Recent Posts
Culture April 17, 2020
Hot kitchens breed even hotter tempers.
Work, in general, can be a challenging experience in any business. Hence, why they call it “work.” Personally, my recent resume consists of the restaurant industry. Don’t take this the wrong way, I do understand that people through all aspects of work go through challenging times such as pay, teamwork, and my personal favorite…bullying.
Restaurants can be a different breed of people in which bullying presents itself in a brand new manner. From the back-of-house kitchen alpha males to the catty front-of-house servers and hosts, there is a lot of toxicity in the air.
There is a stereotype to working in the kitchen or back-of-house at restaurants. In my world, most of the staff is male with a few sprinkles of a woman every few shifts.
Working on the management side, I once heard the hiring manager say, “If I hear a woman’s voice on the phone asking to work in the kitchen, she’s not getting a job.”
Excuse me? This behavior is not what people look for multiple reasons, but put in layman’s terms: it’s bullying.
The magazine and blog, “Food and Wine” has started compiling stories of those who have worked in the restaurant business to make sure these stories get heard. In one article, titled, “The Bully in the Kitchen” the writer explains what the back-of-house culture was like with their aggressive alpha-male chef:
“Many chefs will tell you that aggression is the only way to coax consistent production from their line cooks. Making great food takes extraordinary discipline but a chef’s quest for purity behind the line can often turn sadistic. Long nights in a blazing hot kitchen with a printer that never stops spitting out orders can transform gentle souls into rabid animals. Voices get raised, toes stepped on. The first-aid kit in the kitchen doesn’t treat hurt feelings.”
For the servers or front-of-house staff, it doesn’t get any better. Remember those popular girls that had it all in high school? Think Mean Girls in a restaurant set to run loose; that is the life of a server.
Most servers are sadly females with a sprinkle of a man bringing in a different personality. The girls get catty, territorial and become those memorable bullies we know and (not so) love.
There are plenty of stories about servers creating cliques, gossiping, and purposely setting up servers they don’t like for failure. Why are people acting as bullies? Probably the same reason as they did in high school; for fun or for a power trip. But this can cause serious emotional damage to certain employees.
Back in 2006, there was a young waitress who committed suicide because she was being bullied at work. The employees would make fun of her mental illness and call her fat and ugly. They also spat on her, ruined her clothes and bag, and told her to take rat poison. The restaurant was fined a hefty sum of $335,000 but for the waitresses family and friends, this will never be enough.
Unfortunately, with a lot of restaurants, the toxicity is inherited and ingrained into the establishment’s DNA. Not much can really be done, especially if you’re a new employee.
In California, they started requiring employers to do biannual training on workplace harassment back in 2014. Since this is fairly recent, not much research has gone into whether or not this has worked.
What employers need to understand is that not only is bullying bad for the mental health of their staff, it is also bad for business. Not only could you suffer lawsuits, but if customers catch wind of the hostility among the staff, they may not want to come back to the restaurant or write disparaging reviews online.
This review on TripAdvisor tells a story about the poor treatment this family was given. The worst part, they reported, was that the waitress was publically shamed and fired for an incident that was not necessarily her fault:
“We are in shock that they took the action of firing a waitress in front of us for a mistake that would have been avoided if the kitchen staff had prepared the meals properly to arrive together. It was an act of pure bullying. Needless to say, we do not recommend this restaurant at all.”
Front-of-house and back-of-house staff suffer different types of bullying and both are difficult jobs to tolerate. Because we are cramming these two environments into one setting and clashing between a male and female-dominant staff, it can get scary. The bullying does not stop when this begins because then they all become territorial to a new level.
In my opinion, the restaurant life can be scary and hard work. Most importantly, though, it will build up a tough skin putting up with all of the bullying at work.
