If You've Got Cooking Problems, I Feel Bad For You, Son. I've Got Ninety-Nine Problems But A Grill Ain't One

It’s just one of those moods you get sometimes. You’re walking across the parking lot to work and you see a piece of paper stuck to the inside of the door. It says, “Unfortunately our grill is down so we are unable to make Parmesan-Crusted Chicken or Potstickers.” Once you read it, you get this sort of premonition. Today is going to have one of the busiest work shifts of your life.

I’ve mentioned this before, this superstitious rule I’ve developed working in the foodservice industry. It states that whenever something goes wrong or breaks, that’s when a rush happens. So the logical follow-through would, of course, be that with a broken grill, the entire day is going to more or less be one entire rush.

There’s a similar rule that says if we run out of something, the demand for that skyrockets. Now, in the kitchen, this is a little harder to track. Unless you manage to hear the customers give their orders ten feet away through the sound of two fans, an oven, and some vents, you can’t really know if the cashier had to explain why they couldn’t have their eighteen potstickers so was there anything else they would rather instead? Sometimes, though, you’d get an order online, where people not in the know spoke to other people not in the know and somehow we were the ones who had to apologize and ask for substitutes.

There are some other considerations too. Instead of chicken -- that’s the normal kind of chicken, not the parmesan-crusted kind that we can’t make -- taking two to three minutes to grill, now they take six or seven minutes in the oven. Which on paper should be fine; we’re expected to get orders out six minutes after they’re placed, but there is some wiggle room occasionally, especially in circumstances like these. But we only have one oven, and there are enough other menu items that require it that throwing the frequent six-minute periods where it’s helping restock just throws the whole system out of balance.

Finally, here’s the worst part about all of this: the grill has been fixed. Multiple times -- with presumably different repairmen, though I can’t say for sure on that front -- has someone come in and fiddled around with it, and we’ve dutifully waited with the signs already taped to the doors. Then it’ll start working, and we take the signs down.

But then it doesn’t. It just stops. The grill breaks again. Thankfully, these times have been just after a rush, so there’s a bit more time to prepare for the next one, doing things like calling who we need to call and taping up new notices. The end result is the same, though: we’re back to where we started.

Maybe it’s fixed now. Like, actually fixed instead of temporarily fixed. I guess we’ll have to see.

-F