The Importance of Staff Meal

[phaelon56]

I forgot about my summer working in the dining room of a large hotel. Sundays were particularly slow and the maitre 'd and regular chef did not work. One of my colleagues developed a mysterious system that allowed him to eat unlimited jumbo cocktail shrimp on Sundays - washed down by free Jack Daniels Manhattans from the room service bar. He did not last for obvious reasons - moved right along to the next restaurant victim before the audtiors caught up with his "system".

[Malawry]

I wrote an article on this subject for The Daily Gullet, as part of my Dispatches from a First Kitchen Job series.

Follow the scent of the scraps.

I prepare a sandwich for the guy who takes out my trash every day at my current job...he's the only "employee" type there is to feed (well, besides me). I pile on a lot of meat and slather it with mayo, which is how he likes it. Whenever I make a dessert for my girls I give him a couple of helpings of that too. I guess if I had a large staff to feed I'd be less generous but as it is he keeps my trash can empty and he's friendly and kind...so I don't mind giving him whatever looks good to him.

I feed myself a salad with some kind of meat leftover from lunch almost every day. I also feed myself coffee with plenty of real cream in the morning.

[chefboy2160]

Ive worked for the big hotel casinos here in Nevada off and on for 12 years now and that is one of the perks of working at one of these joints is an employee cafeteria with a free meal per shift for everybody. In some that I have worked the VIPs get a section of the coffee shop and order off of the menu. Not a bad perk realy but you need to watch the dish up items as some of them are things that are not moving to well in the buffet and have been sitting in food warmers for who knows how long sometimes. In the private sector you kinda never realy had time to sit and have a meal so there was realy no rule in most places I worked you just kinda grazed as you worked.

[Bicycle Lee]

one thing I've heard of a couple restaurants doing that I think is bogus is charging you for a staff meal everyday you work whether you eat it or not...

[foodobsessed]

When I was a waitress at a wonderful french restaurant in NJ years ago, we wouldn't get a family meal, but we would get a fantastic meal from the menu at a discounted price.

Honestly, I didn't mind paying the money. The meal was MUCH better than what most of you are describing from your staff meals, and I was able to research first-hand the meals on the menu, and therefore be able to recommend and really know the meals for my customers. I think this gave me a leg up. Not to mention....YUMMY!!!!

[Maesie]

We had a similar policy where I used to work: half price on food any time (with the exception of the lobster I think) and you could also get one bottle of each wine the restaurant offered at half price. This last bit was cumulative - not one bottle of wine every time you walked in, but over the course of your employment. It really helped educate the staff because not only could you taste the food in a leisurely way, you could discuss it with other servers and watch the consistency over time. And if you were low on cash you could at least get a bowl of soup or a salad. The policy was especially helpful when it came to wine. I know a few of servers who are offered neither wine tastings through their restaurant nor discounts on wine. What the heck are you supposed to do?

[Louisa Chu]

I've been thinking a lot about this lately - sad that the staff meal seems decidedly not important in some of the best restaurants in the States.

My family's restaurants were pretty basic but we always had the best staff meals - never scraps - but no set meal time - we never closed during the day so we ate - or tried to eat - sometime between lunch and dinner rush. When the Vietnamese cousins came over we had some of the best meals I've ever had to this day - rice vermicelli in clear chicken broth with finely julienned chicken - or sometimes crispy skinned duck - with big bowls of cilantro leaves and finely sliced green onions to garnish - lemons, limes, and hot sesame oil to season to taste. Non-alcoholic drinks were always available to everyone.

At ADPA we usually left for lunch at about 11:30 and dinner about 18:30 - to be back in our kitchen at the top of the hour. The Plaza has an employee cafeteria and the food was usually pretty good - at least two hot plats every day - typically French bistro kind of food - they once did a very nice boudin noir - with salads, cheeses - oh my god the cheese selection - yogurts, and desserts too. The desserts came from the hotel's central patisserie - extras from tea or the Relais Plaza - so what might have been a 15 euro patisserie for tea was only 45 centimes for us - like the giant chocolate macarons. We all had a meal allowance that we rarely used up. Friday dinners was usually the night we cooks would special order the steak frites. Right before our Christmas vacation we had a special meal with smoked salmon, our own housemade foie gras terrine - the cooks at ADPA made up enough foie gras terrines for everyone at the Plaza - and turbot. After meals - back up in our kitchen - we always had coffee - a big pot of espresso and a tray of demitasses - always right before service.

Is a place to sit, some decent food, and a few minutes to just eat really too much to ask for? Very sad.

[chromedome]

Different establishments have different situations, for sure, but I think making some sort of provision for a good staff meal is a huge positive.

One of the first things I was told, when I started at my job, was that I was *expected* to sample the things I was preparing. Cutting up pears for the grilled-pear salad? Have a wedge. Making up cheese plates? Taste one or two of them. This made immediate sense to me, not only from the cooking-school perspective (taste everything, how else you gonna know you did it right?); but from the quality assurance perspective. It's much better to have a staffer spitting and shouting WTF? than to have a customer tugging on a server's sleeve and saying "Excuse me...?"

The meal itself will vary. Sometimes we'll have extras of an entree item that didn't sell as well as usual that week. Other times we'll accumulate a stock of leftovers or trim pieces, and do something with those. Sometimes somebody (might be the boss, might be the dishwasher) feels like doing some "home cookin'", and we'll have perhaps a pork roast with sauerkraut; or perhaps a multi-course Vietnamese extravaganza.

Sometimes we just order in, on the boss' dime.

One thing I'll guarantee you...every dollar you put into feeding your staff properly, is a dollar you won't lose to pilferage.

[WHT]

2) The most shameful award: a popular bistro style restaurant in Syracuse (the first one ever to open in town and it was making buckets of money at the time). At first they picked one or two light entree items that they had extra quantities of but the limited the menuand started CHARGING us $1.50 per day of we opted in for the meal (this was in 1979). The menu was limited to mixed green salad, bread, rice and French Onion soup. Oh.... I almost forgot .... unlimited coffee - whoop te doo.

I worked at a place like that in the late '90s. Here is the kicker, they charged the staff $3.85 per shift for meals. It was limited to items on the childerens menue and you got charged even if you did not get tha chance to eat. being a broiler and saute' guy I hardly got time to wipe the sweat off much less eat!

My "meal" was usualy coffee and a Marlboro.

[WHT]

The math of feeding the staff, it's tax deductable!

You are so right but most places won’t acknowledge that even if you show t5hem the tax code. Some places are so penny wise and pound foolish it frightens me. As an example a well-known fun time eatery bakes its own potatoes to make an appetizer from the skins, they have to scoop out most of the potato by hand. A small amount of that is used to make a cream of potato soup. The rest is thrown out in the trash! It is not used for staff meals, side dishes or anything else. If you get caught eating it you are fired for stealing.

Same thing with the fresh broccoli, only the tops are used. The stem and shaft gets tossed. They claim it is better than using the equivalent frozen product and cheaper too. Go figure.

[WHT]

I started out working in places that were family run. The staff meal could be anything from leftover whatever to menu items that had a low cost. Pasta, rice burgers and other sandwiches. In some of the corporate joints as the head cook I could have just about anything I wanted, this got lame rather quickly. Some places forbid you from tasting the food you worked with. The reasoning being that if you followed the protocol and formula all would be fine. Every so often during a roll-out we might be able to sample dishes, more often than not it was the servers that did and not the cooking staff.

I have worked in places that I would not eat if you paid me. Usually because I needed the job at the time more than any other reason. The funny thing is out of all the places I have worked over the years the places I remember the most are the ones with the most reasonable policies about staff meals. Why? Because they were the places it was fun to work and the turnover was low. There will always be people that abuse any policy put in place. That should not be a reason to put restrictive policies in place to punish the rest of the crew.

[clothier]

back in the day, I went to bat for my staff with the powers that be about staff meal. I told the staff to stop stealing (oops, I mean eating) food, and let me cook a meal a day for them, and told the boss our food cost would go down.

Damned if it didn't. The staff stopped stealing the expensive stuff, and everybody was happier.

Hard to believe a little logic made sense, huh?

But I still had to keep the whippets under lock and key in my office.

[AndrewK]

My daughter (who is also a student, though not starving, because she only lives less then a mile away and uses my fridge and cupboards as her personal grocery store) works for a very large hotel chain as a banquet server and this hotel chain (shall remain un-names) has a staff cafeteria, ALL FREE OF CHARGE TO EMPLOYEES. Can you beleive it. She loves working there, because she gets to eat for nothing, and most of the other banquet staff are all students as well. Some of them live on campus, well i'll just say that if i was 20 or so and a student, I would move heaven and earth to work in this place too. She usually works three days a week sometimes more. Of coarse she picks her classes so nothing starts before 10 am, because she usually works until 3 or 4 AM.

I think I work for the same hotel chain as a breakfast cook here in Austin. We have a caf that feeds all of the staff free of charge, as well as any police officer, 24 hours a day. The cooks never get breaks, so we are welcome to prepare anything we want for ourselves (within reason). I have to feed the kitchen staff on Sunday mornings, because the cafeteria is closed for the day, so they get a lot of breakfast pizzas and breakfast taco fixings (I'm getting a reputation for hitting hands that I see sneaking onto the line from the waitstaff. Nothing quite like having a run on your refried beans when you step away for two minutes.)

On another note, the worst staff meals I ever had were when I was working in a Michelin one-star restaraunt in France. I was a happy boy when I saw the industrial-size can of Chef Boyardee-style pasta opened up, the regular food was so awful. I'm talking Grade-Q beef and stale bread (if the bakeshop was feeling nice), burnt vegetables, and other things too horrible for me to think about. I credit my strong-as-iron immune system to my time over there.

[Louisa Chu]

Why are we not naming the decent and humane hotel chain?

I forgot to mention that at the Plaza Athenee in Paris that hotel personnel were welcome to free breakfast in the personnel restaurant - coffee, tea - real cream and sugar - hot milk - for cafe au lait - baguettes, butter, jam, and the extra housemade croissants, pain au chocolat, pain aux raisins, and brioche.

[AndrewK]

Why are we not naming the decent and humane hotel chain?

Good point. I'm at Four Seasons in Austin. Even though I'm biased, it has to be one of the top five spots in Austin to eat (especially breakfast!).

Andrew

[TJHarris]

This is interesting... I always assumed that at restaurants the staff would just be given an entree free from the menu if they had to take lunch (or dinner, or whatever) at the restaurant... Odd that that isn't the case.

HA! I hear that all the time , "Oh you must eat so well working here". Not!

At afore mentioned restaurant, the waitstaff would call for pizzas to be delivered. The cooks would put out their platters of crap (squab elbows, fish scrapings, chicken necks) and then have the BALLS to beg for pizza from us.

Mark are you in Detroit? I think I know you.

Seriously, when I was younger, I worked in a fine restaurant where "family meal" was prepared daily by one of the young commis. We did all butchering in house. One stretch of about 10 days we had an excess of veal scrap. The commis faithfully ground the scrap and served veal burgers laced with unbelievable levels of cumin with a different sauce all ten days. After the 4th day we tried to hide the cumin but he always found it.

Edited May 3, 2004 by TJHarris (log)