Daily Dose of English 26
Restaurants
Daily Dose of English 26
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about restaurants. You know, those places that you go to eat food and they do the dishes for you. That's one of the nicest things about restaurants. You don't have to clean up a thing. That's all part of the entire experience. They clean up for you. But there's also other great things about going to restaurants. They can prepare food that you can't prepare otherwise. They specialize in lots of different kinds of cooking and they might be able to get ingredients that you otherwise can't find because you have to buy them in huge amounts or they're just not available where you are or for whatever reason. And so there's a lot of nice things about restaurants. I love restaurants, honestly. They're, I think, one of the coolest things about existing in a lot of ways, because you get to try good food. Okay, maybe not one of the coolest things about living ever, but there's a really great feeling about going to a new restaurant and trying really good food. I'm of the opinion that you should go to restaurants that are interesting and delicious and offer you something new that you can't otherwise get at home, unless you need to do something quickly, which I totally understand. But there's this magic to being able to go get something fresh and delicious that you don't have at home and eat that within a relatively short amount of time. And so I want to talk a little bit about my experience with restaurants, eating at them, working at them, and hopefully make a bit of an interesting episode. Because I actually started working in restaurants when I was 15 years old, maybe even a little bit younger, but I think around 15, I got a job at a pizza place relatively close to my house. and I worked there for a couple years in high school. I didn't work full-time or anything. I didn't even work part-time. I just helped out sort of on the busy days because I didn't want a full-time job, but I did want to have a job to make some money. Thankfully, I didn't have to work, which was really nice, but I know some people definitely have to work at that age, which is uh not as good because I don't know you're still a kid like enjoy life instead of having to worry about paying bills but that's not the society we live in yet sadly hopefully we do one day but I don't know anyways um I started working in a pizza place and I and it was pretty good like I figured things out relatively quickly I got along with my co-workers which is good um I think one of the things that helped is that I've always been relatively quiet and relatively mature for my age. And the fact that I'm quiet means that people will talk more and they'll assume that I am more mature because they're doing most of the work. And I'm also really tall, and so I just didn't look 15. I looked a little bit older, more like 17, 18. And so I got along well with my coworkers. I did good work, and it was a pretty nice gig, honestly. I learned some really good cooking tips and experience, and I learned a lot about also just how restaurants work. So it was a cool experience. I mostly made pizzas. I worked on ovens and the pizza line because it wasn't a very big restaurant. It was a pretty small family-owned pizza restaurant, and so we had a couple orders at a time. I would make the pizza, put it in the oven, and then I'd make sure that it comes out of the oven when it's done cooking. And I also did some other prep stuff and cleaned a couple, like a closing, that sort of thing. It was always a huge pain, but you know, that's how restaurants work. And so I'll talk a little bit about some restaurant vocabulary, like specifically to working in a restaurant and we'll see what we come across. So when you get there, there's often you go to the back, right, is what they call it. The back is just the, where the restaurant workers work is very typical to call it that. Um, you have to clock in, which is when you go to the computer, you put in your number and you say, I'm here. And the computer goes, all right, you're starting your shift now. Your shift is the time that you work, and you typically have a set shift from between 5 p.m. and closing, or whatever it is. Closing is obviously when the restaurant closes, but there's more to it than that because the restaurant stops serving, so the kitchen closes, there's no more new orders, and then the restaurant staff usually has to stay for a little bit longer afterwards. right because they need to clean and to finish all the other um everything right make sure that everything's cleaned put away ready for tomorrow sometimes there's even more prep work to do right so for example in the pizza place um every day somebody would have to make the dough for the next day right and so you do that ahead of time And then you get the dough ready to go, you put it in the fridge, in the walk-in is another good word. So the walk-in freezer, the walk-in fridge is the whole room that holds the food, right? And it's usually just called the walk-in as a bit of a, it's not really slang, but it's like the short name for it. And you put stuff in the walk-in and all that sort of thing. Let's see, is there any other good vocab I know? Often things are shortened, right? And you can say, are you, like what you're assigned to do will be what you're on. So for example, if someone's on dishes, you can ask them, hey, are you on dishes? That means, are you the person that is taking care of washing the dishes? And it's a bit of a shorter way to do it. Oh, that's another good word, pretty common in restaurants. You'll hear somebody say behind or below or above or whatever, like something like that, which is to when there's a corner or there's a place where somebody might not see you, you're supposed to announce where you're going. So there's, there's fewer crashes, right? So if I, cause for example, when I was doing pizzas, there was the pizza line and then there was a bit of a hallway kind of behind me and then there was the ovens. And so somebody could go behind me and go out into the back room. So they would have to say, um, kind of loud enough so that I could hear behind as they were passing so that I wouldn't like turn around quickly with a pizza in my hand and smack them in the face with a raw pizza. Right. And so that's another common thing you'll hear in restaurants. If you're in the back, you'll hear behind. Um, but yeah, I also worked in restaurants a little bit more after that, right. I helped out my uncle was for a while. He was a manager for a restaurant and sometimes he would need, um, an extra help. And so I would help him out on a couple of nights washing dishes. That was not very much fun, but it was kind of satisfying because that was a place with a lot of sauce cups. So like the little cups that have sauce in them, which were sort of gross to clean because people would like leave remnants of sauce and fish in them. But you would get like a humongous stack of sauce cups and then just wash them all in like 15 minutes. And so it was a little bit satisfying in that way. And then later on in New York, I worked at a meatball restaurant that was a bit of a, it was a cool experience. It was a better, um, like better run restaurant. And it was really a, it was really, I don't know. It's pretty good. I don't know. It wasn't really that interesting actually, now that I think about it, but the story of me getting the job was funny because on like a random Saturday, I was like, all right, I got to get a job. I need some extra cash. Um, because I don't have any more. And so I went on like indeed or something and I looked and it was like, okay, hiring line cooks, uh, some experience, uh, please have, or whatever it was. I don't remember exactly what it was. So I called them. I think I sent a message that day. And then like a couple, like 20 minutes later, the guy called back was like, Hey, you want an interview? You want to come in? And I was like, Oh, okay. This is really easy. So I go in, I think the next day, I think it was just that fast. And, uh, he was like, Oh, you have experience working in kitchens. Great. You seem like a normal person who, uh, can work and hang out. So great. You're hired. And I was like, wow, that was easy. Um, obviously it wasn't the best paid job, but it wasn't the best located or anything like that. But I thought it was a funny story because I sort of just happened to find this place at the right exact time when they were looking for more people. And they already had experience working in a kitchen and whatever it was, and so that ended up being a pretty good experience. I had to leave it after just a couple of months because school got too busy, but it was always nice because they would give me free dinners. The dinners were really big as well, and so it was a nice way to get a little extra boost of cash in a very expensive city. And so now my experience with the restaurants is almost completely going to them. I don't work there anymore. I don't want to work in them anymore. It's stressful. It's busy. I highly respect anybody that works in a kitchen for a long time. So you have my utmost respect. But I want to just enjoy your delicious food for now. And so I try to go to new restaurants as much as I can because I like to explore them. But I also don't like to go to restaurants that often because they are generally less healthy and they're expensive, right? And that's totally fair. I don't want to undercharge somebody for their work, obviously. But also at the same time, I can't be going to eat at restaurants every single day or else I'm going to become fatter and have less expendable money. So that's why I don't go to them as often anymore. But when I do, I try to go somewhere good and enjoyable and explore new kinds of foods, because especially in a place where there's some, there's really good local food for sure, but I do want to experience things from other parts of the world and that sort of thing. Right now, the one that I'm really excited to go to is a new dim sum place, which is a sort of, I think, Southeastern Chinese style of dumplings and little plates of delicious goodness. And a new restaurant just opened up here in the city. And people are saying that it's actually authentic, whereas most of them are not super authentic. A lot of restaurants are good, but they're saying this one is like really authentic. There's not even an English or Spanish name. It's just all in Chinese. And I think it's mostly there for Chinese people that live here. And so I'm really excited to try it out. But yeah, I think that's enough talking about restaurants. I hope that you learned a few things in this episode, maybe a couple of words or some interesting tidbits here and there. Let me know down in the comments, what do you think of restaurants? Have you worked in restaurants before? What's your, your favorite restaurant? Um, but that's everything for me today. I hope that you enjoyed, and I'm going to see you again tomorrow for another episode of Ben, or no, Ben's Language Lab, Daily Doze of English. That's what it's called. Bye bye. I'll see you then.
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