Staff Meal Repeats

Today I went for another walk – down past some fields of sheep and some horseback riders. It was a lovely country walk. I also worked more on my internship portfolio, caught up on some more Masterchef, and did some chores around the house.
Today I will talk a bit more about staff meals. I understand kitchen staff are busy, trust me, I’ve been there. And I understand we can’t go way out of budget to make staff food, and try to pick simpler foods that will please everyone. But lately I have been hearing a lot of the other employees complaining about staff meals, calling them ‘dreadful’, ‘rotten’, or ‘ just edible’. This is not good. This is not what we want to hear at all. We are serving amazing food in a restaurant holding two AA Rosettes and a bar continuously doing over 300 covers a day and memorable wedding ceremonies. Yet we cannot even serve our own staff some decent food?

I wish there was more I could do, but usually making staff meals is not part of my responsibilities in the kitchen, and suggestions aren’t always taken well. Usually chef dictates what to make – either stuff we have on hand in the freezer (which apparently only gets ordered for staff, so why do we keep ordering such crap?), such as frozen battered fish, sausage rolls, chicken curry pies, burgers, frozen lasagna, chips, etc. Mostly fatty, fried carbs and meat. Or we serve staff leftovers – leftovers from service the day before and leftovers from functions. I didn’t think this was totally kosher, but we do it. I was taught in school and in my food safety courses that any food leftover from a buffet table is thrown out – no questions asked. It has been sitting there too long, has not been kept out of the temperature danger zone, and you have no idea who has touched it. Furthermore, this food was prepped in advance so is already old and suffering from quality, and should not be cooled and reheated another time – it just isn’t safe. We make a big batch of mashed potatoes in the bar every morning for service throughout the day. I wouldn’t think it would be great to serve the same batch of mash from 12:00p.m. until 9:00p.m., but not only do we do that, we chill it at the end of the night and use it for staff meals the next day. One day, one of the chef’s pulled a bag of unlabelled chicken from the freezer, and said, “I don’t know what this is or what it is from, but we will thaw it and use it for staff tonight to get rid of it.”

Staff lasagna

For lunch today, staff meal consisted of mixed vegetables, roasted baby potatoes, chicken legs in sauce, and pasta in sauce. I used to get excited every time I saw vegetables, but now I am getting sick of the same old frozen mixed vegetables, and today they were absolutely drowned in butter and salt. Potatoes seem to have to be a staple at every meal here, but again, there are thousands of ways to prepare potatoes so we could mix it up a bit more. The pasta is always the same – penne in a rich sauce with a few diced veggies – and is the only vegetarian option presented. The meat is the only thing that changes, but goes in short rotation – chicken, pork, turkey. The sauce is always the same – a very salty sauce made from stock base that you can definitely taste. Furthermore, I have seen the breakfast cook cook the meat first thing in the morning, then set it aside (usually at room temperature) since during breakfast service he wouldn’t have time to attend to it and lunch comes right after. Not only is this not safe, it makes the meat very dry and tough.
The head chef complained about what the cooks made for staff meals the other day – which he said were the same things every day in rotation (roast turkey, roast pork, fried fish, potatoes). He said, “I can order in anything at any price to make these staff happy. But you are too f-ing lazy and not imaginative enough and just make what you want!”