I work in a food service establishment serving made to order food. Its pretty normal for us to get some special requests- its a country club and we know how the stereotypical country club people can be. Usually its pretty normal stuff like no potatoes, sub vegetables, or sauce on the side, etc. Bottom line is that its a pain in the ass having to stop and read red ink(special instructions always come in as red ink, whereas the actual menu item is in black) when calling the order and setting the plate instead of just hearing “halibut”(for example) and knowing that it comes with starch A, veg 2, and sauce z- but its usually doable. The only problem is when we get a special order for something we don’t have. Lets say somebody in the dining room asks for snow peas and we don’t have them, and they’re not on the menu. That sorta situation makes me want to kill servers- they know to ask on special orders, they’re usually just too lazy and incompetent to do it.
The other night we had a special order of quite a different nature. This one was actually physically impossible to do. Lets talk about steak temperatures for a second. If you order your steak medium rare, thats just a phrase assigned to the internal temperature of a steak with a warmish red center, 125 degrees to be exact. That temperature in the very middle of the steak is whats responsible for the color- lower temperatures means proteins that aren’t coagulated and are still holding myoglobin and are thusly more of a red/pink color. Higher temperatures mean coagulated proteins(as meat cooks the protein strands shrink, effectively wringing out all the liquid, and thusly cook) that shift toward a grayish color. Again, to acheive this desired cook, we measure the internal temperature of the steak. So, it would seem pretty self explanatory that a steak could only be cooked to one temperature, right? Meaning, if someone were to request that, while kept whole, half a steak be cooked to rare(115 degrees) and the other half be cooked well done(160 degrees), it’d be pretty fair to laugh them out of the dining room, right?
Apparently not. Not only did one of our real foodies of a member ask for this, but one of our illustrious servers(actually a supervisor in training) said “Sure! I’ll put that order right in for you guys!” So, then some of the most moronic words I’ve ever seen put together were rang in on a ticket. What came next was probably even more disappointing.
We then confronted the server and asked what the hell she was even talking about. Her response was to suggest we just leave one side of the steak on the grill longer than the other side. I don’t know if it was the look of utter disbelief on our faces or me retorting simply with “What?!” but she then started to get it. She asked “Is that not something you can do?” It was then explained to her its not something that anybody can do, and she decided that we should just cook the steak “medium.” Thats a far cry from rare and well done at the same time, but ok.
At the end of all that, I’m pretty sure I’m now dumber from having to go through that whole experience.
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