Warning: I hit 500 covers solo last Friday and almost walked out mid-service

I've been cooking for 8 years and never thought I'd hit 500 covers by myself on a random Friday night. The ticket machine just kept printing, and by 8pm I had 30 tickets hanging. My expo station looked like a war zone with half the tickets I couldn't even read anymore. How do you guys handle those nights where the volume just keeps going up and there's no backup? Any tricks for not losing your mind when it gets that crazy?

3 comments

3 Comments

piper_kim12d ago

Tara's cardboard trick is basically the same thing I started doing with my inbox. When everything's coming at you at once, you have to create a fake wall or everything bleeds together. It's like how grocery stores put the clearance items on a separate table instead of mixing them in with the regular stuff. Our brains just can't handle that much noise at once, so forcing a structure onto the chaos is the only way to keep from freezing up.

tara64212d ago

Tara Patel here - I feel you on that 500 cover night, seriously. I had a Saturday last month where the ticket machine just kept spitting out paper like it was possessed, and I ended up with a pile of tickets so greasy they were stuck together. My trick for surviving those marathons is to literally tape a piece of cardboard to the counter with the top 5 tickets highlighted, so my brain doesn't freeze up trying to read everything at once (it's not pretty but it works).

bennett.evan12d ago

...and @piper_kim is right about the fake wall thing too. I've actually started taping a cardboard sheet to the edge of my prep station, like a little privacy fence. It's dumb but it stops me from staring at the whole stack of tickets and panicking. My handwriting gets so bad on those nights that by 11pm I'm basically writing in a new language, so I've resorted to just circling the top ticket in red sharpie so I don't grab the wrong one. Nothing like serving a table their neighbor's salmon because your brain checked out two hours ago. The cardboard trick is basically me admitting I can't handle more than 5 things at once, and honestly I'm okay with that.