Dying On The Pass

The restaurant business has a lingo all its own. "Dying on the Pass" is one term. The Pass, sometimes called the Window, is the heated, sometimes not heated, counter area where plated food is handed off from the kitchen (Back Of The House) to the servers (Front Of The House) and run to the tables. When an item is "Dying On The Pass" it means the plated food has been sitting too long at The Pass and is losing quality (temperature, texture, or appearance) before being served.

This term is usually an admonishment from the chef or a line cook for the servers to pick up the item or items and run them to the table. I think we all have been served, at one time or another, an item that sat a little too long and "Died On The Pass". It happens. People are human. They make mistakes. I'm not talking about dishes that "Died" before they got to the "Pass". I'm talking about dishes that were perfect when they arrived at the "Pass" but sat too long. The former is a story for another day.

If you get served one of these dishes you have a couple of options. You can send it back, or you could eat it, or you can play with it and not eat it. Personally, I prefer not to eat it, but I don't want to send it back. I will sit there and play with it so it looks like I ate some of it. Then pick up a burger on my way home. My problem is most of the places where I eat know I'm in the business. No one involved in the restaurant business wants to send anything back to the kitchen. They know what's going to happen. Most kitchens are a bit harsh in this situation, especially when it's busy. Someone is definitely going to get blamed for this dish "Dying On The Pass", a server, a cook, someone.

This situation is going to require a new dish to be cooked "On The Fly". "On The Fly" is an urgent request to make a dish immediately because a dish was returned, forgotten, dropped, or not entered correctly. It gets top priority in a kitchen, even if a cook has to use another table's order to supply the remake. This wrecks havoc with the timing in the kitchen. Seasoned cooks know this and take it in stride. The key to working in a professional kitchen is the ability to adapt and move on. 

This ability to adapt is necessary for every position in the restaurant. Especially when you are deep "In The Weeds". This can happen to servers or cooks or bartenders. It means you're overwhelmed and behind, too many tickets all at once, too many things that need to be done right now. There is a sense you are drowning and completely helpless. You get a glazed look in the eyes. You enter a brain fog where you can't think clearly. You start to panic. You can't breathe. The only way out of "The Weeds" is to not panic, take a deep breath, decide what are the 3 most important things to do, do them, then do 3 more, then 3 more. You pull yourself out of "The Weeds". You have grabbed a gas powered weed wacker and slashed your way out. Taking no prisoners. It's a good feeling.

Of course, this ability to adapt or to get out of "The Weeds" is useless if that particular item has been "86'ed". This means that the kitchen for whatever reason is out of this item. This term originated in the 1930's as soda fountain rhyming slang for the word "nix". A lot of kitchens have an "86" board that lists everything they are out of, including food items and alcohol items. Sometimes even customers.

Over the years "86" has evolved to mean in addition to out of stock, cancel an order, remove a customer, or stop doing something. In the effort to provide fresh items especially seafood, I would buy small lots of certain items. Occasionally we would run out and have to 86 that item. We bought fresh fish and seafood on a daily basis, so we would only be out for the night. The next day we would get a fresh supply. 

In the past, I have had to 86 a customer, mostly because of excessive consumption of alcohol. I always kept this to a minimum because the unruly customers are usually the people that spent the most money and come in the most frequently. No sense in shooting yourself in the foot. I have issued a lifetime ban on only 2 customers in my 40 years in the business, so you can imagine what they must have done to deserve that. Life is short. 

The "Pass" varies in size from extremely small to quite large. The smallest has to be the one at Bistrot Paul Bert in Paris and one of the largest had to be the 'Pass" at Citronelle in Washington D.C..

They come with heat lamps in some cases. I have never been a fan of heat lamps, so for the most part, I never use them. The only exception is on the line at the fry station. French fries and other deep fried foods by their nature tend to cool rapidly, so I would use a heat lamp to keep them warm before actually plating them. 

Heat lamps, to me, are a crutch. Instead of getting a dish out when it's at its peak, it allows you to let it sit there for a while. It doesn't ever get better sitting under a heat lamp. When I was cooking, I kept the dinner plates on the stove shelf so that they are warm, not hot but warm. Of course, some dishes are served cold (salads) and we kept those plates in our ice cream freezer in the cold pantry. This is another reason to not have heat lamps on the "Pass". A salad doesn't need to be warm. It needs to be cold. We even chilled the salad forks. 

Some restaurants have a number of "Passes", usually one in front of a particular cooking station, i.e. wood fired grill, cold pantry, wood fired oven, desert station. To the untrained eye this would look confusing but to an experienced server it's child's play. Otium in Los Angeles was a classic example of this phenomenon. 

This requires the server to be really on his toes to get all the different dishes for the table to the table at the same time. Most of the time there is an expediter, who assembles the orders on a main "Pass" and makes sure everything is perfect. They make sure the server has a complete and correct order. They also insure it gets to the table quickly, while it's at its peak. 

In my life, I have been lucky enough to have eaten in a number of really fine restaurants. Restaurants headed by some really fine chefs. Sadly, a lot of these chefs are no longer at the "Pass" for a number of different reasons. Some have died. It's a part of life. Some have retired. Cooking is a young man's game, with young man knees and other young man body parts. Some have been caught up in controversies that have ended their careers. I have lost a lot of friends and inspirations over the years.

Some are no longer on the "Pass" because they have moved on to be food influencers or food personalities. In some cases this was good and some not so good. Like a lot of things, which case it is, depends on who you talk to. You can't please everyone and everyone is a critic.  
 

Luckily, there are a whole new generation of cooks out there on the 'Pass". A lot of them are very talented cooks. They work their magic for old as well as new generations. Their job is a lot harder these days with everyone being a food expert and all the social media platforms exposing them. Everybody's a critic no matter what their knowledge or experience. I don't think I could do it today. I would be "Dying On The Pass".