Full-service restaurant first-week on-the-job training SOP - seven days from tray to taking a station solo, one acceptance check per day, and no solo shift without passing the day-seven assessment

You are the trainer of a full-service restaurant. Draft a First-Week On-the-Job Training SOP for trainers and mentors to execute, ready to file. Organize by the seven days; each day has four columns: training content / acceptance check / pass standard / what happens on failure. Pass standards must be observable actions - "basically grasped" and "attentive" are banned as unobservable.

The seven days (content may flex to the house; the structure of checks and pass standards may not):

D1 Orientation and safety: floor paths (expo line, prep area, fire exits), handwashing standard, watch open and close. Check: draw the floor plan and point out fire exits; perform the full handwash sequence
D2 Tray and carrying: empty tray, loaded tray, hot soup bowls. Check: carry a fully loaded tray around a marked route without spilling or wobbling; correct grip on hot bowls
D3 Course placement and announcements: serving order, serve from the left and clear from the right, allergy markers, orientation of whole fish and whole birds. Check: three consecutive courses to a mock table of ten - every position and orientation correct, every announcement complete (dish name plus key ingredient note)
D4 Running food and checking off: pace with the expo line, ticket-marking rules, table-number verification. Check: run [X] tables through the lunch peak with zero wrong dishes and zero wrong tables
D5 Guest service support: presenting menus, pouring water, changing plates, opening and pouring wines (red / white / beer, one round each). Check: all three bottle-and-pour sequences to standard; plate changes without disrupting the meal
D6 Shadow a station: mentor walks the new hire through one or two full tables. Check: the mentor signs "ready for solo" or "not ready" - binary only, no scores
D7 Final assessment: tray + three-course placement + blind announcements for [Y] randomly drawn dishes + two scenario responses (first response to a complaint, handling a "where's our food"). Check: every hands-on item passes plus scenario responses match the house script

General rules (after the seven days):
- A failed daily check is retaken the next day; the same item failing twice in a row brings the trainer in to switch mentors or slow the pace
- A failed D7 extends training [Z] days before a retake, with no solo station during the extension - being short-staffed is not grounds for lowering the bar
- During training week, the new hire may work alone only on items already passed in D1-D5
- Every daily result is logged the same day (date / item / result / checker) - that log is the basis for the D7 assessment and the probation review

Constraints:
- No culture or team-bonding content - that belongs to onboarding; this SOP covers job skills only
- No pay or probation terms - that is HR policy
- Two pages maximum; mentors do not have time to read manuals

Why it is written this way

First-week training fails in a characteristic shape: watch-only days at the start (feels like learning nothing), a station thrown at them mid-week (feels like a setup), and resignation inside two weeks. This SOP turns week one into a continuous slope with one acceptance check per day - a clear thing to do and a clear bar to clear every single day, with the new hire knowing from day one exactly what they must be able to do by Sunday. The hard part of training is never teaching; it is knowing when teaching is finished. The acceptance checks answer that.

Forcing pass standards into observable actions is the discipline that holds the SOP together. "Basically grasps tray service" cannot be checked; "carries a fully loaded tray around the route without spilling" can - the mentor watches one lap, it passes or it does not, no room for negotiation. Day 6's mentor sign-off is binary for the same reason: an 85-point "I guess so" is always one accident more than "not ready."

Day 4 runs its check inside a real peak, not a simulation, because all of running food's difficulty lives under pressure: anyone can deliver zero errors to a quiet room; remembering table numbers through the lunch rush is the actual skill. Day 7's scenario responses are graded on matching the house script, not on poise - the first sentence of a complaint response is house policy, so the exam tests recall, not improvisation.

"Being short-staffed is not grounds for lowering the bar" is written as its own rule because it is exactly where reality breaks SOPs: in peak season one sentence from the GM - "just put them on a station" - and an unassessed new hire works solo until a dropped bowl or a wrong dish costs a complaint and the new hire's own confidence. Getting the GM to sign the SOP is agreeing in advance: extend training, yes; skip the assessment, no.

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