Chapter 11 - Personnel Organization

History of personnel organization | Changes in organization | Organization in manager-owner operations | Chains and their influence on organization | Restaurant jobs | Disadvantages of restrictive job titles | Uses of the inverted organizational chart | How to organize | Flexibility in departmentalization

The first restaurants as distinct from taverns or inns were small and the personnel organization simple. The chef wore a long nightcap type hat and it helped to identify him as the man in charge. He also carried a large wooden spoon which the new scullion (kitchen worker) soon learned was a symbol of authority as well as a useful kitchen tool. Hapless scullions and maids were thwacked with it to keep them alert while turning the spit by the open fireplace or in pounding up some of the ingredients for a meal.

Later, in 1810 to be exact, chefs changed hat styles, and the higher the hat, the greater the importance. The specialist chefs now wore hats half the height of the head chef's. The lowly apprentices must restrict their hats to no higher than five or six inches. The checked pattern in the trousers is also part of the cook's uniform.

When some of the larger hotel kitchens opened, there was need for more organization. Auguste Escoffier, small in stature but great in spirit, was the man credited with organizing the kitchen into depart­ments. This was in the great Savoy and Carlton Hotels of London about 1890. The French kitchen under his guidance was divided into parties or stations. The kitchen took on a form, personnel were assigned as a part of a smaller work group doing specialized work. The kitchen organization shaped up and remains something like the chart of the French-English kitchen on page 150.

Highly organized in the sense of being well departmentalized, the French-English kitchen is also well defined status-wise. Each job has a well defined place and fits into the kitchen hierarchy. The commis or assistants for each station are learning the cooking trade and advance up the ladder. According to the size of a department, the first commis in the Saucier department may be as skilled as the Chef de Parti (station chef) and would probably have completed five years of apprenticeship. He might have two to five assistant commis with two to five years of training. Each person fits into his niche. Each person has his place on the totem pole, from plonger (diver or dishwasher) to all-powerful Chef de Cuisine.

Our kitchens are often under-organized—too few departments, no regular line of promotion, no understudies, too few supervisors, ill-defined jobs and little prestige for the various jobs. The poorly-structured kitchen revolves around the manager-owner who is supposed to be superman, able to do any or all jobs and often does them. If the ware-washing breaks down, he fixes it. He may cook while his wife is hostess-cashier. Such versatility has its compensations and the small American restaurant that is successful has much flexibility among personnel.

In such places cooks may also be vegetable preparers, hostesses fill in as waitresses and cashiers act as bookkeepers. This is all changing and has been for a number of years.

Famous restaurants like Antoine's, Rector's, Delmonico's and Sherry's had French organization. The Greek family restaurant was built around the family, each member of the family doing what he could. Chain restaurants have sharpened organization.

The first restaurant chain of any size was established in 1891, the J. R. Thompson Dairy Bars in Chicago. Within a few years there were 125 of these combination cafeteria, short-order stores and the owner was a rich man. He was probably the first operator to use a central commissary with specialized butchers and truck delivery—electric trucks to be sure. He achieved high efficiency in use of labor. His labor cost was 15 percent of the gross sales.

As the chain expands so does the number of positions on the staff, and managerial levels become greater. Today, for example, the Howard Johnson's restaurants number over 600 and the company has a goal of 1,000. Gross income is reputedly over $200 million a year. Necessarily, the chains have added supervisors, architects, equipment engineers, personnel managers, and tax experts to the personnel organization.

Job titles and kitchen organization has changed to fit the various kinds of restaurants and their special problems of food production and service. Countermen and countergirls for cafeterias, car hops in drive-ins and fountainmen in luncheonettes are relatively new jobs. Sauce cookery is little used today. Only a few high class pastry chefs, glaciers, and sugar men are found in commercial restaurants any more. Jobs will continue to change as new equipment is devised. Pot and pan men —a tough job and hard to keep filled—may be passing out of the kitchen with new automatic pot and pan washers. Cooks can throw soiled pans into a sink, pull them out later when clean. With pre-cut meats, few restaurant butchers are needed. Food and beverage con­trollers—a separate job—are being added to the chains. Their function is to watch and keep constant controls on food and beverage costs.

Sous Chef Deputy Chef

Outside the kitchen area

Potager PatissierSommelier wines

                                                  Gracier Ice Cream Ice Sculpture
                                                  Confiseur sugar items
                                                  Boulanger baker

RESTAURANT JOBS

Here is a list of jobs commonly found in large U.S. restaurants. Counter service, drive-in service, and cafeteria service have created some specialized jobs and they are seen below also.

Service Personnel

Front Bartender: Mixes and serves alcoholic drinks to customers.

Service Bartender: Mixes and serves alcoholic drinks to waiters for service in guest rooms or various dining rooms.

Barboy: Keeps bartender supplied with liquors, fruits, ice, linens, and silverware, and cleans bar fixtures, glasses and utensils.

Waiter or Waitress: Prepares tables or counters for serving meals; obtains meal order from guest; obtains food from kitchen and serves patron; presents bill for payment.

Host Hostess Maitre d’Hotel Head Waiter

Supervises dining room personnel, greets and escorts them to tables, and assists manager when and where necessary

Bus Boy: Carries dirty dishes to kitchen and resets tables.

Cashier: Receives payment from customers for food service, operates cash register, makes change, prepares daily report on food checks, and verifies cash on hand.

Check Room Attendant: Cares for coats, hats, and parcels for customers while customers are eating.

 – The following job is peculiar to cafeterias:

Counterman: Serves food from a steam table or counter to patrons of a cafeteria.

– Peculiar to the lunchroom or coffee shop:

Counterman: Takes orders from customers at a lunch counter, repeats order to short order cook, serves order to customer, and collects payment or makes out food checks.

Sandwichman: Makes sandwiches to individual customer order.

– Peculiar to drive-ins:

Car Hop: Waits on customers seated in cars, transmits order to kitchen and carries order to car on a tray, presenting check for payment.

KITCHEN PERSONNEL

Chef: Plans meals, orders the food and supervises its cooking, super­vises kitchen personnel.

Sous Chef: Directly assists the chef and takes responsibility for the kitchen personnel and the preparation of the food when the chef is not present, or when delegated to do so.

Night Chef: Has responsibilities for the chefs duties at night.

Garde Manger: Prepares cold food dishes, such as cold meat, sand­wiches, and leftovers.

Pastry Cook: Makes pies, cakes, cookies and other pastry desserts.

Roast Cook: Prepares and cooks meats and soups and may supervise personnel when necessary.

Broiler Cook: Broils meat, fish, and poultry.

Fry Cook: Fries meat, fish, poultry, eggs, or vegetables in deep or shallow fat.

Relief Cook (Swing or Roundsman): Does all types of cooking dur­ing rush periods, unusual hours, or as a substitute for absent personnel.

Short Order Cook: Prepares, cooks and serves to order all kinds of foods which require only a short time to prepare, such as chops, cutlets, and eggs.

Vegetables Cook: Broils, bakes, or steams vegetables for service to customers or for use of other cooks.

Steward (hotel kitchen): Purchases food, sometimes acts as personnel

Kitchen Steward or Floor Steward (hotel kitchen): Supervises dish manager in kitchen, may be in charge of all sanitation, machine operation and all kitchen sanitation.

Catering Manager (hotels): In charge of food and beverage depart­ments. Often concentrates on banquet sales and service.

Food and Beverage Controller: Computes costs daily, may operate forecasting system and do analysis of operations.

Kitchen Porter: Does general utility and cleaning work.

Cook's Helper: Assists cook as directed in preparing and cooking foods.

Butcher: Trims, bones and cuts raw meats into portions for cooking.

Fish Butcher: Prepares and cuts fish into portions for cooking.

Oysterman: Prepares oysters, clams, shrimp, crab, and other shellfish for service to customers.

Baker: Bakes bread, rolls, muffins, and biscuits for serving.

Baker's Helper: Assists baker by greasing pans, cleaning pans and equipment, getting supplies, and other unskilled tasks.

Saladman: Prepares salads, cocktails, canapes, and other cold dishes.

Steam-Tableman: Prepares and fills steam table, carves meats, serves foods, and cares for steam table.

Store-Room Man: Receives and checks stores, inventories, issues food and supplies.

Kitchen Helper: Washes pots and pans, polishes silverware, scrubs tables and floors, removes garbage, and supplies ice and clean linen.

Dishmachine Operator: Sets up, operates, and maintains a dishwash­ing machine that cleans and washes plates, cups, saucers, and other dishes.

Food Checker: Checks the quantity and quality of food against the order as the food is carried from the kitchen. Tabulates the total bill on a checking machine.

The job titles above are the ones commonly used. Other titles are also used, but not so generally.

Disadvantages of Restrictive Job Titles

In naming jobs, be careful to pick titles that will not restrict the duties performed. With unionization, glass washers are likely to be able to do nothing but wash glasses; pot and pan washers, wash pots and pans only. This hampers the employee's development and learning as well as making for inefficiency in the kitchen. Instead of calling a cook a fry cook or a vegetable cook, set the cooks up as Cook I, Cook II, Cook III. Cook Ill's work is that of a learner or cook's helper. Cook II can do breakfast work, grilling, and other duties as required by the restaurant. Cook I is the top level and is reserved for persons with all-around skills or serving as supervisors.

Instead of pot and pan men, employ utility men who may also operate the dish machine and do porter's work as needed. Sholl's Cafeteria, Washington, D.C., one of the most efficient in the country, has a utility man who is training to be a cook, and also does the meat cutting. His wage is $75 a week and the job is so set up that he is well worth it.

With this personnel structure jobs can be grouped so that a Cook II may be doing some meat cutting as well as soup making or other work as required by the layout and menus of the restaurant. A definite line of advancement is set up so that each person sees clearly his next step up. Versatility and the learning of multiple skills is encouraged so that personnel may fill in as needed when the kitchen is short-handed or business is off.

How to Organize

Organizing anything is breaking it into parts and relating the parts to the whole. Organization makes an unwieldy mass of people into an integrated team. It permits specialization of work and fast communica­tion between parts. Everybody has a place, a function and fits into the total picture. Traditionally a restaurant is divided into two parts: food production and food service. Someone is in charge of each. These people report to the manager or his assistant.

A well organized restaurant would be set up similar to the chart on the opposite page.

In the usual restaurant that is not part of a chain, the manager does several of the above functions himself. Nevertheless the functions remain and as the volume of sales permits, the functions can be sepa­rated, insofar as is practical. The housekeeping function may be taken on by the kitchen steward, the promotion and advertising may be handled by an advertising agency, a food and beverage controller may be hired, and a maitre d' hotel placed in charge of the dining room.

Maintain Flexibility

Each section of a kitchen that performs a specific function can be set up as a department or station with someone placed in charge. Coffee, sandwiches, and salads are often grouped together into a pantry with a head pantry woman. All sanitation including warewash-ing, mopping, and pots and pan washing is often placed under a kitchen steward. The warewashing crew should have a head warewasher. Dele­gate authority as far down the line as possible. Then work through these authorized employees.

At the same time, try to avoid the idea that each job can do only one kind of work. This makes for high wage cost and low efficiency. In one city the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union has a contract with operators that will not permit glass washers to work on the dish machine. Highly specialized cooks often refuse to wash a pan or to mop up around their station. While it costs excessively for a $3.00 an hour cook to do $1.00 an hour mopping, there are times when such mopping is reasonable. Requiring each person to keep his own station clean makes sense generally. Unless there are apprentices or helpers, assign cooks to do the clean up and rough work.

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