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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Special Order
What are going to do tonight, Ricochetti?
Same thing we do every night, ChefSly, go to a restaurant and order something not on the menu.
Well, if you’re going to do that, let me share with you some of my years of experience in restaurants.
In a restaurant kitchen, there is a great deal of prep work that is done throughout the day in order to have a successful lunch or dinner. Vegetables are chopped, shrimp is cleaned and portioned, pastas are cooked and portioned, along with a myriad of other tasks. That work is done to accomplish three major things. First is to create a reasonable service time, the second is to ensure the consistency of the final product, and the third is to use the space that is available most efficiently as possible. This also relates to cooking skill and movement.
To create a reasonable service time, some things have to be cooked ahead. As an example, most soups could not be made in the time between ordering and service. Roast meats are also on the list of items that take too long to cook. Pastas are on the edge — some restaurants cook to order, some don’t. Bottom line, if something would take more than 15 minutes to cook, it has to be precooked to some extent. The common exception is well done steak. “I need this 20 ounce bone-in rib-eye well done on the fly please” gets a laugh.
This also applies to components of dishes as well. The four cheese sauce for our Mac and Cheese, the topping for the Oyster Rockefeller, and the corn salsa for the Shrimp Kisses all are done ahead of time. If the dish is something like that, we likely can’t make changes to order. We might be able to leave a prepped component out of a dish, but I don’t have time to make a batch of mashed potatoes without dairy.
Ensuring a consistent product does two things: the guest gets the same meal every time, and the restaurant knows how much money it’s spending per dish. With regard to special orders, I may not have the separate ingredients on the line. For example, our fried calamari has vegetables fried with it: artichokes, banana peppers, jalapenos, and carrot slices. When I get an order for calamari without jalapenos, I have to dig in the bag of veggies and pull them out before I can make them, and I have to cook that one order separately.
Which leads us to efficiency. When I’m on the line during a rush, I need to have everything prepped and portioned and ready to go. As it gets busier, every second on the line matters. This is especially true for the fry station, where the difference between perfect and burnt is a couple seconds. Instead of cooking the food in the order that the tickets are printed, I’ll collect like tickets and cook those items together. In the best of cases, I’ll end up in the zone, where I’m not really thinking about what I’m doing; I’m just cooking. Leaving the line for any reason and working to understand the ticket kick me out of the zone. I have to leave the line to replenish the station as I run out of ingredients, since I don’t have the space on the line to hold everything that’s required during the rush.
I also have to leave the line for allergies. An allergy requires clean tools: cutting board, knife, spatula, etc. It also requires fresh ingredients to avoid cross contamination. It could also require fresh oil in the fryer (which is unlikely). This takes time to assemble, which lengthens service time, for you and for the rest of the orders. If you only don’t want an ingredient in the dish, just ask us. There’s no reason to call it an allergy.
So what’s the takeaway? Think about your allergy before you decide on a restaurant. Please read the menu, and if the menu isn’t clear, ask the server. They should be trained to know the menu, as well as what is possible to sub out or omit. If you’re generally pleasant, when the server goes to ask the chef about a special request, that pleasantness will translate through the chef to the cooks. A special order will likely cause your food to take longer to come out, and so be understanding with your server. Also realize that during the lunch or dinner rush, it’s possible that the delay will cost your server another table. We want to provide great service and food, and we will do our best to accommodate you.
Published in Humor
I wouldn’t have eaten them either.
One of the things in restaurants I’d like to change is the practice of having the waiter bring the check to the table. It would be much better, in my opinion, to have the checks left at the cashier. In this way, the customer is free to leave when he’s done without waiting for the check, and then waiting a further time for the waiter to return to take the check and credit card, and then waiting another little while for the check and card to come back with a pen and receipt to sign.
Why not just go up to the register and pay?
My hypnotherapy client presented with a deadly phobia of seafood with legs. She could not even look at a cooked crab or lobster, etc., without heart palpitations and sweating.
In trance she discovered an early trauma induced by her brothers with a live spider. This was a “stuck place” in the unconscious and was simple to release. YMMV.
The difficulty of release can be complicated by the number of events related to the phobia.
Talk therapy to reveal buried memory could take years and a great deal of money. This lady was happy with her result after one session.
I repeat, YMMV.
Some of the big casual chains (Red Robin, Chicago Uno, Applebee’s near us) have the tabletop kiosks on which the customer can pull up the check, and (if using a credit card) run the card and print the receipt there. Probably not consistent with the image of a linen tablecloth place though.
You are right about the image problem, but this could be changed with a little courage. I have been in countries where even the best restaurants (not that I eat in such places often) keep the check with the cashier. It’s all about what people learn to expect.