#002///Weekend Update

                                                                                                                            Line Cook for Life #002
Friday
It's 3 in the morning and I'm bushed.
Doesn't mean I want to sleep or would even be capable at this point.
The boys and I did a hundo-thirty or so in covers tonight that weren't paced or spaced in any attempt to make our lives easier. To help the reader understand, our kitchen is approximately thirty-five square feet and we seat about fifty in the dining room if everything lines up just right, at least according to fire code. We also have a patio with another thirty on it now that the weather has broken for the better in our rust belt urban center. I'm used to that. We were walking a tightrope for about three solid hours and only towards the end did we wobble a bit.
Purely an issue of stamina. Hot, sweaty, nicotine addicts can only keep that shit up for so long.
I was not satisfied with the last three tables, though. They took too long to get out. In our kitchen, the difference between too long and just right is between twelve and fifteen minutes without food in front of the guest. Each of these tables were twenty. The last was twenty-two.
That hurt.
To any lay folk out there who don't appreciate the difference of three minutes, think about that the next time you ask the server how much longer it'll be for your food or let him know you're in a rush to get to a show after you've had apps and salads. Three minutes is the difference of giving away a thirty dollar plate to some overly entitled dude in a hurry to use their twelve dollar movie ticket.
And they still ate every fcuking bite.
That shit keeps me up at night. Makes me go from wanting to needing a drink. I chew a hole in my cheek to keep from hollering at everyone on staff about things none of them have any control over.

I pace around the block twice.
To make matters better, we left our restaurant after breakdown and went to some local hipster mating pen and ran into a literal assload of people and it seemed it was everybody's birthday. Follow that with darts, watching friends make terrible decisions with strangers and for color add some tom-foolery with a police horse and a good time was had by all.
Now here I am, writing.
I went into the restaurant at ten this morning.
Packed my daughter's lunch at seven.
At least I get to make pancakes for my family in six hours and enjoy the people that I love...

Saturday
Pancakes were awesome. The seeming five minutes I got to enjoy with my kid - yelling at her about lack of listening regarding room cleaning - and wife - griping about daughter's inability to just fucking listen - made life worth living, charged my battery and got me amped for my day.
When I got to the shop the reservations had jumped from forty to eighty. That deflated my good morning balloon a bit. From strictly a business point of view, things couldn't be better.
Make that paper. Dolla' dolla' bill, y'all.
From a strategy and supply point of view, on the other hand, this might be a bit tricky.
Our standard lunch of about twenty-five heads mutated into a well executed, relatively low headache sixty-five in 90 minutes - but sixty-five is still sixty-five and just as mentally taxing as your desk job is during an eight hour day, especially when unexpected.
That tightrope I mentioned regarding yesterday's dinner service? We were on it at two this afternoon. Service didn't start for three more hours.
"Do we have enough salmon?" my sous says to me.
"Where are we gonna find Faroe Island salmon at three on a Saturday?" I reply.
Phone calls are made.
"At that price it fucks our food cost!" says I. It's our top seller...
"Fine."
"Burgers?"
We are low on burgers, now?!?

So, we somehow get ready to roll only slightly late, and roll we did. This service was a well paced affair and it was only after we did hundred covers we had to kick it into high gear. 

I fell asleep during a smoke on the stoop after the nine-thirty ten-top's entrees walked at half past ten, cigarette still burning. My sous-chef woke me up by stepping on me while taking out the garbage...

Sunday

Reflections, pride and exhaustion.

When I broke the yolk for an egg over easy I was throwing together for the wife I lost my cool and went back to bed.
Subtract the pride from the previous statement.

How can I bust out the hash I've slung over the last few days, few years so effectively and be brought so low by a fried egg?

It took a while for my wife to talk me off the ledge of pissing away my day off and succumbing to depression and self-loathing. Now that I'm feeling better, she's upset that she married a man-child. 

While trying to get this written she tells me that we are leaving an hour earlier than expected for our niece's birthday party and I have to boogie to build the fruit tray she signed us up to bring. Now, I volunteered to make it, so this is not a complaint so much an ironic observation about how once you start doing this it never stops never stops never stops never stops never stops...



The "Weekend Update" will be a series used from time to time to let you know what my weekends - and that of most of the over 350,000 pro-cooks within the U.S.-of-fuckin'-A - are like. Remember this: when the rest of the people are getting off from work is when we get busy. You get a lunch break? We are getting busy. Someone have a three-day weekend? We have three days of getting busy. This series will hopefully show multiple points of view about the shit show we all call the service industry.

Please continue to check in on the Line Cook for Life blog. This is quickly growing into a community of food-folk who will begin contributing soon to provide more material for the site and fodder for the podcast. We are planning and preparing for our first show - lots going on here. The LCFL facebook site will be up later this week. That will be a more organized forum of the events we will be doing, pictures of those involved, videos of us acting the fool, etc. By now we all know how versatile facebook can be. The blog will now drop every Monday morning by noon along with any materials collected in the previous week's adventures in line cookery. Expect other's essays later in the week as they will be other shades of the same color.
Until then keep bangin'...
James Pawl Kane