Pest Control

Do you find managers strolling down the line to eat your sliced bread and melted butter while they tell you up-close-and-personal how they'd like you to cook their customized dinner? Do you find yourself crashing into servers in the kitchen, nearly ramming them face-first into the grill with the force of impact, just because they didn't register on kitchen-sonar (no BEHIND YOU, ATRAS, or even a courtesy MEOW)? Do you often catch a server with a few straight out of the fryer fries in his/her mouth, smiling at you all guiltily, before scuttling back into the dark dining room from whence it came?

Your kitchen may be infested with WAITSTAFF

A few quick facts about waitstaff

1. Waitstaff are attracted to food and liquids. Open containers of things like chips, sauces, soups or bread can become an orgy of aprons and shiny black shoes in a matter of minutes, which may take hours or days to dissipate. Unattended containers of red bull or vodka can bring about a swarm that may take weeks to abate, even once the liquids are removed or contained. A waitperson can maintain its territory for up to 24 hours from one lone french fry.
2. All waitstaff live in colonies, consisting of a resume-reading queen (house manager), short lived cocktail waitresses, and workers (sterile bussers). The waitstaff you see foraging in your pantry station are commonly bartenders.
3. Waitstaff that find food communicate to other waitstaff by releasing a chemical message in the form of overpriced cologne and pore-extruded furtive cocktails as they crawl back to their tables.
4. As a group, waitstaff have a wide food range that is not limited to fresh, palatable food intended for human consumption. Very commonly they can be found swarming around dishroom bus bins finishing half-eaten artichokes or cheese plates, even martinis.

How can you control your waitstaff infestation?

1. Waitstaff must be denied access to your kitchen at any conceivable cost. If your kitchen is enclosed, keep doors closed. If your kitchen is open, other measures must be taken.
2. Use a waitstaff-repellent. Waitstaff are more thin-skinned than the average back-of-house worker and cannot tolerate strong odors (feed your biggest, ugliest dishwasher a steady diet of fiber and red meat and park them at entrances) or squeam-inducing foods. Butchering suckling pigs or whole fish in visible areas, or even the sight of mayonnaise with some waitstaff, should do the trick.
3. Immediately discard excess fries, un-slice-able ends of cheese, meats or bread, and small chunks of fruit after plating. These will attract waitstaff.
4. Never allow waitstaff "free" substitutions etc. Every un-ticketed cup of soup, free modification reading (for example) NO FRIES SUB PORK CHOP, or sample of artisan cheese gives waitstaff an open invitation into your kitchen.
5. You must show no pity if waitstaff resort to 'begging'. This can include batting of eyelashes, goofy grins or outright pleading. Waitstaff will not starve or die if denied access to kitchen foods. They can survive for days on a stray piece of bread dipped in a begging-procured sauce, and for weeks even without their heads, much like roaches. In addition, waitstaff are surprisingly self-sufficient, capable of ordering/paying for food, or even purchasing and microwaving their own at their nests outside the confines of the restaurant. Pity only extends a future invitation into the kitchen.

In summary, waitstaff play a vital role in the restaurant ecosystem. Occasionally they remove plates from the window or clear decaying napkins or silverware from restaurant tables, as well as harvesting cash from customers. However, they must be controlled and constant vigilance is needed to prevent an unwanted and dangerous infestation.