Split Shift

Freshly baked breakfast pastries

This morning I arrived to work the breakfast shift with a different breakfast cook. I thought she would be a lot nicer and more patient than the breakfast chef I had been working with. Boy was I wrong! I’ve worked around her (but not directly with her) many times before and she was always kind to me. But today I found her mumbling, and very difficult to understand with her thick accent (I didn’t foresee much of a language barrier travelling to another English-speaking country, but I did not realize a good half of my coworkers would be from away). She was not patient with me at all, although I had only ever worked two breakfast shifts before, and still did not have a clue what I was doing or how the entire process worked. To complicate matters further, she did a lot of things the exact opposite way of how I was taught yesterday, and kept telling me I was doing things wrong. I started with sealing sausages and putting orders away again. She told me I was sealing sausages wrong, that they weren’t cooked or something even though they aren’t supposed to be fully cooked, as they are then baked. She also didn’t understand why I had disappeared, though I had to deal with the orders. I did some other basic tasks, and asked if I should tray bacon and scones and pastries, or make a batch of scones or shortbread like the past two days, but she said, no, not until later.

So I was trying to make the best of the time and do as much as I could to help (the things I knew how to do). Unfortunately, to make matters worse, the power randomly went out three times this morning. This seems to happen way more often than it should around here. It was only for a few seconds, but that is enough to turn all the gas off so we have to relight everything. I am not really familiar with the switchbox that controls all this and how to operate it, so I left that to the cook. She couldn’t get it back on, and we had three big orders in. She just kept saying to the servers, “No gas! I have no gas! Can’t cook!” like they could do anything about it, and were supposed to tell all our diners, “Sorry but we can’t make your breakfast because our gas won’t turn on.” Finally, the head server came to tell us she had called maintenance who would come right away, but the cook just kept repeating about having no gas and was not listening at all. Eventually it came back on, and then luckily I was able to help her with the orders that we needed to catch up on. Service was nearing an end and I was trying to start cleaning up, but she kept getting mad at me for taking away dishes and whatnot, and I just wanted to give up. She got mad at me for throwing out a handful of leftover baked beans, even though they had been sitting there all service and I was told yesterday to throw them out, because she wanted to use them for staff. So, did you want me to save this old oatmeal too? 

Once service finally did end and I was cleaning down the kitchen, she told me to tray up the scones, pastries, bacon, and pick parsley. These are all jobs I offered to do during service when I had nothing else to do, and now she’s making me take time to do them. I told her I was working upstairs now (as I honestly thought I was), and she said, “No, you’re working with me until 12:00.” So I went to the pastry cook to see if I was indeed working with him now, and he told me I better check with the head chef. So I went down to do that, and he had to look at the schedule, and as usual, didn’t seem to know where I was working. His rambling went on something like this: “Oh, you worked breakfast this morning. So you’re here until 4:00. Yeah, I think you should work in the restaurant. Oh wait, who is on in the bar. Hmm, no we need you in the bar. Actually, most of the prep is done. But this isn’t a full shift, so you can’t work in the restaurant. Yeah, work in the bar. Unless, you could do a split shift. Then you could work in the restaurant. There is no point in helping out with prep but you could do service tonight. I’ll leave it up to you. You can work in the bar until 4:00. Or you can work until 12:00 and then come back at 6:00 for a split shift.” I thought about this. I really wanted more experience in the restaurant, as I asked chef and he said several chefs were leaving and the pastry cook would be changing sections and they needed someone to cover pastry, and I definitely could. I said I would be up to that, but I definitely needed more training. I have to work 8-4 tomorrow and the restaurant is closed Friday, then I am off Saturday and Sunday, so I will have to wait until next week for more training. But at this point, I really didn’t feel like doing bar prep work again today, I could tell everyone else in the bar was in a bad mood, and I was tired and not feeling great and not feeling great about my work that morning, so I decided I could benefit from a break, going home and resting. Although it would be a late night and I am working breakfast again tomorrow, I wanted the experience in pastry service in the restaurant. I told chef I would work the split shift, which I’ve never done before, and he said that was a ‘bold move’. I hadn’t thought so, honestly I thought I was taking the easy way out.  

I made it back in by 5:30, early but I wanted to make sure everything was set up before service began at 6:00. I trusted the pastry cook would have all the prep done, but it would be my job to set up the station. I set up and got all ready for service and familiarized myself with the appetizer, potato, and veg of the day. We were in service and things were going well, not too busy but steadily putting out orders. Head chef was wandering between up and downstairs to supervise, as there were plenty of us working. At one point, he came up and said the bar was very busy and one of us needed to go down to give them a hand for fifteen minutes. I’m not sure if it was because I was the most familiar with the bar of the group, or because I was the least busy at the time since no pastry orders had come in yet, or because I was the most reliable, or because they liked to take advantage of the intern, but I was nominated. Of course I obliged.

Downstairs the bar was, well excuse my language, but it was a shitshow. It was the usual cook on mains, the brand new cook on starters and the other intern switching between starters and pastry. I told them I was here to help, and the cook in charge told me to work the pass. This meant standing with them, shouting out the orders, what I needed on the pass and when, what sides I needed to go with what mains, etc. Again, it was a mess of starters, mains, desserts, and kids meals, and I have no experience whatsoever working the pass. But they needed someone to coach them through the mass of orders accumulating, and I was best to do it in the situation. I did my best, and the main chef was very patient with me, but totally losing his patience with the other two. He seemed grateful I was there to help.

I was calling out orders, what needed to be on the pass asap, etc., while one of them was doing mains, one was doing starters, and the other doing the frying. I would call for something, and the two on starters wouldn’t answer me. Then the mains cook yelled at them for not answering. He yelled at them that dishes weren’t looking up to par. I was plating and yelling and organizing. The intern was slow, just kept telling me things were ‘cooking’ when they should have been cooked by now. I had to run to the fridge to restock their station, and do pastry orders since I was faster. I was doing a pastry order when the head server came over and asked me to please give that job to the other intern although she was slower, because I was better on the pass and the mains cook needed me. Then the kitchen started to get smokey and something smelled burnt, and we realized the intern was burning caramel, so then we had to get three servers to wave towels at smoke alarms to prevent them from going off and causing even more chaos. I was down in the bar getting them sorted out for about an hour, then finally got to go back upstairs and fulfill some pastry orders as that’s why I chose to do a split shift.

The pastry orders in the restaurant were a cakewalk compared to the bar, except for one diner who didn’t tell us in advance she couldn’t have dairy, eggs, gluten, or soy. And we had to be nice, as she was a journalist. Other than that, I was the last one in the kitchen at 11:15p.m., because desserts are the last thing to go out, and the others all abandoned me, which only just let me know that they fully trust me to do service alone my first time handling that section.