Kitchen Instructions Gone Wrong

In the kitchen, it is very important when you’re in charge to be fast and precise when giving instructions, making sure that your staff is doing what they need to correct. One tiny mistake left unnoticed can leave you and the whole staff behind on time and scrambling to finish the food for its scheduled time to be put out to the consumers. Food not being put out on time could affect your customers likelihood of coming back and ordering again. Not only that customer, but if you do it ends up being later on time customer who wants to order from you could hear you are slow or always behind on time even if it was a one-time mistake word of mouth spreading from friend to friend can affect your business.

At the beginning of my senior year, I was leading the Green Ladle staff for a lunch buffet at 11:30. I was way overconfident in my skills. Each student takes a turn in their last year to be head chef and you get graded on how well you can organize the food-making schedule so everything goes out on time. A fellow senior had asked me a question on the type of Alfredo being served at lunch, I answered without looking at the order papers I assumed it was supposed to be chicken is the most common and basic Alfredo there. About an hour before we were supposed to serve, I looked at the papers and it was a shrimp Alfredo, not chicken. We had already finished preparing three hotel pans of chicken Alfredo and were still finishing up a few other items so most of my staff was busy. So I helped two other students rush to remake the Alfredo for lunch and ended up using double the produce we were supposed to. Our teacher/head chef had asked me why we didn’t just take out the chicken and make shrimp and mix it in since it’s the same base for the Alfredo. I could have saved more time and money if I had asked for help instead of trying to fix it by myself.

This was a simple mistake but it still cost the Green Ladle quite a bit of money while I fixed the mistakes I had made. We got the Alfredo out just a few minutes after the rest of the food because we had started the Alfredo completely over. I apologized to the person who paid for the buffet and explained what had happened taking full responsibility for the delay, she was very understanding but this mistake could have been prevented.

If I had just calmed down enough to take the time to ask or look at the paper sooner instead of thinking I know everything there wouldn’t have been as much food waste. Not only that the staff as a whole would have had more fun and stressed out less. Overall we would have made more of a profit if I wasn’t so overwhelmed and asked for help. One of my biggest takeaways from this is asking questions doesn’t mean you’re not skilled at what you’re doing if anything it shows you’re attentive while working in a higher-stress situation in the kitchen. Not only does it show you’re attentive it also shows you care about the quality of food being put out to the paying customers.

“Mmm…leftovers” by jeffreyw is licensed under CC BY 2.0.