Fuck fuck fuck.
The dishwasher was not working and plates were starting to pile up, along with utensils, glasses, hotel pans, and everything else. Of course, if you’ve been in the restaurant business for any length of time you know that this is precisely when shit goes wrong. Have a crazy busy day with hordes of people coming to eat? I guarantee something will break, stop working, explode, or worse yet someone will call in sick or simply not show up without calling. This is how it goes in the restaurant biz and the people that understand this and accept it are the ones that thrive. I wasn’t there yet. I stressed hard about this kind of thing at the time. Years later, I still stress, not quite as much, and my first reaction to this kind of stuff is usually laughter. One of the things that comes with experience is the knowledge that these things are unavoidable, and you have to do the best you can. But right at this moment, when I was looking around the dish pit, at the huge mess, I was absolutely freaking out.
Ralph did laugh though, he found it hysterical.
“I’ll call the Ecolab dude,” Ralph told me as he walked out and headed downstairs.
I told the dishwasher he would have to wash the kitchen stuff in the 3 compartment sink, but that I would help him, or I’d make one of the cooks. We started with the kitchen small wares first, the cooks would need this stuff, and when Ecolab fixed the dishwasher the plates and glasses wouldn’t take very long to run. Of course, this was assuming they could fix it. As I was scrubbing pots and pans I was thinking about what would happen if they couldn’t fix it, I wanted so badly to get through this night. Christmas party season was coming to an end next week and it would be time to take a breather, everyone had been working long hours and running around for seemingly days on end.
After we made a serious dent in the pile of pots and pans the nighttime dishwasher arrived and I left them to check on the cooks. Even though it wasn’t super busy in the dining room there were two private parties at the same time. Also, the bulk of our reservations were at the same time as well. So we would have a few hundred people all wanting to eat at the exact same time. Good times. I had asked the managers and catering department to help spread things out but it didn’t seem to matter. Whenever they tried to space out the parties, the early party wanted to eat late, and the late party wanted to eat early, always, without fail. So I gave up and just did the best I could.
By the time I made it to the line the PM cooks were arriving and Ralph was letting them know tonight might be little nuts and also that the dish machine was down. He was giving his usual pep talk “ You guys need to prep your asses off.” Inspiring. We had one cook that took care of the parties for us and Ralph grabbed him and started going over the two parties for tonight. I grabbed the clipboard with our order guide on it and walked into the cooler to figure out the ordering situation for tomorrow. We only had a very small party but we’re booked solid in the dining room. Trying to figure out how to order produce, fish, meat, and groceries for a busy restaurant can seem like astrophysics sometimes. It’s like that scene in Beautiful MInd where Russell Crowe sees all the numbers flashing before his eyes except with chefs it’s food swirling around our heads. Is one case of artichokes enough or should I get two and play it safe? How much Parmigiano Reggiano will get us through the weekend? Should I order the Branzino tonight or wait a day? We burned through brussels sprouts and mushrooms, maybe I should bring in a ton, but will there be room for all this stuff?
When I finished the ordering or at least made a dent in it, I walked to the dish pit to see what was happening there. The Ecolab guy had just arrived and he was bent over flashing a light into the machine when I walked in, the dishwashers were trying to clear room for him to work, playing Tetris with stacks of dirty dishes. I tapped him on the shoulder to let him know I was there and said a silent prayer that he would be able to fix it.
“Oh hey”
“Hey. So what’s going on with this thing"?”
“Well, here’s the thing.”
By the way, whenever someone starts a sentence like this it’s never good. What always follows is some awful fuckery that is going to make you nuts but they are trying to cushion the blow.
“Your inlet valve doesn’t seem to be working. I can replace it but I don’t have the part with me. I am going to have to head back to the office to get one.”
“Ok, that’s not that bad, where’s your office?”
”Elk Grove Village”
“Fuck”
“Yea, sorry”
It was 3 o’clock on a Friday afternoon in December. He might as well go to Wisconsin as go to Elk Grove Village. It was going to take hours for him to drive there and back, which meant no dishwasher to start service. Fuck fuck fuck.
“Ok, if that’s what you have to do then I guess that’s what we have to do.’
“Sorry man, I’ll hurry if I can, but traffic is going to be awful.”
“Yeah, I know, it is what it is.’
I went to drop the bad news on Ralph, hoping he would take it well. There wasn’t a whole lot we could do except help the dishwashers as much as we could. We had convinced the daytime dishwasher to stay a bit later so that helped. Once I talked to Ralph I needed to sit down and headed downstairs to the chef’s office, my head was throbbing and I had Ibruprofen stashed somewhere down there.
I collapsed into the office chair, leaned back and closed my eyes, and tried to think good thoughts. I remembered thinking about cooking school, and how they can’t really prepare you for days like this, or maybe they just chose not to for some reason. Maybe they felt if young kids knew what the restaurant business was really like they would run as far away as they could. No one ever mentioned ordering food for the restaurant, or supplies for that matter. They never talked about what to do when things go wrong. They never talked about stress, or what happens to you when you are stressed all the time, the toll it can take on you. Ever wonder why there are so many angry miserable chefs? It’s not just their enormous egos, it’s enormous stress piled on top of that.
Why is it we spend so much time teaching young chefs how to cook but offer no management training of any kind? I think my first sous chef job they handed me a clipboard with the order guide and told me I was on my own. No one ever really taught me how to make a schedule, how to hire or interview someone, how to get the most out of your team, how to do anything management-related. I had to figure most of it out myself, and I made a monumental amount of mistakes along the way. Too many. I did learn things here and there, but I picked up most of what I know by just winging it. Years later I would read a lot of management/business books and listen to a lot of business podcasts to try and educate myself. But at this time I was mostly making it up as I went along.
I headed upstairs and service had started, I could hear the clang of pots and pans, and Ralph’s voice yelling out the orders. When I walked by the dish pit I looked in to see the two dishwashers trying hard to make a dent in all the stacked plates. Thankfully we were able to wash the wine glasses in a small dishwasher behind the bar, but there was no way these guys were going to be able to keep up, especially when it got busy. It bothered me seeing how hard these guys were working but there wasn’t a whole lot I could do.
When I got to the line Ralph had things in control and it was mellow, right around 7:30 chaos would start, it would last about two hours then it would all be over. I took my spot next to Ralph and checked in with the cooks, making sure they felt loose and were ready for ensuing drama. I mentioned to Ralph that we needed to hook up the dishwashers somehow for having to wash dishes by hand, we had to do something. He suggested we give them a couple of ribeyes and I agreed. We came up with an impromptu menu for them, caesar salads, spaghetti bolognese, ribeyes with roasted potatoes. They could have dessert too if they wanted, I felt they deserved it.
About a half-hour later the room started to fill and the bar was three deep with people arriving for dinner reservations and the private party guests. The host and manager were trying hard to wrangle all the coats and drop them off in coat check, it would also help make room at the table. The loud din of the dining room floated over me, at once familiar and terrifying. There is a roar that comes from a happy dining room. I have worked at many restaurants, and I didn’t always hear that roar, that sound of clinking glasses, silverware hitting plates, servers describing specials, busboys refilling water glasses, hushed conversation, or drunken rants, all emanating from a roomful of strangers thrown together for an evening. The sounds all coalesce into a dull roar, sometimes loud, sometimes not, but it’s the soundtrack to a busy restaurant.
When the ticket machine started spitting out tickets, the room had become loud, we had to shout the orders to the cooks. The cooks were now working with their heads down, not really paying attention to anything outside the kitchen. Sure enough, as 7 pm approached I could see hordes of people waiting to get inside, wanting to start their holidays early. The bartender was having a hard time keeping up, his face said calm but his body said “help”. He was smiling at the customers seated at the bar, trying to hear the drink orders of the people arriving who were leaning over the bar and shouting in his ear. One of the managers had jumped behind him and was helping pour wines by the glass for the servers.
I turned to Ralph “It’s coming for us, we’re going to get slammed”
“Awesome, let’s go.”
And a few minutes later it was like the ticket printer had an extra gear and shifted, tickets started coming out even faster and we couldn’t grab them fast enough. When it got this busy one of us would keep track of the tickets, grabbing them as they came up, holding onto them until the cooks were ready, we couldn’t give them too much at one time, we tried to space it out the best we could. As the tickets were shooting out of the printer I noticed the private party of 25 was being sat in the private room. It was bad, but I expected it. As was often the case, they would arrive starving and would want something on the table right away, which meant fried calamari and pizzas. I turned to look at Bernard, the poor pizza cook, and he had the pizza oven filled with pizzas and he had four more already made, sitting at his station waiting to go into the oven. He had two fryer baskets filled with fried calamari and was having a hard time keeping up. I bounced behind the line and started plating the calamari, it was easy, there were just seemingly a million of them.
“Ralph! How many calamari all day!”
“ 9 chef!”
“Heard 9!”
To be totally honest my plates were a bit sloppy but we had to go, plus I’d rather the food be hot. Bernard winked at me and I jumped back to the expo station. Ralph had a stack of tickets in his hand and he was giggling, he liked it when it was busy. The server handling the private party approached me and asked me if I could fire first courses for the party, and then handed me their orders. I looked over what they had ordered from the limited menu, unfortunately, there was a bunch of vegetarians, so more than half ordered gnocchi.
“Fuck, “ I thought.
The pasta station was already getting absolutely crushed with orders. I showed the orders to Ralph and waited.
“What the fuck is this shit! Two steaks on the whole fucking party! What the fuck dude?”
“Let’s just try getting some of these tickets out of the kitchen before we fire it ok?”
Ralph nodded and kept barking at the cooks, asking them how long before they put their food in the window. I walked over to Manolo, he was spinning around with baskets of pasta and tossing them in pans bubbling with sauce. He was tossing the pasta over and over again in the pan, looking at it intently, making sure it was the right consistency, that the sauce was clinging to the pasta. He had stacks of warm bowls in front of him and he was plating in a calm deliberate manner even though his stove was filled with pans and pans of hot pasta. He would look the pasta into the bowl, never taking his eyes off it, the guy was smooth.
“Hey dude, you’re going to get a giant pasta order next, make sure you have plenty of gnocchi, ok? I can help if you get weeded”
When I said that he stopped what he was doing and looked at me in the eyes.
“Tsk, be real bro.”
”That’s what I thought you’d say”
I walked back to the expo station, next to Ralph. He was yelling at the food runners to hurry up, as he piled plates onto trays for them. He was throwing plates down telling them position number as it went down.
“ Chicken 1, branzino 2, garganelli 3, garganelli 4, go go !”
A few minutes later the board was almost clear and we decided to fire the party, especially since the server had asked us three times if it was ready yet. When we told him to go away he laughed, he knew, he got it.
Ralph called out the order
“23 gnocchi, 2 ribeyes medium, 1 chicken”
So Manolo looked up at me. He didn’t look happy, he looked pissed. He was standing still doing nothing. It was at this moment I will admit I fully panicked, like full-on panic. He walked off the line.
“Oh shit.”
Ralph looked at me and I looked at him. This was bad, very bad. I was thinking of what to do, trying to figure out what was happening. Did he just quit? Did he just walk off in the middle of service? I followed him down the hallway calling him but he didn’t turn around he just kept walking. He turned into the dish pit and I saw him reach up and grab a huge pan, a round pan called a rondeau. He turned around and looked at me.
“What? I need a big pan for all the fucking gnocchi dude”
I felt a bit ill and thought about how fucked up this business is, the stress and trauma we put ourselves through. But to say I was glad he didn’t quit would be a huge understatement. I was so relieved I laughed. Then I saw the Ecolab guy in his goofy labcoat running the machine. I guess he had slipped in while we were busy. It looked like the machine was working too. I sat down on a couple of milk crates and put my head in my hands. Days like this make you feel so alive from all the adrenaline pumping through your body, but eventually, you crash. I was crashing hard.
I walked back to the line and Manolo was stirring a giant pan of all the gnocchi and Ralph was throwing the plates on trays for the food runners, who now were sweating through their uniforms. They had run around like their pants were on fire all night. I asked Ralph if I could go home.
”Get the fuck out of here dude.”
“Tomorrow brother!”
“Yep tomorrow will be more of the same”
When I got to the bar, it was mostly empty but I knew in a couple of hours it would be filled with Gioce employees. The bartender knew my order and had it on the bar before I sat down. He knew I liked the beer to be really cold so he would grab one from the back of the cooler for me. As I took a drink of the cold beer I told him what I always told him.
“The after-work beer is the best beer.”
Damn, this really makes me miss working the dining room at Gioco - such great energy, those sounds of the dining room and the open kitchen. Great stuff Mark, keep it coming!