A: "How often are you supposed to sharpen knives? Because you're always sharpening a knife when I come into the kitchen..."
B: "But...they have chips in them?"
C: "Is B sharpening knives? Good!"
A: "Every DAY??"
B: "They're cheap. They keep chipping when they get used..."
C: "I USE them every day!" -- Anon Guest
Many things are not common knowledge. This is why so many "retirement restaurants" fail inside the first year. The idea has merit, and it seems easy, but the reality is very far from the veneer. Every cost-saving measure, for instance, ends up costing more money in the longer term.
Cheap furniture, for instance, may stand up to years of domestic use, but put them in an arena where even dozens at a time are using them and they fall apart in less than a month. This reality comes with a side of a hefty lawsuit if a customer injures themselves in the process. Cheap ingredients come with the caveat of food poisoning because the most common way of cutting costs is not taking all the food hygiene precautions. Then there's cheap utensils.
It's a mayfly dive in an obscure corner. Restaurants with similar goals of feeding people on the cheap and making astronomical profits have turned up there like summer daisies and, much like the flower itself, faded away before a season was gone. Each mayfly eatery has had a bungee manager who dipped in, left some orders, and dipped out, never to be seen again. It is a place one works in order to plump out the resume, because in the space of working the same job in one year, you can be working for at least four different managers under four different restaurant names.
The management of the parent building, noting the trend, have replaced the usual restaurant name frontage with a marquee. It saves on costs, so the bungee bosses are amenable. It's difficult, by now, to tell if the creative use of letters and numbers are the result of the management being cute, or the result of missing figures from the collection of marquee slides.
This particular boss is not a bungee boss. Mostly, they resemble a mosquito. Always whining about something and not always in sight. The desire to swat them out of existence rose with every high-pitched complaint about how things were run. Chef Raamsi kept organising the mise en place for the day in the casual manner of someone who'd been at their job longer than this particular incarnation of the restaurant had been in existence[1]. I have been here longer than you, the actions said, I will be here long after you're gone. I know what I'm doing and if you listened to me, so would you.
"How often are you meant to be sharpening knives?" whined the boss, seemingly from somewhere in the outskirts of table-space. Just like a mosquito, you never knew exactly where they were until you actually laid eyes on them. "Every time I'm in here, your sous is sharpening all the knives. They don't need to be that sharp. Do they?"
Chef Raamsi could not say out loud, You've never been taken to the hospital with a blunt-knife wound. I could give you one so you understand how dangerous they are[2].
Fortunately, Sous Malin came to the rescue. "They have chips in them. I have to sharpen them to get the chips out."
"Every day?" The boss appeared, very briefly, in the serving window. The temptation to throw one of the paring knives directly into their forehead was outweighed by the fact that the knife would be ruined in the process.
"They're cheap," said Sous Malin. "They keep chipping when they are used."
"All of them?" squealed the boss. "Every day?"
The carving knife was a very nice weight in Chef Raamsi's hand. A plea of temporary insanity caused by the trigger of a boss being bloody stupid within slashing range was nearing completion inside Raamsi's head. For a second, it would be so very easy. Alas, it would ruin Raamsi's plan of gradually purchasing good equipment with the money they had to spare and finally starting a reliable establishment full of people who knew the business well. Fortunately, the boss hovered out of easy reach.
"Have you tried cooking anything without using a knife?" said Chef Raamsi.
"Oh I don't cook," said the boss.
The waitstaff caught Raamsi as they tried to lunge at the idiot through the serving window.
[1] Two weeks, and already the debtors are drooling.
[2] True facts: the most dangerous thing in any given kitchen is a blunt knife that should be sharp.
[Image (c) Can Stock Photo / feferoni]
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