Every once in awhile I make a big hiring mistake.  Well, maybe more often than that.  I’ve had great success with servers.  The kitchen is another matter.  I have heard that “restaurant people are a breed apart,” and “kitchen staff are naturally unreliable.”  Surely that doesn’t have to be true. 

On the 4th of July we had two cooks working, one on the line, and one doing prep.  We had other folks doing prep also, but the two cooks were doing the bulk of the work.  The guy on the line was, shall we say, a bit under-motivated.  He kept complaining that his eye hurt, and to be fair, he did have a minor case of conjunctivitis.  Yes, before you ask, he had a doctor’s ok to return to work.  Anyway, at noon — on the 4th of July — he told me that he had to leave, and was going to the hospital to have his eye looked at.  The guy did have a history of leaving work or not coming to work because of illness, and then being seen riding his bicycle around town.  So I told him that if I he left I’d better not hear that he was out riding around on his bicycle.  He left, and half an hour later someone came in to tell me he was down at the beach playing basketball.  Hope he got sand in his eye.

I fired him the next time I saw him, and he seemed quite surprised.  The beach is two blocks from the restaurant; how did he think I wouldn’t find out?