Cold Days in a Hot Kitchen

There are battles in the kitchen that seem already lost before they even start. What turns those battles into unpredictable monsters is the fact that we are the only restaurant in a hotel of more then 1600 rooms (except the banquet kitchen of course). Now add to this our responsibilty for roomservice and and our lounge and there you have something I call “our hells kitchen”.
This kitchen becomes hot as hell during times when we have outside temperatures dropping to record lows and your 2000 plus guests just don’t want to leave the hotel to go feed themselves. The funny/maddening part, is that after a day like this I usually have dreams about a micros printer chasing me through a dark labyrinth while spitting out continuous streams of order tickets. The noise of the machine while printing makes it all the more real.
To get a better understanding of my nightmares, here is a picture of me on a cold day in chicago with tickets from just lunch time.But, as with everything else in life the better you are prepared the easier the whole situation will be on you. Usually I try to come up with an easy amuse for nights of that caliber, quick to setup, easy to pick up and even faster to replenish. On said day we had pickled and spiced Butternut squash on a leaf of brusselsprout and sauteed laughing bird shrimp. We served this amuse on a small tasting spoon, which made it easy to setup and also easy to pickup by the waitstaff.We still had to replenish during the course of the night, but it made at least one task less daunting. (I still had my nightmare about the micros printers.)