Kitchen Rant: Check Yo Attitude at the Oven Door Biatch!

In every kitchen you will always find one person who is a real bitch. Someone who comes in during the morning with a scowl on their face and refuses to say good morning to anyone. This is seen as very rude in the kitchen because working in a kitchen is hard! Every night it is like fighting a war. Sometimes you get slammed and fall into the shit. And when this happens its the people around you who either pull you out or join you. So it's customary for people in the kitchen to greet one another, it is a way to show respect that you are one as a team and not as an individual. I remember when I staged at Daniel, Daniel Boulud himself would often come down to the restaurant (he lives upstairs and sometimes comes down in his pajamas) and when he does he greets every person in the entire kitchen and shakes their hand, even me, a plebeian, a lowly extern peeling crates of pears. Ok so I digress, back to bitchy people in the kitchen. Everyone who works in the kitchen has sacrificed a lot to be there. We work long hours, work when everyone else is playing, and we get paid in peanuts. Now, I'm not busting my ass and getting paid chiclets to be around someone who unpleasant and doesn't want to be in the kitchen. If you are a cranky person then maybe you should rethink your career and work at CVS! No matter how tired I am or stressed out I am I always come to work pleasant. Because no one deserves to work in a shitty environment. I will not make it shitty for you as long as you don't make it shitty for me.

There's always one who refuses to clean up after themselves or wash their own dishes. Those are the worst people! They are either lazy or too full of themselves to think that they are too good to clean up. (It's funny because head chefs usually don't like to clean up after themselves. When they are around they take up all the space and leave a mess as if a tornado just ran through. It's like they forgot all their manners. But a chef is a chef and they can pretty much act how they want to. Cooks on the other hand are supposed to clean their shit!)

There is this girl at work who obviously hates washing her own dishes and anyone else's. She always leaves dirty sheet pans in the rack. She lets all of her dirty dishes pile up and then dumps them in the sink and walks away. She never thinks about loading or unloading the dishes from the dishwasher, never has the cognizant thought to bring something up/down when she has empty hands. I feel like we constantly play this game of Who-Is-Going-To-Put-Her-Shit-Away, she knows she has the chocolate ganache out (she used it last), I know she has the chocolate ganache out, but she waits to see if I will put it away for her, and I wait to see if she will put that shit away herself. Usually I end up putting it away because its fucking annoying and because I am a team player. If I waited for her to put her own shit away I would be there for hours.

Also in the kitchen you will always find one person who is really slooooooooooooooooow. They don't realize that the rest of the team would like to get the fuck out of work after 12 hours. They are slow and they suck at what they do. It's annoying when you have a shit long production list and you know you are going to have to stay past your 12 hour shift to finish it all and the person you are working with is moving 10mph when everyone else is moving 70mph. Sometimes you can catch them staring off into space or staring at the storage closet. This now leads us to the cocky ones. I find that the slow cooks in the kitchen are usually oblivious to how much they suck and usually think they are so awesome. There's always someone in the kitchen who thinks they are more talented then everyone else and usually their shit sucks. To be a good cook you have to watch,listen, and learn. You have to be humble and be open to learning. Which means be open to some else who's had much more experience tell you what the fuck to do. So that same girl at work who doesn't like to clean or put her shit away also likes to pretend that she is top dog when she isn't. She's bossy and constantly tries to tell me what to do and how to do things. Her shit sucks. I can't respect someone or listen to someone who makes crappy products. So I don't. I just say "yup" and keep on with what I'm doing. She's so untalented.

It's important to have a good team when you are working in the kitchen. It makes the day pleasant and go by much faster. It's great when you work with people who also are working as a team and not as an individual. The kitchen can be a cutthroat place. Some people are really competitive but I think that in the end it's obvious who has the talent and skill and who doesn't. I've worked at a cutthroat place where people from the same team would sabotage each other. Now that to me is just stupid and crazy. Our job is to make a good product that will please our clientèle. The best chef will always keep that in mind instead of how to be better then the other person.