Many years ago I worked (briefly) at a Tex-Mex chain restaurant with a similar name to Tía Julia’s. It was my first job and I was very eager just to get hired as it was my first summer home from college. I left the restaurant/ food service industry and haven’t worked there since. I learned a few things from my 2 12-hour days at said restaurant.
1) Always ask how long the training period will be. While I spent two days “training”, I never did find out how long I would train to be a bus-boy.
2) Make sure they tell you your hourly rate when you are hired. I didn’t and I unsurprisingly made the lowest legal rate in my state.
3) Don’t be a yes man. I put up with serious burns and working a job I wasn’t hired for. I was hired as a bus-boy but didn’t get to even leave the kitchen. I know this might be common practice in restaurants, but why hire me as specifically a bus boy if you want me to work as a dishwasher first? Tell me I’ll be washing dishes for a while and then I can get “promoted” to bus boy.
4) When they say you can’t bring your own food and have to buy their food if you want to eat, consider if the minimum wage job is worth spending more than your hourly wage on lunch or dinner every shift.
5) Don’t let them just shy away from necessary questions, like “when am I working next?” I never got told when I would work for the NEXT DAY until closing time and I had to hound management to find out.
6) Don’t do stuff outside your job / wage. I helped the mostly monolingual management communicate with the mostly Spanish speaking kitchen staff. Not part of my job and I definitely got paid a lot more later as an interpreter at a separate job.