My husband was my boss when we first met. I was a newly-hired prep cook at a restaurant in Pennsylvania, and he was the chef. The rest, as they say, is history. In the short amount of time in which I was paid to respect his authority, he taught me a lot.
A few weeks in to my new gig, my father asked me, “What are you learning at that new place?”
I thought for a while before answering, “There is almost nothing that can’t be saved.”
Sure, there’s a metaphor in there. But I mean it literally.
In restaurants, mistakes aren’t often scrapped. They are salvaged.
Take the guy who used three entire #10 cans of tomato paste to make our marinara sauce when the recipe called for 3 cups (that’s a 1,200% increase for those unfamiliar with #10 cans). I can still see my husband standing over the giant stockpot, shaking his head and adding this and that in order to make it work, somehow.
Take the reservation for 10 people that was actually supposed to be for 18, who are standing in the lobby right now, absolutely starving. The team comes together to move those tables like they’re pawns on a chess board and voila, a table for ten is now longer and the 18 are seated happily.
There are very few errors from which a good restaurant can’t bounce back. However, I’ve identified two that are really hard to overcome. The first is burning the food. That’s tough to camouflage, and even though overcooked food might be passed off as “smoky” or “well-done,” there’s no hiding the taste of burnt.
The other error is dropped food. I know there’s a belief that cooks are dropping steaks left and right and throwing them on the plate, but I don’t see it happening, not at my restaurant anyway. Most importantly, cooks take too much pride in their work to do that. Secondly, in this era of open-concept kitchens, there’s certainly no way a diner would see that happen and let it slide. Plus, with so many chefs literally using tweezers to place the sprig of microgreen ever so gently on that cut of lamb, do you really think food runners and servers are playing fast and loose with the plates? I’m terrified to see a lettuce leaf wobble on my way to the table. There is no way that plate is falling out of my hand.
Enter: other people.
It would be so wonderfully easy to navigate the dining room if I didn’t have to worry about where other people are going. There are servers and drunk people and clumsy kids — KEEP TRACK OF YOUR TODDLERS, PEOPLE — wandering in my path when I’m trying to reach the table. I might want to scream “get out of my way!” when I’m holding a hot plate behind a slow-moving guest, but instead I force a smile and accept the fact that I no longer have fingerprints.
However, when it’s a coworker, I can let them know I’m there.
You have almost certainly heard this if you’ve eaten in a restaurant.
“Behind,” I whisper politely as I snake behind your server while they’re taking your order.
Or perhaps you’re having a lively conversation with your bartender when someone walks behind her with a case of beer. “Behind,” they say, and your bartender somehow continues her conversation with you while simultaneously leaning forward and nodding to the co-worker at her 6.
When someone works in a restaurant, they are told to say “behind” when approaching someone. It is the golden rule, and it becomes reflex. We say it at work, and then sometimes we say it so much that we also say it at the grocery store. “Behind” means a lot of things, such as, “I’m here behind you carrying something! Don’t make me drop this!”
It also means, “I am here behind you and I see that YOU are carrying something! Don’t be startled when you see me and drop it!” I have taken “Behind” so far that sometimes I accidentally say it when I am approaching a co-worker and we are literally making eye contact with each other. “Behind! In front! Whatever! I have hot plates; don’t run into me!”
When I took my Sommelier course, I was told that some dining rooms have a rule that staff will only walk clockwise around a table. This cuts down on bumping incidents and the need to say “behind,” and makes everyone look more graceful. I have taken this to heart and if I’m pouring wine for the person at 1 o’clock, I will walk all the way around a table to serve the person at 12 o’clock. I’m sure I look c̶r̶a̶z̶y̶ graceful.
I have a related personal rule that I hope catches fire: one should never, ever walk backwards in a restaurant. Walking in reverse without looking where you’re going should be forbidden. It’s bad luck. It shouldn’t be done. I can’t give my co-workers warning with a proper “behind” if they’re backing up with no alarm like a busted forklift at Home Depot. Those who back up into me will feel my wrath. If I somehow back up into someone, I will feel shame. Watch where you’re going, team. All eyes ahead.
I would be remiss to discuss “behind” without bringing up its first cousin, “corner.” This is yet another word I find myself yelling out to no one in particular when I’m approaching an aisle cap at Wal*Mart, or entering my own bedroom closet.
Restaurant kitchens and side stations are often kooky little nooks made with leftover space and therefore they have blind corners. The restaurant in which I currently work has one such corner leading out of the kitchen into the dining room. I cross that threshhold hundreds of times a day, and every single time I approach it, I yell “corner” to warn people approaching from the other direction.
Are there convex mirrors hung to allow us to see the traffic coming our way? Yes. Does anyone ever reference these mirrors hung at ceiling height when they are in the weeds? No. The one time I don’t yell ‘corner’ will be the one time I need it. It’s Murphy’s law for restaurants - when I don’t say it, I summon a co-worker carrying hot soup or a bunch of steak knives points-out. So, it’s become habit. We’ve even developed personal cadences and accents to our proclamation. By far the most endearing/annoying is our food runner who says “Corner corner corner corner corner” in quick succession and has frequently been compared to the honking of a goose.
No matter what word they use, your local restaurant staff have no doubt created a vocabulary to prevent them from running into each other. There’s a myriad of mistakes that are fixed by restaurant workers on the fly, but no one wants dropped food on their conscience. That’s time and money on the ground! Avoiding mid-shift collisions is something we can all get behind.