Kitchens. Gary Alan Fine
the owners aspire. Hotels whose guests are potential hotel-restaurant clients typically have food service throughout the day and evening, and room service at night. Gourmet restaurants such as La Pomme de Terre have shorter hours because walk-in customers are rare, and because they can afford to have customers come to them for a unique service. Neighborhood restaurants such as Stan's are open on Sunday afternoons when a traditional “family dinner” is served. While Stan's has customers at that time, if La Pomme de Terre were open then, it would be empty. La Pomme de Terre, with a clientele from a different social class, serves Sunday brunch.
To a degree, restaurant hours determine the times that the cooks work, but the two sets of hours are not identical. Cooks arrive several hours prior to the opening and generally work until after the restaurant closes. Unlike more tightly structured organizations, managers and head chefs are flexible in scheduling cooks, and schedules change weekly with cooks having some say. Schedules respond to “external” forces, such as the number of reservations and special parties. Head chefs occasionally tell cooks to take the day off, leave early, or appear on short notice. While cooks are not on call, the head chef and the manager are aware of who is willing to work extra hours.
The irregular and unpredictable need for workers gives the chef or manager power within the workplace. In coordinating schedules, he must keep his staff happy and treat them in ways they consider fair—both in the number of hours they work and the sequence of those hours (see Zerubavel 1979, pp. 21-22). The chef has an interest in allowing his most competent cooks to work more frequently than those less conscientious, but this choice may create friction. Unlike fast-food restaurants (Leidner 1993, p. 62), in only one restaurant that I observed were hours assigned for social control: a head chef decided to discipline a dishwasher by cutting his hours to teach him to show more deference to the cooks.
The extreme case is when workers are laid off to cut labor costs. This not only causes strain by having fewer people to do the same work but also sends a signal about management's intentions and makes all workers feel less secure. The decision of the Blakemore Hotel to terminate the popular assistant chef caused considerable dissatisfaction, in part because workers felt overburdened, and in part because they felt that management didn't care. From the standpoint of the hotel it was a necessary decision in that labor costs were too high when compared to income (Field notes, Blakemore Hotel).
Employers in all industrial segments have similar problems although these problems take different forms. How does one synchronize the staffing of an organization? In pure production units (e.g., factories) machines may run at any time, and electricity may be cheaper at off-peak hours; but it may be difficult to find workers willing to adapt to off-peak schedules.
FOOD PROCESSING
While the temporal structure of a restaurant is greatly affected by its desire to attract customers, other external influences affect internal decisions. Every organization must maintain an “input boundary,” as well as the “output boundary” discussed above. Simply put, a restaurant requires ingredients (foodstuffs) for its internal production. Most restaurants contract with middlemen or brokers for food to be delivered at set, albeit negotiable, times. These deliveries are arranged to occur before the restaurant needs the food, when the restaurant is not busy, and when cooks or other kitchens workers are present to check or sign for the goods. The restaurant and the vendor select a mutually agreeable time, and cooks need sufficient time to store the food and to prepare whatever portion of the delivery is expected to meet the demands of the day's customers.
Food itself has a temporal dynamic. Most food spoils the longer it is kept—beef and wine that “age” are, to a point, notable exceptions. As a consequence, high turnover is crucial not only for revenue but also to avoid losses from spoilage. Restaurant management sometimes attempts to manipulate customer choice through specials or by having servers “push” a dish. The clients' decisions, in turn, affect cooks by forcing them to spend their time cooking some dishes and not others. To the extent that some dishes are easier or more pleasant to prepare or are prepared by special workers (e.g., main-course salads or broiled dishes), culinary life is influenced by the “life” of the food.
While food has its own dynamic because of spoilage, other objects deteriorate over time or go out of fashion, and this puts pressure on workers to “move” them. Medicines and film have expiration dates, which customers may check. Fabrics become mildewed, and toys, dresses, and automobiles are subject to changes in fashion and technological innovation. Some clothes—swimsuits and overcoats—have their seasons and styles. Although food may be a particularly dramatic instance of how the timing of material objects push workers, it is not unique.
LIVING THE DAY
Kitchen work has both rhythm (periodicity) and tempo that stems from customer demand. Restaurants have slow times and times of incredible demand; each influences how cooks respond to their environment. Some cooks use a theatrical metaphor with its images of preparation for a performance, the emotional “high” of the performance and release after the curtain descends:
It's very much like an actor preparing to go onstage and go into work and start in a quiet place and figure out what you're going to be doing. You get your equipment ready, sharpen knives, cut meats, trim your fish and make your vegetables and make your sauces and get everything set up, and it gets a little bit hotter, people start talking more, and the waiters start coming in, and this is going on over here, and by the time everything starts coming together, it's like you're ready to go onstage. It's there…. Once the curtain goes up, everyone knows exactly what they're supposed to do.
(Personal interview, La Pomme de Terre)
A pantry worker tells me: “I like the atmosphere in kitchens, the speed. It always reminds me of a play. I understand how actors feel. It starts out slow and then it speeds up.”
(Field notes, Blakemore Hotel)
Life in a restaurant is not structured by the clock per se, but by events such as lunch, dinner, or banquets, indirectly set by the clock (Marshall 1986, p. 40). Cooks rarely look at the clock and may profess surprise when, after a busy evening, they learn how late it is.
SYNCHRONIZATION
Professional cooks face the problem of synchronization in that they are not merely cooking “dishes” but for “tables” or “parties,” and must prepare several dishes at once, each timed differently (e.g., steak and fillet of sole). Cooking to order is an occupational challenge to be overcome by skills of synchronization: the recognition of a temporally grounded division of labor. This skill determines their competence in the eyes of others, distinguishing the professional cook from the home cook:
Part of the job is knowing how to take a piece of fish and a piece of chicken up to the window at the same time. If the chicken will take fifteen minutes and the fish two, how do you get them up there at the same time?
(Personal interview, Owl's Nest)
I like to read the orders and time everything. It moves, you think and cook, and everything has to be just right. It's a real test of your dexterity and your ability to concentrate.
(Personal interview, La Pomme de Terre)
How is synchronization achieved? What organizational procedures promote this competence? Each restaurant had a slightly different system for achieving the orderly production of food, but each relies on the presentation of tickets by servers to cooks—the temporal linkage or sequencing of occupations sedimented into a structure. From the presentation of the ticket, cooks know that they have a set amount of time until the dishes need to be ready, until servers and their customers will complain.3 As they know approximately how long each dish will take to prepare, taking these constraints into consideration they can organize their work and gain some temporal autonomy.
The point at which the main course is needed is an approximation based upon the length of time that customers are expected to spend eating appetizers or are willing to wait. While cooks would like to know the exact times that dishes are needed, servers and customers desire food to be ready when it is wanted—different for fast and slow tables. The preparation of food involves a delicate negotiation among cooks, servers, and customers, with each having demands, constraints, rights, and privileges.