Alright ladies and gentlemen, children of all ages... I'm here to answer questions civilians have about restaurants, from the kitchen to the dining room, bar, and host stand.

 

Obviously there won't be details of specific peiple or calling out restaurants by name, but questions will be answered to the best of my ability.

 

I've worked in restaurants in Cleveland for over a decade now, mostly at fairly nice places. I've served,  bartended, and now am part time managing as well. 

 

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How many managers and GM's have you seen fired for stealing?  We had one guy who was skimming the delivery drivers when he ran their numbers + playing void games.  I'm sure he was getting out of there with at least $200 cash every night.  He wouldn't have been caught as soon as he was if it wasn't for a driver who had the best playing dumb act I've ever seen who was changing deliveries after he delivered them so as to pocket the difference.  For example, if it was a $50 order, he would change the sizes of the pizzas or whatever after he got back -- so a $30 pizza would suddenly become an $8 one and he'd pocket the $22 difference at the end of the night when his driver ticket printed.  So the owner knew something was up and fired both of them on Superbowl Sunday. 

 

Each of these were a bit more sophisticated than the base-level trick, which is putting coupons on orders after they're delivered.  Then of course servers write-in tips on the credit card slips.  Never works out well for them. 

 

All right,  what percentage of employees are under the influence on a given night ? How much does this vary by place?

 

All I want to know is if wait staff really spits in your food if you send it back or if you are a dick to them.

All right,  what percentage of employees are under the influence on a given night ? How much does this vary by place?

 

 

Rest assured that somebody is seriously f*cked up who is currently on the clock.  Could be anyone from the dishwasher up to the GM.  In fact it's most likely the GM and the owner.

 

I had a manager who sent drivers to the liquor store to buy him a liter of Jose Quervo Silver pretty much every night.  The guy was drinking 4-5 liters of tequila per week after work.

 

All I want to know is if wait staff really spits in your food if you send it back or if you are a dick to them.

 

I've worked in a variety of places from pizza places to bars to banquet facilities and never seen anyone actually mess with a customer's food intentionally.  Doesn't mean it doesn't happen, of course.  Of course, don't be a dick and your odds of having your food messed with go down even more.

All right,  what percentage of employees are under the influence on a given night ? How much does this vary by place?

It definitely depends on the place. I've worked at bars where this happens occasionally. However alcohol or drug consumption wouldn't have been tolerated at any of the restaurants I worked at (beyond wine tastings before a shift or a "shift drink" after service had ended.)

I'd like to also chime in, I was FOH for 15 years at a lot of different restaurants.

 

Never, ever saw anyone do anything to anybody's food like spitting in it, even when I was a teenager in fast food.

All right,  what percentage of employees are under the influence on a given night ? How much does this vary by place?

 

 

Very, very few. It's a hard enough job to do sober. Sometimes the bartenders have a drink with a patron but they keep it to one or two a night in my experience and it's 100% disallowed at chains. If anyone at any chain I ever worked at showed up even a little intoxicated they would be sent home immediately and likely fired.

I have worked for numerous managers who were high for most of their shifts.  Either marijuana, cocaine, or pills. 

 

A lot of pizza delivery guys are high for their entire shift.  They drive home and hit it between runs and also deliver weed while on the clock. 

 

I worked at a little place that only had two employees on the clock at any given time and the one guy would hand me $10 whenever he needed to "go", which meant he hopped on the back of some guy's motorcycle and came back about 25 minutes later.  I'm not certain what was going on there. 

 

When I worked at Jimmy John's, I ran into the GM at a bar one night and we hung out for a drink in a booth.  Then 20 minutes later he came back and whispered in my ear that he had "left something" in the booth and I looked down and realized that I had been sitting next to a bag of weed the entire time.  I handed it to him under the table and we never talked about it again because about 1-2 weeks later he was fired and then they fired everyone he hired, which meant me as well.  Or rather they just took us all off the schedule and shrugged their shoulders when we asked why we weren't on the schedule anymore. 

 

^ Ugh, I can so relate to the last part of that.  I had a Bit*h of a manager at a coffee shop I worked at, and when I questioned her about how she calculated the credit tips that she'd distribute on Mondays, I suddenly found myself removed from the schedule.  I had been noticing that my credit tips were going down almost every week, and I simply asked what her formula was for splitting them up.  Did she take all the money and simply divide it by the hours worked, or did she take the money from each shift and distribute it to those who were working that shift? It was a pretty simple question, and I was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though I was almost certain that she and her husband had been skimming money from the tips for a while.  Rather than even try to bullshit her way out the question, she took a $10 out of the register and just gave it to me.  When the next week's schedule was released, I wasn't on it.  I asked her about it and she said "I thought you were moving to Utah?" I was like, uh, I've never once said anything about going out of town, much less moving to freakin Utah. Wtf? She just kind of snort laughed and left, and that was that.  Never got put back on the schedule, and she never responded to any of my emails after.  The food industry sucks.

 

*Also, she hired her sister to be the 'cook', despite the woman's complete inability to cook, communicate, or even look halfway presentable.  The sister would bring her jackass of a boyfriend (these people are all in their 50s, btw) to help her in the kitchen, and he was such an asshole and would try to boss everyone around. I'd constantly see them kissing in the kitchen, and he'd slap her ass basically every time he'd walk by her.  If I had to bet I'd say those two were no strangers to drugs both on and off the job.

I would find working in food service so unpleasant that I would probably want to be on drugs all the time.

 

 

How many managers and GM's have you seen fired for stealing?

 

Managers, very few. Most places managers get a meal comped every shift and some places do alcohol as well. Usually if you are in management it's because you're more trustful then the lower grunts.

 

That being said, it's usually kitchen staff that gets busted for theft. Pretty easy to put $50 worth of lobster or steak in a backpack and walk out the employee entrance.

 

I would say in my entire career it's been between 10 and 20 people busted for theft.

 

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All right,  what percentage of employees are under the influence on a given night ? How much does this vary by place?

Really depends on the place.  A nice restaurant (like anything on E4th) it's probably pretty low. Servers really have to be mentally present on a busy night; try being in something and remembering that table 11 needs another round of drinks, table 13 needs more bread, table 14 needs to be cleared of entree plates and talked to about dessert, and table 12 is now being sat, please be there in under a minute and explain tonight's specials.

 

More bar/nightclub places it's definitely much higher. Drinks get made wrong, people buy shots for bartenders, and... shenanigans!

 

Also corporate vs individual restaurants. If you're working somewhere like in the new hilton, I guarantee there was a drug test to get hired. There are cameras everywhere so no sneaking drinks.

 

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All I want to know is if wait staff really spits in your food if you send it back or if you are a dick to them.

Not really. If it's a deal where you ordered a medium steak and it comes out well done or  mooing, I'm royally pissed off at the kitchen.

 

If you ordered something and didn't read the menu or ask questions and send it back,  that's really irritating.

 

That being said I have never spat or done anything to anyone's food, and of the places I have worked that would be immediate termination.

 

If you're a dick to your server, you most definitely slide down the priority scale. Same thing goes for if the food comes out wrong. If you're super nice about it, we are definitely remaking it and discounting it heavily. If you're rude you'll get a replacement and that's it.

 

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Did she take all the money and simply divide it by the hours worked, or did she take the money from each shift and distribute it to those who were working that shift? It was a pretty simple question, and I was trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, even though I was almost certain that she and her husband had been skimming money from the tips for a while.  Rather than even try to bullshit her way out the question, she took a $10 out of the register and just gave it to me.  When the next week's schedule was released, I wasn't on it.  I asked her about it and she said "I thought you were moving to Utah?"

 

That is why I will never work anywhere where tips are pooled. It happens all the time

At least now I fill out my paperwork, and I can see exactly how much is coming my way,  either on a paycheck or cash.

 

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^ I have never worked at a restaurant but I did work at a place where tips were pooled. It was a car dealership where you could bring a car you bought there back any time for a free car wash, and most people would tip a buck or two but all tips were cash because there was no actual transaction. The cash was brought back and put in a big clear jar for all to see. You would quickly learn what new guys were full of crap by sending them to take the cars back to known tippers - some people would tip $5 or $10 every time, and when the new guy came back empty handed everyone knew it was time to get him fired.

 

 

Tell you what, one thing that's cool about owning your own business is never having to work with someone you don't like.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time working in the restaurant business, but the time that I did and in the few places that I did, I haven't seen more co-worker banging than I did in that industry.

 

Did you guys see (or experience) the same?

I haven't spent a whole lot of time working in the restaurant business, but the time that I did and in the few places that I did, I haven't seen more co-worker banging than I did in that industry.

 

It's wild.  There's that and then there's the high drama when somebody steals somebody else's woman.  We had a guy who worked at the place for five years see his girlfriend stolen by the GM, who promptly promoted her to assistant manager.  When that happened the guy who had been there for five years quit since he didn't want to take orders from his now ex-girlfriend who had only worked there for about a year. 

 

 

That being said, it's usually kitchen staff that gets busted for theft. Pretty easy to put $50 worth of lobster or steak in a backpack and walk out the employee entrance.

 

I would say in my entire career it's been between 10 and 20 people busted for theft.

 

 

 

We had a cook get fired for stealing a turkey.  We were located next to a dry cleaner, which had a mini-fridge in their for its workers, and he hid the turkey in that fridge.  I guess he had been in the habit of doing so, but one day the regional manager came around and wondered what the hell a whole turkey was doing in the minifridge. 

 

Oh, banging? Well, there is a LOT of that. I myself have had many sexual encounters on and around restaurant grounds with both FOH and BOH peeps. I lived with a chef for awhile as well.

 

I think there is a lot of banging. A lot. I've come upon numerous encounters in walk-ins, dry storage, basements, etc.

And yeah the drama. I started one place with a BF who was also FOH. We broke up and I started dating the aforementioned chef, so he started banging a married FOH woman with 4 kids and the politics were brutal.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time working in the restaurant business, but the time that I did and in the few places that I did, I haven't seen more co-worker banging than I did in that industry.

 

That's why it's hard to get people to leave that industry for something that's "more stable" and pays better. You get to those "real" jobs and they're all dudes or all dames and then you have to put in real effort to meet partners. Resorting to the internet, dragging things out with slow movers, chasing, all that garbage.

I haven't spent a whole lot of time working in the restaurant business, but the time that I did and in the few places that I did, I haven't seen more co-worker banging than I did in that industry.

 

That's why it's hard to get people to leave that industry for something that's "more stable" and pays better. You get to those "real" jobs and they're all dudes or all dames and then you have to put in real effort to meet partners. Resorting to the internet, dragging things out with slow movers, chasing, all that garbage.

 

We had a 58~ year-old chronically single GM suddenly score a 19 year-old waitress girlfriend.  She basically moved in and they went out for at least a year.  I left town so I don't know what became of them.   

 

Sit-down places that close 10-11pm are the ripest for mass-dating because when the place shuts down there is still a solid 1-2 hours to hit the bars every night.  Usually the crew goes to the same bar pretty much every night. 

 

My brother's now-wife was a manager at Ruby Tuesday's for about five years.  When they were living in the city and didn't have off-street parking, they parked her car at the restaurant for a week when they went out to Burning Man.  They came back and some cook had kicked a big dent in the side of her car.  Of course the video tape had been erased, so the GM was somehow culpable in the incident.  That's the kind of crap you have to put up with working at one of these places. 

 

 

 

I'm so glad I went into coding...

 

I was a manager at Donatos and I've had jobs as a bartender, cook, server at various other places. I have tons of stories, haha. It's definitely an interesting industry to be in but I did ultimately get tired of the drama and the insane amount of drug use/selling going on.

 

At the last Donatos I worked at in Shaker Heights, one of the other managers was selling drugs to all of the other associates. He probably still is. I guess if you have a manager condoning what you're doing and giving you a steady supply, you have no problem doing it every chance you get because there would be so many people that were so high that we would literally lose hundreds of dollars a day just in food (not taking into consideration future losses from customers never returning again because their food had to be remade three times before it was actually made correctly.) The absolute worst was managing on payday. You can smoke weed or pop pills in the comfort of your own home and just chill and be fine but when you're at work and you're a pizza maker and you have 10 tickets that just printed up and you're responsible for analyzing them, remembering how to make each item and are supposed to constantly restack the tickets in order by people who already paid and are waiting/pickup vs. delivery, with deliveries made last/ tickets for future timed orders, etc. while factoring how long each item takes to cook to ensure everything is ready at the same time, you just don't have the cognitive abilities to multi-task and remember everything. It was really frustrating having to constantly jump in and make pizzas and micro-manage everyone and everything to make sure they weren't f-ing everything up. The problem was, as soon as I'd take that station over to get it on track, the cashier up front was screwing something up, like someone who has been waiting 30 minutes for their pizza is standing there and their food is ready and boxed but she didn't think to keep an eye on orders that are done and hand it to the person waiting. So eventually that customer would want to speak to the manager and after I discover that all of these orders are done but not handed out, after giving out discounts/credits, I'd start expediting but once I did that, I would be told I have two manager calls on hold. I'd have one of the drivers take over and expedite (causing his own deliveries to be late) and after picking up the lines on hold, I'd discover that the customer's orders were taken wrong usually because the order-taker didn't repeat the order back to the customer at the end, after hitting the wrong buttons on the screen or was even was rude to the customer. You get an exponential rise in customer complaints that you have to deal with when you're busy and under-staffed or have too high of a percentage of your sh!tty employees on the clock at once and since resolving a customer issue inevitably means having to listen to the customer b!tch for 5-10 minutes and tell you every single little detail of their experience even though you've already explained that their food will be free, it just causes many more things in the restaurant to get messed up since you're tied up and can't help with any of the other issues going on in the restaurant. It was just endless. Especially at a low-volume store like Shaker Heights where they don't have the sales to justify higher pay and more staff. Shaker was the WORST. Several associates would disappear for an hour, on the clock and not say anything, then come back like nothing happened. I would write them up for it and take them off next week's schedule and the GM (who was an active duty police officer and still was after my District Supervisor recruited her from Monster.com) would put them back on the schedule because we just couldn't find any applicants who were worth a damn. She was this crazy little tough Albanian woman who drove a brand new Mercedes SUV. My D. Supervisor literally only hired her to scare everyone into not selling/doing drugs in the store anymore. It didn't work. She did absolutely nothing about anything at that place. She didn't even take the job remotely seriously. She would come into work extremely late and leave early every day, despite being on salary because she also worked almost full time as an officer. I ended up doing all of her managerial work because she was hired without even being trained (I was getting paid 20 hours over-time each week until I got tired of all of her shinanigans and just quit.) It was funny, coming from a corporate store in Columbus, I was more qualified as a Service Manager than any of the franchise partners GMs in the Cleveland market because their training and development standards were so much higher with corporate-ran locations.

 

 

The problem with fast-casual restaurants is that the market is over-saturated with them and they're are so competitive, you can only afford to hire cooks and cashiers for minimum wage. Of course you're going to end up with a bunch of inept, unmotivated, irresponsible drug addicts. Even when I've had gigs at high-end places like Fire, people used drugs all the time but they at least got the job done; in fact, a lot of times they actually functioned better.

 

I've never seen anyone intentionally spit in a customer's food or even condone that under any circumstance. Even the most bi-polar, immature cooks I've ever worked with have admitted "I'd never do that to somebody. I wouldn't want someone to do that to me" However, with that said, I will say this. If you're a cook and you're really busy and you just made something that took 15 minutes to cook - for instance, chicken wings... If you go to plate them and one of them suddenly falls onto the floor, you know that you have two options. Tell the server/cashier they need to let the customer know it will be another 15-20 minutes while you remake their chicken wings, or.... ask yourself, "does a tree really fall in the woods if no one is around to hear it?" Catch what I'm throwing down? That happens a LOT.

 

 

I would find working in food service so unpleasant that I would probably want to be on drugs all the time.

 

I'm allowed to drink while working but usually pass on it because if I have to deal with anyone who is being an ass, being sober is an advantage.  Plus, the cops know I don’t drink at work (you would be surprised how much the local PD knows about what goes on at various bars) so I never get pulled over.  But keep in mind I’m not expected to be nice to anyone.  

 

I used to hang out at the Twinsburg Lizard (when there was one) and we’d get their late and head out with some of them after they closed.  Yeah, they’d pound them down.

 

Drama and co-workers going for it?  We used to joke about doing black light tests on our pool table.  And there always end up being personality clashes, though less so back in the day when Mike could just hire people he knows.

 

No one tampers with food.  Ever.  Though we’ve had incidents of stuff disappearing.  Food and liquor.

 

All right,  what percentage of employees are under the influence on a given night ? How much does this vary by place?

Really depends on the place.  A nice restaurant (like anything on E4th) it's probably pretty low. Servers really have to be mentally present on a busy night; try being in something and remembering that table 11 needs another round of drinks, table 13 needs more bread, table 14 needs to be cleared of entree plates and talked to about dessert, and table 12 is now being sat, please be there in under a minute and explain tonight's specials.

 

More bar/nightclub places it's definitely much higher. Drinks get made wrong, people buy shots for bartenders, and... shenanigans!

 

Also corporate vs individual restaurants. If you're working somewhere like in the new hilton, I guarantee there was a drug test to get hired. There are cameras everywhere so no sneaking drinks.

 

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I work at a large restaurant part-time and a lot of people take "smoke" breaks pretty frequently and everyone is either dating, banging or related.

The problem with fast-casual restaurants is that the market is over-saturated with them and they're are so competitive, you can only afford to hire cooks and cashiers for minimum wage. Of course you're going to end up with a bunch of inept, unmotivated, irresponsible drug addicts. Even when I've had gigs at high-end places like Fire, people used drugs all the time but they at least got the job done; in fact, a lot of times they actually functioned better.

 

 

I'm always stunned by how many people are on drugs at pretty much every place I've worked.  It can be anything -- over-the-counter, prescription, illegal, etc.  Even places that do drug testing have tons of people high on the clock.  They usually don't drug test the managers, so those can be the worst offenders.  I temped at a warehouse that had a manager who tooled around the place on an electric palette jack and could pick up skids perfectly -- every time -- while approaching them at full speed from any angle.  So I guess he was amped-up on adderall or something that helps concentration, because he was pulling feats of accuracy that were like Olympic-level skeet shooting.  His face was always red and dry and wet at the same time.  He looked like an intensely unhappy person, and I was glad I barely had to deal with him.  I also had a manager who I actually liked who obviously did cocaine all day every day because she sniffled all the time.  She would be completely 100% awake and kicking ass at like 7:45am even though you could she hadn't taken a shower before work.  So I don't know if she even slept at all but she'd show up working about 100% harder and more accurately than anyone else. 

 

Some people respond pretty spectacularly to specific drugs in ways others don't.  They're like the Lance Armstrongs of the service industry. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

^ I had a job where any major screw up that resulted in the need for an insurance claim (damaging/crashing a car) required an immediate drug/alcohol test. I somehow managed to end up being the one responsible for escorting people to the piss test place at a nearby urgent care. On more than one occasion the people would completely disappear from the building between doing the paperwork about the incident and me showing up to take them to the test. That was obviously an automatic firing, but without the failed test I think the insurance still paid rather than the person being completely on the hook for the cost (which could be thousands or even tens of thousands depending upon what happened). One guy disappeared for like 20 minutes and then showed up and asked me when we were leaving - I have always assumed he snuck off and got some pee from someone else.