Culinary Hustle
They say the kitchen is the worst place to work. After a few years away from restaurants, I got back in with a camera. In the summer of when I was 14 years old, I started working as a bartender at Chill Out, a small fast-food beach restaurant in La Barra, Uruguay, that is open 24 hours during the high season, the shift was from noon to 6 pm, lunch, and the beach post, around 5:30 pm the night shift arrived, getting ready for what would be a fateful night, at 14 years old it is tough to understand restaurant life, but I always noticed a strange look on the faces of my companions, mix of stress and joy, both caused by the same thing, the hustle. The following summer, I started working the 6 pm to 2 am shift still as a bartender, but the cosmic madness of Chill Out led me to be a cashier, runner, busser, dishwasher, and waiter, but I never worked in the kitchen. Shifts were so intense that there wasn't even time to go into the kitchen, an eight-hour work period of pure hustle. It was like this for seven summers. During those summers, the servers and the front of the house kept the same people; Jime, Emi, Pep, Ramu, Feli, Ante, Ramon, Agus, and more. Yet the kitchen would only remain with two workers, one who would always leave and come back whenever he needed money. No matter how many new people entered that kitchen each season, they would consistently adapt to the intense rhythm of Chill Out. After seven summers, my last month of work arrived, and with it, my substitute, so I got a "break," and I moved to 8 hours of pounding meat with a hammer, and finally, I was in the only place in the restaurant where he had never worked; the kitchen. A small kitchen with five warriors, an oven at 500 degrees, a grill at 400 degrees, and an old freezer to pound meat, but with a unique rhythm, where the customer's order was always ready in less than 10 minutes, these five warriors fed 300 mouths per night. No matter what corner of the world you are in, restaurants will always be in a constant hustle, and whatever the circumstance, the dish must always reach the table.
