I work at a daycare. I used to work at restaurants and do catering and more… upscale things in the Food Service Industry. Hospitality Industry? Restaurants and Catering? It all works.
When I found that I wasn’t getting hours at the main restaurant I was working a few years ago, I pushed my way into being a Personal Chef. It worked, but it was not the amount of hours I really needed. I worked as I could, catering, special events, personal chefing… But I was living off my partner’s teat and not doing as well as I would like.
A friend of mine posted on FaceBook asking if anyone needed hours. I said, “YES!” He gave me the contact info, there was an interview and I was working the next Monday.
It wasn’t just cooking. I cook, I clean, I do errands, as well as other things. It has been a learning experience. And I have learned something that was staring me in the face from the beginning.
I have been working there for just over a month at this point and I just came to realize, I am running a fucking restaurant.
To give perspective, I am the kitchen. Everything from purchasing to dish-pit. I feed three seatings of 10 to 20 people each every day for lunch within a 10 minute gap between, plus I provide continental breakfast and an afternoon snack every day the kids are at the daycare. I also feed the adults, teachers and staff, which brings the numbers up by an average of 4 plates per seating. I am FoH and BoH for all of it.
Oh, and I cannot have the same menu twice in the same month.
I answer to the Director, who is very much like every General Manager I have known in the industry. Perhaps not as cutthroat, but driven to keep the daycare running, and that includes the kitchen. We have not come to any real impasses, yet, but it is interesting that, and this is really sexist, that being women, we communicate, leading us away from conflict. I really like that.
I do hate the paperwork. As with any restaurant, there are things that need to be done, and much of it may look like the cooking, but the counting and measuring for each ‘guest’ to make sure everyone gets what they ‘ordered’ takes a good amount of my time every day. Each child has a proscribed amount of protein, carbs, milk, etc. that I have to provide at each meal. It is almost a pound of food per child for lunch. And each day is different for who is eating in, who is having a packed lunch and who can eat what.
Did I mention I have to put together the next week’s menu on the Monday of the current week?
Children are hardly clear with what they do and don’t like. I have seen the same child hate beans one week and love them the next. I have also seen the Alpha of a class decide they don’t like something and every other child in that group stop eating. It is said that a child will learn to like a food within 3 exposures, some say 10. It isn’t that simple, and the ‘guests’ I have to cook for can change their minds multiple times in one meal. Talk about hard critics.
As Exec, Sous, Cold line, Grill… Every position in the kitchen is me. If I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done. From supremeing the oranges to plating, it’s all me. And I am both a bitch to work for and a lazy slob on the line. I have found that I have to rethink the techniques I plan on using when I come across every kitchens worst enemy, time.
I also do some of the minor maintenance and repair on many of the machines in the kitchen. The sanitizer had not been cleaned for a while when I started. That sounds odd, but most people don’t understand such contraptions. It is not a dish washer – it looks like an industrial dish washer, but it does not have the cycles, or power, to clean dirty dishes. This means you need to scrape the food off, spray it as clean as you can and possibly use some detergent to get some of the greasy remainders off. There is also the silver-soak(for the flatware and utensils) that should be used for at least a few minutes before the flatware gets put through. That is just the start. There are buttons and fill-lines and cycle lengths… And filters that I don’t think anyone had dealt with in a year.
I do this odd thing that some people just don’t get. I read the directions. Sometimes, I follow the directions, sometimes I don’t. It is still good to know the proscribed method to use something before you start. There is a full instruction sheet printed and posted on the sanitizer. I had watched the person training me, the cook who was leaving in 3 days, use the sanitizer, and knew that there was something off about it. The water never looked quite right, even right after filing the reservoir and there were bits stuck to the plates and such after every cycle. The first day it was just me, I read the directions on the machine and saw what it was that was missing. The mesh filters in the reservoir were so clogged, I was not sure if it was water-mold and not just decomposing food on the mesh. I cleaned that, cleaned the ‘gross filter’ at the end of the French drain, scrubbed the inside of the box and took the spinning arms off and cleaned those.
Now, I understand wanting to use the sanitizer to clean things. This has come back to bite me, and I wasn’t even there when it happened. Someone washed a fishtank in the sanitizer. I’ll wait until you get how bad a decision that really was. And I mean BAD. I talked with Bob, the building manager, and found out that several months previous, he had had to scoop out fish tank gravel from the disposal in the dishpit. Food items only, people! No one at the time would admit to having done it. When I took the jet arms off, I found that most of the jet holes on one of them was plugged with little bits of gravel. Tooth pick, scrubbing and some cursing later, I was able to dislodge most of them. It was obvious that it had been a while. Some of the gravel bits had a good layer of food/lime build up keeping them in place.
I have had to clean them several times because the pump in a recirculating pump with a heating reservoir that I really don’t want to try to open. There is still gravel in the system and I find one or two pieces each time I clean the sanitizer. This last time, I took the sanitizer apart because someone had put a disposable gel-pack in. It exploded, leaving a goo of propylene glycol and other unmentionables oozing it’s way out of the top jets. That was not a fun time, since I had not done the morning dishes, yet.
Yes, I am looking at the daycare and kitchen as a restaurant at this point. But I have to understand that the church, and the staff of the daycare, also use the kitchen. This means that things don’t always get left where I put it, or gets misused and I have to deal with it, like the sanitizer. Restaurants don’t really have that problem, do they?
Unfortunately, yes, they do.
At a 3-star I worked at for two years, one of the FoH staff insisted on keeping her purse in the walk-in cooler. This meant that we would find it in with the cucumbers or onions, her make-up under the basil… It was not a good situation. It also was what made her loose her job because she knew the inspector was coming and she put her purse in the cooler that day, anyway. Her purse fell over and we had change in the greens. Not good. It hit us for 3 points and the Exec was livid.
I have dealt with inspectors before, and won. I am very confused about how the inspectors for the daycare work, though, as none of the ones I know have come through have stepped foot into the kitchen. I’m not worried, though. I personally brought up the score of restaurant kitchens before. Just by doing my job.
Anything can happen.
Every restaurant has resource problems. Mine isn’t any different. The most pressing, other than food, is what to serve on. When I started, they had just purchased plates and bowls after having used paper plates for over two years. About a week and a half into my tenure, we changed from paper napkins to fabric ones. I just spent some of my budget to procure more serving bowls to supplement the broken and cracked ones I have had to use, and to bolster the numbers to help with the growing number of children at the facility.
It all comes out of the food budget.
There are other things that come out of the food budget that I was not expecting, and was landed on me from the last person in the position. They tried to help. Being helpful sometimes isn’t. She used almost a month’s worth of budget to supply the kitchen with sanitizer chemicals, cling film, gloves… And then found out, on the last day she worked, that it came out of the food budget, not the general or church budget.
I was in the weeds even before I officially started.
The place is run by modern hippies. I don’t mind that at all. Besides the USDA guidelines, CACFP accreditation and other programs, we are cutting as much HFCS out of the kid’s diet as possible. I am making much more in house than I think the last person did, from granola (I am NOT paying $4.00 a 10oz box for THAT!) to bread to pickles, I am trying to keep things simple and not just out of a can. I even make ricotta cheese from the ‘old’ milk to keep food costs down. All this, and we have a compost bin that I put the scrapings into every day as I head home. I think we are just feeding flies and bees right now, but it will be good for the day care’s garden in a few months!
At this point, I have a rhythm to my day. I am a morning person, so getting up at 6 isn’t a problem. I have about an hour to do morning chores, and wake up, before I head out. Sometimes, I hit one of the stores that opens at 7 on the way into the day care, sometimes I head straight there. I pick up the compost bin from the night before and head in. If I see people in the office when I do the time card, I chat for a few minutes, checking in for the day. I check to make sure I remembered the morning food and get it up to the classrooms.
While I am up there, I check to make sure that I am not going to be surprised by an outing as I chat with the teachers and get the day’s numbers. It ha happened once, and that was enough. Each class has it’s own schedule, which means that there are a few days where everyone is out for lunch, some days everyone is in. Mostly, if a class is on an outing, there is only one class that has gone, which makes things easier for me in the long run.
If there is a class going on an outing, I get their food and bags ready as the priority, a rush to-go order. I may also be heating something or putting things together for lunch or snack at the same time, but getting the food and bags for the kids leaving takes precedence. The tables are next, with wiping them down, putting the proper number of chairs around them and setting them, that usually only takes me about 20 minutes of my day. But if it isn’t done, it can be disastrous.
Lunch has to have many components. And there are the growing tastes to be considered of the kids, and of the teachers. The number of dishes that can be served has now gone up, now that there are more serving dishes available. This means more variety, and more likely that the kids will eat what I put in front of them. It also means I have more dishes to do.
Every day, I have a disorder I call ‘Dish Washer’s Lap’. I am wet from just below my breasts to just above my knees, if it is a bad day. If it is average, it just looks like I wet myself in the front. The dishes, from the pots to the flatware, has to be done before I leave. I did mention that if I don’t do it, it doesn’t get done, right? And then all the counters, as well as the sanitizer’s in and out areas, need to be wiped down. I know that it will not stay clean, but at least it is when I leave for the day.
I have been trying to make baked goods for the next day as I clean from the current. It seems to work out and there have been moderate successes. I am not a baker, but I can bake up some tasty things. Breakfast bars, cheese bread, granola… Many things have been produced, many of those bringing happy but confused compliments. Yes, you can make such things, and make them tasty.
That is my job right now. Making tasty things for children who are just learning about food in the outside world. It is through my talents I am running a restaurant for these kids and their teachers. Mostly successfully.
I am running a fucking restaurant.
Chef Rena