The equipment we have in the communal kitchen areas right now is nice, it really is. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the quality, but it’s very much just stuff you’d find in your average home kitchen, and not quite as commercial as it should be. Trust me, I work in a real kitchen. If you took away my precious commercial grill and gave me one you’d find in the average kitchen, I might just cry. There’s no way I could get everything done on any sort of reasonable time frame, so that would lead to angry customers (hangry, most likely) and no one would get what they want. Same situation here, although people right now seem a little bit too content to simply ‘deal with it’.

I am not! I will crusade until I see a commercial stove in here. Yesterday we had our weekly breakfast fry-up, and just the cleanup was a humongous pain, let alone the cooking process. There simply is not the capacity to cook for thirty people. It took an hour to get each batch out and for everyone to get their food, and this is the morning we’re talking about here. People do not have all day to just hang around for a plate of cold bacon and eggs. Maybe we could renovate a bit, extend the countertops, and add a few more toasters for heaven’s sake. I know we can just make toast in our apartments, but that defeats the whole purpose of having a communal eating space.

I’m thinking of a commercial stove, oven, maybe also a grill. If people want to cook other things for the group, perhaps we could even go so far as a wok burner. I’ll put it to the council at the next meeting, but I think this is as strong a case as they’re going to receive. You can’t expect people to eat together if you don’t give them the facilities to…eat together. It hurts me to watch this struggle, as a chef.

-Millie