If there are two things that I love, they are food and cooking. Many people don’t get this but it’s not just food which you have to enjoy, but the whole process, from buying the ingredients to finally getting to taste your end product. Most of the time that I spend at home, I cook. I cook more than I eat and it’s that curiosity to try something new that gets me spending my allowance to buy the ingredients.
Something I have learned this year is that internships are a great way to get to learn about different work areas. Since I have a deep interest in food, I decided to do a brainstorm of the different restaurant options that interested me the most. This ended up being Le Café. This is a restaurant that was founded in the year 1994 with the purpose of offering Guatemalan people exquisite menu options and most importantly a place to relax.
In order to get the internship I had to talk to the owner (Carol De Cohen). She is one of my mom’s friends so it was really nice that I knew her already. I got in contact with her and told her the reasons why I wanted to take an internship in Le Café. She agreed and gave me the internship. In order to do this I sent her my application message and my updated CV. This was a short/intensive internship. I worked for a total of 40 hours for a week. During this short period of time I learned many things about the world and about myself.
To start off, I worked in many different areas in the restaurant. For most of the time I helped by serving pastries to the customers behind the counter. By doing this, I learned the importance of having good service. One time I was serving pastries when I came to a client to ask if she needed any help. She didn’t respond so I just stood behind the counter in case if she was going to order something. All off a sudden she started shouting at me not to be staring at her when I wasn’t even looking at her. I was cleaning the counter. The only thing I had done was ask her if she needed any help. By this I had to respond in a kind manner even if I didn’t feel like it. “There are all sort of people walking different feelings.” There will be people who you don’t like but sometimes you just have to deal with it in order to make the costumer forgive you. After that, I never had another customer react that way to me.
Le Café was such a cozy place. It had over 70 tables and a small food shop inside of it. As a customer, each time I went to Le Café I was amazed by the amount of people coming and going. It was always full and we normally had to wait 20-30 minutes for a table. Over the week, the costumer flow changed because of the different day and times of the week. The weekends were the most busy days of the week. In order to handle so many people you need to have a clear communication with your teams.
At the café, there were about 35 people working per shift. Some of them helped in the cashier’s station, and others serving food or taking orders. You could see others serving pastries behind the counter and others helping customers select food from the shop. With the amount of customers they had, they had to be fast. And part of being fast is to understand what the customer is asking you and how you are going to do it. By this I mean knowing what food or product they are asking you for. Or by splitting the check with another person. You need to know how to do that because if not you are going to slow down everything else.
At the beginning of the day I helped by putting the new pastries on display. Each day, a order was placed in a excel sheet and was delivered to the kitchen department so that the next day they could bring in the necessary amounts of pastries to put on display. In the X-cel sheet, you could also order customized or special orders made from clients. In order to put the new pastries we moved the old pastries forward to where we faced the counter and the new ones at the from from were the costumer stood. That way the pastries from the day before were sold and the new ones were the ones the costumer saw.
Just in case we had an overflow of pastries, we would put them in plastic containers with a sticker representing the day in which they were brought in. That way we used up all the old things and the new ones after. If pastries were not sold in two days, they were either taken to the kitchen to put with coffee, or sold to people who worked in the mall. I was so surprised by the amount of pastries they brought each day, that I decided to ask my boss (Diana) about the production center. Le Café has 5 restaurants total in different parts of the city. All the pastries are baked in the production center where the restaurant in Fraijanes is. There, everything is made and then delivered to the different restaurants. Each restaurant places its orders and the production site makes them. That includes pastries, sauces for the restaurant, etc. Because they have to order so much food to make they contact different distributors to bring them large amounts of ingredients at a special price. Inventory and order is a constant habit that they practice daily be organized and on task.
Each day they brought new products for the store and because of that I had to learn to put prices on them. We would enter the products to the system and then we would add 40% to the original price. I would print the stickers and then put the products on display. Throughout my time in Le Café, I had many different friends and I also learned the importance of getting along with everyone.
Because Christmas is on its way, the shop sells christmas baskets which include an assortment of different food products. We had to produce over 50 baskets like these and because of this I had to learn to wrap presents. At the beginning I was pretty bad at it but after that I got the hang of it and I am proud to say that I was able to wrap baskets like a pro. A cool thing they have at the cafe is that they have their food on online food delivering apps like Hugo and Uber Eats. I got to see how those two apps works and the procedure since the costumer made his order, and the delivery man came and picked it up.
One of the things I didn’t like about this internship was that a certain points of the day there was literally nothing to do. Everything was done and all you had to do to stay occupied was to clean the window display and organize products. There were other people who were in for job practices as well, and even though they were older than me, I was able to do the same things as them. When we didn’t have anything to do, I liked to observe Diana and see what she was in charge of. I was pretty impressed by the organization that she had because she was always doing something, including talking to new customers, organizing events and so much more.
One of the things that I understood was that many people work for so much time and get so little in return. The people who worked the same as I did earned very little. From this I realized that I have to work really hard to get a good position in a job and still have freedom to do things I like. “Starting from the bottom gets you to the top.” Running a business is not just about staying on top off things, but to literally understand the business is to know how everything works from top to bottom.
A skill that I have to practice more is working under pressure. The more work and pressure I get to handle, the better I will be at completing anything I put my mind to. I know I still have a lot to learn, but starting from a young age will never be something I regret. Internships have shown me the different areas that there are within different businesses. And even if I haven’t come to a decision of what I will do for the rest of my life, I will continue to do internships to learn more about the different job industries and positions that are out there.
Victoria Morales 