Tim explains to me how the wheel operates. The wheel is a metal turntable with clips on which servers place their tickets when customers have ordered. Cooks examine the orders on the wheel and assume twenty minutes until the dish is to be served. When it is about seven or eight minutes from when the customers will want their food, the server places the ticket on the counter (generally when the customer is half finished with the soup or appetizer). When the ticket is placed on the counter, cooks “go full blast.” Some dishes such as lamb en croûte are started immediately when the ticket is placed on the wheel, because it takes twenty minutes to prepare. This structure means that no dish can be served by this restaurant that cooks for longer than twenty minutes.
Sometimes the system breaks down. When servers see many tickets on the counter, they put theirs down early, even though it doesn't need to be ready in seven minutes. They believe that the cooks will be running behind, and they want to insure that their customers (and their tips) are protected. As a result, food is ready ahead of time.
(Field notes, La Pomme de Terre)
The chef at La Pomme de Terre describes himself as an air-traffic controller, suggesting that dishes have the potential for “stacking up” and, if processed in the wrong sequence, they can create disaster. A chef, like any worker with multiple responsibilities, must manage the demands of the kitchen. Another cook at a different restaurant used a similar image of flow control in describing his difficulties: “You have to be really thinking about timing. It's really kinda like a science. You can control the flow. You can control if they [the servers] are running [i.e., if there are a lot of orders]” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). Still, the temporal ordering of dishes is so imprecise that cooks sometimes joke about occasions when they do well in the face of expectations of failure, as when Howie, the sous chef, comments to Mickey, a server, about a slow order:
| HOWIE: | Those people must have been waiting a long time. |
| MICKEY: | Nope. They just got finished with their salad. |
| HOWIE, JOKING: | Great. What finesse. |
(Field notes, La Pomme de Terre)
Timing food reflects a concern with synchronization—a division of labor among cooks and servers. The cook must internalize the ordering and timing of dishes to permit the production of fifteen different dishes, each at the peak of quality, and must believe that other cooks are acting similarly. Cooking decisions are not analyzed at leisure but are split-second decisions, barely permitting a comment between coworkers.
DISTRACTIONS
Ideally cooks as crafts artisans would be autonomous, leading to satisfaction with the temporal organization of work (Baldamus 1961; Ditton 1979). Such a world is impossible in restaurants and most industrial workplaces. Cooks are challenged when they cannot set their own schedule: “Where it's busy enough that it requires somebody to help me, I really have to concentrate. People, waitresses come up and ask questions. It's really hard. When we're busy enough, I can't break my stride or break my train of thought. Sometimes I just tell them to be quiet and go away” (Personal interview, Blakemore Hotel). Like all focused workers, cooks must “bracket” the extraneous events that swirl around them while establishing a rapid rhythm and coping with organizational demands. When the tasks have been completed, they can luxuriate in those events that they had previously bracketed, sometimes not “really working” for an hour or more (Marshall 1986, p. 40), creating a temporal niche: “The previous night the Owl's Nest had 116 customers, a heavy Friday evening. This included a party of 25. Fortunately there were no tickets behind that order [i.e., they didn't have to cook for other customers]. Larry tells me: ‘It can be hard when you have other tickets up. We were lucky last night. It's hard when you have four tickets right behind it. You just want to sit down and rest after it’ ” (Field notes, Owl's Nest).
EXPECTATIONS
Workers have expectations about when their work begins and ends; sometimes to their frustration these expectations are dashed. Workdays should have temporal cues, of which the factory whistle or school bell are models. Unfortunately breaking the serenity of work, customers arrive late, important clients want special meetings, or the boss demands overtime. Once routine and legitimate tasks become an imposition: “At 11:30 P.M. the cooks are almost finished cleaning the kitchen, when a new order comes in from a ‘regular' who often arrives late without a reservation. Larry is so annoyed that he throws a lamb chop bone and later throws a sharpened knife across the counter, fuming That's what's really frustrating. You're ready to close and another order comes in. You get kinda cranky sometimes’ ” (Field notes, Owl's Nest). Frustration with the violation of temporal boundaries applies to an extension of the opening boundary as well as the closing boundary. Although the Owl's Nest is open for lunch at 11:00 A.M., cooks are disoriented if customers arrive before 11:45 A.M. They're not ready for lunch to begin, and they resent it. Within their rights, customers arriving when the restaurant is open in practice disrupt the rhythm of the cooks' work. Cooks typify when their “real work” should occur, even though this expectation may be shattered by a client's exercise of his or her rights. As at colleges, where early morning meetings are taboo, “real” hours differ from the “official” hours of the organization.
THE RUSH
The effects of an organization's environment on its temporal structure is dramatically evident when the system is loaded to capacity. In the kitchen this is the rush, but it has equivalents in many organizations: emergency rooms, fire stations, theater aisles, airline counters, and toll booths. Seen collectively, clients do not use services at regularly spaced intervals. For some workers (ushers) the rush will be predictable; for others (emergency medics), much less so.4 Every restaurant, especially those that are successful, has a rush—a period in which the demands of customers threaten to overwhelm the capacity of the kitchen employees to cope—a time at which the restaurant is “slammed” (Klein-field 1991, p. C24). Customers, unaware of the “backstage” problems, expect their food when they are ready for it. Food should be served after what “feels” like the proper interval, neither rushed nor delayed—comprising the mysterious variable of “good service.” In an attempt to control labor costs, managers hire just enough staff so that the kitchen is on the edge of chaos but not so few that customers are dissatisfied with the service.
From these demands derives the experience of the rush. External demands produce a pattern of action by workers, and this use of time produces the lived experience of the rush (Denzin 1984). Its felt emotion—what Henri Bergson (1910) refers to as durée—differs from other “times” (Flaherty 1987).
The rush represents a distinct behavioral characteristic of restaurant life, which is noted for its demanding tempo (and associated rhythm) and intense pressure (Schroedl 1972, p. 187). The journalist John McPhee (1979, p. 78) describes the temporal life of a master chef: “As his usual day accelerates toward dinner-time, the chef's working rhythms become increasingly intense, increasingly kinetic, and finally all but automatic. His experience becomes his action. He just cruises, functioning by conditioned response. ‘You cook unconsciously,' he says. ‘You know what you're going to do and you do it. When problems come along, your brain spits out the answer.’ ” Those I observed relied on similar metaphors. “You're fighting a battle of chaos,” one cook explained. Another emphasized that coping with a rush involved “keeping calm. Lining up the station. Getting ready. The setups. Getting organized before the rush” (Field notes, Owl's Nest).
The rush feels similar at each restaurant, even though vastly different numbers are served. A rush is characterized by rapid movements (proper sequencing) and little talk, except for brief, subcultural exchanges (“an ivory downtown,” “nine tops, three shrimp, all baked, all medium”)5 or curses and insults. Because of the clattering of pans and plates, the kitchen is noisy, making the rhythms of work seem discordant or nonexistent to an observer (e.g., Kleinfield 1991, p. C24). The number of cooks present is barely sufficient to handle the expected number of customers. When more customers than expected arrive or when mistakes happen, the kitchen extends the duration of preparation; the customers do not get their food “on time,” and the servers may receive smaller tips. The food may be of lower quality than when the restaurant is not so busy.6 The success of the