The bus kept stopping and starting along the way as passengers got on and off. After about fifteen minutes, it arrived near East Star Restaurant.
"We're here."
As soon as Ball stepped off the bus, he felt the waves of heat outside and hurried beneath the shade of a tree.
East Star Restaurant was one of the designated employee cafeterias. Since it was lunchtime, it was packed with customers.
The group quickly squeezed inside.
The central air conditioning kept the entire restaurant pleasantly cool. The first floor had a large seating area that could accommodate five hundred diners at once, and the restaurant had three dining floors in total.
East Star Restaurant specialized in Chinese fast food. Its head chef was a Chinese Filipino from Luzon who had previously run a Chinese restaurant in Limanan, while the manager was a middle-aged woman.
As they queued to order, the customers could watch the busy kitchen through a glass wall.
Compared with ordinary Chinese restaurants, East Star's kitchen was orderly, without the common problems of wastewater flowing everywhere or raw and cooked food being mixed together.
That was largely thanks to Huang Keming, the general manager of Abundant Home. His management style was a little obsessive, and he had established a whole host of standardized rules.
The benefit of standardized management was that everyone had to follow the same procedures. It not only defined each employee's duties and responsibilities, but also prevented workers from passing the buck during work.
Looking at the kitchen through the glass wall, Ball felt at ease. Its orderly beauty made the food seem clean and hygienic.
If a kitchen had wastewater everywhere, flies buzzing around, and grease all over the floor, no amount of claims about cleanliness and hygiene could make people feel like eating there.
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