Soon enough wasn’t so soon.
When they finished the fish, had them all lined up, butter-coated and topped with paprika, when the fish was in the oven, time frame was forty-five minutes to dish-up.
Christmas Eve day. No one wanted to fool around and work later than they had to. Since there were no evening banquets and none on Christmas day, the time off was like a vacation to these service workers.
Four parties, all basically the same menu, they would go off all at the same time, simultaneously, each one from one dish-up station.
Easy peasy?
Not as easy as you might imagine. The most difficult part, almost always, was coordination. The most difficult part of the meal service from the kitchen point of view for any table with more than one person, was bringing it all up together. Even a single table with multiple items in the entrée required coordination of the elements.
Bill had learned this early on, had learned it for keeps when the owner of Suburban, Mr. Bowman, had sat that night in a four-top and ordered the thin steaks rare and the thickest one nearly well-done. Issue: coordination.
Coordination was the same fight he and Lillian, the Suburban expediter, had. She wanted to make sure everything got on the grill so there would be no back up from her end. Bill had to worry about not only that, but the coordination of the tables as well. He also had to worry about not backing up any particular waitress, meaning he didn’t want to put out multiple tables for one waitress all together. It was a ball game and you had play the game as it played out. Being a ball game was what made it fun. Sometimes.
Then too, there were your working partners and their coordinating the items you weren’t personally working on on any table. Sauté cooks and broiler cooks had to be intimate dance partners, each partner knowing what the other one was doing at any given time. If you were doing it all yourself and there were multiple parts to what you were doing, it could be even more complex.
Cooking the food, for the most part, was easy. Today’s fare was simple, just two main courses that had to come out of the oven at just about the same time. Actually, since nothing was being held in warmers, the fish was set to come out about ten minutes past the chicken. This way it would be done and staying warm in the rotary oven (which would be turned off and cooling) while the chicken for each party was dished up. Then there were two different sauces, both with the common element of mushrooms, the same vegetable and potatoes all around.
The stewards and other cooks were already jovial. They’d had some eggnog, rum-laced eggnog. They were happy and peppy and interested in getting things done and getting the hell out of town.
Holiday, who could blame them?
Even the chef was getting out of the hotel. Jimmy Banquet Chef was on for the night to make sure the closing up was okay. But he had some of Christmas day off. Not all. Bill, Jimmy G, Kalista and the room service cooks were the only kitchen crew working. The kitchen and most of the back-of-the-house of the hotel would be like a ghost town.
The Falstaff Room was open for Christmas dinner. Those same people would be working the whole holiday. Sure, they’d make money since it was double-time-and-a-half, but that didn’t make up for not having the holiday. Nevertheless, hotel guests had to be serviced.
They had a moment to smoke a cigarette once the dish-up stations were setup and just before the timer bell on the rotary oven was due to go off. Here was where Jimmy Banquet Chef became traffic cop as well as head of one of the dish-up stations. His first orders were for the stewards to put the potatoes and vegetable out at the stations.
Then the timer bell rang and everything and everyone moved.
