Lunch Time @ Portovino

Today I was supposed to have a day off but one of my coworkers called me up and asked if I could take his shift. It's not like I had anything planned so I said yes. Thing is, he's taking my shift tomorrow and he's only working from 1500 to 2000 while I worked all day from 10 o'clock all the way to close, at 2200. Now that's nice because I get more money.

When I got there I checked the schedule to see who was going to be with me, only to find out I was alone all day. Now I don't take care of the whole kitchen. We have sections, I'm an Entrée cook, I do the entrees, baked pasta, cook the side vegetables, fry fries, help with plating on big groups, etc. There's the grill man, who grills everything, the pasta man, who makes pasta, the end man who's at the end of the line (because the kitchen is literally a line that starts with me and goes in the same order as mentioned), he takes care of mussels, seafood things, salsiccia (sausage with all kinds of things) and some other things, the pizza man (I think that one is pretty self explanatory) and the prep cooks who work in back, they prepare some of our stuff. They pre-cook veggies, cut up calamari, roast roasted potatoes, and countless other things that help us immensely.

I've never worked my section alone before, which scared me a little. A rush can hit when you're doing Mise en place (Prep work like cutting cilantro or layering lasagnas) and that messes you up. The little space you have is already used and now you have to deal with orders. To give you an idea, the only space that is purely flat in my 7x3 feet section was actually measured to fit our cutting boards. It's a small 24x16 inches stainless steel table stuck between my fryers and my seafood/tartar fridge (which has a hole on the top that fits our flour bowls, so it can't really be used for anything else). Luckily when I got there my dear coworker had filled up the fridges (open tops kinda like the ones at subway with inserts in them) the day before and even made me back ups. I got my sauces ready, did the little bit of mise en place that had to be done and I was pretty much ready to go.

Lunch time hit with a few groups, 20, 15 and 7 which was good considering this is Wednesday. A lot of smaller tables were also ordering so I got to it. I had a Table d'hôte (small menu that variates everyday) that consisted of a salmon tartar with a small house salad. In about 10 minutes I went from doing pretty much nothing to rushing like a mad man. The executive chef (probably one of the most awesome bosses ever, I seem to have had really good luck with this) came over to help me with the table d'hôte, since he came up with it. In 5 minutes we were sold out (table d'hote are generally small, special things that are only available in limited quantities), the chef was making 9 salmon tartars and the house salad while I did everything else. Sandwiches, fries, chicken salads, meat tartar entrees, etc. In what seemed like 15 minutes the rush that had started around noon was over, it was 2 o'clock.