Father's Day in the Weeds

Father’s Day ‘98, O’Sullivans Wharf Norfolk, VA

The Weeds is a term used in restaurants that defines a state of being beyond “busy”. It’s past “slammed” and well on the way to “fuck this shit”. It’s when you become so overwhelmed you’re in danger of breaking down. When you get in the weeds everything is growing around you so fast you can’t even see anymore. At that point you have to power through until you come out the other side. Then you sell your last ticket, you survey the carnage around you, and you restock, clean, and sweep as fast as you can before it happens again.

This is about a Father’s Day on the line in the weeds. It wasn’t pretty.

It was getting late on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in Norfolk, VA. And I had been working since that morning in the kitchen at O’Sullivan’s Wharf, a seafood restaurant overlooking an inlet off the Lafayette River. It was Father’s Day which isn’t traditionally as busy as Mother’s Day; the trend is to take Mom out away from the kitchen on her day, but give Dad a beer, a bbq and a slab of meat to cook on his and he’ll be happy. We knew we would still get rocked just from how nice a day it was though. The deck was already starting to fill up…and we were still missing Mike, our third line cook.

Our second line cook, Tommy, had just started the previous week. He had been a regular at Sully’s for a while and we used to joke if he hung out much more he would end up on the payroll…and then one day he did. He spent his entire first week’s pay buying rounds for everyone he was so happy to be working there. And Tommy could cook too. He was more of a skilled home cook than a hard core line cook but he was getting there. His Tommy San chicken was insane. Tommy and I had the line set up and we were saying good-bye to the last of the day crew as the first few tickets started to trickle in…a few nachos…some chicken tenders…and we were still wondering where Mike was.

You could get by on a slow or moderate night in this kitchen with two cooks and a dishwasher. On a good night though you needed a third person to run middle so the other two guys could take wings; the cook on the left has Broiler, Grill, Sauté, Flat-top and Soup and the cook on the right has Set-Up, Steamer, Fryer, and Cold Side. And your third, the Wheelman, is calling tickets, setting plates, communicating audibles from the floor, helping broiler guy with the middle, and recalling tickets to make sure everyone is timing everything out okay. It’s an intricate arrangement that gets more difficult the more people you add into the equation…or the more you take out. We could have up to 7 guys on the line at once and be pushing ridiculous quantities of food out the door…or, like tonight, we could have three…and now two.

It was approaching 6pm and the board was slowly filling up with tickets. Denise was the Manager on Duty; she came back to tell me that Mike had called. He was having the tires on his car changed and he would be here in a couple of hours. 

I had to seriously question reality at that moment.

I looked over at Tommy…and then the board. Tommy had just finished learning the fry station. I knew he could handle that so I asked him to take the fryer, nachos, and cold sandwiches. I took a deep breath and realized I would have to take everything else.

We cranked out the tickets we had up…mostly appetizers and a bunch of steamed shrimp and crab legs…Easy stuff. A few larger tables came in…I set up the sizzle plates for the order, putting some seafood in the steamer, and walked the plates down to the broiler, passing to hit them with some drawn butter at the flattop. I checked on everything else that was already going down there, turned the steaks on the grill, rotated the nachos in the top of the broiler so they were evenly melted, started heating a pan for a scampi and asked the dishwasher to throw in another pan of potatoes, the ones we had weren’t going to last long.

More tickets were coming in now. I started scanning for simple tickets we could clear quickly and we would sell those out of order, just to make sure we got them out of the way. We were still doing okay with times but we were moving fast now. Tommy was keeping up the best he could and we were clearing tickets but the board was definitely staying full. We would sell a six top and 2 more six tops would come back, like some kind of fucked up kitchen Hydra. Sell one ticket and print two more…hahaha!

Suddenly I noticed a cluster of servers by the computers and I knew they were all putting in orders and we were about to go into the next level. Right after that the printer started having a conniption…ticket after ticket spewed forth. We filled the board, then the top of the board, and then the unbroken string of tickets started hanging down the line and aggressively heading for the floor.

All we could do was focus on the tickets we had in front of us. Only about half of it was even fired yet. I scanned the tickets and started getting counts for what I’d have to put together all while trying not to burn all the food I was cooking on the six stations I had going simultaneously. This was a shit-show. My brain was zipping back and forth between what I was doing, what I needed to be doing, and wondering what was still on the string of tickets that needed to be looked at. Servers were on all sides of the line like Children of the Corn, just silently watching me race up and down the line like a banshee.

I looked up from my manic travels and Jeff was standing on the line in front of me. He was a bad-ass server who had been a bad-ass cook, woke up one day and realized you made twice the money and smelled half as bad after a shift on the floor so he had switched sides. The tickets were waving behind him like little flags and I could see the banner of paper from the printer curling on the floor beside him.

“Is there anything I can do?” He said, and it was like a gift from the heavens. I think I’d forgotten he was even working.

“Oh my god man that would be awesome…can you do me a favor and just take the broil side for a few minutes?” I said, allowing myself to feel a touch of relief.

“Haha, no” He went on “That’s not what I meant. Where are my tickets?”

I just looked at him for a second, chaos all around me and my thoughts went from inserting Jeff into the line to just letting him cook his own shit…and that totally worked for me.

“Dude, you’re in there, find em, cook em, they’re yours.” I said and went back to the other couple hundred people eating.

Jeff got his tickets gathered and started knocking his stuff out around us. He was a smart and savvy server and I’m sure he had told his tables what was going on but that he could take care of them…and he did. Jeff was the only server who didn’t have any tables comped for being late. And boy did we comp some shit that night. Denise came back at one point not believing what was going on, wondering how she was going to explain all this to Joe, the General Manager. Almost every ticket was getting some form of comp but she understood, everyone working understood.

Somewhere in there we managed to move enough tickets that we finally had the printer cleared off and that was nice. Just having a double board again felt like a luxury. Tommy and I had settled into a groove and in helping me out he had rapidly learned how to cook a lot more of the menu. We were working as a team and we may have been ridiculously far behind but the food looked good. We kept selling tickets until there were only a few left. And that’s when Mike finally showed up.

Mike tried to tell me it was okay to go home and I just asked him how his tires were. Tommy had gone through the gauntlet that night…it was a definitive trial by fire for both of us really…and I waited until we were restocked and had the floor swept before I said good-night and made the long walk out the kitchen to the bar, where I made sure to buy a few rounds for Tommy for when he got off.