I learned the value of hard work while baking garlic cheddar biscuits at Red Lobster | Opinion
It’s quite sad that Red Lobster seafood restaurants are closing 99 locations nationwide, including its Sacramento spot on Howe Avenue in Arden Arcade.
At first, news reports focused on their famous all-you-can-eat shrimp deals as a reason for the closures. But subsequent news reports revealed numerous issues led to a Florida bankruptcy filing, according to USA Today. So far the restaurant chain has temporarily closed stores in 28 states, according to their website. The U.S. restaurant giant has 551 stores nationwide and 700 locations worldwide.
This sad story might seem trivial to some, but this seafood restaurant was the first choice on Mother’s Day, graduation celebrations, and engagements for many. A Red Lobster is often the heart of small towns in middle America. Some small-town residents, like the kid I used to be, work their first jobs at Red Lobster. They learn what it means to hold a job and make a living.
Feeling a sense of nostalgia, I scoured through the online liquidation listings of kitchenware from the many Red Lobsters closing recently. Seeing the mixing bowls, commercial ovens, and baker racks, sparked memories from when I worked at the restaurant chain roughly a decade ago when I was 19.
One location, in Tullahoma, Tennessee holds a near and dear place in my heart.
Not all nicknames are created equal
I made the glorious, golden brown and garlic-flavored cheddar biscuits, for which I was paid $10.25. Making the mouth-watering biscuits was considered baking, which is not my thing. My ineptitude in the art of baking led to my first nickname.
While training in my first week on the job, one of the chefs showed me step-by-step how to make the biscuits, from adding the right amount of water to the flour to making the dough, rolling it in balls and preparing the garlic butter sauce that goes on top.
Once the biscuits were in the oven for a few minutes, I was instructed to open the oven door to rotate the tray of biscuits before they cooked for a bit longer. What I did, however, was take out the tray out of the oven and spin in a circle with the tray in my hand. Then I put them back in the oven. My trainer was baffled and also quite amused. He put his hand over his face to prevent me from seeing his laughter.
“You’re supposed to rotate the tray, not yourself,” he advised me while chuckling.
Filled with embarrassment, I rotated the tray with my hands and put them back in the oven.
From there on, I walked into the kitchen for work each day, greeted with my new nickname.
“Hey, 360!” my former trainer would yell in the most obnoxious of ways. As annoying as I found the nickname to be, it soon grew on me as I would finish a long day baking dozens of biscuits each day.
“Good job today, 360,” my coworker would tell me after we beat the Sunday lunch rush.
I’m still thankful for those moments to this day. They instilled a work ethic in me from a young age.
Red Lobster closures have meaning
You never forget your first job. There’s something about putting on your first uniform, clocking in, putting in work and leaving feeling like you made a sizable contribution. The pay wasn’t bad either. Red Lobster was one of two jobs I had when I was working full-time at Kroger, a grocery store. And I was also going to college full-time while living in a homeless shelter. Some days there was more work than play, and sometimes more work than sleep.
But if there’s anything that I learned from that time, it’s that hard work isn’t just clocking in the earliest and leaving after everyone. It’s about creating a goal and building your way towards it.
My goal was to get out of homelessness and be the first in my family to graduate from college. Those goals were completed, and I like to think that my perseverance to push forward started in the days I was baking biscuits at Red Lobster, where everyone knew me as 360.
