The first night I closed at the restaurant, I called my then-girlfriend (now fiancee). It was a not a call for help; I was merely delaying the moment to come when I would have to empty the hot oil from the fryer.
The call ended. Every other task was done. The grill cook looked over at me and clucked. “Do I need to do that for you?”
In that moment, I thought about being six and sitting on the steps at my grandparents’ house, outside my parents’ room, in the middle of the night. I needed to throw up but didn’t want to bother my parents or wake them from their slumber. So I cried and sat on the step. If I knocked on the door they would have been at my side in a heartbeat, I knew. But I didn’t want to bother anyone. I wanted to be able to deal on my own. So I took a deep breath, gathered my nerves, and vomited all over the carpet in the bedroom that I shared with my cousins. Like a big boy.
The grill cook sucked in his breath through his teeth.
“No,” I said.
A few nights later, exhausted from a day on the line, I started to pour water in to the fryer to clean it before the oil had finished draining. The oil hissed angrily as it boiled over the pot I had drained it in to. The mistake cost me an extra hour of cleaning, along with the dirty looks from my manager and other chef as they helped me mop up. It also cost me a pair of shoes. As I walked to the subway in my socks, I made my nightly call to my girlfriend. I told her everything. I think I cried a bit.
The thing about the restaurant is that it will let you know quickly when you make a mistake. I have two hands and arms full of cuts and burns as small reminders – one reminds me that I need to stay focused when I clean the grill, another is a beacon to the danger of forgetting the heat of the oven door.
As I’ve progressed at the restaurant, the mistakes shine brighter, and the scars cut deeper. A forgotten inventory order will lead to us running out of product, which will lead to disappointing customers, which will lose us business. A customer doesn’t care (nor should they!) that I got interrupted 5 times while doing our ice cream inventory; all that they see is that the flavor of milkshake that they came to have is unavailable to them.
There is a moment, right as I step onto the line during a rush, where I feel plunged into deep water. Fifteen tickets on the board, no clean space to work with, no semblance of organization. That first ticket I put out, the first time I get to clear the board of old tickets, these are the first strong pushes towards the surface. When I can identify every item we need I can see sunlight, and by the time new orders are coming in I’m already feeling the air rush back into my lungs.
These words are not new or unique – the difficulty of restaurant life has been expounded upon by chefs far more experienced and verbose than me. But in the pain that I’ve brought myself in the countless mistakes and mishaps I’ve run into in the restaurant, I’ve found something revelatory:
I am powerful.
As children, we crave power. Childhood obsessions with dinosaurs, trains, fire trucks, and so on were really just a constant searching for role models that absolutely positively did not have someone setting them a bed time.
Over the course of my life, I had allowed that quest for power to fall by the way side – I allowed each mounting failure (and there were many) to set the parameters of who I was. When I lost or forgot things, I cursed myself and decided I was disorganized. When I flaked on plans, I decided I was not reliable. I allowed my failures to define who I was and what I was capable of.
With so little self esteem, I sought out jobs that came easily to me. I avoided jobs that seemed difficult or taxing because I didn’t trust myself to be able to hold them for any amount of time. The more things I proved myself bad at, the more weak and useless I became.
The restaurant doesn’t care what I think of myself; it only cares about the work getting done. There will be 200 hungry people ready to be fed for dinner tonight whether you are ready for them or not, whether you’re capable or not. If you can’t do it, if you can’t hack it, there are one hundred other resumes just itching for your position. But you have that chance. Everyone starts somewhere – that first night on the line, after the third rush of people, with my manager yelling at me at you to not just stand there and get my station clean, that’s where I found my power.
“I’m just awful at this,” I thought to myself, “but I can get better.”
And slowly, I have. I can run the kitchen or front of house with equal ease on our busiest nights; I’m learning how to keep my purveyor orders organized and on time. I’m still not what I would consider “good” at all of this – a Michelin-starred restaurant would spit me out without breaking stride. But I’m getting better. And my mistakes don’t define the job I’m doing – I still obsess over every detail of them, but only to learn how to never make them again.
The easy cliché would be to draw a direct line from the restaurant to my personal life, to talk about how the confidence in myself at work has allowed the confidence I feel in my life to blossom. That is true to a degree, I suppose. But the fact of the matter is that the restaurant is far simpler than life; rarely are decisions in my personal life as cut-and-dried as whether a delivery customer received his milkshake or not, or whether I remembered to order the proper amount of napkins. Expertise in the restaurant world is only capable of bringing me up to barely passable life-world skills (ask my Fiancée how the cleaning and organization I’ve learned at the restaurant translates to our home life.)
But still, I’m showing myself every day that I have the power to change who I am for the better. I come home from each day of work simultaneously beaten down and beaming. I rest and think about the days events – the seemingly unending mishmash of tiny catastrophes that prevent any one day from being a “normal” day. Anyone can make a meal – It’s batting a thousand on the meals you make that presents the challenge. To work in a restaurant is to recognize that perfection is impossible and to strive for it anyway. Seeing the change I can affect simply by striving in that way has changed my whole worldview.
Now If you will excuse me, I have to get back to work.