Recap
My part-time internship as an cook and waiter started on April 6, 2025 and ended on May 31, 2025.
I learned some basic skills in cooking and beverage preparation. Before this experience, I had no prior knowledge in these areas.
My Perspectives
About the Cooking Itself
Cooking is Manual Labor
For sure, moving materials or intredients is part of the work in the kitchen. However, the scale of the items (wholesale) in a commercial kitchen is much larger than that (retail) in a family kitchen.
In addition, the biggest pot is so large and big that it is impossible to be beld by one hand.
Everying is FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods)
During the cafe's peak business period, non-stick pans are replaced weekly.
Additinally, towels are supposed to be renewed every week.
Friction is Everywhere
Typicall, people slowly place the pan or pot above the stove bracket to protect cooking tools. However, cooks in the cafe just shake and move the cooking tools without holding them up, resulting in the kitchen being filled with the noise of friction.
Tossing is Necessary
While tossing prevents food from burning, which could also be achieved by stirring throughout the cooking process, the head chef always instructed me to toss instead of stirring without explanation.
The assistant chef informed me that tossing is a habit developed and maintained by every cook. Although tossing while using a pan is unnecessary, stirring is slightly less efficient than tossing when using a pot with a diameter of 80 cm. Furthermore, imagine all food shaped like a pie with zero thickness (meaning the food has only two sides) being stirred in the pan. One action of tossing flips the food upside-down, allowing both sides to be heated alternately.
Besides Cooking
Everyone Shouts
As mentioned before, the noise of fiction fills the kitchen. In addition, the sound in the kitchen is the misture of a variety of noise, including the lound sound of the range hood, the sound of bumping refrigeration doors, the airflow sound of the hood, the hitting sound of metal cookware……
Therefor everyone shouts out their inquiries and responses.
Dirty Talk is Normal
For relaxation and enlivening the atmosphere, talks including dirty words covering R-18 topics are frequently held.
Smoking is Normal
Almost every cook smokes. They consider smoking an instant relief, which is weird to me.
Other Cooks’ Perspectives
No One Likes the Bosses
No cook stands by the bosses who have no experience running a cafe but always judges almost everything. Do not missunderstand. Opinions and suggestions are welcomed. What cooks dislike is that the bosses rarely step in the kitchen but make weird suggestions which even contradict the receipt once they enter the kitchen.
I asked the assistant chief whether I should follow the bosses’ “weird” suggestions. The assistant chief told me thet the bosses know shit.
Receiving a Pink Slip is Normal
Expenditure on human resources is an unnegligible part of the overall expenditure. Therefore, it is quite normal to cut down the cost by laying off employees who are used to seeing someone being dissmissed.
Weird Misundertanding
During my internship, I was mainly responsible for making salads. One popular item called beef salad was usually ordered several times during lunch time. However, in early May, there were no such orders.
In a commercial cafeserving customers who eat in the hall or order through the take-away platform, the speed has high priority. Especially for take-away orders, the timeout will be punished by the platform. Therefoore, preparing the food like chopping the vegetable before any take-away order comes is a common way to speed up the process. But the preparation also has drawbacks. The chopped vegetable only remains fresh for two to four days.
As mentioned above, no take-away order was placed at the early stage of May. Two or three batches of chopped vegetables stored in the refrigerator expired and were wasted. So, the assistant chief and I decided not to prepare the food for saving the cost.
All of a sudden, the assistant chief (now upgraded to the chief) found that somebody had taken the beef salad off the shelf. No one knows who did this. Maybe the system itself.
Soon after the beef salad was put back on the shelf, orders flew out of the order printer.
It is quite weird that the order suddenly came after roughly two weeks with no orders. So, I ask the proprietress for confirmation. However, unexpectedly, the proprietress doubted whether I had taken the food off the shelf!