'You said we should follow the system, and we did': Micromanager boss insists he knows better than staffers, leaving restaurant in 'chaos'

Author image for Remy Millisky
Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
Feb 23, 2024 11:00 AM EST

Customers only knew that their food was delayed, but this kitchen worker shared what happened behind the scenes. 

Professional chefs have a job like no other. There's a strict hierarchy, and a lot of shouting happening, but there's a sense of comradery as well. At many restaurants, each chef tends to one type of food or one area. When all goes smoothly, it ensures that customers get the food they ordered fast. And the longer the team of chefs works together, the better their workflow becomes. That's probably why this chef was so blindsided when their micromanaging boss stepped up one day and started commanding changes in the kitchen. 

This person shared that their role assembling the plates after all of the food had been cooked. They write that they liked this position, but that it could be "a bottleneck for food leaving the kitchen" if someone inexperienced was in that role. Not to mention that if things are running slowly, that freshly cooked food sits under the heating lights. It stays warm in the meantime, but quickly gets very stale---no customer wants soggy fries and pasta with the texture of clay. At least their manager learned this lesson with haste! 

Next up, take a bite out of these seriously silly cake-decorating mistakes. 

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    Cheezburger Image 9884598528
    via Jesson Mata on Unsplash
  • 02
    "Well, this is R. Lo and we do things the R way." - said by my manager before L navigating us by the book straight into a blizzard of D.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 03
    This happened several years ago, and I am forever relieved I don't work in a restaurant anymore. Solidarity to all kitchen workers for you have to the endless deal with.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 04
    At the time, I was working in the This can kitchen as an "assembler". be one of the most clutch positions on the line, as you take all the food being prepared by the other cooks and organize it into tickets that can be taken out into the dining room. Accordingly, it is often a bottleneck for food leaving the kitchen - if you have a slow assembler, cooked food dies under the heating lamps. Grilled salmon dries out, fries become soggy, linguini alfredo hardens into concrete, really horrific . It i
    via u/[deleted]
  • 05
    I was working a weekday lunch shift, which is normally pretty slow. We must have provoked the wrath of the restaurant gods on this day though, because out of nowhere the store got hit with a tsunami of customers. I could just barely make out the other cooks through the clouds of shrimp scampi, fryer grease, and cheddar bay biscuits flying through the air. I knew the blizzard was headed my direction, and began putting empty plates up in the window with the "shape" of each ticket that was to leave
    via u/[deleted]
  • 06
    On the other side of the window, coordinating the servers, was my . Shouldn't use manager, his real name, actually, let's call him "Bob" instead. Bob was a bit hyperactive and had an irritating tendency to micromanage kitchen processes, a problem compounded by his not knowing how the to run a kitchen. When I began putting empty plates in the window so that the incoming, Interstellar-sized wave of seafood had something to land on, he stopped me. "What are you doing?" Bob asked.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 07
    "I'm putting the plates and their sides in the window because we're about to have a very high volume of food coming through", I replied. "Well, this is R L , and here we do the things the R L Way. We plate the food when the food is ready, and we don't put sides on early."
    via u/[deleted]
  • 08
    I tried explaining that the Re Lo Way was designed by sentient suits and ties physically incapable of holding a spatula; that our sacred Way (as dictated in the Good Book of Employee Training) had died in the trenches of last year's endless shrimp special; that, while I appreciated the job, I wasn't prepared for an honorable death at the hands of this rush to uphold its most obscure tenets - but he wasn't having any of it. Bob insisted that I take the plates out of the window and only pass him p
    via u/[deleted]
  • 09
    Knowing full well that Bob was flying us by-the-book into a storm of, I put on a feces-resistant raincoat, rubbed some Vick's under my nose, and braced for impact. 30 minutes later, the window was chaos. Finished food was left dying in the wings of the window, while I - swiftly enough to avoid reprimand, but with the fatalistic, mechanical motion of a flood pump removing water at a fraction of the rate at which it's arriving - plated up one finished ticket at a time.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 10
    Bob was equal parts confused and furious, like a toddler whose toy was suddenly taken away. "What's this food waiting on?!", he cried, gesturing towards a shriveled up steak and its associated sides. "Well, that order is waiting on some fried shrimp, and I need to wait for the ticket to be complete before I plate it up." "Why is the ticket missing fried shrimp??"
    via u/[deleted]
  • 11
    "Unfortunately, I'm not manning the fryer, sir, so I don't know." This continued for the better part of an hour. It seemed like every ticket was missing one little thing that kept it from leaving the kitchen. After the rush had passed and I was dumping its precipitated, liquid from my galoshes, Bob approached me with the twitchy, nervous energy of a coked up boxer. Well, that, or a hyper- caffeinated, insecure manager who needed to assert his dominance over the underpaid crew of some bunk ass se
    via u/[deleted]
  • 12
    "Can I, uh, speak to you in the walk-in for a moment, /u/namesrue?" "Sure thing." We walked to the cooler as I struggled to remember how to fight off an attacker armed with a kitchen knife from my days in dish. "So...what happened back there?" Bob asked, arms folded, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. "You said we should follow the system, and we did", I replied, mentally noting that he was standing in front of the walk-in's only exit.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 13
    "But there were a lot of missed items on those tickets. We had food dying in the window." "I saw it, yeah. It was pretty bad." "So why was the food missing?" "I don't know, I wasn't cooking the food, I was assembling it. I am the assembler."
    via u/[deleted]
  • 14
    This line of questioning continued, with Bob trying to somehow pin the catastra- of the last hour on my willingness to comply with his orders, while I blithely insisted that I did exactly what was asked of me. After not being able to move past this point for several minutes, Bob made some sweeping statement about "doing better next time" and left.
    via u/[deleted]
  • 15
    the next time I was and Bob was on the other side of the window, nothing was said about the R L Way, and the rush went smoother, albeit with some hotter plates and servers having to return for delayed items. I guess we ended up doing better, after all. Incidentally, assembling
    via u/[deleted]
  • 16
    ThisVacantHeart As someone who both cooked and ran expo in I felt this a re Ic post in my soul. 5.2k Reply Share [deleted] Solidarity, brother. Hope you are in a better work environment now.
    via u/ThisVacantHeart
  • 17
    I don't envy ANY of you behind-the-window staff. I have a hard enough time coordinating the timing on my "dinner for two" and I've been cooking for 20 years. near Thank goodness for air fryers and ovens that keep parts of the meal warm while I unfuck the rest of it.
    via r/MaliciousCompliance
  • 18
    Incirion Used to be a short order cook not long ago where the only manager over me was the owner. Small. Locally owned. The kitchen would run great until she decided she needed to come back to help. Any time we actually got busy she'd freak out and tell all the servers to stop taking orders. I was never backed up enough to where I'd want to do that and we only had one flat top, 3 fryers, with enough seating for ~200 people. The moral of this story is : If you don't know how to run a kitchen, ple
    via u/Incirion
  • 19
    mangamaster03 "died in the trenches of last years Endless Shrimp Special"...lol!
    via u/mangamaster03
  • 20
    nuclaffeine Worked in restaurants for 10 years, worked in corporate restaurants for 5, and I can tell you what OP already knows - that corporate restaurants are run by absolute buffoons who have no idea what the actually goes on.
    via u/nuclaffeine
  • 21
    Fandom_Tourist. God, I worked in restaurants for years and I felt this in my soul. If I had a dollar for every manager I worked with who was navigating a shift straight into a blizzard of I could have quit years earlier than I did! Great writing OP, I could smell the grease and hear the Cooks swearing a blue streak in the background.
    via u/Fandom_Tourist

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