Jobs I sucked at: A line cook at a sit-down restaurant

I should explain what I mean by a "sit-down" restaurant because maybe that is just North Carolina talk. What I mean by that is that it is a restaurant with a menu, waiters, bill at the end, there is normally a bar or at least beer available as well. Basically McDonalds is not a "sit down" restaurant even though you do sit down. Burger King, 5-guys, and Wahlburger all serve hamburgers but only one of them is "sit down."

I hope that makes sense.

I was working just about any job that came my way but when I was a dishwasher at some other place in the future it was offered to me to pick up a few shifts as a line cook. You don't have a huge amount of responsibility at a line cook because there was a head chef whose responsibility it was, you were given very small portions of the overall menu as your directive and for me that was pasta and nachos. There were likely other things but I don't remember.

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The system is designed so that it is very unlikely that I would be capable of screwing it up. The pasta was already mostly cooked and I only needed to steam it for a little while to make it wet and ready for plating. The meats and vegetables that went into each pasta dish were already portioned and in bags and even though it doesn't sound nice because this was a relatively expensive restaurant, the little bags of chicken or prawns or whatever were microwaved by a number that was on a sticker on the bag If there was a 3 on the bag I hit 3 on the microwave.

The idea here being that I don't need to really think all that much which is good.

The problem was the sheer amount of food that we had to pump out in an evening particularly on weekends.

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I worked at a place called Pargos and it was a great restaurant and was very popular. It did end up going out of business nationwide (I think) but this had a lot to do with it being owned by Shoneys and they were experiencing massive losses in revenue and were forced to shut down almost all of what they were operating.

I'm just saying that the restaurant and the customer base were fine, the closure was beyond our control.

At my job I was able to mostly keep up with demand but every now and then a table would get the pasta munchies and I would have to make 5 or 6 of them at the same time. This is very difficult to do when you only have the ability to cook 2 of them at a time and the head chef is shouting at you to get it down to him faster because he cant have "food sitting in the window getting cold!"

This was rare but what wasn't rare was the temperature of the items I had to handle the entire shift. It was a microwave yes, but they were sealed industrial plastic bags and when you would open them the contents were burn you hot. I also had to handle a nachos broiler and this is basically an open oven that can of course burn the crap out of you at any time. The ceramic plates that we put in there had to be removed by hand and you had to just figure out a way to do it without losing all your skin.

I was not designed for this kind of work even though I have super calloused hands now from years of construction I still cant handle extreme heat with them, it was never something I could get past both physically and mentally.

After a couple of weeks of really kind of loathing this job I asked the manager to not put me on cook shifts anymore and to relegate me to just dishwashing. It just wasn't my cup of tea.

Something good did come out of this that I have kept with me for the rest of my life though and that is a profound level of respect for kitchen workers. Often these guys are the true heroes of a busy restaurant and they don't get enough credit for this.

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We've all probably seen some sort of kitchen show that is a competition and that's exciting and all but the real world reality of busy kitchens is that just one person screwing up the order of things can throw off the kitchen for a long period of time after the initial incident. With me on the line, this stress was something that I didn't handle very well. There was a time that I was working where one of the line cooks quit his job in the middle of the shift and now we all had to do our already busy job and cover for his absence as well. IT was a nightmare and the manager of the whole restaurant stepped in to help as well. None of us ever spoke to the guy who quit ever again.

I wasn't cut out for that sort of work but I wouldn't mind it every single person on earth was required to do that, and other restaurant work at least for a little while so they can see that being mean to the staff should never be something someone should do. They work really hard and get paid very little money for it.