First Things First: A Lesson from a Life on the Line

This is the first of a series of stories I want to write about life lessons I garnered from spending a decade cooking in professional settings.

As I get farther and farther away from that chapter of my life I find myself with little mantras and habits I formed while covered in grease and heat.

The first lesson I want to write about is the concept of

First Things First

Sunday Morning Brunch

I worked the brunch shift at a restaurant while I was in college. I am not a very social individual. I do not go out to drink and most of my coworkers were social people. Saturdays night they ended their shift, had a few shift drinks, and then continued the party at whatever venue accepted their degenerate asses.

More power to them, but the problem would appear Sunday morning. More times than not I got to work at 8 am to open the restaurant alone for the next 2 hours because everyone else was still passed out.

Considering we opened at 10:30 and everything served was made from scratch and unique to the brunch menu, there was a mountain of work to do.

I showed up at 8 and I had 20 gallons of grits to make, you heard me correctly 20 gallons, etouffee, sherry cream sauce, crawfish cream sauce, Belgian waffle mix, French toast mix, sliced the freshly baked brioche for the French toast, fresh mustard greens chopped washed and cooked with onions and bacon, the same process for lima beans and black-eyed peas, cornbread needed to be made and baked, pancake batter, brown gravy, caramelized onions and mushrooms for hamburger steaks, 20 pounds of hamburger steaks pattied out, two cases of chicken breast butterflied and pounded ready for battering and frying, the frying station needed setting up, the omelet station needed all of the necessary toppings. Luckily I cracked 700 eggs the day before during Saturday's lunch which is usually slower and probably 30 other things I am not remembering at the moment.

If you made it all the way through that list of items that I prepared you can see it’s virtually impossible for one person to do it all. Yet sometimes I was there by myself for an hour or two scrambling, literally and figuratively, to get it all done.

Trash Can or Trash Can’t?

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I would come in was to be in a big hurry to get the grits started because it takes a long time to bring cold milk up to a boil. I got the pots on the stove and started opening the cartons of milk and pouring them in. Once they were emptied I needed to discard the cartons and looked around for a trash can and said,

“Fuck”

I was in such a hurry to get my day started I completely overlooked the necessary step of setting up the trash cans.

I had to stop what I was doing, set up the cans, and then resume my prep task.

Falling Flat on Top

The morning continued with me scrambling around to get everything done and then it was time to start grilling the French toast. I dipped the brioche in the egg mix, laid it on the flat top and

Nothing

I forgot to turn on the flat top. Now I’d have to wait 20 minutes for it to warm up.

If you know anything about cooking professionally, 30 seconds is the answer to all time questions and 20 minutes might as well be a lifetime.

Forgot to Call the Hotline

I moved on to something else, as I still had a bunch of stuff to do while the flat top warmed up. After sautéing the onions and bacon for all the vegetables I started cooking down the lima beans, greens, and black-eyed peas. Once they were finished I transferred them to the hot line.

Well, the line. It wasn’t hot, more like a cold line.

I forgot to turn on the hot line. That takes over an hour to heat up and everything would be cold if left in the cold water.

Now I am double fucked.

I had to drain all the water out of the hot line, and immediately start filling up buckets of hot water to put in the line to keep things warm until the heater coils could do it for me. That was a 20-minute job. I didn’t have another 20 minutes to spare.

After a few times of making these colossal mistakes, I developed a mantra that has served me well throughout my life in and out of the kitchen.

First Things First

In my head I just say FTF.

It served as a reminder that the first thing I did when I entered the kitchen was turn every cooking element on, flip and line the trash cans, set up sanitizer buckets, set up the line with the proper utensils for the day, and most importantly

Brew a pot of coffee

Once I developed a system of setting myself up for success by recognizing the things that needed to be done first before other tasks should begin I became a much more efficient and professional line cook. Often I outperformed my contemporaries simply because I exercised forethought in my order of operations and they didn’t.

The Real World

Apply this to yourself during your task. Maybe it’s writing here. What needs to take place before you sit down and start typing? Research? Outline? Ideation?

What about working at your 9–5? Are there things that need to be done every day that if they are done first will help you and your coworkers have a smoother day?

Remember this simple little mantra when you find yourself backtracking and make a point to apply it in the future.