them.  The cost of the ducks he used for the stock was about $75.  He started with about 5 gallons of liquid and after it had cooked for 2 days he had about 2 cups of insanely expensive and highly concentrated stock.  When we figured the total cost of serving half a duck it came to about $54 per plate.  To make this profitable we would need to sell each order for $200.  Keith didn’t see any problem with asking $200 for a 3 ounce duck nreast accompanied by 1 teaspoon of orange sauce served atop a single thin slice of poached turnip.  He said that over time our customers would learn to appreciate fine food and soon everyone would be breaking down the doors to get an order of duck.  I disagreed.  I adjusted his ingredients to make the whole thing less costly and we came up with a combination that he grudgingly accepted and would cost us only about $19 per plate.  We would sell it for $32 and take a loss on this menu item with the intention of using it to draw new customers.  This was a horrible idea but we went with it anyway.  The next time I spoke with the owner I told him that I had doubts about Keith’s ability to develop a profitable menu and he said that part of the process was mine.  I had to make it profitable.

The next item was the lamb rack.  Our racks were served as 4 small chops marinated in an herb and oil mixture and broiled to the customer’s desired degree of doneness.  Keith had other ideas.  He opted for grass fed South Dakota lamb instead of the New Zealand farm-raised product we had been using.  They do not taste the same because the grass-fed lamb is very gamey.  He cut the center part of the loin out of the rack in 2 small sections and then squared off the sides.  Next he used a product called Activa to reattach the pieces.  Activa is an enzyme product that is essentially a “meat glue.”  It binds to the protein molecules in the protein and forms an unbreakable seal.  You could use it to glue a piece of beef to a chunk of fish and it would look and act like it has come from some hybrid land/water beast.  Really a cool product, but you don’t want to do stupid things like that with it because your customers will think you’ve lost your mind.  Anyway, Keith’s method of preparation only used about 30% of the lamb rack and the rest was waste.  He used it to make a very strong lamb stock much like his duck stock only with lamb.  For the next part of this shit show he shaved the sides of the lamb until it was a perfect cube shape.  South Dakota lamb racks were about $26 each, so the cost per order of the 3 oz portion he planned to serve was already $26.  To finish off the plate he served the lamb propped up against a single cippolini onion.  Cippolini onions are similar to a pearl onion but a little larger.  The total price per plate was about $48 which meant we would need to sell 2 ½ ounces of lamb (after cooking) and a single onion all topped with a tablespoon of madeira sauce for $119.  I knew this would never fly in Omaha but I decided to just let him continue hanging himself.

One of French Café’s signature items was our Feench Onion soup.  It had been made the same way for 40 years and was very well known and loved, so he immediately decided to change it.  He switched it from using a beautiful veal stock to a vegetable stock with very little flavor and a taste similar to lukewarm dishwater.  Again, the owner told me to be patient and let Keith make his menu changes.  We started getting every other order returned with some unpleasant comments from our customers.  Keith’s response was that those customers were philistines who knew nothing about good food.

Our most successful and profitable menu item was our peppered filet.  It was an 8 ounce filet served on a beautiful demi-glace sauce finished with a little heavy cream and lots of whole butter. This item had been a staple since the first days of the restaurant and it comprised about 50% of our orders.  With this in mind, Keith set out to completely overhaul it.  His vision was to shape it in a cube much like the lamb and serve it with marble sized sphere of a vinegar sauce encased in sodium alginate.  Sodium alginate is a chemical used in molecular gastronomy where you can take a warm sauce and wrap it up into a sphere ahead of time.  The sphere is transparent so you can see the sauce inside.  Then you warm it in a water bath and spoon it out and serve it with something while it is still in a spherical shape.  It’s a magical product, but had no place on our menu.  I’ve only used it a few times and it is difficult to work with as well as very time consuming and prone to error.  Keith wanted to put a dollop of parsnip puree in the center of the plate, place the filet on top of it, and place little spheres filled with vinegar sauce on and around it.  When he told me about his plan I just told him to leave the filet alone and that my decision was non-negotiable.  He reacted by going out to his car and ranting to himself while he smoked some weed.  The cooks said they would chip in to pay for more weed if it would keep him out of the kitchen.  I told them to be patient so they backed down rather than killing and dismembering him.

The final nail in Keith’s coffin was New Years Eve.  The owner allowed him to design a limited menu with 4 or 5 items on it especially for the occasion.  We ordered in some special ingrdedients (foie gras, chanterelle mushrooms, Beluga caviar, and many others) and begin to prep for the night a few days before.  I can’t remember all the items we made, but the ingredients were all the finest available worldwide and they were expensive.  On the day of New Years Eve it became evident to me and the cooks that we would not be ready by the time service started because Keith insisted on preparing everything himself.  He told us all that the only reason he wanted us there was to help him serve it all.  That would be fine if we were only serving 30 people, but we had reservations for over 400.  The menu was designed in such a way that every plate had to be prepared ala minute.  That means that the ingredients are all prepared beforehand, but they must be meticulously assembled at the time of service.  Keith demonstrated a couple of items and it took him10 minutes to assemble each plate.  I questioned him on this and he said that the customers would just have to wait if they wanted great food.  I quickly calculated that it would take us 67 hours to plate the food for 400 people.  About 4PM I told Keith that his job for the evening would be making onion soup and that the cooks and I would handle everything else.  He flew into a rage and screamed at everyone before going right out the back door to his car for some weed. 

I was hoping he would just go home, but he returned in about half an hour and took his place on the soup station.  While he was gone I had gathered the cooks and together we had formulated a plan to get through service.  I enlisted the help of the expeditor and working as a team we were all able to get everything served in a timely fashion with almost no complaints from our customers.  For the whole duration of service Keith stood back on his station and heckled everyone else with a stream of insults about our cooking abilities, national heritage, and fashion choices.  Several times I told him he could either shut up, go home, or continue his tirade and face certain death.  At the end of the night he walked out the door without a word to anyone.

In the morning I called the owner at home and told him Keith had to go.  He had just gotten the prior month’s P&L and had come to the realization that he was going to have to write another huge check to the restaurant in order to keep the lights on and pay his employees.  Ketih had already called him and told him that he couldn’t work with me because I was holding him back and that the owner would have to fire me in order for the restaurant to be successful.  The owner told Keith that they would talk about it on Tuesday when the restaurant reopened.

On Tuesday I had my doubts that Keith would show, but he did.  He unpacked his knives and told me how upset he was at my decisions on New Years Eve.  I let him rant for a while and then told him that his services were no longer needed.  He proceeded to tell me that the owner and I had set him up for the sole purpose of stealing his ideas and that we had planned to fire him from day one.  This was not true, although I had doubts from the beginning that he would succeed in the role he chose for himself.  I had agreed to hire him anyway because of reasons I discussed earlier, but I didn’t expect him to last very long.

Keith left without further incident or discussion.  The cooks were overjoyed when they arrived and they immediately chipped in to buy me a 6 pack of Modelo.  They were so happy you would have thought that they just won the lottery.  From that minute on the morale in the kitchen was exponentially better as though the team had just collectively vanquished an enemy.  The difference was like night and day.  We reverted Keith’s unsuccessful menu changes over the next few days and things started to run smoothly again.  We kept the salad and the olive oil cake but changed everything else back.  Our regular customers were ecstatic and sales doubled to previous levels within a week as word spread that our experiment with Keith was over.

Some months later I was browsing the book selection at our local Sur La Table and came across a beautiful hardcover called “Bouchon” by Thomas Keller.  Curious, I opened the book and the first thing I saw was a full color photo of our new house salad.  I continued browsing and saw the olive oil cake as well as the cookies and some other items that he had added to our menu during his tenure with us.  The recipes were the same as Keith’s.  I bought the book and later went through it cover to cover where I found all of the items that he had told me about and intended to add to our menu.  A little later I was having a late lunch with my fiancé at a Tex-Mex place in Omaha and saw Keith behind the line shoveling piles of cheap cheese onto the various entrees and then putting them in the salamander before they were to be served.  That was the last time I ever saw him and I have never heard anything more about him from anyone in the industry from Omaha.  I imagine he found that he could no longer get a good job here and just moved on.

At this point I’d like to thank you for being patient enough to read through this long post.  I’ve been wanting to get that off my chest for some time and I appreciate you helping me do just that.

 

Why Are Restaurants Short-Staffed?

There have been all kinds of stories in the news lately about restaurants being short-staffed due to the COVID-19 pandemic.  I am no longer working in that industry, but I still have deep roots in it and most of my friends are restaurant people.  Restaurant owners and managers are limiting their hours open because they say they are experiencing staff shortages.  On the other hand, restaurant workers are saying that they were laid off during COVID-19 and can't find work.  That just didn't make sense to me so I decided to find out more about it.

In the early days of the pandemic, restaurants closed or cut back to delivery/pick-up only and that left a lot of servers and bartenders without work.  These people make their living on tips, so no customers in the restaurant means no tips.  Most places closed at least for a few weeks while we all sorted out what we were going to do now that we couldn't go to bars, restaurants, clubs, and other gathering places.  Customers opted to stay at home and have groceries delivered in order to avoid contact with others.  We all learned to cook for ourselves again and most of us learned how to make a good sourdough starter and use it to produce a bunch of mediocre bread at home.

While this may have been good for public health, it was terrible for restaurants and their employees.  Restaurant workers whose jobs relied on contact with customers were simply cut off from their primary source of income.  Restaurant owners saw sales drop by 80-90% or more.  If you've ever been involved with the financial part of the restaurant business you will know that a restaurant can't survive more than a few weeks operating with this kind of reduction in sales unless the owner has a very large cash reserve and is willing to pour most of it into the business in order to keep the place open.

I could write pages upon pages describing how hard this was on the restaurant industry and the extreme measures employees and restaurant owners took to get through those many months, but that's not the reason for this post so I'll leave it up to you to go find out more about it in your area.  The one fact that's relevant to this story, however, is that restaurant employees either lived on enhanced unemployment benefits offered by the government or they simply found a better way to make money and left the industry entirely.  Restaurant owners either poured their life savings into their businesses, retooled their operations for delivery/pick-up only, or closed their doors permanently.

Now that restaurants have mostly reopened they're finding out that they don't have enough staff to make their businesses run.  There are tons of restaurant jobs available now and tons of people looking for work, but the jobs are mostly part time or low-paying ones and no one wants them.  Americans prefer to have a single job with regular hours rather than three part time jobs with varying schedules.

Another factor that is contributing to the problem is that customer attitudes have changed.  Before COVID-19 most customers were agreeable and pleasant.  Sure, you had a few assholes, but most people were mostly just out to have fun and a good meal.  Now it seems like there's some kind of sense of entitlement -- like restaurants owe them something for being closed for a long time.  I don't quite get it, but this has always been a problem where I live.  Customers here have always acted like they had a constitutional right to excellent tasting, cheap food and great service.  After places started to reopen, that attitude was still there and multiplied tenfold.  Servers take more abuse in a single week than most of us endure in a lifetime.  They're starting to get smart and realize that there are other ways to make money without having to put up with the verbal abuse and they simply haven't come back to restaurant jobs because they've found new jobs that pay better and don't come with a big serving of verbal abuse.

The bottom line is that after COVID-19 it's even harder to make a living in restaurants than before and until we're willing to treat workers there with dignity and respect and pay them a decent wage for the work they do then we're going to see staff shortages.  If you don't want to see this happen then all you have to do as a customer is be nice and tip appropriately.  By the way, "appropriately" means at least a solid 20%.  Don't run up a $97 bill and then leave a $100 bill on the table and call it good.  If you can't afford to do this, then stay home and cook your own food and clean up after yourself.  I'm not saying this to be mean.  Servers make their living on the tips you leave, not on a salary in the form of a paycheck.  Compensate them properly for the work they do.  And for God's sake, just be nice to them.  

The Story of Caralee

 I haven't posted here for a very long time so I thought I would log in and tell you about Caralee.  Sometimes you meet someone in your life that you will always remember for all the wrong reasons.  Caralee was one of those people.

About 15 years ago I owned a small Italian restaurant tucked away in one of Omaha's older neighborhoods.  Now, when people hear the phrase "older neighborhood" they usually imagine a run down place that is way past its prime, infested with gangs, drug dealers, escaped mental patients, and generally full of people trying to stay under the radar.  This neighborhood was truly nothing like that.  It was full of nicely kept homes on tree-lined streets, families out walking, a public library/community center, an ice cream parlor, a family-owned hardware store, and several restaurants and bars.  You get the picture -- it was basically the ideal upper middle class  neighborhood.

I bought the restaurant from an owner who was ready to retire.  The restaurant had been the neighborhood's favorite place to eat, drink, and enjoy live music for many years and lots of Omaha's best bands got their start there.  It had been there over 50 years and a lot of stuff came with it, including Caralee.  

Caralee worked 4 nights a week as the hostess.  Several of the servers had been there for many years and they basically ran the front of the house, leaving me to do what I do best, which is  and manage the kitchen and the business side of things.  If you've ever worked in a busy restaurant you know that the host/hostess is the person who distributes customers among the servers as they come in.  Usually it's a pretty equitable way of making sure each server gets roughly the same number of customers throughout the shift.  

Caralee didn't really have to do this.  The servers would look over the reservation book at the start of the shift and split up the tables ahead of time so there was never any question of someone not getting their fair share of customers.  Caralee would greet the customers as they came in and walk them through the lounge to the edge of the dining room and the servers would take it from there.  Caralee just had to cross their name off the reservation list and walk them about 20 feet and her job was done.  She would be the last person to start her shift each night and the first person to finish for the evening.

Ok, so now you have a mental picture of the work environment.  Now let me draw you a mental picture of Caralee.  She was a middle-aged lady -- maybe in her early fifties, heavy smoker, poor vision, plenty of missing teeth, and no manners.  Just the kind of person you want to have greet your paying customers right when they walk in the door.  Caralee had poor grammar and she could cuss like a sailor.  Unfortunately she didn't hold any of it back.  I heard her tell the CEO of Union Pacific Railroad that "Eileen was going to take your table tonight but the stupid cunt's section is still full so you're going to be stuck with Erin."  Then she proceeded to tell them "Someone fucked up the reservation book and put some fucking kids at your usual table. Next time we'll have to make sure we don't fuck it up again."

Now we come to the heart of the problem, which was Caralee's drinking.  At that point in time it was common for restaurant people to be heavy partiers and there was always lots of alcohol flowing after the shift was over.  We gave everyone a shift drink and any additional drinks they wanted would be half price.  Shortly before Caralee got off she would survey the other employees and see who was not planning to have a shift drink.  Then she would go to the bar and proudly tell the bartender who had agreed to give her their shift drinks.  Sometimes this was 9 or 10 people.  After a couple of minutes she would happily walk away from the bar with a pint glass full to the rim with straight vodka and two ice cubes.

You would think that would be all for Caralee but it wasn't.  If she had some cash with her she would order up some more drinks.  When she ran out of cash then she would try to get someone else to buy her a few more drinks.  If that failed she would resort to using her house account.  After watching this shit show for a couple of months I pulled her aside and told her to get her language cleaned up and limit her alcohol consumption while on the property or she would have to find other employment.

The house account that I mentioned earlier needs a little more explanation.  I gave it to my employees as a benefit.  Basically they could order any food or drink at half price at any time, including on days off.  They could either pay for it like any other customer or put it on their house account and I simply deducted it from their next paycheck.  Most of them used it wisely, but not Caralee.  Usually repaying her house account reduced her checks to almost zero.  This created another problem because she had no money left to buy drinks.  

You won't believe the next thing she tried.  Technically an employee could charge anything on their house account, so Caralee charged cash on hers.  Yes, she would charge $40 in cash on her account.  The bartender would hand her $40 and she would use it to buy half price drinks for the rest of the night.  Anything charged on a house account is technically considered a sale, so I would pay tax to the IRS on the $40 she charged and then sell her drinks at cost for the rest of the night.  When I found out that this was going on I immediately put an end to it and Caralee was irate.  She said it "wasn't fair," "discriminated against her," and, best of all, it "violated her constitutional rights."  I told her that if she could find the text in the US Constitution that covered charging cash to a house account then I would gladly let her continue the practice.

Caralee's next move was to simply ask me for an advance each night at the end of her shift.  She was counting on the fact that I wouldn't know the balance on her house account at that particular moment.  That worked for a while until I got ready to do payroll and found that her net pay wasn't enough to cover the advances and her house charges.  I cut her off on house charges and told her I'd take repayment out of her next four checks until she was even and then we'd have a discussion on whether she would get to enjoy that benefit thereafter.

Unfortunately that didn't stop her from asking for another advance at the end of her next shift.  She was smart enough to wait until she knew I would be exhausted and wouldn't put up much of a fight.  It worked for awhile.  She would pop up in the kitchen, office, bar, dining room or wherever I happened to be and ask "Can you spot me $20?"  It was like she would appear out of thin air and quickly ask for money while I was still wondering where she came from.

I decided to make this a game.  I got the servers to tell me when she was cut for the night and then tried to hold her off as long as possible by making sure she couldn't find me.  On the last night we played I held her off for well over an hour with the help of the servers, bartenders, bouncers, and kitchen staff.  They sent her to some neighboring bars and other restaurants looking for me, but in the end she cornered me in the office when I was helping a new server do her closing.  I gave in and advanced her $20, but told her it was the last time I would ever do it.  I told her that I had an agreement with my bank that promised I would not function as a bank and in turn they agreed not to serve food.

The next day was the end of the road for Caralee.  She called in sick about 15 minutes before her shift started.  I was mad as hell, but the resourceful servers came up with a plan to cover her duties and when we opened to an immediate 2 hour waitlist they were doing a fine job of it.  I had to make a quick run to the office at about 7:30 to grab a few rolls of printer tape.

When I ducked into the office one of the servers followed me in and asked for Caralee's paycheck.  She said Caralee was in her car in the parking lot and had called and asked one of the other employees to get her check and run it out to her.  She said Caralee was so drunk she could hardly talk.

Now I understand when employees are sick and can't come to work.  I really do.  When that happens it's nice to have a little notice so you can cover their job duties, but I understand that sometimes it just doesn't work out that way so we just have to figure it out and move on.  What I don't understand, however, is when an employee calls in sick and then shows up at the workplace drunk and asking for their paycheck.  This was my breaking point with Caralee.

I took a few minutes and calculated the amount of money I owed Caralee for the shifts that would have been on her next paycheck, voided the current payroll check, and cut a new check for the total amount.  I didn't bother to subtract the advances she still owed because I just wanted to be through with her.  I went out the back door and sure enough there she was parked in the lot with her head resting on the steering wheel.  She was out cold and there was a half-empty 1.75 liter handle bottle of some kind of cheap Missouri vodka on the console.  I gently woke her up, handed her the check, and told her that her services would no longer be needed.  She grunted a few times and drove off.

At that point I thought I would never see Caralee or hear from her again.  This was not the case.  In a couple of weeks I got a letter from the unemployment people asking for the details of her termination.  I outlined the whole chain of events just as I have done here and sent it back to them.  For those of you who have never owned a business, it is important to keep these unemployment insurance people on your side.  If you have a lot of terminations that they have to pay out then your unemployment insurance rating will go up and so will your premiums.

About a month after I sent in my response I received a notice that they had decided to pay her claim.  I thought this was ridiculous but decided not to fight it because the business was not doing well and I needed to focus all my attention on turning it around.  They approved Caralee for a few months of benefits which were eventually exhausted.  It seems that Caralee didn't have a very long work history so the funds for her claim were limited.  From what I knew about Caralee this was not surprising to me.

Several months later I got a request from the unemployment people to do a phone hearing to help them process a new claim from Caralee.  Several months after she filed her claim I had decided to close the restaurant.  I won't go into all the details in this post, but basically the landlord had a friend of a friend of a friend who thought he wanted to leave the corporate world and become a restaurant owner/operator.  Our landlord became increasingly more demanding and difficult to work with in hopes that I would simply close the doors and abandon a fully operational restaurant for their friend to simply take over.  Rather than fight that battle I decided to close the doors and rip out every fixture that I could get out the door.  We left the place completely gutted and in violation of every fire, building, and health code possible.  I'm going to call that my contribution to karma.

So back to the Caralee story.  I got on the conference call at the appointed time and learned that Caralee was alleging that when I fired her I already know the restaurant was closing.  There is a little known provision in the Iowa unemployment statutes that provides for a larger unemployment benefit if someone is fired because the business was closing.  I explained to them once again the details of her dismissal and emphasized that my intent at the time was to turn the business around and continue operating it.  having a perpetually drunk hostess who regularly missed shifts wasn't compatible with that goal so she had to go.  When it was Caralee's turn to tell her side of the story she lied as usual and even said that I told her when I fired her that the business would be closing.  I responded by saying that when I told her she was fired she was so drunk there was no way she heard or understood anything I was saying.  The hearing was adjourned and the call ended.

About a month later I received a letter from them saying that the judges in the hearing had ruled in Caralee's favor and that if they didn't hear form me within 10 days they would issue her a check for  the difference between what she would have been paid if anything she had said at the hearing was true and the amount she was actually paid.  I sent in another appeal by mail and they immediately scheduled another hearing.  The second hearing went the same way as the first one except that Caralee sounded more desperate.  

While we were waiting for them to issue a decision a few weeks later I received several phone calls from guys pretending to be Caralee's lawyer.  They all said it would be in my best interest to just drop the matter and let Caralee scam the system a little more.  I could tell by their second grade vocabulary that none of them were actual lawyers and they were probably not smart enough to get themselves dressed without help so I wasn't too concerned.  when someone starts a phone call by saying that they want to discuss their client's constitutional rights and how I violated them, it's a pretty good bet that they're not really a lawyer.  There were a few night when cars with Iowa plates were parked outside my house for several hours.  The next morning there was usually a large nail pushed up under my car tire when I got ready to go somewhere.  It was shoved in there so that it would puncture the tire as soon as I backed the car up a little bit.  The judges once again ruled in Caralee's failure and I decided to just drop it before I was forced to waste a shotgun shell on the "lawyers" she had sent over to persuade me to see things her way.

So that was about 11 years ago.  I thought of Caralee recently and wondered what had happened to her.  After a quick Google search I learned that Caralee is in prison.  In fact, this is her third time in prison since she worked for me.  Each time was for a DUI and subsequent charge for possession of a controlled substance -- weed, then meth, then heroin.  The latest one may keep her there for some time because it was possession of heroin with intent to deliver.

So that's the story of Caralee so far.  I'm sure her story isn't over, but I'm glad I'm not participating in it anymore.

The Tale of the Rubber Band Sauce

This is about a particularly memorable experience I had while working in one of our local country clubs.  It still haunts me.

This wasn't your usual country club.  It was a country club for people who couldn't really afford to become a member of a real country club but still wanted to be able to say they belonged to a country club.  More specifically, they wanted to behave like they belonged to an actual country club and tell their friends about how they lived a life of privilege.  These people had heard the horror stories about how badly the members of some real country clubs treated the club staff and they were determined to treat the staff of their dollar store country club even worse just to make a point that they could "out 1%" the real 1%.  

In this particular club, the Executive Chef was a young guy who had landed his position right out of culinary school.  He didn't go to a prestigious culinary school.  He went to our local community college culinary school.  At first it might sound like I'm disparaging the school, but in reality the graduates of the culinary arts program had a pretty good knowledge of how to cook,  The program had made huge advances in their offerings and it was starting to show in the quality of their graduates.  This guy wasn't one of those.  His crowning achievement was to help a crappy local food critic put together a cookbook full of food photos that looked pretty good but tasted like something you'd find rooting around in a dumpster on a hot July afternoon.

Ok, so the stage is set.  We'll call this guy Ben, which is obviously not his real name.  There's also a guy we'll call Seth who will come later in the story.  I was working as a cook and my main responsibility was mostly doing banquets.  Now I'll tell you up front that I am pretty good at cooking for large parties.  I don't particularly like doing banquets, but I worked for a real French chef at one point and he made it very clear that those banquets were what paid the bills, so I was happy to do it and very appreciative of the wages I was paid for it.

So now we're actually going to get to the story I wanted to tell you.  On this particular night we had a party for about 200 people.  It was a buffet dinner of Italian food, which was totally in my wheelhouse since I had owned a couple of Italian restaurants and had cooked in them every day.  I spent most of the day getting food prepped and ready for the event and we were on schedule to have everything out on the buffet right on time.  Everything was going smoothly until we got to the fettucine alfredo.

If you've ever had real fettucine alfredo you know that it really should be made right at the moment of service.  It starts as a reduction of white wine, shallots, and a little fresh garlic. From there you add some heavy cream and reduce it a little, take it off the heat, add some good quality parmesan cheese, and then finish it with some soft whole butter.

Making alfredo sauce is not rocket science but it's more difficult than microwaving a cup of yesterday's coffee.  When you have to make it for 200 people buffet-style your only real option is to make an "alfredo" sauce beforehand.  This is generally a bechamel sauce with all the required seasonings and parmesan cheese that is ladled over a pan of noodles in a chafing dish and set out for the masses to ravage.  Not the real thing, but it's as close as you can possibly get if you have to serve 200 people in 15 minutes.  As a chef specializing in Italian food, I lose a little bit of my soul every time I have to make it that way.

I would have normally made the imitation alfredo sauce myself and given up a little more of my soul for the cause, but for some reason Ben wanted to make it himself on this day.  I don't know if Ben wanted to spare me the humiliation of making something as hideous as this was destined to be or whether he just wanted to try and make something that would actually pass as real alfredo.  To this day his real motive will remain a mystery unless he steps forward and confesses his true intent.

Anyway, I offered to make it several times throughout the afternoon but my offers were rebuffed each time.  When we got down to about an hour before the guests were to arrive there was still no alfredo sauce, either finished or in progress.  Everything else was ready to go.  After I offered again to make it, Ben decided that the tomato roses he was making for no particular purpose could wait and he gathered the ingredients and started the sauce.  On one hand this was good news to me, but on the other hand I was starting to worry about what culinary monstrosity would eventually be born of his efforts.

Normally we would thicken an imitation alfredo with a little roux to get it to the right consistency.  If you're not familiar with roux it's basically a starch cooked with a fat which results in a compound with thickening properties.  We usually use some clarified butter and flour to make roux.  It's a basic process that every cook learns early in their culinary journey.  For some reason Ben decided to use something other than roux to thicken his imitation alfredo.  

There are many thickening agents that can be used in cooking and they all have their particular uses.  One of the more obscure ones is something called xanthan gum.  You typically find it in processed, shelf-stable non-perishable foods but almost never in hot sauces.  There is a reason for this.  The reason is that xanthan gum thickens things by incorporating it into the food and then physically agitating it.  It can be hot or cold -- it doesn't matter.  Roux thickens by cooking it into a hot sauce or soup.  xanthan gum is different because you can mix it into a cold liquid and beat it for awhile with a whisk and the liquid will get thicker.  The more you beat it the thicker it will get.  While this may sound like a miracle, it really isn't because it's a different kind of thickness.  It's a rubbery thickness.  You don't want your sauces to have a rubbery texture because it's just fucking unnatural.

As you may have guessed by now, Ben chose xanthan gum as his thickening agent.  When all the ingredients were added to the sauce, he followed by adding about half a cup of xanthan gum.  Now if you have any experience using xanthan gum you probably know that a cup of xanthan gum can add body to about 10 gallons of sauce.  You can imagine what it did to 3 gallons of imitation alfredo.  Xanthan gum doesn't immediately thicken whatever you put it in.  You can put a shitload of it into something and as long as you don't agitate it then it won't thicken at all.  But Ben kept stirring his sauce with a big wire whisk, which activated the xanthan gum more and more.  The more he stirred it with the whisk the thicker and more like raw rubber it got.  I don't know if he was genuinely pleased with his sauce or whether he just didn't want to admit that his choice of thickeners was wrong, but he seemed really happy about the outcome.  

I offered several times to finish the sauce for him, but each time he declined.  By "finish the sauce" I actually meant emptying it into the dumpster and making it again.  Unfortunately he was either genuinely pleased with his sauce or too proud to admit that it was a complete disaster and start over.  To this day I don't know for sure.

Seth was the Food and Beverage Manager at the club.  He had a solid kitchen background and routinely checked on the food we were serving, offering input on everything.  As usual, he cruised through the kitchen before the buffet to make sure we were ready and get a feeling for my comfort level.  This guy was not stupid.  He knew that if I was concerned about our ability to serve quality food on time for a banquet then he needed to do something right away.  If I was comfortable then he could go and hit golf balls on the driving range for an hour and then go home afterwards.  On this occasion he sensed that I was not comfortable so he kept probing until he got to the alfredo sauce.  He looked at it and, without tasting or stirring it, he asked if I had made it.  I told him that I hadn't and he asked why it looked shiny.  

That's the other thing about xanthan gum.  Too much of it makes things look shiny.  I'm not talking about the magical sheen that you see with pan sauces finished with a little quality butter.  I'm talking about shiny like a car fender after a good waxing.  You could almost see your face in it.

Seth grabbed a tasting spoon and dipped it into the sauce.  Well, I should say that he tried to dip it into the sauce, but the alfredo just slid off the spoon.  He looked at me and told me he knew it wasn't my fault and then reached for a ladle.  He dipped the ladle into the sauce and, once it was full of Ben's creation, he started to lift it.  His intent was to lift about 8 ounces of sauce out of the pot and let it pour back so he could examine the texture.  He managed to get the ladle about 10 inches above the surface of the sauce before the sauce in the ladle snapped back into the pot like a piece of stretched rubber.  He looked at me again and said he would go talk to Ben about it.

While I was uncomfortable about the quality of Ben's sauce, you have to understand the paradox of the professional kitchen to truly know the dilemma I faced.  I could tell you about it here and I may have already published a post about it, but the bottom line is that the Executive Chef of a professional kitchen is god like.  Whatever he or she says is simply the way it is.  If the Executive Chef tells you to serve a steak he bought out of the back of a pickup truck at the mall for fifty cents a pound and call it Wagyu beef then you do it.  Seth understood this and, as a result, didn't think any less of me as a person or chef as a result of this unfortunate incident.  He knew I didn't have a choice.

So, after reading this far you may wonder what actually happened with the sauce.  We served it and it was so bad the customers didn't eat it because they couldn't get it out of the pan without it sliding off the serving utensils.  That's what happened.  I'm not proud of it, but that's what happened.  Later that night I saw the dishwasher who was unlucky enough to get the pot of leftover alfredo sauce reach into the pot and pull it out with both hands like ten pounds of bread dough.  It was a huge mass of stretchy white material that you would never be able to identify as a sauce.  I felt bad for him but I also wondered if the people who went through the buffet really thought that this was how the 1% liked their pasta.  I hope not, but in these times things that really don't make any sense are the new normal.

If I Could Build a Government With My Friends

Tonight Tanya and I were talking about politics and we both agreed that we could build a government with our friends in key cabinet positions that was far more functional and productive than what we have today.  We discussed it for awhile over a few drinks and decided that we should probably put together a list of our choices in case we are asked to provide one at some point after the upcoming election.  This is what we came up with:

President:                                                            Virginia Maron

Vice President:                                                    Tyler Chickinelli

Secretary of Agriculture:                                      Terra Hall

Secretary of Commerce:                                      Joe Johnson

Secretary of Defense:                                           Vincent Nicolas

Secretary of Education:                                        Angie Sada

Secretary of Energy:                                             Darian Stout

Secretary of Health and Human Services:            Melissa Misegadis

Secretary of Homeland Security:                           Mark Evans

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development:    Amada Zahm

Secretary of Labor:                                                Phillip McGuire

Secretary of the Interior:                                        Mike Newell

Secretary of State:                                                 Margaret Sweany and Adam Flohr

Secretary of Transportation:                                   Annie Penske

Secretary of Treasury:                                            Natasha LaPlante

Secretary of Veterans Affairs:                                C.J. George

Attorney General:                                                   Tara Spencer

We discussed it for quite some time and there are definitely reasons for each of our choices.  There was a lot of discussion and quite a few cocktails before we came up with the final list, but we are pleased to share the final product with you tonight.  After all, this is the first time that either of us has had the opportunity to forge the direction of an entire nation. 

Some of you may be surprised to find yourself on our list.  We sincerely hope that you will remain calm and embrace your new potential role in shaping the future of the United States.  We chose you because we think that it's time for a change and we feel that you would be a valuable contributor to getting our country back on track and heading in a direction where all people can prosper regardless of race, religion, or sexual preference.

Thanks,

Jeff and Tanya