“Rickickckickickck…. rckckckck…. rickrickrckrckrckckckcck… “
The sounds of the ticket machine snapped me out of a moment of stupor. I looked up as the tickets began to pile on, one right after the other.
Servers were taking orders in the restaurant and punching them in at the terminals, and the components of the meals they were ordering were going straight to each station as needed—a state of the art system (for the late 90s) that sent only what was needed to each station was very innovative and time-saving.
Unfortunately for me, I was not prepared for the dinner rush, and the efficiency of the system depended on three things at every station: competence; speed; and above all else, the ability to keep a cool head.
“Rickickckickickck…. rckckckck…. rickrickrckrckrckckckcck… “
The tickets were still piling on! I wasn’t keeping up at all. I was in the weeds.
Fellow writer and chef
wrote a fun piece a while back about sayings from the restaurant business. I lived that life for about 15 years, and thought seriously about making a career cooking for people.One of those sayings encapsulates a great deal of what the restaurant business really is, at least behind the veil of the kitchen. That saying is “in the weeds.”
Today, I want to talk briefly about the saying itself, and to tell my own personal “in the weeds” stories.
As phrase origins go, “in the weeds” is pretty disappointing. I’ve written about whistling past the graveyard, the tail that wags the dog, dog day afternoon, red herrings, and even four score. Those are all great origins! Go read them if you want a really cool origin story for a turn of phrase.
“In the weeds” has a very nebulous origin. There might be a military connotation: if soldiers are out there mired among literal weeds, they’re essentially waiting to get mowed down. Ultimately, all we really know is that the phrase relies on a simple metaphorical understanding of weeds as something that hinders progress, obscures clarity, and creates challenges.
If the tickets are piling on, as was the case in my personal (and traumatic!) example, the thing to do is to get organized. You need to consider the totality of your work, but it’s not enough to just try to be as efficient as possible if you want to get out of the weeds.
The order of operations really, really matters here, and it’s best to consider the Eisenhower matrix principle of separating things into urgent and important categories.
Suppose you have ten burners on a sauté stove, and you notice that you have ten of the same dish “all day” (in total). That really doesn’t mean you can make all ten dishes right now, even though that would probably be the most efficient way to accomplish this task, and if you did all of your items like this, you’d finish in the least amount of time.
Unfortunately, this approach would also mean the restaurant would need to buy half of those meals, since there’s usually an expectation of no more than 20 minutes or so from the time the order is placed, to the time it walks out.
This means you have to use a balance of efficiency and urgency. If you ignore efficiency and just try to prepare what you need, one order at a time, there’s just no way you can keep up. You’ll waste far too much time focusing on one dish, while several other meal components should also be working.
Back over to me being in the weeds: really bad things tend to happen. Vainly attempting to keep up causes you to do all sorts of things wrong, compounding your problem until it feels insurmountable. This causes all sorts of injuries—you won’t want to miss this piece that Brian and I cowrote about what happened to us over the years of being in the weeds:
In addition to the injuries, there’s the tendency to drop breakable things onto the floor, or to overcook food while you’re focusing on other food. Naturally, this makes life much harder for the kitchen manager and for your coworkers, whose emotional energy is palpable. You can feel the loathing and resentment directed at you for not being up for the job.
For folks who have never worked in a kitchen under these circumstances, I can say definitively that this can be mentally taxing work. It’s a real challenge to keep up with the fire hose of customer demand during a busy rush, and most of the cooks I worked with looked forward to this rush, to being busy enough to enter flow state and to lose track of time.
It’s also very, very hard work. It’s physically demanding. We should keep this in mind whenever we think about restaurant workers.
I had always thought of "in the weeds" as deep into technical detail" while what you're describing as "in the shit" though both have a derogatory tone. I wonder if I'm using it wrong or if it just varies in context?
I’d always assumed “in the weeds” was a golfing metaphor. Military makes total sense though, if that’s the case.
During collage I worked in a European delicatessen called the Cheese House. We had a twenty foot long cheese counter with cheeses from all over the world. It was mostly pretty fun, but there was this one cheese called vigneron that would make the whole shop stink when you unwrapped it. We all tried to talk people out of trying it, much to the shop owner’s irritation. I will also never forget the time the Scandinavian chef made head cheese (not cheese). Scarred me for life I think 😂