I managed a theater that served food and I swear to god it made me legitimately swear off working anywhere that serves food. I literally had to stop the cooks from throwing a fit every time a ticket got printed, I occasionally just decided to fire them randomly if they caused too many issues and the replacements did the same stuff. SURELY you can’t all be like this. I have plenty of stories ask away.
This is the only place and department in my career I’ve ever gotten mad enough to legitimately yell at employees.
by tHr0AwAy76
26 Comments
When you get paid $15/hr to hang around with felons with knives in reaching distances, it attracts a very specific type of crowd.
it sounds like it was the culture at that place. sometimes all it takes is one person with a negative attitude to poison the pool and make everyone complain about everything. usually a senior person
I bring that up in the interview. “We’re all adults. We sell food. If you’re gonna have a problem with that, this job isn’t gonna work out for you.” Then during the first couple days of training new people, I “check their temp”. I want a “at the end of the day, it’s just food” attitude. But also, it’s gotta get made. If they’re not into it, we pay cooks well for our area. We’ll find someone who’ll do it.
But I agree, there’s a growing number of cooks that act annoyed at having to do the main part of their job. I admit, when it’s a normally slow part of the day, I’m knee deep in prep, and a ticket prints, I get a little irritated, but it’s the job. It always has been and it always will be.
Didn’t Carmy throw the fit because Syd switched on the mobile order system too soon before they were ready for that volume? Or I’m misremembering that scene.
Don’t listen to these guys. There’s plenty of places with pros.
Things I got annoyed at as a cook:
– Servers stacking their orders and ringing in multiple tables at once
– Expos not knowing what dishes were and asking stupid questions (“is this a Caesar salad?” Pointing at something very clearly not a Caesar salad)
– Servers punching in their personal food orders with a shit ton of mods without talking to me in advance about what they wanted – typically during a rush.
Cooking a bunch of food orders? That’s the fucking job. I would grumble about a customer ordering a well done steak 5 minutes before close but that was more me having to explain why we cut people 30 minutes later than normal the next day to Chef.
Its the same in any job really, and generally a good indicator you don’t want to be there at all. When I wasn’t working in kitchens I was in call centers; I still don’t like talking on the phone if I don’t have to, and I just gotta deal when my current job needs me to.
Tbh as a manager, this sounds like a work culture and management problem, and possibly a compensation problem if it keeps happening over and over and you’re yelling at people and firing them randomly instead of addressing the root issue. Making food can be stressful but plenty of places have a professional kitchen with people who care about what they are doing.
How much are you paying these people? Is it enough to attract anyone half decent at their job or is it minimum wage and you’re getting the people who can’t work anywhere else? For a theater I’m kind of suspecting the latter.
Bad work culture. It may be the employees, it may be management or it may be upper management.
But something happened that disconnected the employees from their passion to make good food for paying customers. Could be poor wages, poor schedules, bad workplace policies, lost benefits, bad bosses, lazy coworkers living without consequences, etc.
I had a guy who was literally yelling in the kitchen about a customer when she could hear him. I told him to cool it, and he yelled “shut the fuck up! I’ll walk out on your ass!” I told him to get the fuck out of my store, moved the cashier (who was cross-trained) to the kitchen, and finished the shift with only one other person. Called the GM, the guy wasn’t even disciplined. I’m glad to be out of that place.
The worst part about prepping is somebody eats it all and then you gotta prep some more
I’m burnt out as all hell so I get it, but I still do the job as best I can.
I turn it into jokes, helps me blow off steam without being a negative Nancy bringing everyone else down.
“What do you MEAN I have cook food at the restaurant that pays me to cook food that’s open for 6 more hours?? This is HORSE SHIT.” We all laugh and move on.
TBF, how dare people make me do part of the job I’m (unfairly) compensated to do! Completely unreasonable of them, if you ask me.
I have to wonder if in your specific situation that it was more along the lines of someone wanting a job, getting a job at a theater, expecting to run cash register and check tickets, and then being surprised with “oh, you’re actually going to be cooking. Have fun!”
That’s the only thing that remotely makes sense because in every kitchen I’ve worked, everyone does their job with minimal complaints. We’re all degenerates and have a bone to pick with the entirety of the world, but that’s just our general attitude towards life. When we would “complain” about having to do our jobs it was more along the lines of “fuck these people coming in five minutes to close. Everything is already off and cleaned, now we have to turn it back on and dirty it again.”
He just like me fr
Shitty people serving shitty food in a shitty environment are shitty. Shocker.
If the people in your kitchen aren’t passionate about food, youre in a shitty dive, probably pay shit, and the culture is shit.
There’s a high likelihood of there being many folks working BoH that don’t wanna be there, prolly true for FoH too…but BoH gets paid for not cooking just the same as cooking…some of us take it a bit too hard when god-damned tickets ruin our Reddit scrolling
I’ve never had an issue with this at any point from start up to the final hour. The final hour is time for cleaning and because ownership likes to trim staff and only schedule everybody up until the end of that final hour, everybody is pissed off if anybody orders. Once you hit that final 30 minutes, shit is getting slammed if anybody orders and people are throwing out profanities, and honestly? I don’t blame them.
Fire the head chef they’re poisoning the kitchen
Sounds like a bad workplace culture lol
Shitty people create shitty conditions that lead to burnout no matter the job.
Assuming they aren’t working multiple positions for 12+ hour shifts with no breaks for shitty pay in a filthy environment, you have a few bad apples spoiling the bunch.
It just takes a couple. A guy with a chip on his shoulder, the one always making inappropriate jokes, the vicious gossip, the heavy drinker, substance adbuser, the shit bird, the holier than thou, and the drama cow.
Get any combination of them on a crew together, and you get a recipe for shitty place to work that makes people just wish the day was over so they could go home.
I bet the pay sucked. It has been my experience these are the cooks you get when you pay little.
I know you personally didn’t set the pay, I have just also managed kitchens that didn’t pay well.
I was unexpectedly promoted to executive chef one time when I worked at the Hilton (our original executive chef moved across the country); and at first, I was elated.
I’ll never fucking take a premonition like that again.
Reading the replies i can see alot of people dont work in “high-octane” kitchens.
Worked in the kitchen for almost two years during my Bachelor’s on campus— One of the biggest pet peeves I had working with the other student cooks there are the ones who would complain CONSTANTLY about making the tickets, even though that’s the whole point of our job. I only made light jokes when it came to tickets that would come in at those times where it felt like the customers knew I was about to clean my station or needed to be away for a moment. Or when my partner at the station I’m in leaves to go to the bathroom and suddenly a whole bunch of orders come in. But I burn through it anyways. Because that’s what I’m paid to do.
I mostly just do the swearing in my head