So, my partner in crime after Dendorff left was MacGyver.
Everyone called him St. John since at any point in time there were at least three "James"s in the kitchen(once there were six standing within a five foot radius). But really, he was MacGyver. Just no Mullet.
This is a very useful skill to have when one is a caterer. Most of the time when you are cooking off-premise(away from your 'home kitchen') you can never be sure what you will have to cook with. Sometimes you have a beautifully laid out, expansive, immaculately kept workplace that you would love to call your own. Sometimes you have a metal box and some Sterno. Most of the time it is somewhere in between, but more leaning to the latter than the former.
This is where St. John always shined. He would pull out the old pocketknife(or Chef Knife when in a pinch) and after a few minutes of gathering random pieces of flotsam, whatever that was once malfunctioning was once more operational. Something else might break on it, but his fix would work like a charm.
One of his most brilliant ideas was to wire the phone to the insanely loud loading dock bell. A bell like on an alarm clock that you would use to wake the dead and call them from beyond. Just looking at that sentence, one may believe that it was not such a good idea but here is the rub. We had several different lines on that phone, and that phone rang all the time. The office was usually empty so there was no one to answer the phones downstairs. I once picked up the wrong line and had to spend twenty minutes trying to talk down a hysterical customer. Seems that she had been trying to reach the owners to make sure that all of the specifics were in place and that everything was set to go. When I tried to politely explain that she had reached the kitchen where we did not have that information and that I would take down her information and get it to those who could help her, she freaked out. She started crying on the phone. She had been trying to get an answer for the past week and I was the first human being that she had reached and she refused to let me go until I had made the solemnest of promises that I would hand deliver her information to the catering director and make sure that the director called the number before I left. Just to be clear, I did exactly as I promised. Even to the point of dialing the number before handing it to Mrs. Kaufmann.
Nobody in the kitchen wants to go through that. We need a buffer(I am happiest with the fewer people that I have to talk to, but maybe that is just me). St. John incorporated his idea and saved me at least five hours a week with his fix. With the bell in place, we could turn the ringer on the phone off. Now there were no more interruptions when one of the other lines rang. Before, the phone would ring and everyone in the kitchen would go dead silent, stop whatever they were doing and look with dread towards the phone. What now? Who wasn't showing up? What had been forgotten or dropped and ruined onsite two hours away? How were we going to fix it? That entire sequence would play out in the mind of each kitchen staff member every time the phone rang and it rang at least once every fifteen minutes during normal business hours(what normal people consider regular business hours, something between 0800 and 1700 hours). Now only when the Kitchen line rang would we have to go through all that. And it had the added bonus that we could be anywhere in the building, even inside the coolers with all of that insulation between us and the phone, we could still hear when we needed to go get the phone instead of making a mad dash for the receiver to only find out once we got there that it was the wrong line, or doing what I did and answering the wrong line to their chagrin.
The downfall of St. John was the fact that he should never use cutlery. That man cut himself more than an Emo Kid on Valentine's Day. There could be a dull spoon in a lock box, covered in gauze, ensconced in bubble wrap, buried six feet deep with a house built on top of that and St. John would still find a way to gash himself on that spoon and come a hair's breadth from needing stitches.
St. John came from a fairly large family, and I worked with at least four of his siblings during my stint there. I am pretty sure that one or two more came of age and put in some time after I left, but the one that I worked with the most was the next youngest St. John down the line, Mark. The Anti-MacGyver. He always wanted to fix things, to make things go right, but it usually ended with something blowing up. But he brought in some friends to help wash dishes(Brandon and Chicken Surfer*). St. John had a group of friends(Gary Hill and Stewie Donolla) that he had started work their with when they were all Mark's age and that made up the bulk of the regular kitchen staff. We had various people that would come in and take care of one or two things, but our core staff after Dendorff left consisted of four nineteen year olds and three fourteen year olds.
Gary took over The Boat(stories about The Boat will have to wait til later, for now just know that we catered chartered cruises twice daily on a lake that was forty five minutes away), Stewie did the Equipment Management(rounding up all the glassware, plateware, etc. for events) and that left St. John and I to run the kitchen.
We had never done scheduling or orders before, but with a bit of help from the owner, Mr. Kaufmann, I think we were able to muddle our way through. Mrs. Kaufmann was not nearly so confident that we would make it work, so she decided to call in Pierre the French Chef. He had been there before(as I have said before, the revolving door policy at this place was astounding) and we were not at all happy with that arrangement.
Don't get me wrong, we would have loved to have a lot more help than we had at the time. We were working twenty hour days all that summer. It is just that Pierre was not a good fit.
Firstly, he totally blew the curve on the average age of the kitchen(16 without - 21 with(I'll wait for you to do the math(ok, he was fifty...don't say I never did anything for you))).
Secondly, his style of cooking just did not suit the mad-race-pace that was inherent in our place of business. They seemed to work on the seven/ten principle. Book ten events a day and hope that seven go well. We took it as a personal challenge to make all ten go well and Pierre was slowing us down. He could spend all day just making the dessert for one party. And he would use an entire prep table to do so leaving four of us on the other prep table to find room to make everything else for rest of the parties.
Thirdly, Pierre was also a ridiculous French Caricature. I hate stereotypes, but every once in a while you just have to shake your head and realize that sometimes they are dead on. The impenetrable accent, odd(disturbing even) sense of humour and hot-temperedness finally became too much for us, so St. John and I decided that our first real act of command was to solve this problem.
We knew that Mr. Kaufmann had no love for Pierre. He put up with him because his wife loved having the ability to claim that we had a 'Classically trained French Chef' on staff, and for all that I know he was. That didn't change the fact that we had to get rid of him. So St. John and I decided to take a peaceable tack in getting rid of him and go through Mr. Kaufmann.
Hmmm....my one year old has decided that he and his frog are awake now. So next up is our first coup.
Everyone called him St. John since at any point in time there were at least three "James"s in the kitchen(once there were six standing within a five foot radius). But really, he was MacGyver. Just no Mullet.
This is a very useful skill to have when one is a caterer. Most of the time when you are cooking off-premise(away from your 'home kitchen') you can never be sure what you will have to cook with. Sometimes you have a beautifully laid out, expansive, immaculately kept workplace that you would love to call your own. Sometimes you have a metal box and some Sterno. Most of the time it is somewhere in between, but more leaning to the latter than the former.
This is where St. John always shined. He would pull out the old pocketknife(or Chef Knife when in a pinch) and after a few minutes of gathering random pieces of flotsam, whatever that was once malfunctioning was once more operational. Something else might break on it, but his fix would work like a charm.
One of his most brilliant ideas was to wire the phone to the insanely loud loading dock bell. A bell like on an alarm clock that you would use to wake the dead and call them from beyond. Just looking at that sentence, one may believe that it was not such a good idea but here is the rub. We had several different lines on that phone, and that phone rang all the time. The office was usually empty so there was no one to answer the phones downstairs. I once picked up the wrong line and had to spend twenty minutes trying to talk down a hysterical customer. Seems that she had been trying to reach the owners to make sure that all of the specifics were in place and that everything was set to go. When I tried to politely explain that she had reached the kitchen where we did not have that information and that I would take down her information and get it to those who could help her, she freaked out. She started crying on the phone. She had been trying to get an answer for the past week and I was the first human being that she had reached and she refused to let me go until I had made the solemnest of promises that I would hand deliver her information to the catering director and make sure that the director called the number before I left. Just to be clear, I did exactly as I promised. Even to the point of dialing the number before handing it to Mrs. Kaufmann.
Nobody in the kitchen wants to go through that. We need a buffer(I am happiest with the fewer people that I have to talk to, but maybe that is just me). St. John incorporated his idea and saved me at least five hours a week with his fix. With the bell in place, we could turn the ringer on the phone off. Now there were no more interruptions when one of the other lines rang. Before, the phone would ring and everyone in the kitchen would go dead silent, stop whatever they were doing and look with dread towards the phone. What now? Who wasn't showing up? What had been forgotten or dropped and ruined onsite two hours away? How were we going to fix it? That entire sequence would play out in the mind of each kitchen staff member every time the phone rang and it rang at least once every fifteen minutes during normal business hours(what normal people consider regular business hours, something between 0800 and 1700 hours). Now only when the Kitchen line rang would we have to go through all that. And it had the added bonus that we could be anywhere in the building, even inside the coolers with all of that insulation between us and the phone, we could still hear when we needed to go get the phone instead of making a mad dash for the receiver to only find out once we got there that it was the wrong line, or doing what I did and answering the wrong line to their chagrin.
The downfall of St. John was the fact that he should never use cutlery. That man cut himself more than an Emo Kid on Valentine's Day. There could be a dull spoon in a lock box, covered in gauze, ensconced in bubble wrap, buried six feet deep with a house built on top of that and St. John would still find a way to gash himself on that spoon and come a hair's breadth from needing stitches.
St. John came from a fairly large family, and I worked with at least four of his siblings during my stint there. I am pretty sure that one or two more came of age and put in some time after I left, but the one that I worked with the most was the next youngest St. John down the line, Mark. The Anti-MacGyver. He always wanted to fix things, to make things go right, but it usually ended with something blowing up. But he brought in some friends to help wash dishes(Brandon and Chicken Surfer*). St. John had a group of friends(Gary Hill and Stewie Donolla) that he had started work their with when they were all Mark's age and that made up the bulk of the regular kitchen staff. We had various people that would come in and take care of one or two things, but our core staff after Dendorff left consisted of four nineteen year olds and three fourteen year olds.
Gary took over The Boat(stories about The Boat will have to wait til later, for now just know that we catered chartered cruises twice daily on a lake that was forty five minutes away), Stewie did the Equipment Management(rounding up all the glassware, plateware, etc. for events) and that left St. John and I to run the kitchen.
We had never done scheduling or orders before, but with a bit of help from the owner, Mr. Kaufmann, I think we were able to muddle our way through. Mrs. Kaufmann was not nearly so confident that we would make it work, so she decided to call in Pierre the French Chef. He had been there before(as I have said before, the revolving door policy at this place was astounding) and we were not at all happy with that arrangement.
Don't get me wrong, we would have loved to have a lot more help than we had at the time. We were working twenty hour days all that summer. It is just that Pierre was not a good fit.
Firstly, he totally blew the curve on the average age of the kitchen(16 without - 21 with(I'll wait for you to do the math(ok, he was fifty...don't say I never did anything for you))).
Secondly, his style of cooking just did not suit the mad-race-pace that was inherent in our place of business. They seemed to work on the seven/ten principle. Book ten events a day and hope that seven go well. We took it as a personal challenge to make all ten go well and Pierre was slowing us down. He could spend all day just making the dessert for one party. And he would use an entire prep table to do so leaving four of us on the other prep table to find room to make everything else for rest of the parties.
Thirdly, Pierre was also a ridiculous French Caricature. I hate stereotypes, but every once in a while you just have to shake your head and realize that sometimes they are dead on. The impenetrable accent, odd(disturbing even) sense of humour and hot-temperedness finally became too much for us, so St. John and I decided that our first real act of command was to solve this problem.
We knew that Mr. Kaufmann had no love for Pierre. He put up with him because his wife loved having the ability to claim that we had a 'Classically trained French Chef' on staff, and for all that I know he was. That didn't change the fact that we had to get rid of him. So St. John and I decided to take a peaceable tack in getting rid of him and go through Mr. Kaufmann.
Hmmm....my one year old has decided that he and his frog are awake now. So next up is our first coup.
* A little sidenote to explain Chicken Surfer. He was one of the young guys that washed dishes for us, pots and pans almost exclusively. I gave him that name late one evening when I was trying to get things wrapped up. I went back and there he was, crouching on the edge of the sink and scrubbing furiously. I have no idea how he was able to keep his balance on such a small lip while he worked. The way that he was precariously perched and bobbing his head as he scoured the pots, there was nothing else to be done but name him Chicken Surfer.
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