BEDLAM

I entered my Friday night close shift with a feeling of dread expecting to be polishing cutlery until one am and having a ten minute period of insanity after absorbing other server's sections (we usually get bombarded when people start going home). But it ended up being a relatively successful shift. Unfortunately the same cannot be said about the kitchen staff.

The kitchen manager, for the purposes of this blog we'll call him... Sam, was not in a happy place last night. Delegated to expo to free up the Front of House manager, he had to endure his kitchen staff taking forever and screwing everything up without being able to do a thing about it. I understand... frustrating. But still... not really Front of House's fault.

To highlight the level of tension, here is just one isolated incident that occured throughout the evening;

I needed two pumpkin soups to go out with two loafs of garlic bread. I am never entirely sure how the system works as one of the pumpkin soups was part of a steak deal and the other was simply sent through as an entree. Turns out they came out separately.

So I went over to the Cold Side guy and asked simply
"Can I grab that other cup of soup now please?"

And he said yes and it took him about five minutes to produce it. However, he gave me what looked like a cup of potato soup (it had chives, cheese and bacon on top, typical garnish for a potato soup)

So I was confused for two reasons: a) why did he give me potato soup when I asked for pumplin? and b) where the hell did he get the potato soup from when we were serving pumpkin tonight?

I told him I needed pumpkin. He was confused as he was looking at another ticket so I just told him I lost the ticket but I needed it urgently (which was kind of true... I just couldn't be bothered explaining the situation).

As I pull the pumpkin soup out of the window I say, simply asking a question that was entirely inconsequential, "Oh... are we serving potato soup now?"

MISTAKE. Sam's brother (who was now on expo so that Sam could kick the kitchen into gear) heard this and came over towards me to resolve the situation.

The Cold Side guy had no idea why I even asked this question and said "Onion... do you need onion soup?". Turns out we had now started serving onion soup as well. Sam heard this and came over to the Cold Side guy to figure out what the problem was. I was still confused as to why he had produced a potato soup earlier, but I noticed that three men had now walked over to where I was standing trying to resolve a situation that didn't even need resolving.

I tried to abort, quickly realising that it was simply a massive communication problem; the Cold Side Guy had probably accidently put the wrong garnish on the onion soup that he thought was for me. I thought he had given me a potato soup, asked why he gave me a potato soup (mainly out of curiosity as I had my pumpkin soup by now) and this made Sam and his brother assume that some mistake had happened and in light of the craziness of last night, starting flaring up ready to blame someone for what had gone wrong.

Naturally when I loudly expressed that I was simply confused but there is nothing to worry about they realised that they had all this built up tension and anger for nothing... so who copped it in the end?? I did.

Sam swore, did his usual "Oh my god" phrase that he pulls on anyone who makes a stupid mistake and stormed off gritting his teeth. His brother was still blinking, entirely confused as to what had just happened. The Cold Side Guy was now glaring at me for getting him into trouble. I stayed out of the kitchen for about half an hour.

Everything was fine by the end of the night, I heard Sam utter the words "the War is over..." which I thought was slightly melodramatic seeing as it was so dead I managed to get out of there before midnight.

But I would be lying if I didn't think it was slightly amusing to watch the kitchen guys go crazy. I mean, thats if they aren't messing up your meals of course. But everytime I walked into the kitchen I could hear someone yelling at someone else. Everytime a back of house guy managed to make it to the drinks fountain in a few quieter moments they had this aura of hostility about them. Nobody was smiling.

Well after completing my back of house duties before we had even closed and scraping together about 30 bucks of tips I was pretty stoked. I was smiling for a change.