the Leathermines

(read Shift Work)

There is never a lighter side @ Grade-B

It is a good thing that Grade-B with Service in the back exists.

I had started to work there for pay off and on as the Pizza joint started to implode.  I was the lucky one because I had the fallback of Service when the manager started to do his shenanigans with my hours.  Most of the other long-timers didn’t have that, and it started to show.

The management announced that the location was being bought up by a competitor, which led to about a week of utter chaos.  One of the new guys had been brought in knowing that this was coming up, and he was trained to take over the shift manager’s slot, at almost half the pay.  Gary, the guy with the most hours into the place, was crying as he begged for more hours as the manager oozed meanness without any sort of guile to cover it.  I saw it happening, and let it.

I know that is not a good thing to say.  I was not as supportive as I might have been to the other shift workers, but I had gone through it before, and knew that once it was announced, it had been a done deal for over a month.

O.k..  I was pissed enough that I called the inspector on the place.  And child welfare on the owner-manager.  One would have little effect, as I knew that the last two inspections didn’t say anything about really obvious problems.  Having a social worker coming in, I knew that would fuck up the manager’s time, and possibly life.  He never saw his kids, anyway.

From maybe a shift a week at Service went to five a week.  I brought some of the good guys from the pizza place with me, too.  There was paperwork, but Chef kept most things loose, up to having a big ‘need hours’ and ‘have hours’ board next to the roach board for things at Service, which started to have postings for other kitchens, too.  Some days it was a really full crew, most days, it was just enough.  The uncertainty didn’t seem to bother Chef, but she seemed to like the extra people and was more than willing to get them on projects.

I slid into working afternoons and evenings at Service.  Chef did go away, I am assuming home, around six every morning, and would be back in by four in the afternoon.  I met the day manager and the day sous and felt like there was always something happening to keep people involved and inspired.  I found out that Chef left a list of things that needed to be ordered for the day manager to deal with, and Tony would do the ordering for the kitchen, which actually used the bodega for the pantry.  Whatever we needed, we could go into the store and get, just as long as Maria or one of the other counter workers rang it into the kitchen’s tab.

The sous…  He was not as easy to work with as Chef.  He had ‘been in the industry’ since he had graduated from culinary school, always working for the best places, until then.  He would not let you forget about his schooling, or the list of places he had worked or staged at.  He had moved from the East Coast to the West Coast in search of the perfect place to be, and when he moved to Austin, he needed a place to work, taking a phone interview with Chef and accepting before he knew what her place was actually like.

He knew how to run a kitchen.  That part, he got right.  Almost every thing else, though, was as far from good as you can get.

It was not the first ‘open kitchen’ I had worked in.  You know, those places that don’t have real walls around the stations to let there be some division between the staff and the guests.  But at Service, it was different.  Most of the people who came into Service were in the industry.  The occasional swear drifting in from the kitchen was laughed at.  There were walls, but the service window and the doorway were open enough to let everyone know what was going on.

The rushes we had were opposite from the ones I was used to.  The rush is what will kill you, and your restaurants, reputation.  Dinner rush was usually starting around the time people who worked in offices got off work, five thirty to six in the evening and lasted until about seven or eight, when the bar crowd and truck crawls started in earnest.  At Service, the rush was about two in the afternoon til about four, and then the big rush was after ten at night.  The times when people going to or coming from food service need to eat, themselves.

Chef was a powerhouse when she got in, pushing herself and us to get things done before the late night rush started.  By then, if it wasn’t done, it was pulled off the line, and off the menu, to be done the next day.  The daytime Sous was not someone who was good at getting into the meat of the prep, he liked to do the fancy gastro molecular hipster stuff, and I heard a few grumbles from Chef at what was not being done more often as I worked there.  She was also good with seeing and saying what she liked about the kitchen, the staff and what was happening in the FoH, so I didn’t give it much mind.

Until I overheard Chef in her office reaming the Sous out in one of their daily catch-up meetings at the beginning of her shift.  She is not soft spoken, but I had not heard her ream anyone out like that in front of people.  And having her voice coming clearly through the plank door made those of us in the hall scoot away.  I know I didn’t want that aimed at me.  Didn’t really hear anything about what it was about, but the Sous was bitchier after that.  As long as Chef wasn’t around.

We started to have the big names you hear of from the magazines and t.v. start to pick up a few shifts, more for a lark than anything I think.  One came in with a few of his staff and had started to write out a menu on one of the paper tablecloths.  Sean was joking with them and mentioned that Chef may want to put that stuff on the menu.  There was some banter until the guest Chef tore the menu and recipe he was working on off the paper and walked over to the window.  I was making egg salad for the next day and heard some of what was said through the hole.  Chef leaned on the expo counter and I saw that little smile.

That was the first night that we had a Guest Chef.  It was still early enough that there were only a few tables.  Chefs got their heads together and came up with a thing that worked the first time.  It was amazing to watch, and then become part of.  We did not scrap the menu we already had, but had a separate thing that our Guest Chef did with us.  Sold out of that as it was being produced.  And I learned a lot that night.

Having a well known Chef pat you on your back and say, “Chris, that was fucking awesome,” is something you will never forget.  I was high on that for a few days.  Distracted enough to not see that the Sous was trying to foment some sort of a rebellion.

Now, I know I have described all sorts of things going on in the kitchen at Service, except for the actual cooking.  To be honest, it is repetitive and boring for most of the stuff we do.  Sixteen quarts of chopped onions, every night.  A twenty two quart pot of tomato bisque, every night.  Six or seven sheet trays of rolls cooked off, every night.  It is repetitive, boring, and not something people who are not in the industry really understand.  So, when someone new came into the kitchen and kept trying to get me to talk about what I was doing, it took a while for me to figure out something was not right.

The sous had invited a reporter from one of the local food blogs to come stage for a few days.  He wanted them to see how he was running the place.  And it led to him taking credit for most of the stuff I had been watching Chef do for months.  The glory hound even pointed out the roach board, claiming it was done on a lark after they had an exterminator in one day.  I couldn’t turn from that, but did not know how to deal with it.  I texted Chef at noon that day, and when the article came out that evening, with pics of the roach board and the bodega, I thought the place was going to be leveled.

We could tell when the article had been posted because the bodega was suddenly filled with people who had no clue about Service, but were insisting on getting shown the door.  The constant rush was worse than the first night with the beer license.  We ran out of our regular menu items and started to use the next days stuff, and lots of #10 cans from the Bodega, to make up stuff on the fly.  Challenging would have been easy.  We were so in the weeds by 8 pm that a bunch of the regulars waded through the ten-top crowded at the doorway and just started working instead of trying to get tables and food.

Chef did not go home that next morning.  She took one of the ‘chef table’ recliners and wrapped a couple of tablecloths around her.  I know this because I was there way past when I normally would have gone home and slept alongside her.  I only woke up after Tony came in and not so gently woke me while the war of the ages was raging in the kitchen.

Service was closed that day and into the night.  The Sous was gone after his ass had been torn from him and handed back, Chef having fired his ass for bringing in a reporter when she did not want any sort of publicity like that, and taking the credit for shit he had not done in her restaurant.  It took three days to get the place back into running order with the amount of stuff we had sold.  And it was the worst I had ever seen of Chef up to then.

I’m not very young, but I am middle-aged when it comes to food service.  I’ve worked in pizza places, bars, a dry roadhouse(that was an experience), and had a few shifts in places that wanted to be three or four star restaurants.  It was all good experience, but I had never been able to see the bones of what it really takes to run a place like in those three days with Chef at Service.  

Tony grabbed me and made me do inventory so we could get what we needed, finding out that, even though we ordered from the purveyors, all the stuff we used really was put on the shelves of the bodega, first.  I had wondered why Service was in the back of Grade-B, and I found out that Chef had been a Sous at a place in LA, but couldn’t handle the politics and infighting.  Her mom had come from Guatemala and had started a small Bodega in California, so she knew how to run a store from when she was a kid.  She had moved and started the Bodega with the intention of having a test kitchen, which turned into Service.

I cleaned out the old glass-fronted milk cooler of the dead to-gos the second day.  It was one of those things that I had kinda ignored when I had first started to go to Service, but once I found out about it, I had taken stuff home, and brought old pizza in boxes while I still worked there.  Chef had started that when she had bought a job lot from a closing restaurant and wanted to see if the cooler worked.  It did, and I think it was Sean who had been working his day job who first brought in some of the stuff that was going to be thrown away and put it in the ‘leftovers’ cooler for the other staff to take, if needed.  That first few weeks of almost no hours at the pizza place went better because I was able to take home random stuff from the leftovers cooler.  The cooler, which was supposed to get wedged into the BoH, never moved once it was plugged in, and has been a centerpiece of several food-waste discussions by our guests.

Third day…  I arrived and Maria in Grade-B was looking a bit off.  I got to the kitchen and Chef was there, wearing a grubby t-shirt, ratty jeans and rubber gloves.  I had never seen her without her Jacket and black pants.  I saw a set of lists written on the wall that had been wiped through and a big ‘FUCK’ written over them.  The old sous, in retribution, had called the health department.  There had been a whirlwind inspection, and Chef was on her knees pulling out everything she could from under one of the reach in coolers.

I have seen worse.  But, it should not have gotten as bad as it had.  Harv and Peter were there, too, but Chef just kept going, cleaning and setting things up for that night.  We put things away and as Sean, Kelly and a few other FoH people came in, Chef gave me the nod to do a family dinner.

Which was both cool and odd.  It always felt like family dinner.  That was part of the point of Service.  Food service is a big family, and Chef wanted us to feel good about the place, and ourselves.  Things were changing, and that night, we were taking reservations for the first time.  Ever.  I fed the troops with a variation of what Chef had set up for that night and I felt the difference in the staff as we waited for the first official guest that night.

There had been a small press release, and now there was a ‘service is open’ sign in the bodega window.  As of six that night, it was not just Service for people who were part of food service.  We were a full restaurant.

There were some townies, some tourists and a few reporters that had made reservations for the first few hours.  People took pics of themselves next to the roach board.  The first person who I had seen in the place with their phone plastered to their ear bulled their way in and was seated in one of the Chef’s table recliners, talking to the person on the other end without a real regard for what was going on around them.  And then there was the politician.

Handshakes.  For everyone.  And then the time Chef had taken away from her as he stood there on the other side of the window, making her smile as one of the reporters and several photographers recorded the moment.  And I saw a fake smile on Chef’s face.  That was when I pulled a line and asked Chef to come check the brisket in the back.

She gave me a puzzled look, but nodded and Harv took her station, to the withering look of the politician.  And then I saw that little smile from Chef.

We stood in the walk-in cooler for a few minutes until we both knew we couldn’t hide for much longer.  Because, you see, there wasn’t any brisket.  The quiet string of expletives that came out of her was impressive.  But she was smiling as she said them.

The first night was constant.  Almost crowded, except we kept up with the tickets and were able to turn over the tables in a timely manner. Mary came in for the late shift, Kelly taking a turn being the busser for a while instead of the host.  More of the actual food service people started to come in after the standard dinner time and it started to feel more like what Service was supposed to be like.

I left before Chef did that night, but we only had a two top left at that point.  I gave out a few tokens to people for doing dishes, including to one person who I am sure had never seen an industrial machine before.  We were all tired, but it was not as much as a shit show as it could have been.

The next day was calm, but that made me really nervous.  Tony and I went over the reservation system and I asked him to order a few things I saw we had been close to out of the night before.  He nodded and said that Chef had put most of that on the list before she had left in the morning, but he would get the other stuff on the list.  We were not really open, but we had several tables come through as the prep for the night service was continuing.  And then…

Service at Grade-B had been ever-changing.  The second night we were open a a full restaurant, we were slammed, and mostly because one of the local Chefs that had done guest work there before mentioned in his twitter feed that he wanted to get a table and see how things had changed.  It was crazy.  We were not prepared, but we made it through.

The guest Chef did show up after his place had closed, and apologized to Chef when he realized what he had done.  And the cool thing that night?  He went to the roach board and put his own restaurant on the list.

Yea.  That happened.