I just quit my restaurant job and it feels like a weight has been lifted from me. Now, I'm not saying I like my new job but I'll take a permanent position with at least some benefits over working in a restaurant. I worked there for 2.5 years, through the entire pandemic, only called in sick like 6 or 7 times in that period, and never got a single raise, only increased our wages due to minimum wage going up. The owner is an incompetent jerk who takes it out on his staff. His brother, a chef who has worked in michelin star restaurants, told him to give up and cut his losses after his previous restaurant failed, and he decided to go against his brother and open a restaurant and a bar with no idea of how to run either.
Now here's a long list of all the terrible things that have happened in this restaurant.
- The previous owner was a scummy and cheap dude who would do all the electrical wiring by himself. The restaurant was in bad shape and dirty. I have no idea why the current owner even agreed to renting it if he actually toured the place before deciding to rent.
- Building on the last point the previous owner also fucked with some safety mechanisms because he found some processes “too slow”. I've mentioned this on this sub before and this story is very grim. The kitchen is a floor below the dining room so there's a little lift you can put food on and it sends the food upstairs. The doors to the lift are automatically supposed to reopen if they encounter resistance e.g. you try to stick your hand in. Obviously they couldn't have that because having the bare minimum safety mechanisms in place would make it too slow. What do you mean the doors open instead of crushing your hands?? Well a poor server working realized he had fucked up an order and stuck his head in the food lift and the doors closed on his neck, and didn't reopen. By the time they rushed him to the hospital he had died from lack of oxygen. While this is technically the previous owners doing it's a huge oversight on the part of the current owners. Don't fucking let your staff use equipment if you can't verify that it's safe. This, I heard, was the first mass quitting event where almost all the front of house staff quit. If I had worked there then I would have quit too. The restaurant obviously got sued by the boy's parents and I don't know much about him except for the fact that we went to the same university so he must of been around 20 yrs old when he passed. It was only after the server had passed that they blocked access to the lift. Not to mention the managers and owner all blame the server “not that it's his fault but he did break every single safety protocol by sticking his head in there. STFU no one should be dying being a waiter.
- The current owner keeps spending and losing money on bad business ventures and thus, the staff are underpaid and overworked. He would rather spend money on hiring a jazz band for the bar than hiring 2-3 more servers or giving raises to make everything run more smoothly. Due to a literal death happening in the restaurant servers have to run up and down the stairs to get orders. There's only 2 servers on shift at a time and they refuse to hire more people. This is their way of saving money there's no host, no barista, no food runners. They make their servers do 5 jobs at once and get mad when the service is slow. Then when my co-worker had a panic attack during a busy shift and brought up the fact that we were overworked, they blamed us and said it's our fault that we couldn't keep up and that we were overpaid when they were paying us minimum wage.
- The owner picks and chooses his favorites from the staff and is easily manipulated. There's a loyal cook (Jay) that's been there for 4 years who is loyal af and worked himself to the bone. Instead of promoting him to head chef he hired a new head chef (HC) who is an absolute psycho. The owner can't tell but we can all see that HC is power tripping because the owner basically let's him run the entire kitchen. HC is lazy af and whenever Jay would come him there would be prep work undone, things unwashed, etc. So one day Jay confronts HC about his laziness and HC THROWS A KNIFE and that shit flies across the kitchen. Jay talked to the owner about it and the owner BLAMED HIM and said Jay probably provoked HC, refused to listen when Jay said he was scared to work with HC. Jay and the owner are on bad terms now. HC and Jay are both immigrants and Jay's visa is expiring and he asked the owner to sponsor him. Owner refused but is sponsoring HC's visa, literally refusing out of pettiness.
- A cook raped a server and management handled it in the worst possible way. The cook (CJ) and the server (Sarah) went out for drinks after work. CJ is just feeding Sarah more and more drinks until she's so drunk she can't even walk home by herself. CJ then walks her back to his apartment and rapes her. Sarah was obviously traumatized by this event and even mustered up the courage to tell a manager. They then say some bs about how it's not their problem because it occurred outside of work and then because they viewed it as petty drama they called a meeting with all the staff and made them “talk it out” in front of everyone!!
I am so glad I got out of there but I really hope that place burns to the ground. I love all my coworkers and I sincerely hope they find something better and recover from the emotional scars that place left on all of us.