Note on the second service

I am writing this down because I was asked to, and because the person who asked has since said that it will be kept whether or not anything is done with it. That suits me. I am not making a case.

What I was taught

I trained in Atlanta, at Le Cordon Bleu, and I say that here only because the alumni association keeps a list and the list is how I was found. What I was taught there was a set of timings. Everything in a kitchen is a timing: how long a thing takes, when it must be started so that it is ready when the others are, how much of the delay you can absorb without anyone noticing.

The method assumes that each service begins from nothing. You clean down, you set up, and the evening starts at zero.

What I found instead

It does not start at zero. It starts déphasé, out of phase with itself, by an amount that is small at six o'clock and is not small at ten.

I do not mean that we fall behind, which is ordinary and which you correct. I mean that the correction does not hold. If I bring a station back onto its timing at half past seven, it is off again by eight, and off by about the same amount, in the same direction. Whatever I have corrected for is still there after I have corrected it.

For a long time I took this as a fault in me. I kept notes, which is not usual, and the notes are what convinced me otherwise: the interval is the same on the nights I am tired and on the nights I am not.

What I think it is

I think the evening is not the unit. I think the unit is longer than a day, and that what I am correcting at half past seven was set in motion before I came in, possibly some days before.

Somebody sent me a description of what a brewery does with its Consumables footprint — that the batch is not the unit either, that residues and cleaning variance carry across, and that the sensible thing is to stop pretending each batch starts clean and to write the recipes with the carry-over in them. I read that and I recognised it. I am not saying the two things are the same. I am saying I stopped correcting.

What I do now

I set the stations to run at the interval rather than against it. The timings I was taught are still the timings; I start them earlier by the amount the evening is going to be off, and I no longer bring anything back during service.

It works, in the sense that the food goes out when it should. It does not work in the sense of being explicable to anybody. I have twice tried to teach it to somebody else and both times it came out sounding like superstition, which it may be, though I would say that a superstition is something you do because it once worked, and this is something I do because it works each time.

What I am not saying

I am not saying anything about why. I have been asked whether I think the building has something to do with it, and I do not know, and I would rather not be asked again.

I have been told this will be filed with the Misdirected enquiries, among things people send that have no bearing on anything held there. I have no objection. I would only say that it has a bearing on me.

See also

• Misdirected enquiries — Misdirected enquiries
• The pairing habit — Misdirected enquiries
• Manfred — Consumables footprint
• Odette Pruvost — Misdirected enquiries
• On keeping what cannot be answered — Misdirected enquiries
• Spondulex — Consumables footprint
• Composite sheet
• External ordering