The 5 Things I Learnt From Working 12 days In a Restaurant
I am in love with Food and people who make and serve Food.
For the past 10 years, I’ve been working in a large Retail Group in Dubai. Starting January 2017, I’ll be the proud founder of my consultancy in Guest Experience for both Retail and Food & Beverage.
I knew my passion for food wasn’t enough to deliver the best consulting services, so I decided to go consolidate my learning in the trenches. I worked 6 days in a chic and contemporary restaurant as a kitchen ‘commis’ and 6 days as a waiter.
Restaurants are fast learning environments. After over 100 hours there, starting from ground zero, here are 5 lessons I learned that I can apply to any field:
#1. The Result Is Worth The Effort
Creating beautiful dishes takes place in an environment of strong smell, sweat, tension, precision, trial and error, pain and much more. In brief, a lot of efforts.
Look at this Chicken Duxelle: a yellow free-range chicken stuffed with Portobello reduction, laid down on a half-moon of Quinoa and half-moon of lemon-butter sauce.
Creating this dish requires a series of basic steps: boiling kilos of quinoa for all the orders of the week, washing, peeling, and chopping a full crate of Portobello, chopping a kilo of garlic, crushing spices, and pan frying the whole thing during a long time to obtain the tasty stuffing that goes inside the chicken.
All those elements are put together and assembled when an order comes.
Chicken Duxelle is only one of over 30 dishes that are offered in the menu.
This is hard work. It is tough and contains a lot of behind-the-curtain imperfections. The result is beauty.
It reminded me of this: to achieve something beautiful, you need to go through steps that, taken separately, are not fancy or nice to do. But the result is worth it.
#2. Repetition Is The Key To Mastery
I find those cooks and chefs who chop-chop like razors while casually talking to you pretty cool and I have always wanted to gain and master this skill. I thought I would be able to learn at least this in 6 days:
Of course, it didn’t happen.
In 6 days, I cut onion, butternut, meat, potatoes, mushrooms and many more things. But in big pieces and at a slow pace.
When I tried to chop chives, one of the cooks showed me patiently how to do it only to see me massacring the batch of herbs. He showed me again. Watched me massacring it more. Told me eventually with a big smile: “It’s ok, I will do it”.
That didn’t feel great inside.
But it was a strong illustration of this: skills take repetition to be mastered. People who chop with grace and efficiency have done it hundreds, if not thousands of hours in their life. On a TV screen it seems easy. With the knife and a batch of chives in hand, it’s another story.
In order to integrate any skill as a natural move, you need to make repetition your best friend first.
#3. Doing It Together Creates Solid Bonds
Every dish that came out of the kitchen was the result of the work of many, either in the preparation of the separate elements — what is called ‘mise en place’, or in the making of the dish once the order was received by the kitchen.
From the Head Chef down to the Steward (the colleague who washes dishes and cleans the kitchen), everybody does a piece of the global result.
I understood the extent to kitchen teamwork with the chocolate fondant:
On my first day, when the chocolate fondant order came, a commis who was free took a plate and started to prepare the semi spheres of coulis along with the chocolate carpet. In the meantime, the pastry Chef put the chocolate base in the oven. Once the fondant was hot and ready, he placed it on the plate and the commis took the vanilla ice cream and the clove to finish the plating. Before being served, I remember that the pastry Chef inspected the plate, cleaned the edges and sent it to the restaurant through the elevator. Two people worked together on this one.
During peak times, more people can jump into the preparation to make the order ready as fast and as beautifully as possible.
There is not a lot of ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ during this process and on the surface, one could think that each one is working in a bubble.
Everyday though, when plates were sent, perfectly executed, at the right temperature and on-time, I could perceive an invisible pleasant feeling circulating between people in the kitchen for a few micro-seconds.
The accumulation of those moments gave something fascinating at the end of each day: we were all leaving with a smile on our face, happy to have shared 9 or 10 hours together.
Achieving things alone might be faster; achieving things together takes more effort (and sometimes more time in the first stages), but it creates solid bonds between human beings.
#4. If you don’t take risks, forget about learning
When I started my duty as a waiter — after 6 days in the kitchen, I thought that knowing how the dishes were made would allow me to take orders easily.
Eager to do well, I approached my first Guests, placed them and went to see a waiter to inform him that 2 people were at table 12. He asked:
- “So which water will they take? Still or Sparkling?”
- “I didn’t ask…”
- “Well go and tell me”
- [after 10 seconds] “Sparkling”
- “With ice and lemon?”
- “…”
On my very first order, I let my colleague take over to avoid making things worst: my debut was a disaster.
After 6 days working as a waiter, I still couldn’t take orders. I was terrified to forget questions, go back multiple times to the table and expose my incompetence again.
And guess what, for not taking a risk to fail again, I didn’t learn so much on taking orders properly.
Looking back, I feet a little regret that I didn’t dare more despite the encouragements of some waiters who were ready to assist me.
But a good thing emerged from this situation: instead of taking orders, I decided work on the tables set-up — putting back napkins, cutlery, bread plate and glasses after cleaning.
I was so bad at the beginning that I provoked a few irritated reactions from waiters who needed to correct the alignment or the symmetry of my set-up. But I kept doing it over and over again, convinced that I would eventually do it faster and well.
This is exactly what happened. At the end of the 6 days, the team could rely on me for the table set-up. I took the risk to fail many times and persisted in doing it. In the end, I learned.
Learning means to acquire a knowledge or a craft you didn’t know. The first time is going to be risky and that is inevitable.
Fear of failure or ridicule will try to make you believe that taking a risk has serious consequences. Overcoming this fear builds confidence and opens doors to learning.
#5. Clean up your mess
In both the kitchen and the restaurant, I had the bitter experience to suffer from the mess made by others and the magic feeling to benefit from the care of others.
A table needed to be cleared fast because new Guests wanted the spot. I went to catch the crumb set (the fabric to clean the table) and took the cloth in hand: it was full of the dirt from the previous cleanings and I could not use it in front of the Guests.
I had to run to the service area to clean it and come back. The Guests were growing impatient; their experience was not starting well. No big drama, everything went back on track and the Guests were eventually very happy of their experience. But the frustration was there and a small bothering feeling came from this incident, sounding like: ‘I might find again a dirty crumb set during a rush time’. Since I didn’t know who had left the crumb this way, I guess this feeling was split between all my waiter colleagues.
I also had the opposite experience: I needed to gather 8 set-up sets for two tables during a relatively busy time. When I opened the drawer at the station (the place where all of the set-up elements are), everything was replenished and I could prepare my sets in no time. The next Guests could sit rapidly on a refreshed table and it felt good: good to make people happy, good to be efficient and contribute to a great start, good to know that someone before me had taken the time to replenish knives, forks, folded napkins, glasses and bread plates for the benefit of many others.
Because one colleague ‘cleaned the mess’, I was able to perform well and make a difference.
What a great feeling.
Cleaning up your mess might not be pleasant, but the ripple effects might be bigger and more impactful than you think both for you and others.
That experience was short and intense. 12 days of my life, that’s not a lot. I still feel this might be one of the crossroads in my life that I will remember for a long time.
Beyond the learning, I met amazing people who welcomed me with open arms from the first second. They made me a better person and strengthened my passion.
I can’t wait for January 2017 to start working with restaurants.
Bon Appétit!
Joe Sejean is a co-founder of Activate Creativity, a platform that helps people reconnect, stretch and nurture their creativity.
10.28 Detox™ is a CREATIVE Detox that takes 10 minutes per day, for 28 days. It starts every Monday.
