Man in Uniform

Yesterday, for the first time in many years, I went to work and did not change into my whites. I'm still feeling weird about it.

The GM is visiting her sister and I'm filling a bit of her role. Payroll mostly, but other office work as well. Nothing I didn't used to do, before she was gracious enough to take this grossly underpaid position, but things I haven't done in a while.

I'm trying to be out of the kitchen some while training, especially in the day so my guys can learn their rhythm and set their priorities which will give me more time to play with food. So I set about payroll and then dealing with little loose ends and our ongoing Micros dilemma. At this point I will have to either ship or bring the machines in for Micros to repair. We'll be heading to SF next month so I'll see how the GM feels about being with one machine for that long. Seems like it would be cheaper to bring it in on our regular trip but with the price of gas who knows?

By staying in my street clothes I was able to force myself to do some rather boring tasks like reconciling 6 months worth of bank statements. If I had changed my clothes I would have started some kitchen project and tried to go back and forth from kitchen to office, burning everything and royally screwing up the statements.

I love my uniform. Not in a fetishistic way (an instructor of mine said if anyone fell in love with you who had seen you in your whites, marry them because they are some of the least flattering clothes in the world) but in a functional, utilitarian way. I like the idea of changing my clothes when I arrive at work. It puts mind and body on notice that I am now something other than myself. This is why we have insisted the waiters wear uniforms. First, I didn't want to put myself in the position of arbiter of taste and second, I believe putting on your uniform does produce a different mental state.

I do however, have to transcend the working chef role I have filled for years and move toward one where I am supervising more and cutting onions less. Not that I don't enjoy cutting onions, I do. But at this point I am more valuable to the restaurant for other things. Staying out of uniform will keep me focused on that goal.

This does have a price. After baking the shortcakes my day prep guy had done, we saw there was something radically wrong with the results. I'm not sure what he did so I'll have him show me today. Sometimes my recipes confuse new cooks because I write my fractions as decimals so 3/4 cup becomes .75 cup. Until they get used to this mistakes happen. I started doing this because MS Word changes at least some fractions to smaller type and when emailing recipes to people their fractions weren't displaying. I know there's a way to change the setting but I always forget to do it and have developed a different habit. Plus, after one mistake a good cook will pay more attention to the entire recipe.

I probably should start maintaining recipes in a spreadsheet so they can be scaled up or down easily, but that's going to be a major project and I don't know if I'm prepared to be in street clothes for that long.

Comments

[Kudzu]

We who work at home and send in copy have the same problems with fractions in recipes (and elsewhere). My copy editor asked me to write out the measurement, i.e., "three-fourths". Would that help?

[brian w]

We always used MasterCook on the office Macs in our restaurant because it handled the conversions very well, and you could write decimals or fractions and it could understand either. It's not marketed as a "professional" tool but it gets things done and stays out of your way. The data format has turned out to be robust, too--we have files that are ten years old that are still readable in the current version, plus you can always export things as bare text files for safe-keeping.

I'm not surprised you're having trouble with your Micros machines, but I AM surprised that you don't have some kind of service contract that lets you send the machines in. Those things take a beating. We always seemed to have one of our twelve terminals in for service at any given time. Our service place sent out new ones immediately as soon as a problem was reported, so they would cross in the mail and we wouldn't have to be without a terminal for very long.

[haddock]

Never liked MasterCook. It got in my way rather than helped with its lists of ingredients, measurements etc. Plus, when people request recipes I like to send something that looks nicer than what MasterCook exports. Excel works fine for the same purposes but truthfully I don't have to scale up or down that frequently.

As for the Micros we've NEVER had a hardware problem with them. A service contract isn't really applicable for two reasons. One, I bought our entire system at an auction 6 plus years ago for $75, so I've never actually been a customer of Micros'. Two, these are 2700's and they're heavy. I'm not willing to pay the shipping. I'm also not willing to pay for a service contract, even if one were to be offered.

I appreciate the thoughts though.

[brian w]

Wow, $75, great deal!! I understand where you're coming from :)

[Fatemeh]

I love reading your posts about the restaurant.

I don't have what it takes to be in the kitchen professionally, but I love reading about it... probably more than anything else I read about.

I'm seriously considering the big change to restaurant management so I can at least revel is some of the energy. That, plus it's a way to do something with all that wine knowledge I'm accruing.

[shuna]

I am a big fan of File Maker Pro 7. My recipes look really nice, I only have to enter in the information once, I can put in photos, they are all in one place, and I can easily turn it into a book if I want to down the line. I have so many tiny notebooks of recipes and now I am testing some for Sur La Table = the home cook, so I really need an organized system.

I agree 100% that the uniform changes me. The first time I put on whites I felt like I had come home. I knew that this was what I was meant to do.

Some people can look really sexy in whites. I recently bought jackets that fit me from Cayson Designs in SF and that made a world of difference. {Not to mention how good that Egyptian cotton feels!}
And I like that all genders in kitchens wear the same uniform. It evens us out, I think.

[haddock]

Fatemeh:

My first instinct is to tell you not to make the change, just because of the money (or lack thereof) but if it's something you have the heart for.... Perhaps you should try a part time gig just to see if the energy you experience is what you expect.

Shuna:

Thanks for the meniton of Filemaker. I downloaded a demo version and will give it a try.

As for evening out the gender, the whites certainly do that. When we opened and actually up until about a year and a half ago the front of the house uniform was white chef coat and black pants. When we changed to black pants and a black pullover shirt, suddenly all the women on the floor had shapes and immediately their tips started going up. Sad commentary on our culture.