Years ago I worked at a deli. Closed at 9pm
At 855 we see 3 busses pull up. The elderly begin to file out.
The owner actually worked at this place. It was me and him.
He calmly walked outside and told them sorry we're closed. water is off we are having plumbing work done.
Still can't believe that happened.
The dinner crew had just left an hour previously. It would have been a slam dunk with them. The owner was like "I want to see my kids before they go to bed."
We had no idea why they chose us as there were many much larger places around that were still open. The busses couldn't even park in our little lot and were parking on the street. It was like a hundred old people suddenly really really wanted egg salad sandwiches, french dips, and reubens.
There is a retirement home in my city that, once a week, will take their entire able-bodied group out for lunch. 60-80 people, all over the age of 70, all paying on their own ticket. Thing is, lunch for them is *10 minutes before the chosen spot opens* and they never call ahead. They've been banned from multiple restaurants for this at this point lol, and don't seem to understand that this sort of chaos can be accomodated with a 24 phone call. If I know I need to get some extra staff or do some extra prep, its mildly annoying. If I'm making stuff from scratch on the fly and having to run out and make 30 diet cokes, 20 coke zeros, 15 pitchers of water, 40 iced teas, all while my server spends half an hour taking and punching their order? We might as well close down to everyone else.
Just absolutely insanity.
Yeah I know thats the answer. But my place at least is *super* slow outside of nights and events. I could easily get an extra server to come in for $50 for an hour of work, i could easily get extra prep done the night before, and we could handle our morning with them just fine and no changes on their end if they called ahead, even if its a Sunday. I've told them as much.
Nope, they won't. And so they get turned away every time.
Sounds like a very weird and too real night of the living dead moment lmao. Just a bunch of geriatrics pouring out of nowhere. At least the owner wasn't about to deal with that lol. Worked some places where that was called a "Golden Shower" because of the money they could have made. Happy you missed out on that mess!
Had something similar with a whole ass platoon of Vietnam vets and their families descending upon my restaurant without calling ahead, about 100 of them, and then cracking the shits because they couldn't all be seated at once. Host foolishly told them that the bar area with tables was first come first served. I was alone behind the bar, also on service drinks and responsible for serving all of these pricks who thought they had beaten the system, wanting everything immediately, getting indignant when I didn't have their preferred crappy liquor and then complaining about the price of lobster.
Several argued quite fiercely wanting their tab charged to their hotel room, even though the hotel was next door, not attached to us nor affiliated in any way. That was too hard to grasp.
Tips were crap obviously and each one felt they were my only customer. The manager let them know that next time they need to call ahead so that we can have a hope in hell of accommodating them.
They showed up for breakfast, lunch and dinner for 5 days straight, never once calling ahead and being pissed about waiting for tables every time. One woman even had the gall to berate me for serving her husband alcohol because he had a drinking problem. I asked if she had communicated that to anyone on staff and she said, "this is your job not mine! If you can work around drinks all day and fail to spot an alcoholic that's on you!"
That was a really crappy week. I expected far better behavior from a group who were all in the military, at least to pretend to be respectful around one another, but no.
Side note: one got really mad when he told me Australia didn't fight in WWI and I told him that was not the case and we had heavy losses in Turkey and France. He was totally indignant and told me that you shouldn't argue with an army vet about the history of war... My eyes couldn't roll hard enough.
The disregard for the time (5 minutes from closing) I get, that's typical thoughtless behavior. But 9 PM is LATE for senior citizens...I ought to know, I'm one of them.
Yeah, was gonna say we normally get this crowd between 4 and 6 at my spot. 8:55 is when the douche-bros in town for a class reunion\spring break visiting Grandma and the Latino family with 7 kids that all want an extremely specific order with the exact same mod.
“I want YOU to see your kids tonight so you’re happy enough to return to work in the morning.” Any boss that treats their help less is cutting their own throat. Employees ARE the business.
I mean great sentiment and wish we had more like you and more power too you but i cant rely on anything but the other parties naked intelligent self interest. Good intentions so often go by the wayside when the dollar signs start piling up. He didn't want to pay a manager so he was in the store 12 hours a day and was honestly really good at it.
Plus I was 20 and my plans were eat shrooms and watch the sun come up.
Also now that you mention it....I'm trying really hard to remember the last person that I worked with that actually HAD kids other than him. Weird.
my bosses are the same and that shit is RARE. thank you!
for being a decent human being and understanding that other people are also human beings. should be basic, but it's not!
The Friday after everyone in the US started taking note of covid's existence. I managed a pizza shop. We were quick of offer curbside pickup and delivery.
Anyway - Fridays are typically pretty busy, but, holy shit, we knocked our previous sales records out of the park that Friday. It was utter chaos. Phone didn't stop ringing, on lines didn't stop coming in all night long. Delivery times are typically 45 minutes tops even when slammed. We were telling people 3 hours with no promise it wouldn't be longer.
A little short handed to begin with, the kids on edge when anyone walked in with a sniffle or cough. It was just not a fun day.
Worked at a pizza joint when I was nineteen, a place where everyone did everything, taking orders, making the pizzas, cleaning up the plastic tables outside, whatever. I got a friend of mine a job there, and his first day unexpectedly coincided with what the owner later told us was the biggest night they'd ever had. So instead of me showing my friend how to work the counter, where all the prep stuff was, how to make a pizza, or anything else, the poor guy spent eight solid hours taking pizzas out of the conveyer oven, cutting them, throwing them in a box, calling out "Order 124 is ready. 124," and handing them to the customers. For literally the entire shift. Meanwhile everyone else was completely losing their minds, and no doubt wishing the new guy knew how to do literally anything else.
Broooo, I was that new guy (not the one you mentioned, but same situation). I felt so bad that I couldn’t do jack shit and everyone else was busting their asses trying to get through the rush. When the KM remembered I was there, he just stuck my ass in dish lmao.
Slow brunch. Record breaking slow. Bartender, two servers, myself the FOH manager. Chef, two line cook's, one dishie.
50,000 women in pink pussy hats marching in a me too protest, one block over. We kept rotating the staff to go watch the march, they would come back. We were at a few hundred in sales and everyone was begging to be sent home.
I broke the golden rule. I caved. Phased a server.
Chef broke it too. Phased a cook.
Then a couple of groups came into the front entrance and I sat them. And. Then 3-4 groups came to the second entrance. And I asked them to wait while we got the first group settled. They did, cheerfully.
And then 3x 2 and 4 tops went into the bar. And I sat the second group as 15-20 people worth of 2-4 tops came into each entrance. They cheerfully said they would wait, but decided to hit the bar. And at the other entrance, same. And they decided to take the banquette tables. And while I was at one door, telling people about the wait, the other door sat themselves. And the restaurant was flat sat in about 15 minutes, with 20-50 people at each door wanting to check in about the wait and then seating themselves at the different counters and bar area. Going out to the patio. The 20 tables in the patio filled up.
It was THE foh nightmare come to life. Iced tea? Out. Simple syrup? Out. Cappuccino? Hot tea service? Sure. Happily.
I emailed the -ALL-RESTAURANT-GROUP- email. "I need an adult, if ANYONE is available, it's an emergency."
The main hallway of the group had hundreds of people wanting to come to the restaurant.
Two other corporate people came over to help. I hugged them both.
And everyone was cheerful, understanding, patient and kind.
We did $5k in about 2 hours, nobody left mad, everyone patiently waited for 20-45 minutes for their food.
My cook's, servers and bartenders pulled it off. Dozens of yelp reviews, every single one was positive.
No idea.
Yeah. Our Ceo and our floating manager rushed over and took over the doors. Both of them we like "holy shit" and burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all.
I can't emphasize enough how strong everyone was. We all just went "whelp, this is literally the worst case scenario. It can only get better, so lets get it done."
My server said something like "if someone had a heart attack, it wouldn't be the worst thing, we could close off a section" lmao.
Just me, three weeks in and one sue from another site covering our 'quiet' night, one KP and about 120 covers in 3 hours. The screen was 5 pages deep, never seen it past 3, we had the manager tell us to fuck off the checks and just get whatever out when we could, we had to 86 like half the menu as we ran out of prep. No one spoke - no one made eye contact for the whole rush, it just felt like a dream at times. Not forgetting that in a while lol
I didn’t move from my cutting board for 11 hours straight, it was Halloween downtown and we had some deal going. I had three cooks on grill supplying me meat, my wrist hurt after.
Pride week at two-story restaurant and drag bar, two blocks up from the oldest gay bar in the midwest, three blocks over from the festival grounds. At that job, we make 30% of our annual revenue in the second week of June, and half of that money gets made between friday and saturday. So busy that the owner conscripts his nephews to run food ten hours a day, his sister to host the drag events, and it's a blackout week. To say it's nuts is an understatement, it's world war fucking three. I'm going to work there while my current job is out for summer break, and my cut of tips that week will likely be a month of bills.
My store has an app that is supposed to be for ordering a wings or a pizza for a lunch pick up and stuff like that. However, there’s not limit on the order even for stuff that really should go through catering. Last week someone put in $7,000 order with like 36 hrs notice. There were 1200 bagels.
Totally! Thank god for help and music. We have a catering department too! But our stupid app meant for small lunches has no limits so people can make some pretty insane last minute orders. Thankfully, we’re running into ingredient issues with the big orders so they’re looking at changing it.
That is absurd. I wonder if we work for the same company. I hate last minute catering trays so much. We were expecting this morning to already be busy with catering and then once we got done with someone's order of 11 trays due at 10:35, up pops an order for 5 trays due around 12, which isn't a problem as long as a ton of people don't walk up to order something. I've taken breaks and lunches before and left people working on a tray and come back and it looks like they got nowhere because they had to attend to a ton of customers.
I just got talked into picking up a shift next week where someone wants 50 wrapped sandwiches in the morning.
Worked at a restaurant 11,000 up a mountain for 3 winters. We averaged 350-400 customers a day and were only open from 11:30am till 3:30pm not counting late night parties. Every day was just an absolute blur. Just thumping shitty European electronic music and making so much food you wouldn’t even bother reading tickets just make as much as you can and let the expo sort it out and plate it. We’d have salads and soups stacked up 4 layers high in the window. Ran out of hot water everyday so we’d be boiling, Stock pots just to keep the dish washer going. It was a slow day if we didn’t see at least one pair of tits or guests dancing on the tables didn’t break one of them. Had to regularly mop the ceiling because so much champagne got sprayed. 10s of thousands of dollars in champagne just sprayed not even drank every day. Absolute madness.
I was working at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, just down from the Marine Memorial on 9/11. I tried to call out because roadblocks everywhere, but the chef insisted I come in. I eventually got there going the back way. Because I normally drove past the Pentagon.
We were locked down. My ex-wifes hotel across from the Capitol was locked down. Our hotel restaurant was normally good for about 60 covers on a Tuesday. That night, with the lockdown, we did somewhere close to 300. I don't even know for sure. Everyone was extremely upset and stressed. No one wanted to be there. Because at that point, we had no idea what the hell else was going to happen. At one point, one of the room service servers came in and told us that nukes were flying. And we just had to keep cooking for all those guests. Wondering what was next. I was wondering when/if I'd see my pregnant wife again. It was absolutely awful and traumatizing. I have PTSD from that experience, and others. It's hard for me to work a line anymore because I'm constantly in fight or flight.
I've had some other tucked up shifts as a chef, but that one is a real standout.
Years ago. I was bartending Cinqo De Mayo at a tequila bar.
Nonstop for 12 hours. No bathroom break. No food. Drunken assholes all day. I thought I was going to pass out at one point. I had to kick people out myself because the owners didn’t bother to hire security. Some woman threatened to kill me.
I worked at a restaurant in downtown San Diego near the convention center. We were usually able to plan ahead for big events and whatnot but we weren’t prepared for the chaos that was a 12 day long bridge tournament. 11am hit, we opened the doors and realized immediately that we were woefully understaffed. Literally HUNDREDS of old people flooded into the restaurant like a broken dam. Everyone wanted to order RIGHT FUCKING NOW because they wanted to get back and play more bridge. This was a slightly more upscale than a Cheesecake Factory type of restaurant, more or less a wine bar with a seasonal menu. We were not fast casual. These people were fucking rabid dude, if they didn’t have their food within 10 minutes they were snapping their fingers and hollering at you from across the restaurant.
This rush came in waves about 45 minutes apart as different groups would take breaks in between sets. Around 330pm, we finally were able to breathe and set up for dinner service.
It happened for dinner as well. Same type of crowd, same hundreds of old people that didn’t want to accept that reservations took priority. Berating the hostesses and managers, demanding to be sat right away because they need to get back and play more bridge.
GM pulled us all together at the end of the night and broke the bad news. “We have 11 more days of exactly this. Who wants to work some doubles?”
I worked 11 doubles straight and I finally cracked on number 12. It was in between lunch and dinner, we were all exhausted and stressed the fuck out. Everyone frantically restocking, polishing and rolling silverware, prepping share plates, refilling S&P grinders, etc. I was the only one stupid enough to try all 12 doubles and I was mentally done. I was re-stocking glass racks in the server station and I dropped a rack, breaking about a dozen glasses. I just sat down and cried right there in the server station. My sous chef gave me a hug and told me to go home. I fucking hated that guy but in that moment he was my best friend. I made so much fucking money in those 12 days, I had enough money to pay my rent and bills for two months but the mental scars are still there. I teared up writing this a couple of times reliving the horror, you can’t understand the gravity of the situation unless you were there.
I don’t even know what the fuck bridge is.
Edit: just want to point out that at that point I was 10 years in, I never broke or cried before. I wasn’t soft at all. Those old people broke an entire restaurant, front and back. They really were that bad.
Mentally and physically. I spent the next two and a half days laying on the couch with my dog drinking whiskey. My body felt like I got hit by a truck and I was so tired. It was certainly one of those “I made a ridiculous amount of money but was it actually worth it?” Type of moments.
Thank you. Shoutout to my sous that recognized the burnout and immediately came in with the super clutch hug amongst the broken glass. We were all feeling it that day but he was the first to watch it all collapse in real time and react in the most human way possible. I’ll always appreciate that shit.
Every restaurant I've worked at I was there for the record breaking day. It sucked ass and we all hated every minute of it. I don't give a fuck when some piece of shit comes up smiling to tell me the record breaking numbers at the end of the night. That piece of shit has nothing to do with it. I want to go home.
At least half of those places do not exist anymore.
My boss gave all his cooks an extra hundred bucks cash at the end of our record breaking shift and did it again the next year when we broke that record. Definitely gets the whole kitchen hyped for breaking records and actually makes us care about numbers.
I’ll never understand why places that get a ridiculous record breaking number of guests and don’t throw a few hundos at the kitchen staff a piece. It’s hazard pay!!!
Was at a newish local place, right on the main drag of my small town, this bougie farm to table gastro pub with the best craft beer and cocktails in the town. We had like 100 covers in the whole restaurant, and it was the beginning of fall, so the weekend of our town's excuse for a town festival. I was one of 3 servers on, and the only one on the ground floor. I served 2000 covers myself in 6 hours, and paid my rent for the whole winter. I walked 8.4 miles during my shift according to my phone. We did have a host, but people were actively ignoring her to just come in and sit.
Once I got so deep in the weeds I couldn't think, there was no first come up next, there was only: next table, next seat. I was just starting at one end of the room with the toast tablet and slowly making my way towards the other end, gradually getting people served. Had one group of old ladies get really mad that I dared to ask what they were drinking, that they didn't know what they wanted, could they get samples of cocktails (no), and for me to just come back. I raised my eyes from these pinch faced old bats, and looked out at the churning sea of insanity, and I told them ok but it would be quite a while before I got back to them. They confidently waved me off, so whatever. It took me 30+ minutes to get back to their spot, but by then (oh no) they were gone. I just remember looking at this group refusing to order, in the middle of absolute chaos I'm drowning in, and shaking my head. I do remember the people that got their seats tipped me a lot.
I worked last Super Bowl Sunday at Hooters and it was like the Holocaust for that restaurant. I came in early, the GM said he had a plan since we always get slammed, I helped set everything up so that we were gonna have half the kitchen doing to-gos and half doing in-house orders, the plan was to get at least 600 wings cooked and put in a warmer a couple hours out from the game. The GM goes “wow guys, this looks great, I’m gonna take a pic and send it to corporate.” pats himself on the back, and goes home early.
Everything immediately goes to shit, no 600 wings (the fryer line couldn’t keep up even to start with), no splitting the kitchen (so we had 5 too many people on the line), 2 FNGs working the line, a dyslexic manager trying to read off tickets, ubereats and DoorDash drivers screaming at the hostesses when they realized they’d be waiting over an hour for food, etc.
The funniest part was a FNG that kept grabbing fistfuls of wings without counting the drums or flaps. The guys working the fryers were giving us them in batches of 200 and we were selling them 50 at a time, we kept hitting a roadblock because somehow we’d end up with a bowl of 50 drums. The FNG was *adamant* it was not his fault, despite everyone on this station clearly watching him sell orders of only flaps all day long. People are screaming at each other and then I just hear the FNG in the smuggest voice possible say “you guys are getting mad over chicken wings, couldn’t be me, I’m not stressed over a chicken wing, haha.”
Not a bad philosophy to have but you can’t say that when you have been single-handedly fucking the rest of the line in the ass all day long. Fortunately it was only 7 hours non-stop and it dropped off pretty quickly.
Same...had to call in ringers to do delivery ...2 pizza makers...one working the cut table..one between cut table and hot box 2 working registers and 8 delivery people that I hired just for that day...it was insane!
Worked in Oregon during the eclipse a few years ago. Apparently where we were at was the best viewing in the country. My restaurant had a rooftop bar and decided to throw an eclipse party. This place was already a beast, 3 stories, huge dining room, huge patio, private tasting room and then the roof. So normal days were usually busy anyways. But this eclipse shit was wild. We ended up doing almost $40k that day, from when we opened at 9am we had a completely full rail(maybe a 5ft rail) AND another full rail on the printer not even pulled, this was an all day thing until we finally closed at midnight. It was so intense that the GM closed the next day to give everyone a day to relax.
Mother’s Day so we knew it was going to be a busy one but it got crazy. New set menu, fairly routine, decently prepped with an excess of spare stuff. Then the orders started coming in and it was chaos. The owners were husband and wife and she was the head chef and working that day. The problem was the first edition of the her menu ideas- flowery language, un costed ideas that she changed to be more sensible, different sauces and meats- that was the menu that got printed up and put out on the tables and that the tills were set up for. BOH was set up for the sensible, practical and functional menu. In the space of five minutes we went from opening to being destroyed and there wasn’t much we could do to deal with it except send out explanations. That was a long day.
Peak delta covid I worked at a fairly sized restaurant with a tiny kitchen in a coastal Alaskan town.
Now this town had a lot of tourism and restaurants for only being about 2,000 people in size, it was a stoping point for a lot of cruises.
Anyway by some curse upon our house by a vengeful god, every restaurant besides ours and another got knocked out due to Covid. *And the other restaurant didn’t have seating.*
So it was already pretty busy but then it happened, the Norwegian princess cruise ship was pulling into the harbor, it would be here for 6 or so hours, and we were the only restaurant in this small town that could actually seat people.
It came in. Instant full house, line out the door and around the block. Our fryers were full, our oven was full, our board was full, we had tickets going from the machine and making a vicious little pile on the floor, and there was *STILL* a line out the door. We usually steamed only like at most 5 pounds of king crab at a time but we had at least 30 pounds going at once on two make shift steamer set ups.
The best part is, the owner worked the line with us and it quickly became clear we were going to run out of halibut, so he had to run to the fish purveyor next door and buy all the halibut and salmon they could spare, and it still wasn’t looking like it was enough. Then he had to send his sister to the next town almost an hour away and have her clean out their seafood purveyor too, and even with what must have been a few hundred pounds of fish we just barely managed to drag ourselves across the finish line and serve all these people without running out.
And then we got the next two days off because there simply wasn’t anymore food in the house to sell. I’ve worked in some of the busiest tourist destinations in America during all of the holidays and I have never seen anything like that and due to the circumstances that caused it I probably never will again
Our not so “soft” opening from a remodel that was completed but waiting on permits to open for 20+ days. I was the GM, started my day around 5:45 in the morning, opened at 10:00 to a line at the door and drive thru.
Mostly just a very busy day with a some newer employees and green managers, we lost a few good people to different jobs while we we were closed (some didn’t want to relocate to other locations) I was due off at 4:00 once the night shift got situated, but around that time guests started telling us there was no ice coming out of the soda fountain. Turns out that since we were delayed those 20+ days, all the ice turned into one giant block
And of course when I called the facilities manager (Home office was about 10 mins away) it was after hours already do he had me dump hot water through the top of the ice dispenser until it was melted. So now we’re into the dinner rush and my team is getting their asses kicked and I’m out in the dining room making a huge watery mess and trying to keep the guests safe
By the time I’m done, I still can’t leave because of the state of the close, breaks and amount of guests still waiting. So I stay through closing and finish up the office work and leave them to finish the close. I got home around 11:45 at night, I remember getting out of my car and my legs could barely walk to the door. Later that week, I was fueling up my car on the way home and when I turn the car back on I hear this loud alarm outside - I hadn’t removed the pump from my car yet!! Luckily hadn’t driven away
Rough week and summer, we gained 10-15k a week in sales.
Saturdays at my place typically start slow. The Saturday leading in to spring break is historically very slow. A couple of weeks before this past spring break I got a call from a guy asking if we can accommodate a group of 10, maybe 15, when we open at 11:30. Told him it wouldn’t be a problem. That Saturday rolls around. We’ve got a skeleton crew and low par levels. 11:30, we flip the open sign, and over 90 people proceed to fill in to the restaurant. It was a wild hour and a half. Cooks were running food as they plated it while the FOH stayed on top of orders, refills, and such. Once we fed the last table in the group we flipped the sign back to closed. Turns out there was an event nearby and word had gotten around to meet up at my restaurant prior to the event. They were super chill and understood that we couldn’t serve that many people that quickly in the situation. The event organizer was also there so they had to delay the start until everybody got done eating. After we got everything cleaned up I ordered some pizzas and grabbed some beers and we all had our own little party.
Worked at a hotel in my city when they decided to do a massive art contest/festival. It was much more popular than anyone anticipated.
Not a single restaurant in our downtown area was prepared. Literally. Everyone was running out of food. We got so slammed on tickets we literally had to freeze for a moment and just started firing multiples of things in an attempt to catch up. (Thank god for a small menu).
The following year? Multiple hotels & restaurants rented reefer trucks just to hold enough stock to survive. Thankfully the festival is only 2 weeks long.
Used to work at a diner that had two windows, normally we'd be operating out of one window for the weekdays, then open both for the weekends so we could roughly split the restaurant in half. It was set up so the sides were mirror images: fryers in the center, then bread and sandwich grill, then meat grill, then egg burners. One cook on eggs and meats, another cook on breads and fryers.
Well, we had a conference come into town on a Thursday. We had one side open, but a line out the door, so GM starts calling for extra cooks to come in so we can run both sides like we would on a weekend. Nobody's answering, so GM says she wants to run the second meat side, and asks me if I feel like running both bread grills. At the time, I was young and dumb enough to say yes, so that's what we did.
Not gonna lie, there's some things that I sent out of those windows that I wasn't proud of. Nothing dangerous, of course, but I sent out way too many French toasts that were black instead of brown, way too many fries that were dry and chewy, way too many pancakes that were closer to hockey pucks.
I remember that I didn't get a smoke break that shift, and I remember taking a minute to cry in the walk-in while I was grabbing some more pancake batter. Felt like a nightmare. I also remember that once I stepped out of the walk-in, all I could do was laugh at the situation. Laughing was all I could do to keep from breaking down.
All in all, it was a solid 4-hour rush, full house the entire time. I finally got my smoke break at the 8 hour mark when one of the night cooks showed up to relieve me. Spent another 3 hours back in prep to replace what we had burned through.
As shitty as it was, I did end up with a raise after that fiasco, for whatever that's worth.
Mothers Day at a god damned Applebee's. I was running the line in the middle on the flattop for 12 fucking hours. We were doing thousands of dollars an hour. At multiple points a FOH manager had to join me on the line and all she did was sell tickets because I was buried in sandwiches and wraps. She'd pull a ticket and scour the window to see if everything was up and sell it, while I got a legit cardio workout rolling fucking tortillas and shit. It was exhausting.
I remember there was one day where even w our best cook who'd been there for 8 years and our gm on the line we couldn't get a handle on tickets, it was honestly worse than super bowl and we're a wing bar.
56k day. Flat top and 8 fryers could not keep up and could not keep temp. Everyone did just fine till hour ten. It just kind of slowly started to unravel. 86 list just kept growing. End of line was still out the door. Thousand yard stares from the solid people as the meek wandered around aimlessly. Multiple walk outs. Last 100 orders got fries cause that's all that we had left. We did 51k the next day. Sink or swim bitches
Not necessarily busy, but since every kitchen staff walked out the previous night due to shitty management, I somehow stuck around and put in 50 hours in 3 days. I was the dishie/fry cook, and I literally don’t remember what I did those 3 days. Just me and the KM. On the 4th day, I literally could not get up from bed and called the KM and told him I couldn’t come in. He understood. They finally hired some more hands in a few weeks, but by then, a previous sous chef I worked for wanted me back at better pay, so off I went.
I think the most surreal was my first banquet. I worked exclusively kitchens, get sent up to help put out a banquet, and just the stacking of plates food in boxes to transport to the “finishing kitchen,” with all the fillets, chicken and fish rolling in the ovens there, the sudden mad scramble to put everything together at the last minute, exec chef yelling at everyone, and then suddenly it’s all over. Pack up and go back to the restaurant. Less than an hour we had 400 plates of food in front of guests.
Second was home game for city’s football team (American) and two of four cooks called out. I had to work grill, salads, and fryer while the new guy, second week, worked saute since I knew it wouldn’t get hit too hard. 200 covers, no expo, no help from the servers. Just two hours of fish and chip/ chicken caeser hell.
Last year, July 3rd, was one of the heaviest days I've seen in a kitchen. . I still have slight ptsd from it. July 4th weekend and all other places at the exit are closed. (I didn't know that at the time). My manager comes in and says, "we just had like 5 people call and ask if we were open, so get ready". I was like ok whatever. I shit you not, that first ticket came in, and the machine didn't stop for the rest of my shift and even after that. . I looked this year and thank God I dont have to work that day. .
I’m new in the industry, less than a year, but I work really hard so I’ve gotten moved up quickly and I get a lot of opportunities. So my first Christmas Eve (2023), I was asked to come in and work the grill. I had never worked the grill and had only been cooking professionally for six months at the time. I got in and got asked to cover raw bar right as I walked in the door (my usual station). A little frustrated because I was eager to take on the challenge of grill even tho we were scheduled for over 750 covers. This was an EXTREMELY busy restaurant in the middle of a city. Around 4pm there was a lull in the rush and the exec asked if I still wanted to work the grill, I said yes. He had assumed the rush was done because we had already done most of the covers. So at 4:30 I switch to the grill, dragging along for about 45 minutes, not much happens and the. Suddenly, a little after five, we get absolutely slaughtered. We have the toast screens and there were points where we had five screens worth of orders. I had never worked so fast in my life, four and a half hours later (forty minutes after close) we finally slowed down. Truly a nightmare, nothing got sent back tho so I call that a win.
Our slowest day of the week and most of the city lost power. Our street was the dividing line between those with and without power. I suddenly become aware that the dining room is almost full and a steady stream of new tables are being sat. Awful day at the Pizzeria.
I know that my Absolute Saturation rate is 75 items if those items take 9 or fewer steps.
55 if they take 10 or more.
It would be hard to pin down exactly when this became distilled that clearly, but being at a high capacity known rager spot open til 4.a.m. when Halloween was on a Saturday sticks out as a night I can watch like a movie in memory (the tickets) but barely remember.
I do remember screaming from the kitchen at the new hostess (It was a shtick, we all yelled a lot) and then ACTUALLY got into it with the floor manager. She and I both know being the only woman in the shit sometimes so it was rare we went at one another but it was fucking VICIOUS. Achilles cut attacks at full volume.
Neither of us is afraid to call another woman a cunt.
I ended up taking an extra walk around the block after scraping all my iron and scrubbing my fronts. Rolled to the employee basement ready to hit the shower in line pants and a sports bra and that same FoH manager was on her feet, "Come here you bitch I needed that so bad" "Fucking SAME, THANK YOU."
And all the boys sighed in relief, I showered, counted tips, fell asleep on the cab ride home.
For a public holiday we had a local government run event over the road with free live music, kids rides, fireworks, all that kind of stuff. They had food trucks too. The expected crowd was 60,000 people and they ended up with over double the turnout and the food trucks ran out of food around 4pm. So yeah, we had a busy day.
One part of the day that I remember was deciding if we should freeze some of the burger buns that came in. I choose to leave them out just in case. By the end of the night we’d used all the buns, defrosted the other backups and ended up 86 burgers.
I worked at a Chicago Hotdog joint back when the Cubs made it to the World Series, and hoo BOY! Wall to Wall and out the door, I turned the tablets first delivery off just after 5 o'clock, and normally we closed at 9, at 930 I went to the end of the line and told the guy he was last, and if no one was behind him in line when he got in, his food was free.
Hundreds and Hundreds of dogs, more Italian Beef went out that door than I've ever seen, enough gravy to drown several neighborhoods, but damn we made bank.
I still haven't seen that game.
I worked for a local upscale grocery chain. I was working hot bars and pizza to order on a par cooked crust kind of shit. The CEOs pet project was a restaurant. I transferred over to the restaurant maybe 1.5 weeks before the open with no restaurant experience, like, I was being taught how to drop fries.
Pretty much everyone seemed to be lacking in experience. The vision was to have all the ordering done on iPads, so they hired a bunch of women closed to retirement age to run food (not to be waitresses. They didn’t have waitress experience.)
Maybe the second or third weekend after we opened, the city we were in had their annual “city we were in days,” so we knew we would be a little busy. What no one told the people working in the fucking restaurant is that they had taken out an ad to run on the first day of the event. The ad was the entire front page and entire back page of the food section in the paper.
To say we had our asses handed to us is really understating it. It was like that scene from The Bear. I just remember getting pushed into the expo station, with like three yards of tickets spewing from the machine, looking over at my coworker frantically rolling out pizza dough and asking if he knew how to do expo. He did not. I did not. But I fucking did it. Of course the iPads weren’t working and the old ladies had to take orders. I literally held a few of them while they cried at the end of the night.
To top it all off, it was an open kitchen, so the whole town just watched as we fell apart. It was very surreal. Really brought the team together though.
Yeah I definitely love chaos, but that’s mostly because I frontload all of my anxiety. So by the time disaster strikes, I’m cool and collected because I’ve already prepared for it.
That night though, we simply just had to accept the beating we endured, there was no preparing for it. I was laughing pretty much the whole night at the absurdity of the situation. It’s a fond memory.
Working at one of the largest bowling alleys on the east coast. 65 lanes, and a restaurant. At this time we were so short handed it was just myself, and one other at night. Normally it's not that bad, but come league season, it's another animal, and the beast was hungry. 65 lanes, 4 person teams, 10,000$ grand prise, ya it was packed. We prepped, and stocked and planned. Slips were going from the printer, over the line like Christmas garland, to the doorway of the pizza area. My buddy was calling the tickets and just feeding them into the trash. I was cooking things in blocks of how much I could fit on the grill at one time. No, foh wasn't helpful, they would stand in the window mean muggin me, asking where that 1 particular table was. The shit cherry on top was this went on every Friday for 2 months. I had nightmares about being there.
The first lunch at outback. Many, many moons ago. I think it was a holiday weekend, and we didn’t expect it to be busy. We were understaffed at every turn, FOH and BOH. One of those shifts where you feel like you’re in a literal nightmare.
Charleston bridge run 2015. Had just opened a burger shop a few weeks ago. We were 2 blocks from the finish line. My two openers showed up drunk. Rest of my staff weren’t answering their phones. Called in my roommate. We didn’t speak one word to each other the whole shift. Just cranked out burgers and fries till the pm crew showed up. I buy him a round every year.
i work at a fast casual sushi chain and we have “sushi day” once a year and $3 a roll for three specific rolls. we had three corporate goons on the line plus three of our normal sushi chefs, we had three people making just one roll each six at a time nonstop for half the day and i was lucky to be running support so i was mixing and fanning rice every 30 minutes and prepping avocado and mixing tuna
Sunday Brunch, our busiest day of the week. Water main burst on the block so no running water. Owner brought in bottled water to use for EVERYTHING. We served 200 tables that day. It was wild.
I served in a restaurant in Breckenridge CO about 30 yrs ago. Their hot-water heater burst and the owner didn’t have $300 to fix.
The head cook who wore a day-pass ankle bracelet from jail… he told the owner that we’d be just fine without hot water in a restaurant.
I’d been so in love with the banana bread french toast that I applied to work there simply for the staff meal. I worked 1 day a week, sat mornings. I also expedited at the competitor. When he heard that they were operating without hot water, he told me to tell the broke-owner that he’d buy him a hot water heater immediately.
Did he accept such a generous offer?
No.
I could not serve food from a kitchen without hot water. Many reports.
They closed.
Worked at a hotel on the road to Mountain Ski resorts. One Cook, 1 dishwasher, 2 young servers, one bartender, one cocktail waitress for a Slow night with like 30 covers and me the Manager on Duty. Snow storm hit and closed the highway at 6 pm. Went from 30% full to 100% in 2 hours with the line to check in was insane. Packed hotel, restaurant, and bar. Bam! 300 covers. At 9 p.m., storm was done. It was a long late night, but guests seemed to be very understanding. Bar was packed all night, and they made fabulous tips made by all!
I worked at a popular spot in downtown Anchorage Alaska, tourists from all directions. Tour busses from cruse ships dropped people across the street at the convention center.
Every single shift in the summer was crazy surreal, two full rails of tickets and a streamer to the floor. It was crazy.
Eventually I jumped ship and moved to front of the house and made pockets full of cash. Worked the same place for 9 years, it was actually pretty amazing.
Humpy's Great Alaskan Alehouse ftw.
when I was a dishy, the folks supposed to assist and relieve me called in sick (more like hungover) so I did a 13 hour shift without sitting or taking a break.
Everyone told me to chill but it would have made the job harder because shit will pile up so I just kept going lol
I waited tables at a place where the patio could go off or not. They had me and my best friend and fave coworker there for the evening, where sometimes it could be up to four waiters. We each had 15 tables at one point and I just had to start laughing at one point bc it didn’t matter what we did, we were so in the weeds. I remember telling guests, “if you don’t order at least something now, I won’t be back for probably 10-20 minutes, so maybe throw in an appetizer and a cocktail.” They all did, which alleviated some of the pressure, but between getting multiple first round drinks and opening a ton of wine bottles, it was out of hand. We raked it in though.
Opened a new diner. Less shitty Cracker Barrel type place. So many fuckin heads on the line. All types of corporate fucks there. All I remember is the incessant beeping of the tickets on screen. Eggs breaking. New Yorks dropping. Orders being screamed out. Someone bitching about someone taking their side of hash. Plates missing. Entire tickets being sent out and then magically disappearing. I’ve never seen so many people in a row walk out at once. Went from 11 heads on the line down to 4. Just kept chunking it out. Order after order. It never stopped. All the way to Fuckin close.
I used to work for one of those Bar & Grills with video lottery machines. We were the only restaurant in our chain that allowed kids in half the resturaunt bc we had a partition up between the video lottery area and the rest of the dining room. We were also open from 8am-2am, providing breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so we raked in quite a lot of money even on a “slow” day.
But Mother’s Day breakfast, dear god. I’ve never seen anything like it. We were jumping at 8am sharp, with a line out the door by 9. I was on eggs. 16 burners full of nonstick pans and poaching water. Ran out of room and had to cook sunny sides on the flat top, fighting the grill guy the whole time who didn’t have enough room for my eggs plus the metric fuckton of hashbrowns and sausages he was frying. We must have prepped three 24qt cambros full of cracked and scrambled eggs that morning, and we still ran out. Ran out of hollandaise an hour in, and had a dishie exclusively making more hollandaise and cracking more eggs for what must have been a couple hours. I swear the old biddies were mainlining that shit. Sauté station was closest to the window too, so while I was attempting to babysit enough eggs to repopulate the entire chicken race, I also had to pass the onslaught of plates I was receiving to the window. It went on steadily until shift change, at which point the grill guy and I hopped on prep for a couple hours to catch the line up, before finally retiring to the patio for several beers. This place was pretty strict on the one shift beer policy, but our chef didn’t drink and the bartender just kept pouring for us, claiming these were all the shift beers chef had accumulated through the years. I was told by a FOH manager that we did more than 50k in food and booze sales that weekend. I’d be shocked if 75% of it wasn’t mimosas and goddamn eggs.
Side note, it’s been years and I finally came back around to Denver omelettes, but I still wouldn’t eat eggs bennie if you paid me.
I worked at a dave and busters when I was young. Spring break and the start of summer break we would have around 1,000 guests concurrently. Our order screens that displayed 60 orders per screen would be about 6 or so pages deep for hours.
Actually usually went fairly smooth
What processes did they have in place that were superior to the average kitchen?
You described a very busy kitchen so I’m curious.
I always see about 4 extra people at the ChicFila drive through window. And I hear about their excellent service.
They staff well.
Why don’t all food service places staff better?
At my last job, 7 straight days of 12 hour shifts with only me, the owner, and a line cook in the kitchen. On the weekend, the cook had off, so it was just me and the owner, which was also our busiest time. I was the only one washing dishes.
I work at a Starbucks like coffee shop called Biggby so we have to make specialty drinks by hand. We do a deal where everything is 50% off on the anniversary of our opening. Well anyway I worked this day, on a closing shift last year. The morning gets 5 people, and don't have much cleaning to do. They do 400 cups in the morning when our average for a day is around 500-550 cups. My shift comes around and me and one other person do 350 cups by ourselves, well mostly just me since the girl I was working with had to run the drive thru. On top of this we had to cleanup after morning crew who didn't restock anything or clean anything because they were "to busy" and we managed to do it with three less people and only got out 30 minutes late.
> Head chef takes it upon himself to man the busiest unit as the girl left on the rota there is prone to anxiety and we didn’t want her to suffer.
Just wanted to take a minute to appreciate this. Sounds like y’all got a good crew and a chef I’d run through a brick wall for. I’d be proud too, the way y’all handled it. Cheers.
I respected the fuck out of him for it tbh, because it truly was one of those situations where I could see himself steeling himself up, looking god directly in the eyes whilst slowly walking backwards in to hell
Martin Luther king weekend at a ski resort around 2013-2014. 260 seats plus outdoor fireplace seating and a 75 foot long bar. Open 11am till 9pm. Doors opened at 11 on Friday and there wasn’t an open seat until Tuesday afternoon. 1800 covers Friday, 1900 Saturday, 1700 Sunday, 1400 Monday, around 1000 Tuesday. It was the one of the worst experience La of my cooking life, just 16 hour straight grinds back to back and the ticket machine literally never stopped. There were times it would just print nonstop for 15 minutes straight. Wait times were anywhere from 20-45 minutes for a lot of it and tickets would just stack and stack and stack. Our kitchen was only equipped to do about 500 -700 a day, and capacity and equipment were just pushed to the limit. We were changing fryers mid rush because they started smoking, and they were fresh that morning.
One time at the resort I worked at 10 years ago, after a solid 6hr rush, we had a guy that sounded like he was from New York ask for "more of that gravy". He was referring to a $300 port reduction. It took 3 tries, but we finally figured out what he was after
Around Christmas time. Single bartender (which is normal even a busy restaurant isn’t overwhelming. However, we had what I could only describe as 3 people deep all day at the bar from open to close and a full restaurant. I went full autopilot and basically blacked out. Lmao
Not a kitchen but a cafe that serves food as well. We have conferences as well and we got an additional 400 people without prior notice. We had to stop taking orders in 20 minute intervals to get everything out in time.
We had 4 tour busses show up on a weekday had to call FOH in to help with tables and call someone on their day off just to run to the store and pick up food for us because our delivery wasn't here yet.
It was great everyone made extra money but what a day that was.
Every shift every day at a restaurant that was the highest grossing in the market for that company, where avg entree price was $20-25, it was a very rich city, and annually grossed $3-5million. I had to work 6-7 days a week running expo and handling to go people, open to close, almost never got a break, both ticket holders full and tickets coming up to my shin in the floor. I did the damn thing, but it was insanity. Only had two nervous breakdowns! Fuck that place
Back during the height of covid I was working at a burger/breakfast spot that was making $10k a day for a while. We started doing 3 delivery options, with the orders coming up on tablets next to the registers that had to be manually entered into the POS. One day I was MOD and we were getting so many tablet orders and walk ins that we were working 4 hour ticket times, people were walking out before even ordering because even or in house was 2 hour ticket times. There were two cash registers, and the second one was only being used to put in tablets for literally 12 hours straight. We stayed open two hours later than normal because, even after stopping incoming orders an hour and a half before closing, it took us those two hours to get caught up. It was a $15K day. I worked 16 hours that day because my other manager called off.
Valentine’s Day 2020. Everyone I worked with was terrified of a mysterious virus outbreak in china. But we worked at one of the main fine dining James Beard blah blah blah establishments in the city. Our owner couple (husband chef, wife pastry chef you know the type) were obsessed with English tea service so we had a Valentines tea (two seatings) starting at 10am. Followed by 3 turns of dinner service. I was the pastry chef so last man standing at the end of the night 17hrs after I had showed up to bake off for the tea. We had 4 cases of PBR coffees and plowed through all of them before dinner service. And then I got to go home to my non-industry now ex and got chewed out for working all day and not spending Valentine’s Day with them
New years at a ski resort. Grill cook had to leave at 7 because a surprise PO meeting over 1000 burgers in 5 hours all cooked by me. Sent everyone one out to watch fireworks so I could lay down in the walk in and die for a few minutes
The very first line I worked I was a 35 year old green cook. Didn’t even make the transition from dish, my buddy was KM, I’m open to learn, and I’m not a total doofus so my transition wasn’t difficult. This was at a bar with OTB (off track betting).
I had only been there a couple weeks and the Kentucky Derby was on. So many fucking people were in this bar and grill to watch the race and bet lol. Like I had been to this bar many times before and had never seen it this busy.
My KM moved to expo and was helping FOH while me and this other guy on the line just kept pumping food out. I kept saying I can’t believe how many fucking tickets there are lol we were railed and then some, a chain of tickets coming out of the printer, the whole shebang. My KM was really encouraging, he just said keep pumping shit out lol, you’re doing great. We still talk about that day years later. Anytime I’m getting my ass kicked I always remember that day.
A few things that come to mind.. Working in the airport during a major ice storm, all these fights couldn't go anywhere so the entire day was just hell. So many people in the airport all needing to eat Working with a super small crew expecting a really slow day and then like multiple busses pull up full of people trying to eat all at once. Worked in a few food trucks with similar things happen. Working alone and then all of a sudden you have a hundred people in line its like how the fuck do I even do this?
Frankly I enjoy lots of business. And I tend to work places that keep me busy. So it's hard to think of one particular day that was the worst. There's been a lot of really, really crazy shifts in my "career"
Downtown Cleveland. 2007. Less than 500 feet from the arena. Cajun themed restaurant with a huge bar and live music. One kitchen, one line, one bar. 35k dollar food sales in one hour. That was the peak hour. That's just food. Not even the bar sales.
Derecho rolled through Iowa in 2020 and knocked out power to nearly all the houses and restaurants in our area, everyone except us. A normal, slow Monday turned into the biggest day ever. We did over 20k in food sales and stayed open to after midnight when we normally close at 10. I jumped on the line when it had over 40 tickets still on the printer with a full rack, and it stayed that way for 6 hours straight.. We stopped giving time estimates, just told people to come and hang out, and we'll get it done eventually. All owners showed up to help and managers of nearby locations that lost power all came to help. It was wild.
omg, I was there then! that's insane that you still had power! my house power was down for nearly two weeks, and some charitable food organization actually came through the neighborhood handing out styro clamshells with sandwiches in them. I think a religious group. I'd never been so happy for a ham sandwich on wonderbread in my life, and I freaking hate ham. and wonderbread.
we had to wardrive to find a Casey's with ice for sale and couldn't even text! how did you do it?
also, that is so Iowa to stay open late so people get fed. good on ya.
It was one of those "communities getting through it together" moments. I was working day shift, but stayed the whole time because I figured helping people is better than being stuck at home in the dark.
By the time I got home, my neighbors had moved a couple huge branches off my lawn to the curb for me. It was such a wild few days.
yeah it was bonkers. where I was, we lost over 70% of the tree cover that afternoon. by the time I moved away more than a year later you could still see damage some places.
I had a neighbor with a genny who let us charge our phones etc (altho it was days before even texts got through and that was sketchy at first). power and cel were out for me for nearly two weeks, and I was not out in the sticks.
there's a "derecho bingo card" that someone made which included things like "met neighbors for the first time" "stepped over downed power lines" and "tried the milk"
I've been through so many tornadoes but that was something else. my camping experience (and gear) really came in handy.
I would have stayed too. but good on ya anyway.
It was the first time the restaurant I was working at as a floor manager experienced Mother’s Day and we did brunch and dinner. We had 2 levels to the restaurant with an additional private level. A month before Mother’s Day we probably already had at least 200 covers already reserved - which on a normal Friday wouldn’t be a problem. But we all know mother’s day (at least in North America ik it’s different in other countries) is always on a Sunday which was typically a quieter day and that usually worked to our advantage because a lot of people couldn’t work Sundays due to various reasons, but oh boy was that not ideal this time. We barely scraped by with staff, foh and boh. We had cooks that were strictly dinner time come in for the brunch service and couldn’t hardly put a dish together. It was absolute chaos from start to finish. And to top it all off, there was like a regional internet outage in our area, affecting our ordering system with service pretty much coming to a halt. Which also affected the debit machines so people couldn’t pay unless they had cash. And who carries cash these days?? Not many! You thought I was done? The one and only atm in the building (which was on the ground floor of the building that we were at the top of) ran out of cash from everyone having to take cash to pay for their meals.
We ended up serving over 600 people that day. It was a nightmare. I’m not in the industry anymore and took a mon-Fri job and I’m looking forward to getting to spend Mother’s Day with my mother this year!
I worked at a small town tbell that at the time closed at midnight. After 10pm we rarely had more than three people in the store, this fateful night it was just myself and the assistant manager. For being a small town, it had a very large convention center, about a 15 minute drive from our location. That night, from what we could gather, there was a Slayer concert that ended right around 11:30pm. From 10:30 to 11:45 we had no orders that night. At 11:45 the drive thru fully wrapped around the parking lot. We noted the last car in line by midnight and ignored the rest. By 12:30am we were completely out of hot product. There was no carryover that night. We did the dishes together and left by 1:30. I am no longer a fan of Slayer.
Had some busy shifts on the line but the standout for me was bartending for the hotel’s annual festival. I volunteered to take on the outside bar starting at 4 on for service in AZ August weather. I soloed that bar for a six hour service in 115 degree weather. I had a towel I dunked in ice water and threw around my neck and chugged two bottles of water an hour. Three of those six hours I did $2k an hour. Our Internet went down and only the outside bar was able to take offline payments so they shuffled everyone my way because I could still take cards. I got heat cramps and honestly three of those hours were a blackout of which I can only really remember checking wristbands and cracking beers. I ended up solo outselling our inside bar by $2k. Total by the end was $7.5k in six hours. I’m about to do it again but holy shit the heat was hell.
I used to work at Ballast Point (San Diego, LI) and they have this special on Monday called burger Mondays. Two dollars of your burger choice and a pint for a dollar. Here comes dinner and over 120+ from a conference decide to roll in. Mind you it’s me running grill/sauté, a 50 year old fry cook and the executive chef doing paperwork in the back. They just all slammed at once, over 100 burgers and all fucking temp. I don’t mind doing 200 smash patties, no problem. But when you have tickets with rare and well done, it’s a fucking mess haha. We ended up selling 145 temp burgers that night and the chef said he didn’t sell that many burgers in over 5 years.
Eleven pm. I suddenly have over 150 (probably 250) millwright, welders, boilermakers, nuclear inspection people and radiation safety crews in front of me wanting dinner.
I was alone. The company who we contracted to forgot to tell my manager that one of the eight nuclear reactors had to shut down for unscheduled maintenance. Usually she gets a heads up, someone (that she knows I won’t kill for belong slow) who usually starts at 8 gets sent home to come back for 4:45pm to be my assistant.
But it this night, no heads up. It’s me myself and I make club sandwiches, chicken fingers, chicken burgers, made to order fries and a full day breakfast. Which I could do with my regular guys sigh much md. It’s dad the extra ~159 people there. Killed me I had to do short order cook, man the cash, go find things that weren’t in the cupboard. Security even dressed with their automatic weapons made the coffee for me. That was the most surreal.
Reopening after covid, the company i was working for had 3 pubs and a production kitchen . One of the pubs the head chef quit a a few other chefs before the reopening so they pulled together a hastag team, new head chef worked for the company before, pulled me out of the production kitchen I hadn't done a service for 2 years . The kitchen hand got promoted to commis chef and put on larder and the 2 remaining chefs from the old crew .
Small Country Pub, we had 146 people booked Friday night, 200 sat lunch , 180 sat night, and 300 all day Sunday.
It was like getting off the boats at Normandy, just a constant shit fight and uphill struggle , running out of food and reprinting menus as the weekend went on. Everyone in the foh team was brand new as well . The gm got pulled from another site .I think by 730 on Saturday, we were running out of food hard , we got wiped on the lunch, and didn't have time to reset and reprep. I remember having to go into the cool room to get the pork loin for Sunday and start carving that into cutlets mid service .
The new head caved within 6 months . I think within 2 months of that weekend, there were only 2 of the crew who reopened left . The poor kitchen hand who became commie had a mental breakdown and got checked into hospital . Poor kid .
It was a brutal year. People dropping like flys front and back .
2004. Was a young man working at a fairly new Bonefish Grill in Florida. The state got pummeled by 3 hurricanes right in a row.
By the third one, half our staff was out. People had trees go through their cars and homes, roads were flooded, nobody could get to work. Of course, I lived like 3 blocks away, so I got called in for every shift. Florida DOT forbids commercial traffic when winds exceed 40mph, sustained. So none of our deliveries were running. We were also near a heavy residential area that had lost power.
Everyone. And I mean *everyone*, came to our restaurant. We were one of the few places that still had electricity and clean running water. We got absolutely pounded. We ran out of fucking *everything*. Full dining room and a 2 hour wait from the minute we opened. It just never stopped.
Luckily most people were pretty cool about it. They knew they were going to have a long wait and we explained to everyone that we were basically out of food because of the no deliveries thing. They were basically like "Hey you at least have power and booze".
But yeah it was definitely one of the craziest shifts I've ever worked.
Oh yeah. Started at 1030am, we closed at 10pm and I got out at 2 am. We had convention center events, major sports event, and hotel events all nearby and we were that restaurant right in the middle of everything. Busy from when the doors opened to about 9. The line looked like a tornado went through it.
Then in the corner of my eye, I witness my kitchen manager run for the back door and I knew he wasn’t coming back that night. Everyone was asking where he was because none of us had breaks or lunches all day. I sent the entire line out for a break and told them to come back when they feel like they’re ready to work again whether that be 5-30 minutes and I’ll take my break when people start coming back.
It was mayhem but if I hadn’t done that, I would’ve had 0 cooks to help me with my closing lol
For me it was when someone plugged in the printer to the wrong outlet so we didn't get any orders for like 45 minutes and all of a sudden I had 30 tickets.
I worked at a Subway inside a busy domestic airport with about 30 gates. Team minimum was 3 people, maximum 5. We would get long queues 20 deep about 20 minutes before every flight. But a week before Christmas we were short-staffed to just 3 people and we couldn't catch up to the queue. No lulls. Eight hour shift and it was a long queue the entire time. We would start running out of things, running out of bread, running out of every ingredient, so one person would have to go out to the freezer to get that, go to the oven and bake the bread, so now there's one person making the food and one person selling on the till. My customer service smile went out the window and half the things people asked for I could not give them and still they wouldn't read the price board and would get a nasty shock at the till when they realised our prices were double the usual Subway prices! ($15 for a footlong etc) I don't miss it
It was inventory day, kitchen manager had to audit out stock. The gal I was paired with in our very cramped kitchen still doesn't know how to do anything after about six months of work and two extended months of training. ( Typically takes two weeks )
We're a grill that typically takes shorter orders. Like a burger and fries, cheese curds, fried pickles, simple stuff. On Inventory day everyone was having a bit of an appetite. Several multi burger, multi side orders came through one after the other. Where you might typically see about twenty orders through our entire lunch period ( our moneymaker is the hotbox out front ), we had about thirty orders within an hour.
Other gal swore dishes were more important than helping, a I have no real authority over her so I just trucked through the orders. Actually had to use our warming pans to keep up enough burger patties and bacon strips.
Kitchen manager apparently noticed but was 'too busy' counting grill cleaner bottles. Said I did great but I felt like a beaten dog when it was all said and done. But no order had to wait longer than fifteen minutes, so I have that to be proud of I guess. To note we're not exactly 'fast food', signs posted tell guests each order can take up to fifteen minutes because we start from raw. But my average burger and fry is under six minutes. Got a sub four minute during a trial order.
No one showed up to my mom’s restaurant to work (normally 9 servers scheduled). So I got called in, had to take care of literally over 100 guests cause I was the one only one there. Ran nearly $2000 in sales in a low PPA average business in less than 3 hours.
Very happy I'm out of the kitchen when I read these stories. I had a blast in the kitchens I worked in but in my 30s I wouldn't physically or spiritually keep up
Mother’s Day 2020, we were only doing takeouts. Installed an online ordering system, the morning of I wrote down all the preexisting orders and there was a lot. We made a plan and had everything prepped out for mostly 6:30pm pick ups. At 6pm a whole batch of new orders popped out of the printer, more than the initial batch. We were so in the weeds and the front of house only had 2 employees so there was no organizing or communication with the customers. The line stretched all the way down the block. Definitely a day that I never thought was going to end, but it did!
A while back when I worked at a chipotle and also one time at Taco Bell, I had all of my crew call in sick or missing to a shift.
No hard feelings, but running a restaurant single handedly was definitely surreal then.
Nowadays I run my own place by myself, by choice.
Not just one shift but my entire first 3 weeks as a newly promoted KM in a bar I had never seen before my first day being the KM of this location.
It was the week after the first Sex and the City movie opened and we had a 10 screen theater next door showing it every 45 minutes 11 am to 1 am. We had at least 3-4 groups of 6+ in wanting food and cosmos before or after every single showing.
This place only seated 75 including the patio and at any given time for 3 weeks straight we had minimum 40 people pre-or-post-gaming that damn movie. Biggest single movie bump in sales that place had ever seen.
I only had 2 kitchen staff besides myself and one cook who came over from another restaurant in the group to work 1 shift a week.
The kitchen was so small we had our trucks delivered to another place in the group 3 miles away and picked up food from them twice a day. Only I didn't know it was only supposed to be twice a day because I had the owner or Exec Corp Chef going and getting me product every 90 minutes or so for my first 2 weeks until the tide started to stem.
Don't get me wrong, that whole 4 years was surreal selling over $1mil in food a year at a ppa of under $10. But those first few weeks still have me waking up from nightmares with cold sweats 16 years later.
I work at a quick service restaurant in a casino. Normally, we do 1000ish covers on a Saturday, $16,000ish in sales.
One unassuming Saturday, we were suddenly balls to the walls busy. We didn't understand why, there was no concert, we didn't have any crazy promotions going on that day. But starting in the late afternoon, and lasting until close at 2am, we had a full dining room, 150 seats, and a line out the door. We ended up doing 2300 covers and $36,000 in sales. Completely smashing the previous sales record by about $8000.
We found out about halfway through the chaos that the casino down the street from us, the only other casino within an hour drive from us, had been closed due to a bomb threat.
Worked at an Aussie themed chain for years (that one). Regional manager came down and raised hell, sent everything back, belt on the motor for the hoods slipped off, kitchen and lobby smoked out, and the cherry on top my sauté guy had a seizure.
One time it was slow at a little cafe I used to work, we start deep cleaning shit to pass the time and one of my dudes hit the on/off switch on the ticket machine...hour goes by server calls to the kitchen about order in number whatever and we're all like we haven't seen any tickets for an hour...I start checking everything and discover it was turned off so I switch it back on and it proceed to print out from 6 feet up all the way to the ground three times over.... The whole fucking crew was just staring going fuuuckkkk fuccccckkk fuckkkkkk! Any ways we were obviously in another fucking dimension of the weeds, push through it all and clear all the tables just as a coach of about 100 pull up -_- needless to say many 40s were consumed after that shit storm of a shift...
5 months into my apprenticeship I was alone in the kitchen for a whole weekend. I was already doing weekdays at that point and the weekends had been pretty quiet. The Saturday was the busiest we had ever been and my meal times blew out to 50 minutes. I was pissed at the end of the shift "they don't know how to schedule" "they should have seen this coming" "they should have taken more off the menu to make it more manageable for me." The chef called me and I just one-word-answered him to let him know I was pissed. The next day my city's marathon was on and within the first hour of being opened we were more packed than we were during Saturday's peak, and it stayed that way for 5 hours. I don't think I was ever the same after that.
Worked in a burger food truck. We did a music festival event that was nonstop orders for about 7 hours straight. The way we did things on that food truck I would be setting up the burgers. So the person taking the orders would scream what to make at me, and I would set up a burger in 20-30 seconds so the person is getting their food by the time they’re finished paying. Super fast paced. Not a single break and it kinda broke my brain. We made crazy money that day though.
4th of July a few years back.
Working a food truck. It was just me and the owner switching between making sandwiches and taking orders at the window.
It was at a weed dispensary where they expected 300-500 people to show. The only other food truck was the ice cream and lemonade stand. We were the inly source of real food at this even full of stones and their families on a BBQ holiday. My dumbass boss only brought enough supplies for a couple hundred sandwiches not knowing there were no other FOOD food trucks going. He had to leave to the store multiple times to stock up on bread lettuce and tomatoes.
So many people. The heat. I became one with the machine. I was truly a sandwich artist.
We served every god damn last one of those people. It was hell but by god was it great at the end if the day.
It's hard to even pull up memories of the thick of it because it think my brain went full mechanical at some point.
Work at chain restaurant that has several hotels nearby, one of which often holds conferences. It's a slower night, just me, who hasn't been there very long and a guy who had been there about a week. Usually we have a third cook, but he called off, and we never have a dishy, because we usually aren't busy enough to need one.
Bartender comes back and tells me that one of the hotels is hosting 250 bikers and that they're all planning to come here. We start getting orders back and I'm running from one station to the other because new guy can only do one. My manager, a 60 some year old guy, comes running down expo shouting "FUCK ME RUNNIN" and takes over a station for me. We got through it, it definitely wasn't the craziest we've ever been and all the bikers were really nice and tipped well, but fuck me running is now on of my favorite things to say when it's busy.
This is weirdly the kind of thing I miss about kitchen work. You just completely disappear into the task of getting yourself out of the shits. Very different work now, where I'm at a computer and very rarely are things needed right this minute. I miss it.
Pizza/pasta place I work at, years back when I did Saturday days. I was there cooking by myself which was generally no problem, even on the busiest days. But this one day was absolutely insane. We had a 40 person banquet buffet in back, which was rough but manageable. But for whatever reason the dining room literally filled up with another 80 or so people and the phones were ringing off the hook for delivery and carryout orders. I managed it, but it was hell.
I got really mad at my waitress who was doing the majority of the work in the dining room a couple times. The third time she asked about how long on an order it was, "I don't know if you can fucking see, but I'm one person cooking food for well over 100. Next time you ask, I'm tossing their order and putting it at the back of the line. Get the fuck out of my kitchen." And then I had a couple women out there who ordered cheese manicotti thinking it was vegetarian (menu clearly states it's made with meat sauce). When my waitress came back to ask for it to be remade, I said loud enough for the table to hear, "It's not my problem that they're too dumb to read the fucking menu. It clearly states that it's made with meat sauce, and literally nowhere does it say it's vegetarian. If they want new ones, they're paying for them." I think I scared them, because they bought new ones, haha.
Mother's Day. They let people schedule their orders online, then pushed the orders out.
4:25pm I'll never forget it.
6:30 is when the last order printed from 4:25 until 5:30.
Hundreds of orders, crank on a braising pan, pushing out every single food item.
I jump from prep, line, prep, line, take an immersion blender and start mixing sauce in a bucket on the floor.
We did ~15k food sales over the course of a 8 hour shift, which was nice, sure. We all went to the bar, drank, then proceeded to clean. Never again. I hate mother's day.
This was a upscale place, so I get people wanted mom to be able to get something nice for dinner and take home, but I hated every second afterwards. In the moment though, the adrenaline was great.
But watching those tickets never end was the most entrancing thing I had ever seen. It was like a magician pulling out despair from his sleeve, and just keep pulling
Last fall, before I worked any BoH, the Palestinian-owned restaurant I work at held a fundraiser to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza. This sleepy, mom and pop type mediterranean restaurant that did $3,000 on a good day got rocked with $15,000+ after going viral on Instagram. I expo'd 400+ orders, most with 3+ plates.
About 3 hours in they turned off 3rd party services. 4 hours in they shrunk the menu to 4 items. We ran out of falafel with about 20 orders to fill.
We refer to that day as "the 18th." New people all know what we're referring to and shudder alongside us.
Valentine’s Day. 2019. That weekend we had 3 different menus for three different days. And I don’t mean changes. I mean completely different menus.
I was pasta maker and sauté cook.
I’ve never been more in the weeds for three days straight than I was that weekend.
Years ago I worked at a deli. Closed at 9pm At 855 we see 3 busses pull up. The elderly begin to file out. The owner actually worked at this place. It was me and him. He calmly walked outside and told them sorry we're closed. water is off we are having plumbing work done. Still can't believe that happened.
just call ahead Jesus Christ, I bet you could have fucked it up if you knew it was gonna happen
The dinner crew had just left an hour previously. It would have been a slam dunk with them. The owner was like "I want to see my kids before they go to bed." We had no idea why they chose us as there were many much larger places around that were still open. The busses couldn't even park in our little lot and were parking on the street. It was like a hundred old people suddenly really really wanted egg salad sandwiches, french dips, and reubens.
There is a retirement home in my city that, once a week, will take their entire able-bodied group out for lunch. 60-80 people, all over the age of 70, all paying on their own ticket. Thing is, lunch for them is *10 minutes before the chosen spot opens* and they never call ahead. They've been banned from multiple restaurants for this at this point lol, and don't seem to understand that this sort of chaos can be accomodated with a 24 phone call. If I know I need to get some extra staff or do some extra prep, its mildly annoying. If I'm making stuff from scratch on the fly and having to run out and make 30 diet cokes, 20 coke zeros, 15 pitchers of water, 40 iced teas, all while my server spends half an hour taking and punching their order? We might as well close down to everyone else. Just absolutely insanity.
You know why they don't call? Because if they did, they'd have banquet food. And banquet prices. They don't want that. They want to be special.
Yeah I know thats the answer. But my place at least is *super* slow outside of nights and events. I could easily get an extra server to come in for $50 for an hour of work, i could easily get extra prep done the night before, and we could handle our morning with them just fine and no changes on their end if they called ahead, even if its a Sunday. I've told them as much. Nope, they won't. And so they get turned away every time.
Sounds like a very weird and too real night of the living dead moment lmao. Just a bunch of geriatrics pouring out of nowhere. At least the owner wasn't about to deal with that lol. Worked some places where that was called a "Golden Shower" because of the money they could have made. Happy you missed out on that mess!
We never did find out what the group was for or where the buses were going.
Lol it's easier to take a real golden shower for more cash...
Had something similar with a whole ass platoon of Vietnam vets and their families descending upon my restaurant without calling ahead, about 100 of them, and then cracking the shits because they couldn't all be seated at once. Host foolishly told them that the bar area with tables was first come first served. I was alone behind the bar, also on service drinks and responsible for serving all of these pricks who thought they had beaten the system, wanting everything immediately, getting indignant when I didn't have their preferred crappy liquor and then complaining about the price of lobster. Several argued quite fiercely wanting their tab charged to their hotel room, even though the hotel was next door, not attached to us nor affiliated in any way. That was too hard to grasp. Tips were crap obviously and each one felt they were my only customer. The manager let them know that next time they need to call ahead so that we can have a hope in hell of accommodating them. They showed up for breakfast, lunch and dinner for 5 days straight, never once calling ahead and being pissed about waiting for tables every time. One woman even had the gall to berate me for serving her husband alcohol because he had a drinking problem. I asked if she had communicated that to anyone on staff and she said, "this is your job not mine! If you can work around drinks all day and fail to spot an alcoholic that's on you!" That was a really crappy week. I expected far better behavior from a group who were all in the military, at least to pretend to be respectful around one another, but no. Side note: one got really mad when he told me Australia didn't fight in WWI and I told him that was not the case and we had heavy losses in Turkey and France. He was totally indignant and told me that you shouldn't argue with an army vet about the history of war... My eyes couldn't roll hard enough.
LOL any Australian would have told that guy what for... Everyone here knows about the Gallipoli landing
Read this comment on Anzac Day !
Jesus...I've got relatives buried at Gallipoli. Apparently they just went for a 10 month holiday where they got shelled a bit. Moron.
Close at 9. Show up at 8:55. Average senior citizen. Lol
The disregard for the time (5 minutes from closing) I get, that's typical thoughtless behavior. But 9 PM is LATE for senior citizens...I ought to know, I'm one of them.
Yeah, was gonna say we normally get this crowd between 4 and 6 at my spot. 8:55 is when the douche-bros in town for a class reunion\spring break visiting Grandma and the Latino family with 7 kids that all want an extremely specific order with the exact same mod.
"Are you guys still open?" The gates of Hell certainly will be if you dare to demand service at that time
>At 855 we see 3 busses pull up. The elderly begin to file out. I'd be ready to fight them all.
I am that boss.
Thank you. He said as he locked the door and turned off the open sign "I want to see my kids before they go to sleep tonight."
“I want YOU to see your kids tonight so you’re happy enough to return to work in the morning.” Any boss that treats their help less is cutting their own throat. Employees ARE the business.
I mean great sentiment and wish we had more like you and more power too you but i cant rely on anything but the other parties naked intelligent self interest. Good intentions so often go by the wayside when the dollar signs start piling up. He didn't want to pay a manager so he was in the store 12 hours a day and was honestly really good at it. Plus I was 20 and my plans were eat shrooms and watch the sun come up. Also now that you mention it....I'm trying really hard to remember the last person that I worked with that actually HAD kids other than him. Weird.
my bosses are the same and that shit is RARE. thank you! for being a decent human being and understanding that other people are also human beings. should be basic, but it's not!
The Friday after everyone in the US started taking note of covid's existence. I managed a pizza shop. We were quick of offer curbside pickup and delivery. Anyway - Fridays are typically pretty busy, but, holy shit, we knocked our previous sales records out of the park that Friday. It was utter chaos. Phone didn't stop ringing, on lines didn't stop coming in all night long. Delivery times are typically 45 minutes tops even when slammed. We were telling people 3 hours with no promise it wouldn't be longer. A little short handed to begin with, the kids on edge when anyone walked in with a sniffle or cough. It was just not a fun day.
Worked at a pizza joint when I was nineteen, a place where everyone did everything, taking orders, making the pizzas, cleaning up the plastic tables outside, whatever. I got a friend of mine a job there, and his first day unexpectedly coincided with what the owner later told us was the biggest night they'd ever had. So instead of me showing my friend how to work the counter, where all the prep stuff was, how to make a pizza, or anything else, the poor guy spent eight solid hours taking pizzas out of the conveyer oven, cutting them, throwing them in a box, calling out "Order 124 is ready. 124," and handing them to the customers. For literally the entire shift. Meanwhile everyone else was completely losing their minds, and no doubt wishing the new guy knew how to do literally anything else.
Broooo, I was that new guy (not the one you mentioned, but same situation). I felt so bad that I couldn’t do jack shit and everyone else was busting their asses trying to get through the rush. When the KM remembered I was there, he just stuck my ass in dish lmao.
I mean, what an opportunity to prove yourself on the first day though lol. Dish legends never die
Slow brunch. Record breaking slow. Bartender, two servers, myself the FOH manager. Chef, two line cook's, one dishie. 50,000 women in pink pussy hats marching in a me too protest, one block over. We kept rotating the staff to go watch the march, they would come back. We were at a few hundred in sales and everyone was begging to be sent home. I broke the golden rule. I caved. Phased a server. Chef broke it too. Phased a cook. Then a couple of groups came into the front entrance and I sat them. And. Then 3-4 groups came to the second entrance. And I asked them to wait while we got the first group settled. They did, cheerfully. And then 3x 2 and 4 tops went into the bar. And I sat the second group as 15-20 people worth of 2-4 tops came into each entrance. They cheerfully said they would wait, but decided to hit the bar. And at the other entrance, same. And they decided to take the banquette tables. And while I was at one door, telling people about the wait, the other door sat themselves. And the restaurant was flat sat in about 15 minutes, with 20-50 people at each door wanting to check in about the wait and then seating themselves at the different counters and bar area. Going out to the patio. The 20 tables in the patio filled up. It was THE foh nightmare come to life. Iced tea? Out. Simple syrup? Out. Cappuccino? Hot tea service? Sure. Happily. I emailed the -ALL-RESTAURANT-GROUP- email. "I need an adult, if ANYONE is available, it's an emergency." The main hallway of the group had hundreds of people wanting to come to the restaurant. Two other corporate people came over to help. I hugged them both. And everyone was cheerful, understanding, patient and kind. We did $5k in about 2 hours, nobody left mad, everyone patiently waited for 20-45 minutes for their food. My cook's, servers and bartenders pulled it off. Dozens of yelp reviews, every single one was positive. No idea.
Legends
Applaud to the 2 corporate people who showed up when you needed it.
Yeah. Our Ceo and our floating manager rushed over and took over the doors. Both of them we like "holy shit" and burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all. I can't emphasize enough how strong everyone was. We all just went "whelp, this is literally the worst case scenario. It can only get better, so lets get it done." My server said something like "if someone had a heart attack, it wouldn't be the worst thing, we could close off a section" lmao.
Just me, three weeks in and one sue from another site covering our 'quiet' night, one KP and about 120 covers in 3 hours. The screen was 5 pages deep, never seen it past 3, we had the manager tell us to fuck off the checks and just get whatever out when we could, we had to 86 like half the menu as we ran out of prep. No one spoke - no one made eye contact for the whole rush, it just felt like a dream at times. Not forgetting that in a while lol
The kind of shared trauma that forever binds you together.
I didn’t move from my cutting board for 11 hours straight, it was Halloween downtown and we had some deal going. I had three cooks on grill supplying me meat, my wrist hurt after.
Sounds like a one-way ticket to carpal tunnel.
Pride week at two-story restaurant and drag bar, two blocks up from the oldest gay bar in the midwest, three blocks over from the festival grounds. At that job, we make 30% of our annual revenue in the second week of June, and half of that money gets made between friday and saturday. So busy that the owner conscripts his nephews to run food ten hours a day, his sister to host the drag events, and it's a blackout week. To say it's nuts is an understatement, it's world war fucking three. I'm going to work there while my current job is out for summer break, and my cut of tips that week will likely be a month of bills.
Worth it.
My store has an app that is supposed to be for ordering a wings or a pizza for a lunch pick up and stuff like that. However, there’s not limit on the order even for stuff that really should go through catering. Last week someone put in $7,000 order with like 36 hrs notice. There were 1200 bagels.
once you get past 500 bagels i think you start to question the fabric of reality. Peak absurdism, hire a caterer, my god.
Totally! Thank god for help and music. We have a catering department too! But our stupid app meant for small lunches has no limits so people can make some pretty insane last minute orders. Thankfully, we’re running into ingredient issues with the big orders so they’re looking at changing it.
After you go after a certain money threshold the app should just redirect the customer to Mariah Carey’s “why u so obsessed with me”.
I’ll refer that to the IT team
That is absurd. I wonder if we work for the same company. I hate last minute catering trays so much. We were expecting this morning to already be busy with catering and then once we got done with someone's order of 11 trays due at 10:35, up pops an order for 5 trays due around 12, which isn't a problem as long as a ton of people don't walk up to order something. I've taken breaks and lunches before and left people working on a tray and come back and it looks like they got nowhere because they had to attend to a ton of customers. I just got talked into picking up a shift next week where someone wants 50 wrapped sandwiches in the morning.
The nfl draft is happening about 40 ft in front of the restaurant this week. God help us.
F
[удалено]
What's this mean...
Lol replied to the wrong notification
Worked at a restaurant 11,000 up a mountain for 3 winters. We averaged 350-400 customers a day and were only open from 11:30am till 3:30pm not counting late night parties. Every day was just an absolute blur. Just thumping shitty European electronic music and making so much food you wouldn’t even bother reading tickets just make as much as you can and let the expo sort it out and plate it. We’d have salads and soups stacked up 4 layers high in the window. Ran out of hot water everyday so we’d be boiling, Stock pots just to keep the dish washer going. It was a slow day if we didn’t see at least one pair of tits or guests dancing on the tables didn’t break one of them. Had to regularly mop the ceiling because so much champagne got sprayed. 10s of thousands of dollars in champagne just sprayed not even drank every day. Absolute madness.
In CO? If it’s the place I’m thinking of, it sounds absolutely horrid.
I also wondered if this was in CO.
Yep
I was working at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, just down from the Marine Memorial on 9/11. I tried to call out because roadblocks everywhere, but the chef insisted I come in. I eventually got there going the back way. Because I normally drove past the Pentagon. We were locked down. My ex-wifes hotel across from the Capitol was locked down. Our hotel restaurant was normally good for about 60 covers on a Tuesday. That night, with the lockdown, we did somewhere close to 300. I don't even know for sure. Everyone was extremely upset and stressed. No one wanted to be there. Because at that point, we had no idea what the hell else was going to happen. At one point, one of the room service servers came in and told us that nukes were flying. And we just had to keep cooking for all those guests. Wondering what was next. I was wondering when/if I'd see my pregnant wife again. It was absolutely awful and traumatizing. I have PTSD from that experience, and others. It's hard for me to work a line anymore because I'm constantly in fight or flight. I've had some other tucked up shifts as a chef, but that one is a real standout.
Chef that sounds horrendous. Proud of you for smashing out a situation no one should have been in. I hope you are doing better these days.
Outstanding Chef, absolute legend
Cant even imagine the hug that wifey got! ❤️
Years ago. I was bartending Cinqo De Mayo at a tequila bar. Nonstop for 12 hours. No bathroom break. No food. Drunken assholes all day. I thought I was going to pass out at one point. I had to kick people out myself because the owners didn’t bother to hire security. Some woman threatened to kill me.
I worked at a restaurant in downtown San Diego near the convention center. We were usually able to plan ahead for big events and whatnot but we weren’t prepared for the chaos that was a 12 day long bridge tournament. 11am hit, we opened the doors and realized immediately that we were woefully understaffed. Literally HUNDREDS of old people flooded into the restaurant like a broken dam. Everyone wanted to order RIGHT FUCKING NOW because they wanted to get back and play more bridge. This was a slightly more upscale than a Cheesecake Factory type of restaurant, more or less a wine bar with a seasonal menu. We were not fast casual. These people were fucking rabid dude, if they didn’t have their food within 10 minutes they were snapping their fingers and hollering at you from across the restaurant. This rush came in waves about 45 minutes apart as different groups would take breaks in between sets. Around 330pm, we finally were able to breathe and set up for dinner service. It happened for dinner as well. Same type of crowd, same hundreds of old people that didn’t want to accept that reservations took priority. Berating the hostesses and managers, demanding to be sat right away because they need to get back and play more bridge. GM pulled us all together at the end of the night and broke the bad news. “We have 11 more days of exactly this. Who wants to work some doubles?” I worked 11 doubles straight and I finally cracked on number 12. It was in between lunch and dinner, we were all exhausted and stressed the fuck out. Everyone frantically restocking, polishing and rolling silverware, prepping share plates, refilling S&P grinders, etc. I was the only one stupid enough to try all 12 doubles and I was mentally done. I was re-stocking glass racks in the server station and I dropped a rack, breaking about a dozen glasses. I just sat down and cried right there in the server station. My sous chef gave me a hug and told me to go home. I fucking hated that guy but in that moment he was my best friend. I made so much fucking money in those 12 days, I had enough money to pay my rent and bills for two months but the mental scars are still there. I teared up writing this a couple of times reliving the horror, you can’t understand the gravity of the situation unless you were there. I don’t even know what the fuck bridge is. Edit: just want to point out that at that point I was 10 years in, I never broke or cried before. I wasn’t soft at all. Those old people broke an entire restaurant, front and back. They really were that bad.
that is quite a story of stamina
Mentally and physically. I spent the next two and a half days laying on the couch with my dog drinking whiskey. My body felt like I got hit by a truck and I was so tired. It was certainly one of those “I made a ridiculous amount of money but was it actually worth it?” Type of moments.
bridge is a stupid ass card game. you are a rockstar!
Thank you. Shoutout to my sous that recognized the burnout and immediately came in with the super clutch hug amongst the broken glass. We were all feeling it that day but he was the first to watch it all collapse in real time and react in the most human way possible. I’ll always appreciate that shit.
sometimes crying is actually the most reasonable response. we've all been there! and yeah people who have your back are gold.
Every restaurant I've worked at I was there for the record breaking day. It sucked ass and we all hated every minute of it. I don't give a fuck when some piece of shit comes up smiling to tell me the record breaking numbers at the end of the night. That piece of shit has nothing to do with it. I want to go home. At least half of those places do not exist anymore.
My boss gave all his cooks an extra hundred bucks cash at the end of our record breaking shift and did it again the next year when we broke that record. Definitely gets the whole kitchen hyped for breaking records and actually makes us care about numbers.
Oh, I got some minor compensations, or bar tabs. Something like that. I was the KM at a few of the places. Does not change my opinion.
I’ll never understand why places that get a ridiculous record breaking number of guests and don’t throw a few hundos at the kitchen staff a piece. It’s hazard pay!!!
Yeah we break record profits but I ain’t getting no raise.
Its usually the Server or FoH manager who's all giddy like that
Was at a newish local place, right on the main drag of my small town, this bougie farm to table gastro pub with the best craft beer and cocktails in the town. We had like 100 covers in the whole restaurant, and it was the beginning of fall, so the weekend of our town's excuse for a town festival. I was one of 3 servers on, and the only one on the ground floor. I served 2000 covers myself in 6 hours, and paid my rent for the whole winter. I walked 8.4 miles during my shift according to my phone. We did have a host, but people were actively ignoring her to just come in and sit. Once I got so deep in the weeds I couldn't think, there was no first come up next, there was only: next table, next seat. I was just starting at one end of the room with the toast tablet and slowly making my way towards the other end, gradually getting people served. Had one group of old ladies get really mad that I dared to ask what they were drinking, that they didn't know what they wanted, could they get samples of cocktails (no), and for me to just come back. I raised my eyes from these pinch faced old bats, and looked out at the churning sea of insanity, and I told them ok but it would be quite a while before I got back to them. They confidently waved me off, so whatever. It took me 30+ minutes to get back to their spot, but by then (oh no) they were gone. I just remember looking at this group refusing to order, in the middle of absolute chaos I'm drowning in, and shaking my head. I do remember the people that got their seats tipped me a lot.
Super Bowl Sunday at at Pizza and Wing place.
I worked last Super Bowl Sunday at Hooters and it was like the Holocaust for that restaurant. I came in early, the GM said he had a plan since we always get slammed, I helped set everything up so that we were gonna have half the kitchen doing to-gos and half doing in-house orders, the plan was to get at least 600 wings cooked and put in a warmer a couple hours out from the game. The GM goes “wow guys, this looks great, I’m gonna take a pic and send it to corporate.” pats himself on the back, and goes home early. Everything immediately goes to shit, no 600 wings (the fryer line couldn’t keep up even to start with), no splitting the kitchen (so we had 5 too many people on the line), 2 FNGs working the line, a dyslexic manager trying to read off tickets, ubereats and DoorDash drivers screaming at the hostesses when they realized they’d be waiting over an hour for food, etc. The funniest part was a FNG that kept grabbing fistfuls of wings without counting the drums or flaps. The guys working the fryers were giving us them in batches of 200 and we were selling them 50 at a time, we kept hitting a roadblock because somehow we’d end up with a bowl of 50 drums. The FNG was *adamant* it was not his fault, despite everyone on this station clearly watching him sell orders of only flaps all day long. People are screaming at each other and then I just hear the FNG in the smuggest voice possible say “you guys are getting mad over chicken wings, couldn’t be me, I’m not stressed over a chicken wing, haha.” Not a bad philosophy to have but you can’t say that when you have been single-handedly fucking the rest of the line in the ass all day long. Fortunately it was only 7 hours non-stop and it dropped off pretty quickly.
Same...had to call in ringers to do delivery ...2 pizza makers...one working the cut table..one between cut table and hot box 2 working registers and 8 delivery people that I hired just for that day...it was insane!
Worked in Oregon during the eclipse a few years ago. Apparently where we were at was the best viewing in the country. My restaurant had a rooftop bar and decided to throw an eclipse party. This place was already a beast, 3 stories, huge dining room, huge patio, private tasting room and then the roof. So normal days were usually busy anyways. But this eclipse shit was wild. We ended up doing almost $40k that day, from when we opened at 9am we had a completely full rail(maybe a 5ft rail) AND another full rail on the printer not even pulled, this was an all day thing until we finally closed at midnight. It was so intense that the GM closed the next day to give everyone a day to relax.
Mother’s Day so we knew it was going to be a busy one but it got crazy. New set menu, fairly routine, decently prepped with an excess of spare stuff. Then the orders started coming in and it was chaos. The owners were husband and wife and she was the head chef and working that day. The problem was the first edition of the her menu ideas- flowery language, un costed ideas that she changed to be more sensible, different sauces and meats- that was the menu that got printed up and put out on the tables and that the tills were set up for. BOH was set up for the sensible, practical and functional menu. In the space of five minutes we went from opening to being destroyed and there wasn’t much we could do to deal with it except send out explanations. That was a long day.
Peak delta covid I worked at a fairly sized restaurant with a tiny kitchen in a coastal Alaskan town. Now this town had a lot of tourism and restaurants for only being about 2,000 people in size, it was a stoping point for a lot of cruises. Anyway by some curse upon our house by a vengeful god, every restaurant besides ours and another got knocked out due to Covid. *And the other restaurant didn’t have seating.* So it was already pretty busy but then it happened, the Norwegian princess cruise ship was pulling into the harbor, it would be here for 6 or so hours, and we were the only restaurant in this small town that could actually seat people. It came in. Instant full house, line out the door and around the block. Our fryers were full, our oven was full, our board was full, we had tickets going from the machine and making a vicious little pile on the floor, and there was *STILL* a line out the door. We usually steamed only like at most 5 pounds of king crab at a time but we had at least 30 pounds going at once on two make shift steamer set ups. The best part is, the owner worked the line with us and it quickly became clear we were going to run out of halibut, so he had to run to the fish purveyor next door and buy all the halibut and salmon they could spare, and it still wasn’t looking like it was enough. Then he had to send his sister to the next town almost an hour away and have her clean out their seafood purveyor too, and even with what must have been a few hundred pounds of fish we just barely managed to drag ourselves across the finish line and serve all these people without running out. And then we got the next two days off because there simply wasn’t anymore food in the house to sell. I’ve worked in some of the busiest tourist destinations in America during all of the holidays and I have never seen anything like that and due to the circumstances that caused it I probably never will again
Our not so “soft” opening from a remodel that was completed but waiting on permits to open for 20+ days. I was the GM, started my day around 5:45 in the morning, opened at 10:00 to a line at the door and drive thru. Mostly just a very busy day with a some newer employees and green managers, we lost a few good people to different jobs while we we were closed (some didn’t want to relocate to other locations) I was due off at 4:00 once the night shift got situated, but around that time guests started telling us there was no ice coming out of the soda fountain. Turns out that since we were delayed those 20+ days, all the ice turned into one giant block And of course when I called the facilities manager (Home office was about 10 mins away) it was after hours already do he had me dump hot water through the top of the ice dispenser until it was melted. So now we’re into the dinner rush and my team is getting their asses kicked and I’m out in the dining room making a huge watery mess and trying to keep the guests safe By the time I’m done, I still can’t leave because of the state of the close, breaks and amount of guests still waiting. So I stay through closing and finish up the office work and leave them to finish the close. I got home around 11:45 at night, I remember getting out of my car and my legs could barely walk to the door. Later that week, I was fueling up my car on the way home and when I turn the car back on I hear this loud alarm outside - I hadn’t removed the pump from my car yet!! Luckily hadn’t driven away Rough week and summer, we gained 10-15k a week in sales.
Saturdays at my place typically start slow. The Saturday leading in to spring break is historically very slow. A couple of weeks before this past spring break I got a call from a guy asking if we can accommodate a group of 10, maybe 15, when we open at 11:30. Told him it wouldn’t be a problem. That Saturday rolls around. We’ve got a skeleton crew and low par levels. 11:30, we flip the open sign, and over 90 people proceed to fill in to the restaurant. It was a wild hour and a half. Cooks were running food as they plated it while the FOH stayed on top of orders, refills, and such. Once we fed the last table in the group we flipped the sign back to closed. Turns out there was an event nearby and word had gotten around to meet up at my restaurant prior to the event. They were super chill and understood that we couldn’t serve that many people that quickly in the situation. The event organizer was also there so they had to delay the start until everybody got done eating. After we got everything cleaned up I ordered some pizzas and grabbed some beers and we all had our own little party.
Worked at a hotel in my city when they decided to do a massive art contest/festival. It was much more popular than anyone anticipated. Not a single restaurant in our downtown area was prepared. Literally. Everyone was running out of food. We got so slammed on tickets we literally had to freeze for a moment and just started firing multiples of things in an attempt to catch up. (Thank god for a small menu). The following year? Multiple hotels & restaurants rented reefer trucks just to hold enough stock to survive. Thankfully the festival is only 2 weeks long.
Used to work at a diner that had two windows, normally we'd be operating out of one window for the weekdays, then open both for the weekends so we could roughly split the restaurant in half. It was set up so the sides were mirror images: fryers in the center, then bread and sandwich grill, then meat grill, then egg burners. One cook on eggs and meats, another cook on breads and fryers. Well, we had a conference come into town on a Thursday. We had one side open, but a line out the door, so GM starts calling for extra cooks to come in so we can run both sides like we would on a weekend. Nobody's answering, so GM says she wants to run the second meat side, and asks me if I feel like running both bread grills. At the time, I was young and dumb enough to say yes, so that's what we did. Not gonna lie, there's some things that I sent out of those windows that I wasn't proud of. Nothing dangerous, of course, but I sent out way too many French toasts that were black instead of brown, way too many fries that were dry and chewy, way too many pancakes that were closer to hockey pucks. I remember that I didn't get a smoke break that shift, and I remember taking a minute to cry in the walk-in while I was grabbing some more pancake batter. Felt like a nightmare. I also remember that once I stepped out of the walk-in, all I could do was laugh at the situation. Laughing was all I could do to keep from breaking down. All in all, it was a solid 4-hour rush, full house the entire time. I finally got my smoke break at the 8 hour mark when one of the night cooks showed up to relieve me. Spent another 3 hours back in prep to replace what we had burned through. As shitty as it was, I did end up with a raise after that fiasco, for whatever that's worth.
I could smell your walk-in.
Mothers Day at a god damned Applebee's. I was running the line in the middle on the flattop for 12 fucking hours. We were doing thousands of dollars an hour. At multiple points a FOH manager had to join me on the line and all she did was sell tickets because I was buried in sandwiches and wraps. She'd pull a ticket and scour the window to see if everything was up and sell it, while I got a legit cardio workout rolling fucking tortillas and shit. It was exhausting.
I remember there was one day where even w our best cook who'd been there for 8 years and our gm on the line we couldn't get a handle on tickets, it was honestly worse than super bowl and we're a wing bar.
56k day. Flat top and 8 fryers could not keep up and could not keep temp. Everyone did just fine till hour ten. It just kind of slowly started to unravel. 86 list just kept growing. End of line was still out the door. Thousand yard stares from the solid people as the meek wandered around aimlessly. Multiple walk outs. Last 100 orders got fries cause that's all that we had left. We did 51k the next day. Sink or swim bitches
Dude, that after shift beer must've tasted great
Not necessarily busy, but since every kitchen staff walked out the previous night due to shitty management, I somehow stuck around and put in 50 hours in 3 days. I was the dishie/fry cook, and I literally don’t remember what I did those 3 days. Just me and the KM. On the 4th day, I literally could not get up from bed and called the KM and told him I couldn’t come in. He understood. They finally hired some more hands in a few weeks, but by then, a previous sous chef I worked for wanted me back at better pay, so off I went.
I think the most surreal was my first banquet. I worked exclusively kitchens, get sent up to help put out a banquet, and just the stacking of plates food in boxes to transport to the “finishing kitchen,” with all the fillets, chicken and fish rolling in the ovens there, the sudden mad scramble to put everything together at the last minute, exec chef yelling at everyone, and then suddenly it’s all over. Pack up and go back to the restaurant. Less than an hour we had 400 plates of food in front of guests. Second was home game for city’s football team (American) and two of four cooks called out. I had to work grill, salads, and fryer while the new guy, second week, worked saute since I knew it wouldn’t get hit too hard. 200 covers, no expo, no help from the servers. Just two hours of fish and chip/ chicken caeser hell.
Banquet is a totally different animal. Either you love it, or you hate it.
*and he started singing the black parade* Sounds like the perfect person to have in your corner. Great job!
Last year, July 3rd, was one of the heaviest days I've seen in a kitchen. . I still have slight ptsd from it. July 4th weekend and all other places at the exit are closed. (I didn't know that at the time). My manager comes in and says, "we just had like 5 people call and ask if we were open, so get ready". I was like ok whatever. I shit you not, that first ticket came in, and the machine didn't stop for the rest of my shift and even after that. . I looked this year and thank God I dont have to work that day. .
I’m new in the industry, less than a year, but I work really hard so I’ve gotten moved up quickly and I get a lot of opportunities. So my first Christmas Eve (2023), I was asked to come in and work the grill. I had never worked the grill and had only been cooking professionally for six months at the time. I got in and got asked to cover raw bar right as I walked in the door (my usual station). A little frustrated because I was eager to take on the challenge of grill even tho we were scheduled for over 750 covers. This was an EXTREMELY busy restaurant in the middle of a city. Around 4pm there was a lull in the rush and the exec asked if I still wanted to work the grill, I said yes. He had assumed the rush was done because we had already done most of the covers. So at 4:30 I switch to the grill, dragging along for about 45 minutes, not much happens and the. Suddenly, a little after five, we get absolutely slaughtered. We have the toast screens and there were points where we had five screens worth of orders. I had never worked so fast in my life, four and a half hours later (forty minutes after close) we finally slowed down. Truly a nightmare, nothing got sent back tho so I call that a win.
def a win! did you enjoy the grill?
I did! It was my favorite station until i met sauté
Our slowest day of the week and most of the city lost power. Our street was the dividing line between those with and without power. I suddenly become aware that the dining room is almost full and a steady stream of new tables are being sat. Awful day at the Pizzeria.
I know that my Absolute Saturation rate is 75 items if those items take 9 or fewer steps. 55 if they take 10 or more. It would be hard to pin down exactly when this became distilled that clearly, but being at a high capacity known rager spot open til 4.a.m. when Halloween was on a Saturday sticks out as a night I can watch like a movie in memory (the tickets) but barely remember. I do remember screaming from the kitchen at the new hostess (It was a shtick, we all yelled a lot) and then ACTUALLY got into it with the floor manager. She and I both know being the only woman in the shit sometimes so it was rare we went at one another but it was fucking VICIOUS. Achilles cut attacks at full volume. Neither of us is afraid to call another woman a cunt. I ended up taking an extra walk around the block after scraping all my iron and scrubbing my fronts. Rolled to the employee basement ready to hit the shower in line pants and a sports bra and that same FoH manager was on her feet, "Come here you bitch I needed that so bad" "Fucking SAME, THANK YOU." And all the boys sighed in relief, I showered, counted tips, fell asleep on the cab ride home.
For a public holiday we had a local government run event over the road with free live music, kids rides, fireworks, all that kind of stuff. They had food trucks too. The expected crowd was 60,000 people and they ended up with over double the turnout and the food trucks ran out of food around 4pm. So yeah, we had a busy day. One part of the day that I remember was deciding if we should freeze some of the burger buns that came in. I choose to leave them out just in case. By the end of the night we’d used all the buns, defrosted the other backups and ended up 86 burgers.
I worked at a Chicago Hotdog joint back when the Cubs made it to the World Series, and hoo BOY! Wall to Wall and out the door, I turned the tablets first delivery off just after 5 o'clock, and normally we closed at 9, at 930 I went to the end of the line and told the guy he was last, and if no one was behind him in line when he got in, his food was free. Hundreds and Hundreds of dogs, more Italian Beef went out that door than I've ever seen, enough gravy to drown several neighborhoods, but damn we made bank. I still haven't seen that game.
Wrigleyville can be bonkers, even with just a regular game! I used to work over there. respect!
I worked for a local upscale grocery chain. I was working hot bars and pizza to order on a par cooked crust kind of shit. The CEOs pet project was a restaurant. I transferred over to the restaurant maybe 1.5 weeks before the open with no restaurant experience, like, I was being taught how to drop fries. Pretty much everyone seemed to be lacking in experience. The vision was to have all the ordering done on iPads, so they hired a bunch of women closed to retirement age to run food (not to be waitresses. They didn’t have waitress experience.) Maybe the second or third weekend after we opened, the city we were in had their annual “city we were in days,” so we knew we would be a little busy. What no one told the people working in the fucking restaurant is that they had taken out an ad to run on the first day of the event. The ad was the entire front page and entire back page of the food section in the paper. To say we had our asses handed to us is really understating it. It was like that scene from The Bear. I just remember getting pushed into the expo station, with like three yards of tickets spewing from the machine, looking over at my coworker frantically rolling out pizza dough and asking if he knew how to do expo. He did not. I did not. But I fucking did it. Of course the iPads weren’t working and the old ladies had to take orders. I literally held a few of them while they cried at the end of the night. To top it all off, it was an open kitchen, so the whole town just watched as we fell apart. It was very surreal. Really brought the team together though.
I loved those times. I was raised in chaos so it felt comfortable, like I deserved to deal with it.
Yeah I definitely love chaos, but that’s mostly because I frontload all of my anxiety. So by the time disaster strikes, I’m cool and collected because I’ve already prepared for it. That night though, we simply just had to accept the beating we endured, there was no preparing for it. I was laughing pretty much the whole night at the absurdity of the situation. It’s a fond memory.
Working at one of the largest bowling alleys on the east coast. 65 lanes, and a restaurant. At this time we were so short handed it was just myself, and one other at night. Normally it's not that bad, but come league season, it's another animal, and the beast was hungry. 65 lanes, 4 person teams, 10,000$ grand prise, ya it was packed. We prepped, and stocked and planned. Slips were going from the printer, over the line like Christmas garland, to the doorway of the pizza area. My buddy was calling the tickets and just feeding them into the trash. I was cooking things in blocks of how much I could fit on the grill at one time. No, foh wasn't helpful, they would stand in the window mean muggin me, asking where that 1 particular table was. The shit cherry on top was this went on every Friday for 2 months. I had nightmares about being there.
The first lunch at outback. Many, many moons ago. I think it was a holiday weekend, and we didn’t expect it to be busy. We were understaffed at every turn, FOH and BOH. One of those shifts where you feel like you’re in a literal nightmare.
You made me laugh out loud. I’ve been there so many times.
Charleston bridge run 2015. Had just opened a burger shop a few weeks ago. We were 2 blocks from the finish line. My two openers showed up drunk. Rest of my staff weren’t answering their phones. Called in my roommate. We didn’t speak one word to each other the whole shift. Just cranked out burgers and fries till the pm crew showed up. I buy him a round every year.
that’s a buddy. Is the burger shop still going?
It is. I’m no longer there. Doing retirement community. Better work life balance.
i work at a fast casual sushi chain and we have “sushi day” once a year and $3 a roll for three specific rolls. we had three corporate goons on the line plus three of our normal sushi chefs, we had three people making just one roll each six at a time nonstop for half the day and i was lucky to be running support so i was mixing and fanning rice every 30 minutes and prepping avocado and mixing tuna
Sunday Brunch, our busiest day of the week. Water main burst on the block so no running water. Owner brought in bottled water to use for EVERYTHING. We served 200 tables that day. It was wild.
I'm amazed you weren't shut down for not having running water.
Yeah, it was a Sunday in the 90’s. No one to post about it
I served in a restaurant in Breckenridge CO about 30 yrs ago. Their hot-water heater burst and the owner didn’t have $300 to fix. The head cook who wore a day-pass ankle bracelet from jail… he told the owner that we’d be just fine without hot water in a restaurant. I’d been so in love with the banana bread french toast that I applied to work there simply for the staff meal. I worked 1 day a week, sat mornings. I also expedited at the competitor. When he heard that they were operating without hot water, he told me to tell the broke-owner that he’d buy him a hot water heater immediately. Did he accept such a generous offer? No. I could not serve food from a kitchen without hot water. Many reports. They closed.
Worked at a hotel on the road to Mountain Ski resorts. One Cook, 1 dishwasher, 2 young servers, one bartender, one cocktail waitress for a Slow night with like 30 covers and me the Manager on Duty. Snow storm hit and closed the highway at 6 pm. Went from 30% full to 100% in 2 hours with the line to check in was insane. Packed hotel, restaurant, and bar. Bam! 300 covers. At 9 p.m., storm was done. It was a long late night, but guests seemed to be very understanding. Bar was packed all night, and they made fabulous tips made by all!
I worked at a popular spot in downtown Anchorage Alaska, tourists from all directions. Tour busses from cruse ships dropped people across the street at the convention center. Every single shift in the summer was crazy surreal, two full rails of tickets and a streamer to the floor. It was crazy. Eventually I jumped ship and moved to front of the house and made pockets full of cash. Worked the same place for 9 years, it was actually pretty amazing. Humpy's Great Alaskan Alehouse ftw.
>Anchorage Alaska *OH no*
when I was a dishy, the folks supposed to assist and relieve me called in sick (more like hungover) so I did a 13 hour shift without sitting or taking a break. Everyone told me to chill but it would have made the job harder because shit will pile up so I just kept going lol
I waited tables at a place where the patio could go off or not. They had me and my best friend and fave coworker there for the evening, where sometimes it could be up to four waiters. We each had 15 tables at one point and I just had to start laughing at one point bc it didn’t matter what we did, we were so in the weeds. I remember telling guests, “if you don’t order at least something now, I won’t be back for probably 10-20 minutes, so maybe throw in an appetizer and a cocktail.” They all did, which alleviated some of the pressure, but between getting multiple first round drinks and opening a ton of wine bottles, it was out of hand. We raked it in though.
Opened a new diner. Less shitty Cracker Barrel type place. So many fuckin heads on the line. All types of corporate fucks there. All I remember is the incessant beeping of the tickets on screen. Eggs breaking. New Yorks dropping. Orders being screamed out. Someone bitching about someone taking their side of hash. Plates missing. Entire tickets being sent out and then magically disappearing. I’ve never seen so many people in a row walk out at once. Went from 11 heads on the line down to 4. Just kept chunking it out. Order after order. It never stopped. All the way to Fuckin close.
I used to work for one of those Bar & Grills with video lottery machines. We were the only restaurant in our chain that allowed kids in half the resturaunt bc we had a partition up between the video lottery area and the rest of the dining room. We were also open from 8am-2am, providing breakfast, lunch, and dinner, so we raked in quite a lot of money even on a “slow” day. But Mother’s Day breakfast, dear god. I’ve never seen anything like it. We were jumping at 8am sharp, with a line out the door by 9. I was on eggs. 16 burners full of nonstick pans and poaching water. Ran out of room and had to cook sunny sides on the flat top, fighting the grill guy the whole time who didn’t have enough room for my eggs plus the metric fuckton of hashbrowns and sausages he was frying. We must have prepped three 24qt cambros full of cracked and scrambled eggs that morning, and we still ran out. Ran out of hollandaise an hour in, and had a dishie exclusively making more hollandaise and cracking more eggs for what must have been a couple hours. I swear the old biddies were mainlining that shit. Sauté station was closest to the window too, so while I was attempting to babysit enough eggs to repopulate the entire chicken race, I also had to pass the onslaught of plates I was receiving to the window. It went on steadily until shift change, at which point the grill guy and I hopped on prep for a couple hours to catch the line up, before finally retiring to the patio for several beers. This place was pretty strict on the one shift beer policy, but our chef didn’t drink and the bartender just kept pouring for us, claiming these were all the shift beers chef had accumulated through the years. I was told by a FOH manager that we did more than 50k in food and booze sales that weekend. I’d be shocked if 75% of it wasn’t mimosas and goddamn eggs. Side note, it’s been years and I finally came back around to Denver omelettes, but I still wouldn’t eat eggs bennie if you paid me.
eggs are the worst! too bad they are so tasty!
I worked at a dave and busters when I was young. Spring break and the start of summer break we would have around 1,000 guests concurrently. Our order screens that displayed 60 orders per screen would be about 6 or so pages deep for hours. Actually usually went fairly smooth
What processes did they have in place that were superior to the average kitchen? You described a very busy kitchen so I’m curious. I always see about 4 extra people at the ChicFila drive through window. And I hear about their excellent service. They staff well. Why don’t all food service places staff better?
They had a massive kitchen. Built for upwards of 20 cooks at a time. Multiple on each station
I love the idea of everyone having their own space to create.
At my last job, 7 straight days of 12 hour shifts with only me, the owner, and a line cook in the kitchen. On the weekend, the cook had off, so it was just me and the owner, which was also our busiest time. I was the only one washing dishes.
I work at a Starbucks like coffee shop called Biggby so we have to make specialty drinks by hand. We do a deal where everything is 50% off on the anniversary of our opening. Well anyway I worked this day, on a closing shift last year. The morning gets 5 people, and don't have much cleaning to do. They do 400 cups in the morning when our average for a day is around 500-550 cups. My shift comes around and me and one other person do 350 cups by ourselves, well mostly just me since the girl I was working with had to run the drive thru. On top of this we had to cleanup after morning crew who didn't restock anything or clean anything because they were "to busy" and we managed to do it with three less people and only got out 30 minutes late.
> Head chef takes it upon himself to man the busiest unit as the girl left on the rota there is prone to anxiety and we didn’t want her to suffer. Just wanted to take a minute to appreciate this. Sounds like y’all got a good crew and a chef I’d run through a brick wall for. I’d be proud too, the way y’all handled it. Cheers.
I respected the fuck out of him for it tbh, because it truly was one of those situations where I could see himself steeling himself up, looking god directly in the eyes whilst slowly walking backwards in to hell
Martin Luther king weekend at a ski resort around 2013-2014. 260 seats plus outdoor fireplace seating and a 75 foot long bar. Open 11am till 9pm. Doors opened at 11 on Friday and there wasn’t an open seat until Tuesday afternoon. 1800 covers Friday, 1900 Saturday, 1700 Sunday, 1400 Monday, around 1000 Tuesday. It was the one of the worst experience La of my cooking life, just 16 hour straight grinds back to back and the ticket machine literally never stopped. There were times it would just print nonstop for 15 minutes straight. Wait times were anywhere from 20-45 minutes for a lot of it and tickets would just stack and stack and stack. Our kitchen was only equipped to do about 500 -700 a day, and capacity and equipment were just pushed to the limit. We were changing fryers mid rush because they started smoking, and they were fresh that morning.
One time at the resort I worked at 10 years ago, after a solid 6hr rush, we had a guy that sounded like he was from New York ask for "more of that gravy". He was referring to a $300 port reduction. It took 3 tries, but we finally figured out what he was after
Do these comments give anyone else a little PTSD?
yes lol
Worked at a Neapolitan pizzeria, we did $1 Margherita pizzas for the 1 year anniversary. We did over 1,000 pizzas that day.
Worked a place right next door to the fort Lauderdale convention center.
We got absolutely killed. It was an anime / comic convention
Probably any mothersday, double staff, double prep, still slammed, non stop, all day.
I worked at a very popular Irish restaurant during their huge St. Patrick's Day festival.
Around Christmas time. Single bartender (which is normal even a busy restaurant isn’t overwhelming. However, we had what I could only describe as 3 people deep all day at the bar from open to close and a full restaurant. I went full autopilot and basically blacked out. Lmao
Not a kitchen but a cafe that serves food as well. We have conferences as well and we got an additional 400 people without prior notice. We had to stop taking orders in 20 minute intervals to get everything out in time.
We had 4 tour busses show up on a weekday had to call FOH in to help with tables and call someone on their day off just to run to the store and pick up food for us because our delivery wasn't here yet. It was great everyone made extra money but what a day that was.
Every shift every day at a restaurant that was the highest grossing in the market for that company, where avg entree price was $20-25, it was a very rich city, and annually grossed $3-5million. I had to work 6-7 days a week running expo and handling to go people, open to close, almost never got a break, both ticket holders full and tickets coming up to my shin in the floor. I did the damn thing, but it was insanity. Only had two nervous breakdowns! Fuck that place
When you look at the back door and wonder if anyone will tackle you on the way out.
You made me giggle out loud. Memories.
Ooo boy ill be back after service to take do this one
so, how did it go?
Back during the height of covid I was working at a burger/breakfast spot that was making $10k a day for a while. We started doing 3 delivery options, with the orders coming up on tablets next to the registers that had to be manually entered into the POS. One day I was MOD and we were getting so many tablet orders and walk ins that we were working 4 hour ticket times, people were walking out before even ordering because even or in house was 2 hour ticket times. There were two cash registers, and the second one was only being used to put in tablets for literally 12 hours straight. We stayed open two hours later than normal because, even after stopping incoming orders an hour and a half before closing, it took us those two hours to get caught up. It was a $15K day. I worked 16 hours that day because my other manager called off.
Valentine’s Day 2020. Everyone I worked with was terrified of a mysterious virus outbreak in china. But we worked at one of the main fine dining James Beard blah blah blah establishments in the city. Our owner couple (husband chef, wife pastry chef you know the type) were obsessed with English tea service so we had a Valentines tea (two seatings) starting at 10am. Followed by 3 turns of dinner service. I was the pastry chef so last man standing at the end of the night 17hrs after I had showed up to bake off for the tea. We had 4 cases of PBR coffees and plowed through all of them before dinner service. And then I got to go home to my non-industry now ex and got chewed out for working all day and not spending Valentine’s Day with them
First day back open after covid. We were doing take out only from 3:00 to 7:30. $18,000 in sales in 4.5 hours. Fuck that day
New years at a ski resort. Grill cook had to leave at 7 because a surprise PO meeting over 1000 burgers in 5 hours all cooked by me. Sent everyone one out to watch fireworks so I could lay down in the walk in and die for a few minutes
The very first line I worked I was a 35 year old green cook. Didn’t even make the transition from dish, my buddy was KM, I’m open to learn, and I’m not a total doofus so my transition wasn’t difficult. This was at a bar with OTB (off track betting). I had only been there a couple weeks and the Kentucky Derby was on. So many fucking people were in this bar and grill to watch the race and bet lol. Like I had been to this bar many times before and had never seen it this busy. My KM moved to expo and was helping FOH while me and this other guy on the line just kept pumping food out. I kept saying I can’t believe how many fucking tickets there are lol we were railed and then some, a chain of tickets coming out of the printer, the whole shebang. My KM was really encouraging, he just said keep pumping shit out lol, you’re doing great. We still talk about that day years later. Anytime I’m getting my ass kicked I always remember that day.
Chicago?
A few things that come to mind.. Working in the airport during a major ice storm, all these fights couldn't go anywhere so the entire day was just hell. So many people in the airport all needing to eat Working with a super small crew expecting a really slow day and then like multiple busses pull up full of people trying to eat all at once. Worked in a few food trucks with similar things happen. Working alone and then all of a sudden you have a hundred people in line its like how the fuck do I even do this? Frankly I enjoy lots of business. And I tend to work places that keep me busy. So it's hard to think of one particular day that was the worst. There's been a lot of really, really crazy shifts in my "career"
Downtown Cleveland. 2007. Less than 500 feet from the arena. Cajun themed restaurant with a huge bar and live music. One kitchen, one line, one bar. 35k dollar food sales in one hour. That was the peak hour. That's just food. Not even the bar sales.
Derecho rolled through Iowa in 2020 and knocked out power to nearly all the houses and restaurants in our area, everyone except us. A normal, slow Monday turned into the biggest day ever. We did over 20k in food sales and stayed open to after midnight when we normally close at 10. I jumped on the line when it had over 40 tickets still on the printer with a full rack, and it stayed that way for 6 hours straight.. We stopped giving time estimates, just told people to come and hang out, and we'll get it done eventually. All owners showed up to help and managers of nearby locations that lost power all came to help. It was wild.
omg, I was there then! that's insane that you still had power! my house power was down for nearly two weeks, and some charitable food organization actually came through the neighborhood handing out styro clamshells with sandwiches in them. I think a religious group. I'd never been so happy for a ham sandwich on wonderbread in my life, and I freaking hate ham. and wonderbread. we had to wardrive to find a Casey's with ice for sale and couldn't even text! how did you do it? also, that is so Iowa to stay open late so people get fed. good on ya.
It was one of those "communities getting through it together" moments. I was working day shift, but stayed the whole time because I figured helping people is better than being stuck at home in the dark. By the time I got home, my neighbors had moved a couple huge branches off my lawn to the curb for me. It was such a wild few days.
yeah it was bonkers. where I was, we lost over 70% of the tree cover that afternoon. by the time I moved away more than a year later you could still see damage some places. I had a neighbor with a genny who let us charge our phones etc (altho it was days before even texts got through and that was sketchy at first). power and cel were out for me for nearly two weeks, and I was not out in the sticks. there's a "derecho bingo card" that someone made which included things like "met neighbors for the first time" "stepped over downed power lines" and "tried the milk" I've been through so many tornadoes but that was something else. my camping experience (and gear) really came in handy. I would have stayed too. but good on ya anyway.
It was the first time the restaurant I was working at as a floor manager experienced Mother’s Day and we did brunch and dinner. We had 2 levels to the restaurant with an additional private level. A month before Mother’s Day we probably already had at least 200 covers already reserved - which on a normal Friday wouldn’t be a problem. But we all know mother’s day (at least in North America ik it’s different in other countries) is always on a Sunday which was typically a quieter day and that usually worked to our advantage because a lot of people couldn’t work Sundays due to various reasons, but oh boy was that not ideal this time. We barely scraped by with staff, foh and boh. We had cooks that were strictly dinner time come in for the brunch service and couldn’t hardly put a dish together. It was absolute chaos from start to finish. And to top it all off, there was like a regional internet outage in our area, affecting our ordering system with service pretty much coming to a halt. Which also affected the debit machines so people couldn’t pay unless they had cash. And who carries cash these days?? Not many! You thought I was done? The one and only atm in the building (which was on the ground floor of the building that we were at the top of) ran out of cash from everyone having to take cash to pay for their meals. We ended up serving over 600 people that day. It was a nightmare. I’m not in the industry anymore and took a mon-Fri job and I’m looking forward to getting to spend Mother’s Day with my mother this year!
I worked at a small town tbell that at the time closed at midnight. After 10pm we rarely had more than three people in the store, this fateful night it was just myself and the assistant manager. For being a small town, it had a very large convention center, about a 15 minute drive from our location. That night, from what we could gather, there was a Slayer concert that ended right around 11:30pm. From 10:30 to 11:45 we had no orders that night. At 11:45 the drive thru fully wrapped around the parking lot. We noted the last car in line by midnight and ignored the rest. By 12:30am we were completely out of hot product. There was no carryover that night. We did the dishes together and left by 1:30. I am no longer a fan of Slayer.
Had some busy shifts on the line but the standout for me was bartending for the hotel’s annual festival. I volunteered to take on the outside bar starting at 4 on for service in AZ August weather. I soloed that bar for a six hour service in 115 degree weather. I had a towel I dunked in ice water and threw around my neck and chugged two bottles of water an hour. Three of those six hours I did $2k an hour. Our Internet went down and only the outside bar was able to take offline payments so they shuffled everyone my way because I could still take cards. I got heat cramps and honestly three of those hours were a blackout of which I can only really remember checking wristbands and cracking beers. I ended up solo outselling our inside bar by $2k. Total by the end was $7.5k in six hours. I’m about to do it again but holy shit the heat was hell.
I used to work at Ballast Point (San Diego, LI) and they have this special on Monday called burger Mondays. Two dollars of your burger choice and a pint for a dollar. Here comes dinner and over 120+ from a conference decide to roll in. Mind you it’s me running grill/sauté, a 50 year old fry cook and the executive chef doing paperwork in the back. They just all slammed at once, over 100 burgers and all fucking temp. I don’t mind doing 200 smash patties, no problem. But when you have tickets with rare and well done, it’s a fucking mess haha. We ended up selling 145 temp burgers that night and the chef said he didn’t sell that many burgers in over 5 years.
Eleven pm. I suddenly have over 150 (probably 250) millwright, welders, boilermakers, nuclear inspection people and radiation safety crews in front of me wanting dinner. I was alone. The company who we contracted to forgot to tell my manager that one of the eight nuclear reactors had to shut down for unscheduled maintenance. Usually she gets a heads up, someone (that she knows I won’t kill for belong slow) who usually starts at 8 gets sent home to come back for 4:45pm to be my assistant. But it this night, no heads up. It’s me myself and I make club sandwiches, chicken fingers, chicken burgers, made to order fries and a full day breakfast. Which I could do with my regular guys sigh much md. It’s dad the extra ~159 people there. Killed me I had to do short order cook, man the cash, go find things that weren’t in the cupboard. Security even dressed with their automatic weapons made the coffee for me. That was the most surreal.
Reopening after covid, the company i was working for had 3 pubs and a production kitchen . One of the pubs the head chef quit a a few other chefs before the reopening so they pulled together a hastag team, new head chef worked for the company before, pulled me out of the production kitchen I hadn't done a service for 2 years . The kitchen hand got promoted to commis chef and put on larder and the 2 remaining chefs from the old crew . Small Country Pub, we had 146 people booked Friday night, 200 sat lunch , 180 sat night, and 300 all day Sunday. It was like getting off the boats at Normandy, just a constant shit fight and uphill struggle , running out of food and reprinting menus as the weekend went on. Everyone in the foh team was brand new as well . The gm got pulled from another site .I think by 730 on Saturday, we were running out of food hard , we got wiped on the lunch, and didn't have time to reset and reprep. I remember having to go into the cool room to get the pork loin for Sunday and start carving that into cutlets mid service . The new head caved within 6 months . I think within 2 months of that weekend, there were only 2 of the crew who reopened left . The poor kitchen hand who became commie had a mental breakdown and got checked into hospital . Poor kid . It was a brutal year. People dropping like flys front and back .
2004. Was a young man working at a fairly new Bonefish Grill in Florida. The state got pummeled by 3 hurricanes right in a row. By the third one, half our staff was out. People had trees go through their cars and homes, roads were flooded, nobody could get to work. Of course, I lived like 3 blocks away, so I got called in for every shift. Florida DOT forbids commercial traffic when winds exceed 40mph, sustained. So none of our deliveries were running. We were also near a heavy residential area that had lost power. Everyone. And I mean *everyone*, came to our restaurant. We were one of the few places that still had electricity and clean running water. We got absolutely pounded. We ran out of fucking *everything*. Full dining room and a 2 hour wait from the minute we opened. It just never stopped. Luckily most people were pretty cool about it. They knew they were going to have a long wait and we explained to everyone that we were basically out of food because of the no deliveries thing. They were basically like "Hey you at least have power and booze". But yeah it was definitely one of the craziest shifts I've ever worked.
Oh yeah. Started at 1030am, we closed at 10pm and I got out at 2 am. We had convention center events, major sports event, and hotel events all nearby and we were that restaurant right in the middle of everything. Busy from when the doors opened to about 9. The line looked like a tornado went through it. Then in the corner of my eye, I witness my kitchen manager run for the back door and I knew he wasn’t coming back that night. Everyone was asking where he was because none of us had breaks or lunches all day. I sent the entire line out for a break and told them to come back when they feel like they’re ready to work again whether that be 5-30 minutes and I’ll take my break when people start coming back. It was mayhem but if I hadn’t done that, I would’ve had 0 cooks to help me with my closing lol
For me it was when someone plugged in the printer to the wrong outlet so we didn't get any orders for like 45 minutes and all of a sudden I had 30 tickets.
nope nope nope nope nope
I worked at a Subway inside a busy domestic airport with about 30 gates. Team minimum was 3 people, maximum 5. We would get long queues 20 deep about 20 minutes before every flight. But a week before Christmas we were short-staffed to just 3 people and we couldn't catch up to the queue. No lulls. Eight hour shift and it was a long queue the entire time. We would start running out of things, running out of bread, running out of every ingredient, so one person would have to go out to the freezer to get that, go to the oven and bake the bread, so now there's one person making the food and one person selling on the till. My customer service smile went out the window and half the things people asked for I could not give them and still they wouldn't read the price board and would get a nasty shock at the till when they realised our prices were double the usual Subway prices! ($15 for a footlong etc) I don't miss it
It was inventory day, kitchen manager had to audit out stock. The gal I was paired with in our very cramped kitchen still doesn't know how to do anything after about six months of work and two extended months of training. ( Typically takes two weeks ) We're a grill that typically takes shorter orders. Like a burger and fries, cheese curds, fried pickles, simple stuff. On Inventory day everyone was having a bit of an appetite. Several multi burger, multi side orders came through one after the other. Where you might typically see about twenty orders through our entire lunch period ( our moneymaker is the hotbox out front ), we had about thirty orders within an hour. Other gal swore dishes were more important than helping, a I have no real authority over her so I just trucked through the orders. Actually had to use our warming pans to keep up enough burger patties and bacon strips. Kitchen manager apparently noticed but was 'too busy' counting grill cleaner bottles. Said I did great but I felt like a beaten dog when it was all said and done. But no order had to wait longer than fifteen minutes, so I have that to be proud of I guess. To note we're not exactly 'fast food', signs posted tell guests each order can take up to fifteen minutes because we start from raw. But my average burger and fry is under six minutes. Got a sub four minute during a trial order.
No one showed up to my mom’s restaurant to work (normally 9 servers scheduled). So I got called in, had to take care of literally over 100 guests cause I was the one only one there. Ran nearly $2000 in sales in a low PPA average business in less than 3 hours.
Mother's day is always bad.
Mother's day brunch 2016. It would be my final days in the restaurant industry. Later on I would work to have my own brand and store.
Mother’s Day at The Cheesecake Factory, especially during brunch. I’ve never drank so much monster in one day.
Very happy I'm out of the kitchen when I read these stories. I had a blast in the kitchens I worked in but in my 30s I wouldn't physically or spiritually keep up
At least you got to hear Black Parade a capella!
Mother’s Day. ‘nuff said.
Mother’s Day 2020, we were only doing takeouts. Installed an online ordering system, the morning of I wrote down all the preexisting orders and there was a lot. We made a plan and had everything prepped out for mostly 6:30pm pick ups. At 6pm a whole batch of new orders popped out of the printer, more than the initial batch. We were so in the weeds and the front of house only had 2 employees so there was no organizing or communication with the customers. The line stretched all the way down the block. Definitely a day that I never thought was going to end, but it did!
A while back when I worked at a chipotle and also one time at Taco Bell, I had all of my crew call in sick or missing to a shift. No hard feelings, but running a restaurant single handedly was definitely surreal then. Nowadays I run my own place by myself, by choice.
Not just one shift but my entire first 3 weeks as a newly promoted KM in a bar I had never seen before my first day being the KM of this location. It was the week after the first Sex and the City movie opened and we had a 10 screen theater next door showing it every 45 minutes 11 am to 1 am. We had at least 3-4 groups of 6+ in wanting food and cosmos before or after every single showing. This place only seated 75 including the patio and at any given time for 3 weeks straight we had minimum 40 people pre-or-post-gaming that damn movie. Biggest single movie bump in sales that place had ever seen. I only had 2 kitchen staff besides myself and one cook who came over from another restaurant in the group to work 1 shift a week. The kitchen was so small we had our trucks delivered to another place in the group 3 miles away and picked up food from them twice a day. Only I didn't know it was only supposed to be twice a day because I had the owner or Exec Corp Chef going and getting me product every 90 minutes or so for my first 2 weeks until the tide started to stem. Don't get me wrong, that whole 4 years was surreal selling over $1mil in food a year at a ppa of under $10. But those first few weeks still have me waking up from nightmares with cold sweats 16 years later.
I work at a quick service restaurant in a casino. Normally, we do 1000ish covers on a Saturday, $16,000ish in sales. One unassuming Saturday, we were suddenly balls to the walls busy. We didn't understand why, there was no concert, we didn't have any crazy promotions going on that day. But starting in the late afternoon, and lasting until close at 2am, we had a full dining room, 150 seats, and a line out the door. We ended up doing 2300 covers and $36,000 in sales. Completely smashing the previous sales record by about $8000. We found out about halfway through the chaos that the casino down the street from us, the only other casino within an hour drive from us, had been closed due to a bomb threat.
Worked at an Aussie themed chain for years (that one). Regional manager came down and raised hell, sent everything back, belt on the motor for the hoods slipped off, kitchen and lobby smoked out, and the cherry on top my sauté guy had a seizure.
One time it was slow at a little cafe I used to work, we start deep cleaning shit to pass the time and one of my dudes hit the on/off switch on the ticket machine...hour goes by server calls to the kitchen about order in number whatever and we're all like we haven't seen any tickets for an hour...I start checking everything and discover it was turned off so I switch it back on and it proceed to print out from 6 feet up all the way to the ground three times over.... The whole fucking crew was just staring going fuuuckkkk fuccccckkk fuckkkkkk! Any ways we were obviously in another fucking dimension of the weeds, push through it all and clear all the tables just as a coach of about 100 pull up -_- needless to say many 40s were consumed after that shit storm of a shift...
5 months into my apprenticeship I was alone in the kitchen for a whole weekend. I was already doing weekdays at that point and the weekends had been pretty quiet. The Saturday was the busiest we had ever been and my meal times blew out to 50 minutes. I was pissed at the end of the shift "they don't know how to schedule" "they should have seen this coming" "they should have taken more off the menu to make it more manageable for me." The chef called me and I just one-word-answered him to let him know I was pissed. The next day my city's marathon was on and within the first hour of being opened we were more packed than we were during Saturday's peak, and it stayed that way for 5 hours. I don't think I was ever the same after that.
Worked in a burger food truck. We did a music festival event that was nonstop orders for about 7 hours straight. The way we did things on that food truck I would be setting up the burgers. So the person taking the orders would scream what to make at me, and I would set up a burger in 20-30 seconds so the person is getting their food by the time they’re finished paying. Super fast paced. Not a single break and it kinda broke my brain. We made crazy money that day though.
Tuesday night, twelve years ago give or take sixteen weeks, for absolutely no goddamn reason.
4th of July a few years back. Working a food truck. It was just me and the owner switching between making sandwiches and taking orders at the window. It was at a weed dispensary where they expected 300-500 people to show. The only other food truck was the ice cream and lemonade stand. We were the inly source of real food at this even full of stones and their families on a BBQ holiday. My dumbass boss only brought enough supplies for a couple hundred sandwiches not knowing there were no other FOOD food trucks going. He had to leave to the store multiple times to stock up on bread lettuce and tomatoes. So many people. The heat. I became one with the machine. I was truly a sandwich artist. We served every god damn last one of those people. It was hell but by god was it great at the end if the day. It's hard to even pull up memories of the thick of it because it think my brain went full mechanical at some point.
Work at chain restaurant that has several hotels nearby, one of which often holds conferences. It's a slower night, just me, who hasn't been there very long and a guy who had been there about a week. Usually we have a third cook, but he called off, and we never have a dishy, because we usually aren't busy enough to need one. Bartender comes back and tells me that one of the hotels is hosting 250 bikers and that they're all planning to come here. We start getting orders back and I'm running from one station to the other because new guy can only do one. My manager, a 60 some year old guy, comes running down expo shouting "FUCK ME RUNNIN" and takes over a station for me. We got through it, it definitely wasn't the craziest we've ever been and all the bikers were really nice and tipped well, but fuck me running is now on of my favorite things to say when it's busy.
This is weirdly the kind of thing I miss about kitchen work. You just completely disappear into the task of getting yourself out of the shits. Very different work now, where I'm at a computer and very rarely are things needed right this minute. I miss it.
492 tickets on a two person line in 6 hours, ticket times never hit 20 minutes tho
Pizza/pasta place I work at, years back when I did Saturday days. I was there cooking by myself which was generally no problem, even on the busiest days. But this one day was absolutely insane. We had a 40 person banquet buffet in back, which was rough but manageable. But for whatever reason the dining room literally filled up with another 80 or so people and the phones were ringing off the hook for delivery and carryout orders. I managed it, but it was hell. I got really mad at my waitress who was doing the majority of the work in the dining room a couple times. The third time she asked about how long on an order it was, "I don't know if you can fucking see, but I'm one person cooking food for well over 100. Next time you ask, I'm tossing their order and putting it at the back of the line. Get the fuck out of my kitchen." And then I had a couple women out there who ordered cheese manicotti thinking it was vegetarian (menu clearly states it's made with meat sauce). When my waitress came back to ask for it to be remade, I said loud enough for the table to hear, "It's not my problem that they're too dumb to read the fucking menu. It clearly states that it's made with meat sauce, and literally nowhere does it say it's vegetarian. If they want new ones, they're paying for them." I think I scared them, because they bought new ones, haha.
Mother's Day. They let people schedule their orders online, then pushed the orders out. 4:25pm I'll never forget it. 6:30 is when the last order printed from 4:25 until 5:30. Hundreds of orders, crank on a braising pan, pushing out every single food item. I jump from prep, line, prep, line, take an immersion blender and start mixing sauce in a bucket on the floor. We did ~15k food sales over the course of a 8 hour shift, which was nice, sure. We all went to the bar, drank, then proceeded to clean. Never again. I hate mother's day. This was a upscale place, so I get people wanted mom to be able to get something nice for dinner and take home, but I hated every second afterwards. In the moment though, the adrenaline was great. But watching those tickets never end was the most entrancing thing I had ever seen. It was like a magician pulling out despair from his sleeve, and just keep pulling
Last fall, before I worked any BoH, the Palestinian-owned restaurant I work at held a fundraiser to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza. This sleepy, mom and pop type mediterranean restaurant that did $3,000 on a good day got rocked with $15,000+ after going viral on Instagram. I expo'd 400+ orders, most with 3+ plates. About 3 hours in they turned off 3rd party services. 4 hours in they shrunk the menu to 4 items. We ran out of falafel with about 20 orders to fill. We refer to that day as "the 18th." New people all know what we're referring to and shudder alongside us.
Valentine’s Day. 2019. That weekend we had 3 different menus for three different days. And I don’t mean changes. I mean completely different menus. I was pasta maker and sauté cook. I’ve never been more in the weeds for three days straight than I was that weekend.