When the Shit Goes Down...
In the restaurant industry stuff breaks ALL the time. Ideally you can call someone to fix things but if you have a vested interest in your kitchen or the operation as a whole you should know how to fix as many things as you can yourself, or at least be able to identify what the problem really is. Half because you need to get busted equipment functional again, and half because if you can figure it out yourself you don’t have to pay someone else hundreds of dollars to figure it out for you. The more problems you can solve as they appear the less headaches you’ll have, which is good because the regular day to day headaches don't stop while the big stuff takes a dump. I used to work at a seafood place whose steamer would take a nap every other week, so the repair guy would come out, fix it, and then eat on his house account. When I found out how much he made I knew why the G.M. liked to pay him in trade.
I was interviewing for job once and while we were walking around the kitchen checking out the equipment the owner said the combi oven had a leak they couldn’t figure out but they had another service call put in on it. I looked at the drain and the back of the oven…and realized the oven had been nudged. I moved it back 3 inches so the drain pipe was over the floor drain. Problem solved. I only half jokingly told him I'd send him a bill.
Most of the time when something breaks you can make adjustments on the fly but sometimes you have to make a new plan altogether. If the steamer goes down, you set up a steamer pot and do it old school. When the power goes out, you’re finishing tickets by flashlight. If the walk in goes down you pack it full of ice and if the ice machine breaks, you go to the store and buy all the ice. You figure it out.
A while back I worked in Highlands N.C. for a guy who had 4 restaurants within a quarter mile of each other and something was constantly breaking at one or another like some kind of broken stuff voodoo carousel. One winter I was under The Log Cabin Steakhouse helping fix 14 pipes that had frozen and burst open. I was technically a manager at The Smokehouse, a BBQ restaurant they were renovating that hadn’t opened yet, but this was still way outside my job description. It was something that had to be done though so this place could reopen. We couldn’t get anyone to come out and fix the plumbing soon enough so there we were laying on the frozen mud under the restaurant fixing pipes. Good times.
Another time I was cooking at Ruka’s, an upscale Southern with a twist style place. We had a break between lunch and dinner and we all left around 3. When I got back a couple hours later and was turning the equipment back on I realized the fryer was way hotter than it should have been. The outside was blazing hot to the touch and the oil was starting to boil. I put on an oven mitt, opened the door and saw the burners were fully lit and the oil reservoir itself was starting to glow red hot. This was not good. My first thought was someone must have left it on but I saw the temperature knob was definitely turned to “off”. Something was busted and this thing was about to explode. I found the yellow valve on the gas line and turned it off and it eventually stopped bubbling like Satan’s Jacuzzi. If this had happened overnight we wouldn’t have had a job to come into the next day. That evening we ran a pot full of peanut oil as a fryer on the range and it was only slightly less safe than the cauldron we had just shut down.
Sometimes something fails though and there isn’t anything you can do but suffer through it. About 100 feet away from Ruka’s we had The Flip Side, an old school burger counter built out of a 50’s auto garage. The owner had asked the Coke guys for some old 50’s style Coke kitsch and they had backed the truck up. We had Coke coolers, signs, napkin holders…we were only about 90 miles away from Coca-Cola Ground Zero in Atlanta so they had some to spare. The service bay was now the kitchen and we could see the old floor drain, but during the renovation some dickhead decided to fill it in and instead of being able to hose everything off and squeegee down the drain we had a big watertight basin we had to mop and dry or water would pool…right on top of the drain it should have been going down.
To fill the mop bucket there was a garden variety faucet coming off of the pipes under the triple sink. One day I was about to mop the floor after the lunch shift and my coworker Will was getting ready to take off early. We were stocked for dinner, the line was set up, and we were good.
I had barely started to turn the knob and suddenly the water was blasting out of the faucet at full force with commercial water pressure right in my face. I tried to turn it back off and it took me a couple of seconds, while getting smashed with water, to realize the knob was just spinning around having no effect whatsoever. My dumbass was so shocked I kept turning the knob that wasn’t doing anything while what felt like a firehose kept spraying me relentlessly. I was screaming at Will “Turn off the water! Turn off the water!”
Will was yelling back “Where is it! Where is it?!” He was slamming shut the sandwich unit doors and looking around frantically for a water valve.
I was still getting pummeled by water (but water from the mountains of North Carolina, so, you know, tasty) and screaming “I don’t know! I don’t know!”
I looked down at the copper pipe attached to the exploded faucet head I was holding and had been trying to staunch the flow of with my bare hands alone, the knob having now been blown off in my hand too. I let go and followed the pipe down under the dish sink to a beautiful, majestic, yellow handle I slammed down cutting off water to the faucet. Suddenly time resumed its normal pace. We looked around and water was everywhere. It had sprayed at full force, first against me, and then out in all directions, and water was covering every single surface and was at least an inch deep in our watertight bathtub of a kitchen. Will said flatly “Well I thought I was leaving early.”
We just stood there and surveyed the carnage for a minute. I was completely soaked. Steam was coming off the grill from the spray. It was on the ceiling, the walls, the coolers…it had bounced off me and hit the mirrors in the dining room 30 feet away. We grabbed mops and towels and spent the next hour mopping and wringing and cursing whoever filled in that floor drain.
Easy fix for this one…we moved that faucet outside. That was never, ever happening again.
Improvise, adapt, and overcome. Clint Eastwood said it to his Marines in Heartbreak Ridge but it’s worth repeating here. Cooks can do anything, and sometimes we do a lot more than just cook. #kitchenmacguyver #improvise #cheffixit
