I was just on vacation in New Orleans, and we went to an average breakfast place. Like 9am on a Thursday. Place was maybe 40% full. We didn’t want anything fancy, the kids just wanted eggs and pancakes, I wanted a big platter and my wife something simple like oatmeal and fruit.
It took over an hour to get our food. When it came out the waitress said something like “Sorry for the wait, this bitch in the back just started and still thinks she’s at her fancy ass fine dining place.”
It at least looked really nice and was one of the best breakfasts I’ve had. Wife and kids couldn’t care less though because they were all raging from hunger.
A long time ago I used to work at a Cheesecake factory in a non big city, my KM came from Chicago and was always talking shit about "back in chicago bla bla bla" until one day he was trying to explain how to be more efficient during rush and saying something like "Back in Chicago we would have one guy doing this, then the other guy would do this, and the other would fishish it like this" and I had to stop him mid sentence and explain that it was just me on that station and I had to also help the guy on the grill when he got busy lol
He was a good guy though, just a little oblivious to how different a high volume restaurant with many cooks is to a one man show slower restaurant
A lot of people. The one I worked at was in a small city so in bigger ones they would have more people but I remember having about 8 people in the PM line (not counting KMs) depending on the day, 3 prep cooks and about 3 dishwashers. For the AM it would be two less cooks but way many more prep cooks since they would make almost everything in house (While funnily enough having a huge walk in freezer for their cheesecakes that would be made somewhere else and shipped to the store lol)
Add to that the bussers, servers and managers and the number of employees a single store has is huge.
To be fair… It’s called the Big Easy. Not The Big Hard Working.
I had a friend who grew up there. He told me they just aren’t in that kind of hardcore work mode that is expected in so many places. They’d rather make great food over getting a ton of volume out in a fast pace. Which is why every place you eat has awesome food. Hell local chain food is dope.
Now this person might have been slow as shit and that waitress might be right, but it’s New Orleans, it’s basically in “Island Time”. You get it when you get it.
Also it sounds like there may only have been one cook.
While there certainly are many places like that, that mentality is not the norm. New Orleans and Louisiana in general have a work hard, play hard mentality and genuinely have some of the best work ethics out there. There are, however, a lot of career kitchen workers that don't give a fuck, but their routine and flow is down to a science. When I moved from LA to Colorado 10 years ago, I interviewed at 3 places in a week and got 3 offers, and they all said "you're from Louisiana, I know you know how to work hard."
I feel like New Orleans work culture has a level of restraint the rest of the country isn't used to. Like the badass lunch spots that have a line out the door but serve 11-4. In my state they'd get greedy and try and grind it out until 10pm, and if that didn't make it medicore enough they'd add a shitty brunch.
When I was in CO, I had one cook from Louisiana that wasnt a good cook. He tried cleaning the flat top and it was still dirty, how dirty? He went "chef I'm done how does it look?" I was able to scratch grease off the flat with my fingernail, I told him do it again.
Another LA cook was that snobby and pretentious he thought he was cool enough to flirt with my other sous chef to which she was disgusted as fuck. He was also an ass, a creep and a terrible cook who burnt marinara sauce
“And so you’re asking me: Who does the dishes when the revolution comes? I do my own dishes now, I’ll do my own dishes then. It’s always the ones who don’t that ask that fucking question.” -P. T. Bunny, Wingnut Dishwashers Union (2016)
Also for some weird reason, every salumiere/meat slicer we hired from Eataly had a nervous breakdown 10 minutes into dinner rush and fled the building to smoke 50 cigarettes
That would be a lame generalization if we didn't hire EASILY 20+ of them over 3 years. Turnaround was 1 month. Maybe our hiring manager was just an idiot
We had a guy brag about being a sous chef at a Michelin star restaurant in San Fransisco. We are a small town Appalachian family restaurant, and he's genuinely trying to insinuate he worked with Thomas Keller.
So I go to show him how we make grits, and he says "I know how to make grits."
Proceeds to pour grits straight from the bag to an empty pot, then asks where we keep the milk.
(For context, that's not even how we make grits, and I've never seen someone add grits to cold liquid, let alone put the grits in first.)
He lasted up until, in the middle of the rush when he's clearly in the weeds, he says, "Guess I better get serious," to which our exec said, "Guess you better go home, actually."
Last I heard he's a homeless busker in the big city.
Had a sous chef one time that thought he was hot shit since he staged at Alinea for a while. He made family meal one day and served everyone undercooked chicken. Luckily I caught it before anyone actually ate any of it
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u/Eber- May 21 '25 edited May 21 '25
It’s always the Billy Badass types that came from amazing restaurants that can’t hang.