The nameplate on the kitchen door said "Magazijn", which basically means "Office" or "Stockroom" in Dutch, and yep that's what it is most like: it is most definitely not anything like a kitchen.
What it is most like is a depressingly fluorescent-lit office cubicle where someone should be seated in a not-quite-comfortable swivel chair, stapling printed-out expense reports or purchase orders into 3-ring binders a la 1995, making several unnecessary phone calls and wishing they were somewhere, anywhere else.
There is one rectangular window about the size of a large cutting board, and it looks out on the leafy green thoroughfare of Pieterburen's west end, the Hoofdstraat. Since there are only 3 other storefronts in town and we are the last business on this side of the street, this window view has never featured anything other than backpack-wearing tourists loping blandly towards the "center of town": they'd somehow found a place to park and were now on the prowl for something to do/eat/drink. During the summer months this window is also how we let all the flying/stinging insects in.
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One of our worst shifts ever was the day a busload of tourists showed up unexpectedly at around 11:45, forty cranky old people in various stages of disappointment/evolution/potential immobility, all shuffling and stumbling with excruciating slowness through our decidedly obstacle-laden dining room and all needing something to eat within 30 minutes before their bus left again.
There was absolutely never any fucking way this was going to happen. In our defense, I've been to very few cafés in this country where this had any chance of fucking happening at all, more due to the nature of Dutch hospitality/restaurant service than anything having to do with actual food, IYKYK.
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But I digress. I don't remember exactly what was on the menu the day the busload of tourists showed up except for our tomato fennel soup, which I remember only because one diner said upon hearing what the soup of the day was, nearly spitting with incredulity, "Tomato? And......fennel? Together????????????????"
We were not set up for serving a horde of incredulous, spitting people without advance notice. Inside we could seat 22 credulous, non-spitting people comfortably, and if the weather was nice you could probably add 12 or 14 to that, and at this point in our arc I think we were only printing out 5 or 6 menus a day so as not to be wasting a shitload of paper. So, already, a logistic snafu (by the time we called it quits these seats were filled from 11:30 to 14:30 most days, but at the point in our arc when the busload showed up we were still pretty empty before noon).
Then, the menu itself, the logic of which is perhaps best explained by continuing to describe the kitchen. The longest side of the kitchen, where the window is, features a stainless steel countertop with two or three €59 Ikea portable induction burners, 2 or 3 because sometimes one of them was moved to the opposite wall to create a "soup station". You could potentially have all 3 burners going at the same time, but then you had to keep them all below "setting 7" or a fuse would blow and you'd have to go out into the dining room to reset it.
I had never successfully used an induction stovetop before, and after this experience I no longer think of cooking in terms of low, medium, or high heat; I think of setting 1 (almost nothing happens); setting 4 (active, reliable medium heat cooking), setting 9 (do not take your eye off the pan because what happens heat-wise here is both wildly variable and barely comprehensible, very difficult to predict the outcome). At a certain point we added a tosti press to the arsenal which kind of mostly worked ok but was a hit on counter space and visual processing cycles so it eventually had to be relocated out into the front of house, more on this later.
The last important piece of equipment in the office/kitchen is an upright baker's oven almost 2 meters tall and able to realistically hold a maximum of five cakes if you were to use a creative mix of round and loaf pans. Four if you're only using round springforms.
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The upshot of all this moaning about kitchen size/layout/equipment is that, operating at peak capacity, you could still really only be firing a maximum of 3 pans' worth of dishes at any one time. Some could be executed with more than one dish to a pan, so, for example 6 tostis (8 if you include the tosti press). Realistically 3 pav bhajis, possibly 6 if things were going well (toasting the buttered buns correctly only worked on a griddle, not in the oven). At a certain point we added pancakes to the menu and, while people loved them and they were a very handy solution to things like gluten-free diets and children's meals, they could also absolutely bring the kitchen to its knees.
Anyone who has ever failed to make a pancake can probably immediately understand why. Pancakes need a predictably, consistently hot cooking surface. In order to get our pancakes coming out of the kitchen looking and feeling beautiful, the pan needed to be preheated for 3 minutes at setting 5.
So, a table of 4 comes in, two parents and two kids, the parents order something "easy" like quiche and a tosti and soup, and the kids order pancakes (for this example let's say sweet ones, because the savory ones usually required another burner to warm up the fillings, and kids would almost always have sweet ones anyway).
Burner 1: soup with bread.
Burner 2: pancake 1.
Burner 3: pancake 2.
Tosti press: tosti.
Burners 2 and 3 each take 3 minutes to heat up, then 2 minutes to cook each pancake.
Tostis took around 10 minutes.
Quiche/galettes took 10 minutes in the baker's oven.
Salad for the quiche would be prepped/tossed while the quiche was in the oven.
This particular order could go OK! But also this is just one table of 4 and already the kitchen is kind of disabled for 15 minutes. Yes more quiches and soup could be served, but anything that required contact with a hot cooking surface was on hold until these first orders could be sent out.
So, like the nightmare scenario for any lunch service was two equally-sized parties arriving at 11:45. If one of them was a table full of women this could be survivable because that table would mostly be soup and quiche, sorry for the generalization ladiesss but my experience has shown this to be mostly true. If, however, there were any men or kids at the table, there was no telling what would happen, order wise. Also, by 11:45 we generally hadn't sent any lunch orders out yet, so if there were kinks in the day's lunch prep to be discovered, they generally hadn't been discovered yet. And then if you're already in the weeds by 12 noon it's going to be a looooonnnnng fucking lunch.
We served a lot of tartines to try to address these logistical problems: the bread could be toasted either in the oven or a toaster, and the fillings/toppings for toasts were primarily room-temperature or could be heated quickly in a small sauté pan that didn't really obstruct any signal path for anything else. But then this is a lot of task switching for the inexperienced restaurant cook: soup with bread; pancake, pancake, tosti, tosti, toast, toast filling/topping, put 4 pieces of quiche in the oven, make/dress 4 salads (which I ratcheted up the complexity on by using a lot of freshly cut fruit and herbs that couldn't be pre-cut and also making stupidly small batches of homemade dressing). Five different cooking methods with different timers and temperatures, etc. Maximum output! But this math kind of means that the chef could be making 12 or so dishes at once, all in the space of a large hotel bathroom.
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The busful of old tourists were, as you might imagine, not especially empathetic to our plight. They didn't care that our (scarce!) menu was very small because there was no grocery store in town and we were striving to be a waste-free vegetarian cafe at the end of the world and our kitchen was in a broom closet. They just wanted something familiar to eat. I'm sure almost none of them wanted to be at a vegetarian cafe, and most of them would've preferred the food at a highway gas station, at least there would've been familiar options. Our Google Reviews rating (4.9/5.0!) survived that day only because none of those customers knew what a Google Review was.
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P.S: We also had no garbage service! So at the end of the night after either prepping for the next day and/or processing all of our leftovers, then cleaning, we would throw our bag of garbage into the back of Marge the Cargo Van and bring it home with us. And all of our recyclables.
