Restaurant #2 is a fine-dining establishment. It's a nice change of pace from the crabhouse, fine dining is what I'm used to. I have to mind my manners at this place.
I was part of the opening team for this restaurant. We opened in late January after a little over two weeks of training. The restaurant is part of a pretty large group of restaurants based out of New York City, so they pretty much had all of their ducks in a row as far as how we would be trained. Some of my co-workers would disagree, but screw them, I've opened two other restaurants; I've seen worse.
When you're a new server at an established business, obviously there are people working there that have been there longer than you. Some of these people might have opened the place. At any rate, you'll probably be training with someone who has more experience at that restaurant than other servers. Every restaurant has rules in place about how things are done; how you approach a table, how you deliver drinks, how you ring orders in, where things go, and so on and so on. You learn all these things while you're training and if you don't always agree, oh well. We all have opinions, but it's not YOUR restaurant, you still have to follow the basic guidelines.
Now imagine you are walking in to train at a restaurant where everybody is new. There are no older servers, just your trainers from New York that work in other restaurants. It's pretty chaotic. We had five trainers to about forty-some servers, food runners and bartenders. And these poor people are training "experienced" servers.
The problem with "experienced" servers is that everybody is an expert. "Experienced" runs the gamut from the chick who has had only one other restaurant job a LONG time ago to the guy who used to manage a couple of places before landing this job. In between you have the girls who MIGHT have worked at one other fine-dining establishment for about a year, the guys who HAVE worked at plenty of nice restaurants, ( the key word here is plenty, they'd bounced around the city quite a bit ), and the female that ran her mouth about working in the best restaurant across the river but somehow ended up with us. Lucky us. All these people have "experience" and all these people know everything.
It was a nightmare. There were quite a few people who were quite vociferous in letting everyone know that they knew everything. It was like that nerdy kid in school who shoots his hand up in the air before the question is even halfway out of the teacher's mouth. Except it was adults finishing sentences for trainers. Loud. So everyone could hear and benefit from their knowledge. I was so glad they were there.
It was about everything; the food, points of service, wine. One guy in particular would flat out argue with the trainers. If a trainer was telling us where a particular cheese was from, someone would interrupt to elaborate on the subject. The best was the wine tastings, people would say the DUMBEST shit. There is nothing worse than someone who doesn't know anything about wine trying to sound like they do. Wine is an area where you can be soooooo wrong! I used to be a wine steward, I know what I'm talking about.
This happened every day and all day during training. Someone would interrupt, or King Know-It-All would tell everyone they were wrong, and you could see the trainers jaws tighten. I know mine did. It was rude and it really sucked for the people that maybe actually wanted to learn something. I am a big fan of shut your mouth and listen. We would have moved along alot faster if everyone would have just shut up.
But, everyone was an expert, and we all needed to know it. Training was fun with these people, but the actual opening was pure joy. That's another post, my jaw is tight : ) Stay tuned...
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