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Doing Your Best In Spite of Corporate Interference

July 13, 2010 by John Politte

In the environment in which I work, we do our best to serve great food and provide excellent service to our guests, but sometimes problems come up in the service, cuisine or the way the dining room was left from the shift before.

I work in a senior living facility where we take care of senior citizens in an independent, assisted living and memory care environment, and our staff does an excellent job in providing the needs of this unique group of people.  The meals are tasty and well presented; the staff is trained to recognize the specific dietary requests of clientele (i.e. food allergies, sodium, diabetic and mechanically altered diets), serve the food professionally and to clean up and get ready for the next shift or go home.

Pretty simple stuff-prepare the food, cook the food, serve the food and clean up, because it is only food.

However, problems do arise.  The meal was not perfect, the waitress didn’t get my ice cream fast enough, you ran out of pie, or the soup was too salty.  This happens and a little understanding and diplomacy goes a long way in alleviating the problem, and you can usually make things ok if you listen and show sincere empathy.  But sometimes you just hire people who are not suitable for the position they are in.

But then somehow the powers that be get involved and things get blown out of proportion and paperwork needs to be filed and policy and procedures need to be re-written and the wheel needs to be re-invented.

Meetings are scheduled and new”action plans” are implemented instead of addressing the mistakes and keeping the employees in the department aware that these mistakes cannot be made and there will be consequence if you continually repeat them. 

We are so afraid of litigation and are so driven by being politically correct, that our hands are tied when trying to produce a good group of employees to do the job.  You need four reams of paperwork in a personnel file before you can terminate bad employees.

My favorite example of idiocy was when the corporate geniuses changed the whole dining concept to be more competitive. Our company already has a high profile for excellence in the community so my first thought was “why do we need to change? Maybe the competition is trying to be like us.” My concept of this industry is to do something great, and do it right consistently.  Everything else will fall into place.  But let’s spend thousands of dollars and invaluable time with consultants instead of tapping the never ending well of expertise and knowledge coming out of our own dining staff.

But I digress.

 We see logic being pushed aside in favor of drinking the corporate Kool-aid.  The people who should be making the decisions for their departments are being advised by out of touch HR people who have never stepped into a kitchen or dining room and performed the duties of a chef or wait staff (and I don’t mean for one day or a shift). We see impractical use of critical thinking to solve an issue when five minutes of common sense could have worked.

I love what I do and the people I serve and work with, but I get irritated when over-reaction occurs to the wrong thing and complacency happens when real issues need to be addressed.

Because in my world it is relatively easy-you prepare the food, cook the food, serve the food and clean up after wards.

It is that simple.

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: corporate, dining out, eating, food, restaurant

The Bad and Good of the Chain Restaurant

July 12, 2010 by John Politte

There are a lot of good things to say about dining out in a chain restaurant, and there are a lot of dreadful things as well.  Let’s start with the good.  Let me think…oh yeah-average, lackluster food and automaton service.  Now don’t get me wrong, the service is great in some of the chains, but it is usually because the server is brand new with a personality that hasn’t been tarnished by the banality of the job, is passing through to better things, or a company drone with a 401(k) that is just biding their time until they are fully vested in the company and can one day reprieve themselves from serving the same dull food day after day after day, like a beat cop waiting for the day his pension kicks in.

And then there is the food.  You can’t blame the cooks and chefs for the dreary fare that is taken from box to plate and prepared with all the imagination of a factory worker on valium.  They bake, broil and grill whatever the corporate goons sitting behind desks 300 miles away decide.  And it is usually a trend or three behind the culinary curve.  If anyone remembers the great pesto obsession of the early 90’s then you know what I am talking about because it is probably on some chain restaurant’s menu right now..  They don’t create food trends they just copy them, and the chef should not be blamed for that.  Most chain restaurants are a great training ground for those just starting out in the culinary field, a boot camp for those out of culinary school who believe they will be an executive chef in Switzerland with a six figure income at a 5 star hotel when they graduate.  I know quite a few that ended up at Applebee’s or Denny’s to learn how the real world works because it wasn’t explained to them in school that there are long hours and you might just get your chef coat dirty while waiting for a phone call from the Food Network.

 

I recently moved to an area in Minnesota that has one of the largest malls in the metro area, and there are chain restaurants far and wide.  My wife and I have eaten in our share of them, because it is difficult to find a unique restaurant or bistro, and convenience is always a huge factor.  But we are bored and almost in tears to find a place that will excite us and make a distinct impression.  After eating breakfast at a place that must have had a job fair at the local trailer park, we both said “enough” and are on a quest to find decent digs at which to eat.  Hence I am writing this story to exorcise the demons.

 

Give me a chef driven restaurant that uses local produce and out-of-the-box ideas in the kitchen, with servers that labor for their tips out of love for the industry and the food.  Give me a ponytailed chef with tattoos and a lip ring that has figured out a new way to prepare calamari or a tapenade, and can make caramelized onions and a béchamel sauce without looking in the standardized corporate cookbook.  Give me a chef that has worked 12 days in a row, but still comes in to work because this is where they belong.  Give me a server that loves their customers and can do their job well without the benefit of the company manuals to show them how.  All of us would benefit greatly.  Especially the culinary field.

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: chain restaurants, cooking, corporate, dating, dining out, eating, food

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