As the breakfast shift queen, I feel that I am in fact the most qualified to write The Breakfast Chef Review. Also, I'm pretty sure I'm the only one who cares enough to do it. So here it is - The Breakfast Chef Review, the history of breakfast cooks at Vintner's since late July 2002.
Seth - There is little for me to say about Seth. I had to think for a couple of minutes before I could even remember his name for sure. He was the breakfast chef before I started working breakfast, back when Joe thought I was commuting from Lenoir and didn't put me on the schedule any earlier than 10:30. Seth worked there a long time, though he was at the end of his term by the time I got there, and seemed to be a nice guy. I heard that Joe used to forget to schedule morning servers, so Seth would take orders and then cook them, which is an amusing image for me. Then one day, Seth decided to just stop showing up.
Joe & Taylor - Let me clarify that this is not my boss Joe. That Joe is old and white, while the one that cooked breafkast was young and black and had a great big crush on me.
This was our only breakfast chef team. I'm not really sure why we needed two of them, as Joe was more than able to handle it for himself. They really weren't all that bad. Only at our busiest did they ever really fall behind, and they seemed to work well enough together. They lasted for about four months, when Joe's grandfather died, which apparently inspired him to move to Atlanta and marry his ex-girlfriend.
Taylor, solo - This is the same Taylor. While he wasn't bad in a team with Joe, by himself, Taylor is slooow. I didn't even realize it until we got other breakfast chefs and I realized how fast breakfast food could come out of the kitchen. And when Taylor gets behind, he gets stressed out in a hurry, and it's best to just leave him alone. He's fine in the winter, though, when we don't have enough business for him to fall behind. And he's a great guy. He is the most likeable person at the restaurant, which has kept him his job, as he has frequent difficulty showing up on time. As another note, Taylor is the only person that has been there longer than I have and does not own the place.
Sean - I liked ole Sean, though his political views were always much farther to the left than I could see. He wasn't a bad chef, either, a little faster than Taylor with the food being pretty consistent. He was the one who created the much-debated new breakfast menu. He would make us sample dishes from the new menu, and they were fabulous and vaguely exotic, things you would never taste at Denny's. However, he moved away, also somewhere south, before the new menu was ever put into effect. He moved because his girlfriend, who he had been with for something like a decade was moving and taking his son with her. Sean had some pretty strong anti-marriage views, and I think he may have pitied me with my traditional semi-conservative southern ones.
Taylor - Again. Taylor acts as our interrim breakfast chef, the guy who is our back up in between the time the old guy gets fed up and the time the new guy comes in.
Amanda - Under Amanda's breakfast reign was when I discovered how fast breakfast can be. I loved her. The food was fast, it was consistently good, and she was great. One of the best things about Amanda was that she had no issue with making the servers free breakfast if they desired it, which we usually did. She actually thought it was her duty to feed us. Amanda left in the state of transition for the kitchen. When the old kitchen manager left, she went with him. She would have gone anyway, as Joe kept trying to make her cook breakfast and lunch, which had not been per their agreement. Plus there was some friction between her and the new kitchen manager. There is always drama in a restaurant.
Donna - In The Breakfast Chef Review, Donna's role was the shortest. I'm not even sure that she lasted a month. Her brother or someone in her family was involved in a motorcycle accident shortly after she was hired, and he was in the hospital a couple of hours away. She would go visit him after her shift and come back before her next shift, with no sleeping hours in between. She'd also come in drunk, and make frequent visits to her car to keep up her drunken state. The management tried to be sympathetic about her situation, but she was rotten. She was slow and the orders tended to be wrong if they came out at all. Apparently, you cannot cook breakfast well when inebriated. There was an infamous morning when the manager had to help her cook, at which point Joe and the kitchen manager probably started trying to get him to join the kitchen staff.
John - I'm not even sure if John is worth mentioning. He's only cooked a few times, and is actually the sous chef. He's moderately fast and the food is moderately good. Sometimes things get a little burnt. If nothing else, he's a very likeable guy and never gets stressed out, even when there is a line of tickets as long as three of my arms. I love him for that.
Brit - My all-time favorite. I said that Brit was the best breakfast chef we'd ever had once in the kitchen, at which point they looked at me and said quietly, "Even better than Amanda?" I thought about it for several moments, realizing the magnitude of the idea of being better than Amanda, before finally saying "Yeah." Brit, real name Britain, was actually a waitress before volunteering to cook breakfast. I don't remember hearing that she had previous experience, but she surely must have, because she is good. The food is always good, the orders are always right, and she can cook it faster than we can serve it. She makes special order eggs that are not on the menu and even makes those stupid omelets that people figure they can create on their own rather than just pick one off of the menu. Brit has been trying to quit recently; I think her schoolwork has been suffering. The trouble is, she's just too nice to just quit and always gets coerced into working some more. I think the kitchen manager realizes he should hang on to her as long as he can, and while I agree with that, the poor girl hates it there.
So I realize this entire entry has no bearing upon anything whatsoever and probably wasn't even all that interesting. That's okay. I interested myself writing it, and frankly, you are lucky that this didn't turn into a lecture on how to behave as a customer when eating breakfast out. Come back tomorrow and we'll talk about the lunch guys.
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