Poor Training

Training is a key step when you hire new employees to your establishment. One easy way to explain it is when you teach a particular skill or behavior through instruction over a period of time specifically to your employees. Even though it might take time in the beginning, at the end you are going to gain it back and you will see it was all worth it. The final product of training your employees are likely to be perfection at work and more knowledge. Also, you are not going to waste money on food being spoiled by mishandling since they will know how to do it before ever starting. You will also save time since you won’t have to complain about your employees not doing the job correctly. In the end you are going to save some chaos.

During my extern experience at Eleven Madison Park Restaurant unfortunately I got a very poor training. My first day at work was the Kentucky Derby party, so I guess that might have been the reason for them not to properly explain how everything was run in the kitchen. I don’t know if I should call it a reason or just a good excuse. They were all too worried and focused on their dishes that I was just as another worker at the restaurant but they never provided the training I was supposed to get. When I got there they just told me “here are the walking, grab a cutting board, set your station here, and all the cucumber that you can find in the walking must be done”. After that he grabbed a mandolin and said: “Do as many thin slices of cucumber without any seed and save the trim”. Given that he did not showed me a demo and I did not wanted to do something wrong I slices three pieces of cumber and showed them to the Chef to make sure that was what he wanted. After I was finished they really did not put me in a station given that the restaurant was not operating as usual, so I was just working with everyone in the kitchen. Even thought I was not given a tour or explanation on how things worked there, it was kind of interesting and fun cause that way I got to interact with mostly everyone at the kitchen. I asked people where the equipment was located and if what I was doing was perfect. I felt like a little kid playing a game since it was like a challenge to find stuff around the kitchen.

After this experience, even thought it gave me a lot of confidence and communication skills, it was hard to work at such demanding kitchen without any prior training.