Working the Line: Bettering Yourself in the Culinary World

Think you can take criticism?  Try being yelled at by a French chef after you burnt the pommes dauphinoise.  Have you ever written a paper while listening to music?  That’s nothing.  Take care of fifteen tables of hungry idiotic tourists while your bar-back is banging that MILF who slugged seven gin-and-tonics.  After interviewing individuals in the restaurant business and working the line, as a cashier, server, and cook, I compiled a list of personal attributes that are severely tested while working in and around a kitchen.

Multitasking and Time Management

Try ordering product for next week’s mahi-mahi special and cooking for three 6-tops all the while making sure your sous-chef doesn’t burn the lamb chops on the broiler.  Out on the floor, the server must memorize each individual drink and dinner order while buttering up the customers to ensure a healthy tip at the end of the service.  Both areas require excellent short-term memory and serious efficiency.  If something goes awry, the customer becomes displeased and is less likely to be a returning patron.  As a line cook, I cannot use the tickets as a crutch, continually referring to them to be sure.  I must memorize each one and cook the meal to order.  When the plate is sent out, the memory of that meal goes with it.

Pain and Criticism

“It went suddenly very quiet in the Mario kitchen, all eyes on the big broiler man and his hopelessly inept assistant. Orders, as if by some terrible and poetically just magic, stopped coming in for a long, horrible moment. Tyrone turned slowly to me, looked down through bloodshot eyes, the sweat dripping off his nose, and said, ‘Whachoo want, white boy? Burn cream? A Band-Aid? Then he raised his own enormous palms to me, brought them up real close so I could see them properly: the hideous constellation of water-filled blisters, angry red welts from grill marks, the old scars, the raw flesh where steam or hot fat had made the skin simply roll off. They looked like the claws of some monstrous science-fiction crustacean, knobby and calloused under wounds old and new. I watched, transfixed, as Tyronehis eyes never leaving mine-reached slowly under the broiler and, with one naked hand, picked
up a glowing-hot sizzle-platter, moved it over to the cutting board, and set it down in front of me. He never flinched.”
- Anthony Bourdain Kitchen Confidential

Anthony Bourdain puts it into perspective quite well.  Need I say more?

The Server-Guest Relationship

People come to dinner not only to have a good time with family and/or friends, they arrive hungry and expect that hunger to be satisfied.  You, the employee, are given the privilege,essentially, to continue sustaining their life.  It is your job to give them the energy to leave the restaurant packed to the gills with a slurry of nourishment.  When you scramble the order, you almost offend the customer on the most intrinsic level.  With that being said, you can usually tell when the customer reflects his/her personal problems on the person serving.  If the customer has brain-bleed after seeing his hashbrowns aren’t done to his liking, there’s more to the story.

Reader, I give you a challenge.  Take a job in the world of food and see what happens.  The majority of you will flop, cry, and become offended; however, for those of you who can continue the life, hold your head high and be proud.  The cliche “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen” instills an extremely horrible way of thinking.  Do not fold like a house of cards.  When life becomes too difficult, you should strive forward and push past the barrier.  It is at this time when personal growth and prosperity arise.  Persist and you will find yourself a better person because of it.  Who knows, you may even learn how to cook as well.