8-23-04

I need to do this blog for myself, to rant and get the days waste and detritus out of my system so that I can sleep at night. I have been working as an agency chef for almost a year and I find it soul destroying to see my chosen profession being mishandled and dismantled by inept management and fat cat corporations that use and abuse employees, expect loyalty and dedication and in return give little except a minimum wage, long hours and no prospects for a better future. There are a huge number of immigrant and unskilled British employees in this business who are taken advantage of each day, due to their ignorance of the system, insecurity and just the need of a regular income. Granted, someone has to do these jobs but it wouldn’t hurt to let them keep their dignity, pay them fairly and provide them with some decent conditions at work.

Today was a day of confusion, not unlike days past.
The kitchen I was assigned was under equipped and dirty. The chefs budget for staffing is such that he cannot do the housekeeping as well as the cooking in the allotted time because he is a young guy with less experience than is needed to handle the job but he probably comes cheaper than an experienced well-qualified chef. I see this too often.

8-19-04

Back to the shack today, this time with Nicola, a cool guy from Belgium, for another 10 hours but he grants a 30 minute break—I decide I like Nicola, he is calm and together, not like the Kareem character from yesterday who is a totally anal fanatic, panic merchant, misogynist turkey.

8-18-04

I am in an up market country club three days this week. In a kitchen/shack with three sauté pans and two omelet pans, two chefs, one cloth and one pair of tongs. 185 a la carte covers between noon and 3pm. Start work at noon, first order comes in at 2 minutes after, written almost illegibly, seemingly by a drunk spider that crawled out of an ink pot but was in fact written by one of the many Polish servers, hard working and organized but with little command of the English language—the day was not looking good at that point. The guy I was working with, Kareem, was on a split shift, so I am working in a kitchen that I have never been in before on a menu I don’t know, totally alone from 3pm until 6pm. He assures me that I will do nothing during this time and leaves a mis en place list as long as my arm. Ten hours today with a grudging 15 minute break at 6pm—he doesn’t want to be left alone in case it gets busy. Ha!
The pot washer is Chinese as are all of them, between 3 and 6pm he lets me know he is hungry and he helps himself to a couple of dozen mozzarella sticks from the freezer. He likes them and teaches me some Chinese—he speaks no English at all. I look on the kitchen roster and see that he and his Chinese compatriots work seven days a week, ten hours every day for 4 pounds and 50 pence an hour. They live on the premises and the country club charges them 140 pounds a month each for their rooms. I did the math and I slip him another dozen cheese sticks with a couple bottles of Budweiser.