III. Speech Exercises

Ex. 1. Answer the following questions:

1. Is the formal service identical for all occasions?

2. Should anything be set on the table before dinner?

3. What is the unbreakable rule while laying a table?

4. In which way must be everything on the table spaced?

5. What are the places set with?

6. What must be put on the left of the plate? And on the right of the plate?

7. In which way do we put the knives near the plate?

8. Where must be the soup spoon?

9. How many knives and forks can be on the table at the moment?

10. When do we put additional forks and knives?

11. Where are the dinner napkins laid?

12. In which way must be they folded? Why?

13. Where must be goblets for water placed?

14. What about the champagne glass, the tall-stemmed glass?

Ex. 2. Say about the main rules of laying a table.

Unit 6 text the kitchen organization

A kitchen is, first of all, a production unit; it must produce the best food at the lowest possible price. Food cost and quality are therefore the chefs main concerns, so he should be endowed with the right amount of space, appliances and staff in order to come up to the management's expectations.

The kitchen is as near perfection as possible, and its layout has been particularly well planned. .The cooks can work in the commodious, well-lit cooking area, and there is no interference at all with the commis waiters coming from the restaurant. As the commis enter the kitchen, they find the table for «dirties» on their left. Having deposited the used plates and dishes, they pass round the service area to collect the next course. This area is fitted with an electric griller and a carving table, as well as a hot plate and hot cupboards. Behind the “dirties” table is the washing-up area with its dish-washing machine and “cleans” table.

The equipment of the cooking area proper is outstanding; besides the usual coal-range, one finds electric, and gas, and oil cookers. On the racks and shelves of the area you have all the necessary utensils, a regular assortment of saucepans, frying pans, casseroles, boilers, tins and trays of every description, supplemented by the usual time-saving gadgets: mincers, slicers. Peelers, chippers, mashers and mixers to name just a few.

This is indeed a functional, labour-saving kitchen, which is a necessity, considering that it has to handle hundreds of meals a day, besides providing snacks for the coffee-shop or the licensed bar, and catering for the social functions and conferences help in the hotel. The days are gone when cheap labour was easily available; economic changes and a shortage of trained kitchen help, have brought a complete revolution in the kitchen. Automation and mechanization tend to be the rule nowadays with time steampressure cookers, high­speed fryers, electric ovens and micro-wave ovens. Dishwashers are automatic and there are even new types of garbage and waste disposal machinery grinding and dehydrating wastes into powder, thus reducing garbage to one sixth of its original mass.

The common aim of all these efforts: to produce more and better food at a price acceptable by the client and yielding a reasonable profit to the establishment.