Dudes,
When someone asked me what the worst job in the restaurant/pub industry was they had expected me to suggest the pot washing job. Yes this is a lowly position and involves cleaning dirty plates, however, it is not the worst or most stressful job in the industry. For that I would suggest the position of Expediter or Expo.
As I noted in the previous post, in the Kitchen the Head Chef is the conductor of a food orchestra, in so much as they plate the food and make sure that it is is cooked up to standard, as it is put onto the 'pass' for taking out to the guests. The other conductor is the head of the Front of House, the Restaurant Manager. Again as most of the tradition in service is via the French they can have French styled titles, in this case Maitre d'hotel or Matra-D in phonetics . They are the ones who are responsible for bookings (i.e. that the place doesn't get double booked or not having bookings too close together) , the host who greets guests into the dining room and generally paces the flow of people into it (waiters are responsible for serving individual tables). Waiters in high end or fine dining restaurants can have a sub -strata of their own, for example the wine waiter is called a Sommelier, There are also food runners, whose only task is to run the food from the kitchen pass to the tables.
The Expo belongs to neither of the front of house or the back of house staff, but is in essence a co-ordinator between the two: this is helpful if you have an extremely busy restaurant, because both the front of house and back of house have different agendas. For the front of house, they will want to serve guests in the order which they put through their tickets : to kitchen staff they will often want to cook in order of ease of dish cooking time (or conversely focus on the complex or longer taking dishes first). This might be ok if you have only a couple of tables to cook for, but if you have a full restaurant and you need to turn tables (that is because over the course of the night you have more guests coming than you have seating) then it can cause disruption to the service.
The Expo only speaks to the head chef on one hand and the restaurant manager on the other: with those two guys or girls speaking to their respective members of staff. This is better than having a dozen or so waiters in the kitchen all demanding of the chefs 'where's table xyz? ' or for the chefs asking individual waiters about orders wherein guests have 'made their own menu' , e.g. I don't want chips but a jacket potato or something like that. so it all goes through one person. Therefore the expo will tell the head chef '2 salads, 3 burgers, 4 fish n' chips, 2 pates, 2 sharing platters'. rather than a chef having to look at each individual ticket, while also making sure there is enough 'breathing space' so the kitchen doesn't get overwhelmed with orders (some inexperienced waiters go round tables, take all the orders and bash them through the ticket system all at once, not good if that's 30 tables and 120 dishes at once).
The same can be said of complaints or if food is sent back to the kitchen: it is easier for one voice in the kitchen, than individual waiters coming in with problems or issues. Complaints or the need to re-cook a dish from fresh do created problems for the kitchen and again a co-ordinator can help solve these problems. I remember once a waitress once left two dishes off a 20 cover ticket: as a Chef I would go mad, but with an expo it can be handled quickly and efficiently, as it's one step away from the person who made the mistake because the expo can see straight away that there's 20 starters and 17 mains and clarify. When you are a Chef and you have numerous tickets in front of you and you are under pressure to cook them ASAP , it is easy to ignore or not even notice such discrepancies and just cook what the ticket says.
A further crucial aspect of the role is to know when tables are' called back'. This means than if a table has had a starter and the table has finished or is finishing a starter and are ready for mains. This is a crucial bit of communication between front and back of house : the waiter must be discretely observant of their tables and tell the expo an anticipated time. This allows the chefs to cook the main course without it either siting under the hot lamps of the pass or having the guests waiting for their food for a long time .
[I would say 10 and no more than 15 minutes between starter and main course and not half an hour or more : some kitchens I've worked in will start to cook mains as soon as starters have gone out, but this can be trouble : elderly people eat food slower and some people like to relax into the service, whereas others might be there for a pre-'something' such as the theatre, so will want a quicker service, so a waiter has to get a sense of their guests and how they will treat the night and speak with the Expo, if a waiter spoke to a half decent Chef, the Chef will be more concerned about the quality of the cooking, rather than the time it takes to cook, but will also, in a paradox, be keen to cook the dish as quickly as quality allows, rather than to demands from a jumped up waiter, as the Chefs see it, whereas the waiter is only concerned about the guest and their whims, hence the expo takes this burden onto their own shoulders].
One final use for an Expo is that of 'check and challenge': whilst the head chef will plate up the dishes and check they are of standard quality, a second pair of eyes is always useful, especially with 'cleaning' with a cloth, the plates of any blobs of sauce or gravy that are on the plate, but have been missed. The one thing that used to piss me off was waiters who'd never cooked in their lives trying to critique the dishes or if they really did want to push my buttons to nuclear warfare mode, touch the food on the plates and move around the garnishes. With an expo I can clearly see they are sanitising and washing their hands on a regular basis.
So given that the Expo needs to have a clear focus and is the middle man between often conflicting interests, I'd say it is the most difficult, stressful and worse job in the catering business.
Dudes,
It's hard to believe that it has been 20 years since I started my professional life as a chef: I started off at the age of 16 as a potwash then Kitchen Porter for my local pub and at the age of 18, I was working for a burger chain as a 'fry bitch'- fries and onion rings don't cook themselves- working my way up to the grill line, flipping burgers, often doing 10-12 hour shifts, with a 20 min break , it was knackering. The length of shifts only went up as I progressed through the industry. After that I spent time working at various places across the market 'spectrum', which are fine dining, middle market and fast food, both Jewish and non -Jewish .
(in between these categories I would say there's a relatively new category - at least in the west- of ' Kitchen street food' which combines elements of both middle market dining and fast food, where chefs cook inside a truck, but provide better quality food than the old fashioned burger or breakfast vans you used to find outside factories and warehouses).
This line of jobs over a decade included hotels, pubs, restaurants, a greasy spoon (sausages were spelt suesajes) and even office canteens- although I've never been a 'dinner lady' at school- before trying my luck in France, Greece, Switzerland, Israel and 6 months in the Caribbean, cooking on oil rigs and ships, by which time I was still a Commis Chef, rather than taking a particular 'station' or 'line', as I was more interested in different types of food and cooking, than specialising in one particular area. Today I enjoy cooking the traditional food I was bought up with- e.g. Fish and Chips T'beet and Kubba Stew, but also to adapt other food to kosher rules, for example sausage and mash can be made kosher if the sausage is not made from pork, so I have spent many times trying to find out whether beef, lamb, chicken was a better substitute, before trying a vegetarian sausage.
I think the biggest adventure I undertook in those days was taking a decision to work on several cruise ships, which would take more than one blog post to reminisce over. The thing was that both the cooking and the people meant that global cuisine came to me, rather than I having to go to it. This was both because the people you worked with were of almost every foreign nationality and because cruise ships have a variety of restaurants to choose from. My favourite line was the pastry and bakery section and I guess this is why I see myself as a Pastry chef, rather than as a Grill chef. After I'd settled down back in Britain, it became more hum drum, even as I managed to get various promotions. In fact by the time you become an 'executive chef' you don't actually do any cooking, except to design menus. That's exciting, but so many of these executive chefs have forgotten what it is like to work in a kitchen and can forget that a one size fits all menu is okay, if every kitchen is of similar size and every chef of similar competence. In fact as you get promoted in the industry, you actually do less and less cooking, a Sous Chef and or the Head Chef rarely do so, their role is akin to the conductor of an orchestra during service: vital, but as we know a conductor doesn't actually play a musical instrument. Not good if you actually enjoy the cooking part itself. Hence why I decided to set up as my own boss.
For those of you who don't know much about kitchens, they are organised like a military into 'brigades' and because this system was created by the French, everyone has a French name: the Head Chef (Chef de Cuisine or if you own the business Chef Patron ) at the top, the Sous Chef being the deputy, followed by Chef De Partie, Commis Chefs, the Plonguer ( Kitchen Porter or KP and /or the Pot Wash). The Chef De Partie specialises in a particular line in the kitchen, e.g grill, fish, pastry etc, whereas the Commis Chef is an 'all round' junior Chef, who has to get to know the basics of every line and eventually gets to specialise in one (ironically once promotion beckons you revert to being a generalist rather than a specialist!). Not every kitchen will have a such a big set up and have maybe 3 stations such as grill, starters, garnishes and maybe deserts ( but then in your average 'non gastro' UK pub the KP or Potwash is often left to do deserts as they are mostly microwaved products) .
As for my faith during my twenties and now into my late thirties, I wouldn't pretend that I was some Orthodox poster boy, as I have cooked pork and shellfish in the past, although I do not nowadays, but I wasn't some ultra liberal either, I kept the Shabbat and tried to attend Shul when I could. After many years, I think I prefer the Israeli Masortim which is found among the Israeli Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, rather than the extreme of being totally secular or totally ultra Orthodox religious . This is distinctly Israeli and nothing to do with the 'Conservative' or Masorti Judaism of Ashkenazi origin and those of us who identify as 'Shomrei Masoret' or 'upholders of tradition' look to what outsiders would see as 'Orthodox' Rabbis and belong to traditional Sephardic congregations, with a desire to uphold the culture, tradition and heritage of our form of Judaism, without being sucked into a vortex of conflicts with secular education, science or not working but studying Torah all day, managing to avoid IDF service or trying to isolate oneself from the outside world as a deliberate policy, This Wikipedia article explains more fully .
