Eataly reviews

Cockroaches. Like, giant ones. When I called management’s attention to a large specimen hovering near some dough one morning, nothing was done about it. Then, several days later, management helpfully informed me that “the” cockroach had been killed. Of course. Because a kitchen only ever has one cockroach. They are totes just like “The Highlander.” Fruit Flies. Their population really explodes during the summer, even though this bakery has no windows or access to outdoors, and they lurve hovering around a giant mother yeast fermentor and dive-bombing into bowls of flour and large Esmach mixers full of dough in autolyse. The bakery at Eataly has overlapping day and overnight shifts, and mixers are rarely cleaned. Shift times and responsibilities for mixing don’t really factor in the time needed to clean mixers—I’ve never worked someplace where one didn’t deep-clean the mixer and mop up the flour on the floor at the end of every day, and found myself trying to clean my mixers whenever possible. But in any case, mixers are rarely cleaned—keeping the fruit flies fed and happy in their lives hovering on the ceiling over the mixers—and also enabling tons of cross-contamination scenarios. During a given shift mixers will accommodate doughs with allergens—nuts—as well as butter, and squid ink, and no sanitizer is used to clean up after these additions. Moldy Couche-Cloths. Like, the lining of shaping bowls and flour bowls will be a couche-cloth that is, literally, black with mold. Couche-cloths for shaped doughs like baguettes are also moldy—they are not scraped every day after use, though again some employees try to scrape them as much as possible. You should not be able to "smell" a couche-cloth; if you can, you shouldn't put newly-shaped raw dough on it. But you totally can do all of this stuff, at Eataly Boston! Opportunities for Advancement. Are. Non-Existent. At least if you’ve put in more than a year of full-time work as an experienced baker, and if you happen to be slightly over 40 and female. In a year's time working at Eataly Boston full-time, I was never evaluated formally for even a basic cost-of-living raise; I actually was never formally evaluated, at all. Instead of a formal evaluation process, managers will, on the fly and as an afterthought, invent problems with how you work and run your station—particularly if you are proactive about trying to deep-clean, organize and prep your station so as to fend off the onslaught of insects and mold—and then refuse to implement a fair means of systematically and consistently evaluating you or any other employee. On the other hand, if you are a smarmy young male wannabe chef who routinely orders around co-workers who just happen to be people of color, you can demand a raise after 2 months of employment and management will love you for it and totally give it to you. And, every employee who has brought up this inconsistent model for evaluating employees and granting raises to management and HR has been fired. Vacation Coverage. When your salaried manager takes 2 10-day vacations over the course of a year, and fires her assistant manager (who took no vacation time at all, during that same year) right before taking off on that sweet vacay, as an hourly employee you will be required to take on the manager's administrative duties (inventory and supply orders) in her absence. That work itself is fairly easy--anybody working full-time over the course of a year will know what supplies the bakery actually needs. But it sorta begs the question: what is management accomplishing on a daily basis, exactly, that deserves a salary, and that can't be covered by other hourly people during the course of the day? If the entire Eataly Boston bakery runs perfectly fine without the manager's presence--and actually is a friendlier place to be, since everyone can just do their jobs without interruption--why does Eataly Boston, on the whole, need as many managers as it presently has? You can't walk a across the floor at that place without tripping over someone officiously "managing" "something," yet figuring out what they actually do, as work, is pretty tricky. Here's an idea: fire all the managers, take that pool of salary money, and distribute it equally among the hourly workers. See if you notice any change in overall productivity--beyond work actually being accomplished more efficiently. Dispute Resolution. You have the option, in your contract, of submitting claims regarding workplace discrimination to arbitration, and your manager cannot instigate “retaliatory measures” against you while this process is going on. However, if you express anger over the fact that active age discrimination happens in this place, especially regarding evaluation for raises and promotion, and request information about how to initiate a dispute claim, they retaliate pretty harshly before you ever articulate the claim--i.e., they just fire you, because they are so very butt-hurt at the thought that they could ever be guilty of any kind of discrimination.