Cooking in a Restaurant

Working in a restaurant can be both fun, and stressful. I cook at the Trempealeau Hotel and it’s anything but boring. On a busy Friday night, from the second you walk in until the second you leave, you’re on your feet running around, dodging waitresses, cutting up vegetables, or running back to the walk-in cooler. To be a descent cook, you definitely need to know how to multi-task. Orders are constantly coming back, and you and the other cook/cooks are throwing food on the grills or sending food out to the tables. You also have to remember how long food has been on. When you're cooking for ten tables orders, it's pretty easy to get confused to whose food is whose. A disadvantage of cooking would be our schedules. Restaurants busiest times are on nights and weekends, and that’s when I want to enjoy being away from school. Another disadvantage to cooking would be the customers. Everyone’s policy when working with people maybe that the customer is always right, but when you start working in a restaurant, you quickly find out that the customer is usually wrong, no matter how stubborn they may be. Some nights you get food sent back because the customers food is to dry, over done, not done enough, to hot, to cold, to salty, to bland, etc. Although, sometimes they are right and we made a mistake, but a lot of the times people are just looking to make their bill a little lighter. There are a lot of stressors when it comes to the restaurant business, but there are a lot of good things that come with it too. You meet a lot of new people when working in the food industry. There are always new waiters and waitresses who come and go throughout the year. A lot of the people who come to eat are from around the country and some are from different parts of the world too. Work friends are also an important part for working in a restaurant or any other job. I have met a lot of friends of all ages while working. Some busy and stressful night feel like they're never going to end, but by the end of the night, we can all look back and laugh on how we got our butts kicked. Another benefit to cooking in a restaurant is there is always something to eat when you get hungry. By the end of every shift, I am always starving and I definitely don't want to go home and cook something for myself, so can just make something really fast at work before I go home. And of course the best part of working in a restaurant is getting a paycheck at the end of the week.