1. People always consider Doctor, Pharmacist, Engineer, Professor as working professionals, but what about us who are in Food and Beverage industry?
People always have this kind of perception that everyone can work as a waiter or waitress, and you do not need a degree certificate to do so. We may not be major in Biology, Chemistry, Physics and sorts, but it doesn't mean that hospitality course is very easy, and it also doesn't mean that working in this line is a peanuts job. When you woke up from your holiday and heading towards the hotel's buffet counter, who is the one who set up the buffet counter for you? Who are the ones who are sweating like mad behind the kitchen counter preparing your breakfast? You may need to rush for your early flight, but we need to wake up even earlier to prepare everything in the restaurant.
Customers come in to the restaurant, look at menu and order. But menu planning is not as simple as ABC, you need to calculate food cost, research, food tasting after food tasting, seeking approvals and all. Then when we prepare the food and drink, we need to think about food safety, need to follow standard, need to practice, need to train new staffs, need to monitor the operations. @@ But, not everyone knows that!! But once again, every industry also has its problem, I am just stating from my point of view.
Customers come in to the restaurant, look at menu and order. But menu planning is not as simple as ABC, you need to calculate food cost, research, food tasting after food tasting, seeking approvals and all. Then when we prepare the food and drink, we need to think about food safety, need to follow standard, need to practice, need to train new staffs, need to monitor the operations. @@ But, not everyone knows that!! But once again, every industry also has its problem, I am just stating from my point of view.
2. Not everyone will appreciate what you do, including the higher management.
The very frustrating thing about service line is that people may not remember everything that you have done right, but will forever remember the things that you had done wrong. You may have an excellent service all along, but once you made one small little mistake, it may even affect the restaurant's reputation, especially you are holding bigger responsibilities.
We worked during public holidays like Christmas, Chinese New Year, National Day where else other people can take a break from work. And who are the ones who are serving food in the restaurant? And yet, some people they do not appreciate what we do, and only blaming us for obvious reasons like not getting a table, slower service etc. Its the same thing like going to a shopping mall, you know that public holiday people will surely flock into the mall, hence it is harder to find parking, getting cramp up in retail shops etc. Same goes to restaurant, when there is a bigger crowd, you may need to aspect a queue and the waiting time for food will be longer as well. But, sad to say this, not many people will understand.
Then you bust your ass off to work for the company, people from the higher management will come and give you unnecessary stress because they simply do not understand how operation staff works. Let me give you an example, company will always want to get higher profit margin, hence they want to save cost and cut cost. Money don't fall from the sky don't they? You want to get higher profit margin, firstly, you need to provide good service and good food for the customers because customers are the ones . By doing so, you will need to have enough manpower and resources to cater for that. If you want to cut down the manpower cost, fine, Then at least provide us with a good tools to work with. But, coffee machine don't know how old already, this not enough that not enough. Wah, and you aspect us to be technician and maintenance also? And the worst thing is, they don't understand the fact that it is not easy to run a restaurant operation. The least you can do, is to motivate the staffs to work better. You know like bonus, compliments and all. ( Everything that we learnt from the book ) But, the owner may compliment you, then those who works under the owner come and stress you with this and that. What is the point? haiy.
To be continue~~~
