Life with Landry's: A Small Hurricane

Whew! It's been exactly one week since I last made contact here. And what a week it's been.

To be completely honest, my life for the past 7 days has consisted of jumbo-sized work, boiled in the shell and garnished liberally with boot camp, served on top of a heaping bed of crushed studying, then accompanied with small sides of fresh eating and sleeping. I might have also forgotten parsley.

Training-wise, the last 4 days boiled down essentially to shadowing fools around the restaurant, mostly JW. I did help put finishing touches on food and do other grunt work with Mama Rosa y el kitchen (aka Cafe Mexico). But for the most part, I got eased into the whole waiting bit until yesterday, when I basically waited my own 3 tables with Charlton as my safety net. Him and JW are two pretty awesome dudes. They've bailed me out a lot with all the leaks my boat of waiting skills kept springing.

The best part is when my customers "get it" early on and throw me extra hard curveballs. Or the occasional gyro. Like my first-ever table, which had 4 Landry's corporate VIPs, no less, who told me (very jokingly) they were going to be "really tough" on me, then proceeded to order a bevy of ridiculously specific dishes. Ha ha, very funny.

Anyway, they told me at the start that it'd be a lot to learn, and I was expecting a lot, but what I got wasn't a lot. It wasn't even a flood. It was a small hurricane.

Beef and fowl. Flavorings, cuts, and preparations of fresh fish. Sanitation protocol. Appetizers, hot and cold. Beers and wines and mixed drinks to no end. Corny acronyms up to my ears. And my personal favorite, Professional Service Standards. That's our script we have to follow with Guests. (Yes, that's Guests with a capital G)

And it's all in preparation for a 2-4 hour-long beast of a final exam, encompassing every area from my brick of a training manual and the 32 pages of menu items to meticulously memorize. Which is then followed by a private, dry audit with none other than Mike the general manager. Nothing less than an A on both obstacle courses tomorrow will get me the job.

Thanks to Hurricane Landry's, my room, which I spent a whole day mercilessly cleaning when I moved back in, is now a pigsty again. My table, which before only featured a lone desklamp, has also disappeared into oblivion, forgotten under a heavily blackened markerboard and a wrinkled blanket of note packets and menu item descriptions. Plus, I haven't showered in days.

Just kidding. About that last sentence, anyway.

I wish I was kidding that I've also had to sedate and cage my inner gym rat for the past eternity. My chest, shoulder and tricep group nags constantly, refusing to let me forget the neglect. My body begs for weights and basketball. And my fingers are starting to forget the feel of molded plastic. I thought muscles only got sore when they were building. Apparently, mine get sore from not being used, too.

And the worst part? "Trainee's tab" doesn't exist. Not anymore. There was actually a pretty funny mix-up involving me trying to convince another manager that it really did exist. It didn't end too well.

The strangest part of all this, though?

I like it.

Deep down, at the end of the day, the jumbled ingredients of a thousand dishes ringing in my ear as I collapse into bed, I smirk a little. Just a little. Here I am, in the eye of a small hurricane, doing something I used to know nothing about, in an industry I've never worked in, at a job I thought I could never do. The adrenaline rush of keeping up with a packed house, the wafting aromas of the kitchen, the rudely inappropriate jokes we crack on each other to keep ourselves sane, it's all starting to get kind of addictive. Even the lame robot/jerk customers who sometimes wind up in my section. Actually, no, not them. I don't even know why I included them in there.

But yeah, I think I'm gonna be alright.