Line Cook at Main Street Grill

Okay, so I've been in this new class for 1 1/2 weeks now. The restaurant, "Main Street Grill", is open 6 days a week, so I only have one day off and it's filled with homework, laundry, etc. I've already completed most of the stations, which are pantry (that's soup & salad), sandwich & pasta, and saute. Tonight I start on the grill and my final station will be the fry station.

We've had a good demonstration of what position in the kitchen is the most important. It is not any of the chefs or cooks or servers. It's the dishwashers. We have one really good dishwasher who normally busses and runs food for servers, it pays better (servers share tips with bussers) than washing dishes. But, when he is washing dishes we never run out of saute pans or pie tins (used for heating stuff in the oven) and he always picks up the dirty saute pans that we drop into hotel pans as we use them on the line. It's so nice and things run really smoothly on the line. Last night was not such a night. The other dishwashers cannot seem to keep up with the dishes and they put the pans off to last, not a good idea. Nor do they pick up the used saute pans so I frequently made trips to the dish pit with dirty pans. At one point, just happened to be during a rush, we had no clean saute pans or pie tins and I needed to get orders into the oven and cooking on the stove top. Incidentally, I ended up having two orders fade from my short-term memory into the black hole only to be rememberd when the chef wanted me to plate them. Ooops! I managed to get them out, but it was more of a rush than it needed to be.

Note to self. Pool tips and share them with the dishwashers. It's financial incentive to work smarter and faster. (NECI does not do this.) Always treat them with respect and remember to thank them for a job well done!