So me first...I didn't get a good look at my schedule this week because if I had I would have known today was my day off and not shown up to work. Not that this is a big deal since I live within a mile of work and I needed to talk to my GM anyway.
Now on to last night...
It was bad. We have had worse but it was not an easy night for anyone. Big thing that sucked balls was we kept running out of bread. We give unlimited bread sticks to our guests so running out always sucks; especially when the person doing bread isn't doing it right. Now really there is no way to make bread wrong...but really when we're out of bread and you make one pan and bring it out you know we have been out of bread for at least three minutes because servers have kept yelling for "mas pan" you should have started the second pan of bread before you even brought out the other stuff.....is this what our guy did last night? No, he would bring out one pan after having been out and then get upset because it was gone within a minute and would tell us it was our fault that we needed bread. Also I realize that the kitchen staff wants to get out of work as soon as possible, our kitchen staff generally walks out of work with 10-20 minutes of locking the doors so they start cleaning about an hour or two prior to close. Ok, that's all well and good but don't forget that we don't close for another hour, we still have guests walking in that want their soup and salad. If you don't want to make salads for us fine but you really need to have bins of it so that the servers don't have to make the salad bin (which truly isn't all that hard but suck if you also have other stuff to do) and make (although the manager finally grudgingly said to at least call for it) bread, oh and don't forget that servers also have to greet tables, get drinks, run hot food, run refill whatever's, try to sell deserts and wine and alcohol and appetizers and and and...I figure we were all hoping for an easy night since we hadn't had one since last Tuesday (the week before V-day) and it would have been....maybe....ok it had potential to have been an easy one until it went to shit.
Guest Wise it wasn't too bad...they mostly understood what was going on (at least my to go guests did) I had some guests that called at 5 and asked if we had lasagna (in my head "no we're just an italian restaurant but we don't serve lasagna just other stuff...like tacos, and eggrolls...") I told them of course and that our lasagna is scrumdidliumptious...so they decide to place an order and then asked, "do you have buffalo wings?"--now our phone system sucks...it doesn't matter which phone I use but it can be static-y and difficult to understand so while she asked for buffalo wings I heard garble the first time and "special an low dings" the second and third. I repeated what I heard the third time and she chuckled and finally enunciated "buffalo wings" ...(in my head "of course we do! we're an italian restaurant that serves buffalo wings just like pizza places* do!") instead I say "no" she is finally done ordering and I repeat everything back to make sure we are on the same page so far and tell her the order will be done in ten minutes. Three hours later she hasn't picked up her order so I put it in with our food that we donate and then she calls asking if it was ready. close my eyes, deep breath, tell her it was ready within ten minutes of her placing the order and she acts surprised...really?! I don't call you when your order is ready that's why I give you an estimated time range to show up in...she tells me she's on her way so I get the food re-made and bag it all up again and she still doesn't show up for an hour...I hope you enjoyed the hot salad, cold lasagna, mussels and the chewy bread sticks...
Another guest called to ask if we had a certain soup, I explain that we had to take it off the menu because we are testing a new potato and mushroom soup but we would be bringing the other one back in a month. She gets all uppity and asks is it just our location or all of them, I say all of the ones in our region and she snottily replies "well I guess I'll be back in a month!" so as I am a really, very, incredibly nice person I reply "Well, you have an excellent month then. We'll definitely enjoy talking to you again!"...yeah not a great come back as far as come backs go but if you do the tone just right then you know it will piss the person off without them being able to say you were being rude (like smiling and waving at the person driving by who is flipping you off...nothing better)
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