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Article Excerpt
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In restaurants, the food's the thing. But the drinks, presentation, service, and ambience are important, too. And it's up to restaurant workers to provide diners with a square meal that's well rounded.
The hard work of the kitchen, bar, and dining-room staff gets food and drink from menu to mouth. Some of the more visible workers may include waiters and waitresses (also known as servers), busboys, hosts and hostesses, bartenders, and sommeliers. Less visible restaurant staff includes chefs, cooks, managers, dishwashers, and janitorial and office staff. All have a role in helping to make a diner's experience pleasant.
This article begins with an overview of the restaurant industry. It then looks at four occupations--cooks, executive chefs, servers, and bartenders--and describes their job duties; employment, wages, and outlook; and skills and training. You'll learn what working in a restaurant is like, including its challenges and rewards. Suggested resources for additional information on restaurant careers are at the end.
The restaurant industry
The restaurant industry doesn't just feed people; it also employs them. In fact, the food and drinking places industry, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), had more than 9 million workers in 2007, making this industry one of the largest employers in the country.
The food and drinking places industry includes snack bars, fine dining--and everything in between. Limited-service eating places, such as cafeterias and fast food establishments, employ about 43 percent of workers in food and drinking places. The smallest segment of the industry comprises special food services, such as caterers and food-service contractors, and drinking places, including pubs and nightclubs.
Full-service restaurants--in which diners order, are served, and eat while seated--employ almost 48 percent of workers in the food and drinking places industry. It is this latter type of establishment that is the focus of the occupations covered in this article.
Popular belief holds that new restaurants struggle to survive, and many close their doors within the first couple of years. Although restaurants are difficult to run, their failure rate is reported to be about 60 percent--similar to the failure rate for all new businesses.
Restaurant occupations
The following pages describe the job duties, employment, wages, outlook, and skills and training of cooks, executive chefs, servers, and bartenders. Job titles vary depending on the type and size of the restaurant, but workers in these occupations have some similar responsibilities.
High turnover in most restaurant occupations means that prospective workers usually have excellent prospects. And because restaurants are in nearly every town or city, jobs should be widely available.
Cooks
Restaurant cooks turn the food orders they receive from servers into appetizing cuisine--often while racing the clock. Some cooks are referred to as chefs, usually because they have additional skills or responsibilities. (See, for example, executive chefs, described in more detail beginning on the next page.)
For cooks, the kitchen's pace becomes hectic before diners arrive. "You're always busy," says Jon Gatewood of Ludlow, Vermont, who has worked as a cook. "There were times when we were finishing prep work even as the doors opened for business."
Cooks follow recipes in preparing, measuring, and mixing ingredients--and, often, testing the final product--to create menu items. And to make some dishes, cooks might need to arrive several hours before serving begins. In addition to cooking, preparations might include a daily briefing from the executive chef on menu changes or kitchen performance. Cooks also use their prep time to ensure that all of the equipment in their work areas is clean and fully functional.
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Restaurant cooks use special, industrial-grade equipment to prepare food. For example, they might use step-in coolers, high-quality knives, and meat slicers and grinders. And most restaurants have multiple sets of heavy-duty ovens and stovetop burners that cooks use to prepare dishes simultaneously.
In most kitchens, cooks are assigned to different stations, such as deep fryer, broiler, or vegetables. Some restaurants may also have cooks who specialize in a type of food and work on a single course, such as pastries or soup. Cooks may collaborate on a dish or work individually. Either way, they frequently work together under the direction of executive chefs or their assistants, sous chefs.
The true test of kitchen skills is in efficiently filling orders. Cooks receive diners' orders, called meal tickets, from servers. To complete the ticket, cooks either prepare a dish from scratch or combine ready-made...
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