Every work environment has a learning curve. There are always skills and knowledge that are only obtained through hard work on the job. This is definitely true in a restaurant kitchen.
One of the key components of a smoothly operated kitchen is proper communication between cooks, especially during service. Before stepping foot in the kitchen, I was completely unaware of the almost foreign language spoken among chefs. As with any fast paced job, there was no orientation to the industry terms. There was no sympathy for getting an order wrong because I didn't understand what "on the fly" ("make it now and make it fast") or "all day" ("total" as in "I have three orders of bread left sandwiches all day") meant. But that is why of course, I learned these canonical terms so quickly, out of necessity. As I look back though, these definitions seem so reductive and ordinarily simple.
The component of kitchen language that gave me the most trouble is learning the most effective way to communicate. The experience has sparked my athletic background (I try to put my years of training and being coached to use every once and a while) in trying to understand why adjusting to a new form of communication had been difficult for me.
First of all, especially during service, there is no conversation, there is no discussion, and there is no "why." For example, if the Chef on expo turns to the Finish and says "Do you have that poke bowl for table 82?" or even "I need a poke bowl," the last thing he wants to hear is "well, I'm about to make it but we don’t have any poke made right now" or even worse "oh, I didn't hear you call that out, I wasn't aware that you needed a poke bowl from me." Those answers make the Chef, or really anyone in a kitchen cringe. All a chef ever wants to hear is "yes," "straight away," or if necessary "I'm a minute out" (that is if you really are a minute out. If its three, then it’s three-be credible) if there really is a worth while delay to mention.
Long drawn out explanations are not welcome for understandable reasons. Explanations in a kitchen make things complicated and in the end are inconsequential--the people at table 82 do not care why the poke bowl isn't ready, just that it isn't in their mouth. It took me a long time to understand this. At first, when my explanations were clearly causing frustration for the chef, I took it personally. I felt disrespected that I was expected to be a robot programmed for one-word answers. My MO is explanation, I'm wordy, I like context, and I’ve been told that I could talk to a stick. I like discussion and these things do not fly in the "sink or swim" environment of a professional kitchen. When discussing this with my one of my first chefs, he pointed out that this form of communication is very similar to that found in sports and particularly between coaches and players during games. If you make a bad play, your coach will probably say "what the f#%* were you thinking? Get your head in the game!!!!" and the most effective response would be either to nod or say "yes, coach." You wouldn't embark on a discussion of why you decided to kick the ball out of bounds, or how messing up the play made you feel-get over yourself…
One other thing I learned from years of being an athlete, if you don’t perform to the level that is needed you may end up on the bench, for me this wasn’t really a problem, as I choose sports that were based on more individual performance; swimming, track and field and cross country. Though these sports are individual sports, they are technically team sport; the resulting wins were a culmination of individual efforts, much like a kitchen. If you could swim the fastest 100m freestyle-that would not guarantee a team win. In High School swimming for instance, typically there were 11 events in swim meet: 8 individual races and 3 relays. If your other teammates did not finish well in the remaining 7 individual events, and the three relays-your team loses.
The same goes in the kitchen. If your star grill cook makes everything on time, cooked to the right temperature, but the Finish cook forgets to let anyone know that there is no more rice, and it has to be 86’d (a canonical kitchen term meaning “we ran out of f#%* rice”) your team loses, the guest loses and we failed as a team.
