Waiter Rant (14 page)

One time I had a couple come into The Bistro long after the restaurant was closed. They said they were hungry and asked me to open the kitchen especially for them. I said I couldn’t. When they asked me if there was another place open at that late hour, I suggested a diner down the street. They looked at me in shock. Diner food was beneath them. I’ll never forget what the woman
said as she walked out the door. “Where are we going to find a quality place to dine at now?”

People forget food is first and foremost about survival. Everything else is secondary. Some people believe the impetus of eating to stay alive has faded from our consciousness. Oh, yeah? Go three days without food. When you’re starving, all the niceties about food presentation and theories about social communion, free-range this, and organic that go out the window. Remember the hungry refugees at the Superdome clamoring for food after Hurricane Katrina? Try being in their shoes. You’ll remember very quickly that food’s about survival. What did the man say? The only difference between civilization and chaos is three meals and twenty-four hours? Chilling.

Despite all my bitching about the Food Network, I have to admit I watch it myself. I’ve always enjoyed watching Mario Batali huff and puff while competing on
Iron Chef
. I’m going to get no end of shit for saying this, but my favorite program is Rachael Ray’s cooking show. I like how she whips up nice little meals using the stuff average people have lying around their kitchen. No, I don’t like the cheap-ass tips she hands out on her show
Forty Dollars a Day
, but I understand that’s a conceit designed to make for an interesting program. Besides, I always thought she was kind of cute. Did you see her in that layout in
Maxim
? Anthony Bourdain may bitch about her not being a chef, but somehow I don’t think he’d look as good in a bikini.

As the night progresses I get seated the most difficult kind of customers a waiter has to deal with—foodies. Foodies are usually middle-aged people who fancy themselves experts on food, wine, and the finer points of table service. There’s nothing wrong with being a gourmand, but foodies are not gourmands. They’re gourmand wannabes. Like anything else, culinary knowledge takes time to learn. Foodies think they can watch one TV show and become the food critic for the
New York Times
. They’re the culinary version of the guy who’s had one karate lesson. They clutch their
Zagat
guides like it’s Mao’s Red Book and quote Frank
Bruni like brainwashed members of the Weather Underground.
Gourmet
magazine’s their spank mag and the Food Network’s their Spice Channel. Right off the bat, I know these four guys are going to be trouble.

“Excuse me, waiter,” one of the men says. “Where’s the bread from?”

I tell him it’s from a commercial bakery.

“Oh,” the man says, putting the bread back in the basket. “I thought it was artisanal bread.”

“Sorry, sir.”

“Do you have any other bread?” his companion asks

“We don’t, sir.”

“Well, bring me some balsamic vinegar to dip this bread in.”

“It’s in the bottle next to you, sir,” I say.

The bread lover picks up one of the bottles of balsamic vinegar we have on the tables and holds it up to the light.

“What kind of balsamic is in here?”

I tell him. It’s a good commercial brand you can find in the supermarket.

“You don’t have
super-fancy balsamic vinegar
, do you?” the man asks.

“I beg your pardon?”

“It’s balsamic vinegar that costs two hundred dollars a bottle,” the man says. “I have it at home. You can put it on ice cream.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I say. “But then again, I learn something new every day.”

“You should know about it,” the man sniffs. “You’re a waiter in a Tuscan restaurant.”

“I don’t think the management would be offended if you brought your own balsamic vinegar in, sir.”

The man looks at me like I slapped him. “Just tell us the specials,” he says dryly.

I tell the men the specials. We have a rib-eye-steak entrée for thirty dollars.

“I’d like the steak,” the balsamic connoisseur says, “but I’m worried about mad cow disease.”

“Our steaks are excellent,” I reply. “But if you’re really worried, I’d suggest you eat something else.”

“But I’m in the mood for a steak,” the man says, smiling slyly at his companions. This guy’s putting me on for his amusement. Okay, pal, let’s play.

“The steak’s very good here, sir,” I say.

“But how can you guarantee there’ll be no mad cow disease in my steak?”

“No one can guarantee anything one hundred percent, sir.”

“So it could have mad cow?”

“That’s a very
remote
possibility.”

“You sound so sure,” the man says, smirking. “How can you be so sure?”

“I can explain it. I’m just not sure if you’d want me to.”

The man stares at me. “By all means,” he says. “Go ahead.”

“Sir…”

“Tell me.”

Okay. You asked for it.

“Well,” I say, assuming a professorial air, “mad cow disease affects the spinal cord and neurological tissue of cows. When they butcher a cow in Europe, they sometimes process the whole carcass. When they remove the cow’s brain, the nearby meat can get contaminated with the organisms that cause mad cow disease. Sometimes it’s transferred from the brain into the meat by using contaminated knives.”

My customer turns a lovely shade of green.

“In the United States,” I rattle on, “we don’t have that problem because we usually lop off the cow’s head almost as soon as we kill it.”

“Oh,” the man says.

“So the odds that brain and spinal matter will get into your steak are small. And quality control would probably prevent a sick cow from being processed into food anyway.”

“You didn’t need to tell me all that,” the man says.

“I warned you.”

The newly minted vegetarian glares at me. “There was no need to get graphic.”

“It’s a graphic thing.”

“I’ll have the fettuccine Alfredo, Mr. Wizard,” the customer says.

“Very good, sir,” I say, keeping the grin off my face.

I
f you thought the cow thing was disgusting, skip this chapter.

It’s nine o’clock on Sunday evening. Facing Monday morning reentry, my customers have already settled up and are saying their good-byes. I’m happy. This is my favorite kind of night—regular customers coming in at a slow, steady, lucrative pace. I didn’t break a sweat and I’m pocketing $200 bucks. Righteous.

“Thanks again,” one of my favorite regulars, a burly man with an Amish-style beard, says. “Everything was wonderful, as always.”

“Thank you, sir,” I reply.

“Thanks for always taking such good care of us,” the man’s elegant wife says. “We appreciate your service.”

“My pleasure.”

“See you next week,” the man says.

“Looking forward to it, sir.”

“Good night.”

I sigh as I watch my regulars walk out of sight. If all my customers were as polite and generous as these two, I’d be able to retire to Tahiti within a year. Oh well. I walk to the back of the restaurant and start doing my end-of-the-night paperwork.

Just as I start tabulating my receipts, the front door chimes. I groan inwardly. Technically The Bistro’s open for a few more minutes. I don’t need any last-minute diners keeping me here for another two hours. Besides, the kitchen guys are tired. Plastering the happy smile on my face, I get up from my seat and walk toward the entrance.

When I see who’s waiting at the door, I’m both relieved and turned on. It’s not a new customer. It’s the hot twenty-something blonde who ate in my section with her three equally hot girlfriends at the beginning of the night. That table was a waiter’s letter to
Penthouse
. The blonde and I flirted with each other shamelessly throughout the entire meal. I was a bit disappointed that she didn’t leave me her phone number. But now she’s back, looking for a little waiter love.
Oh yeah…

I swap out my waiter smile for the real deal. As I get closer, however, I see that the girl’s pale beneath her makeup. Something’s wrong. She’s not showing me her bedroom eyes—she’s showing me her pissed-off-customer look.

“Miss,” I say, “is everything all right?”

“No,” she says. “Everything is not all right. I got sick and threw up an hour after I left here.”

“I’m terribly sorry to hear that.”

“It was my tuna. There was something wrong with it.”

Uh-oh. A customer’s blaming The Bistro’s food for making her sick. This can be a tricky situation.

“When did you start feeling sick?”

“Actually, I started feeling queasy at dessert,” the girl says. “And I threw up the minute I got home.”

“What time did you get sick, miss?” I ask.

“Around eight-thirty.”

“And you finished your tuna around…?”

“Seven-thirty?” the blonde says. “Maybe? What’s with all the questions?”

“I’m just trying to understand what happened.”

“You guys gave me food poisoning!” the blonde says, loudly. “And I want my money back!”

“Miss…”

“I got sick on your food! I want the entire bill refunded.”

“Are your friends sick?” I ask.

“What does it matter?”

“I’m trying to determine if—”

“They’re fine,” the blonde says. “I think one of your cooks forgot to wash his hands after he went to the bathroom and infected my tuna! I want my money back.”

Oh man, I hope none of the customers caught that visual.

“How are you feeling now?” I solicit gently.

“I’ll be fine,” the woman says. “I think it all came up when I puked.”

“I’m glad to hear you’re feeling better.”

“I’m glad, too,” the girl snorts. “You going to give me back my money or what?”

“Allow me a few moments, miss. I need to call the owner.”

“Why?”

“He’s the only one who can authorize a refund,” I lie.

“Fine.”

I head over to the waiter’s station and disappear from the blonde’s view. The odds that this girl got sick off her medium-well tuna are slim to none. I’m not a doctor, but I know from experience it normally takes seven to forty-eight hours for offending microbes to incubate in your system and make you sick. Even though there’s a slim chance some superbug could have made her sick this quickly, it would still need two to three hours to start working its magic. This young woman claims she started feeling ill twenty minutes after swallowing the last bite of her yellowfin tuna. That’s impossible. Of course, chemical poisoning could explain her rapid-onset symptoms, but since she’s telling me she’s feeling better and none of her friends are sick, the odds that ammonia or industrial-strength degreaser got into her food are remote. It’s possible that the symptoms she experienced were caused by something she ate twenty-four hours earlier, and, since she just left our establishment, she’s
blaming it on us. Of course, it’s also possible that she drank too much and simply threw up.

You can’t tell this stuff to a customer who’s blaming your establishment for food poisoning, though. They don’t want an epidemiological lecture—they want justice. And, if a restaurant could possibly be at fault, even though it’s unlikely, the best thing to do is pay up. No restaurant wants to get a reputation for serving cuisine you taste twice.

But something about this girl’s story seems, well, fishy. She never looked sick when she was flirting with me. She also made a big show of picking up the tab and leaving me a nice fat tip. My theory is that when she got home the buzz from her Pinot Grigio wore off, and she had an episode of buyer’s remorse. Quite a few of the twenty-something women (and men) I serve really can’t afford the
Sex and the City
lifestyles they’re living. They spend all their money on fancy clothes, expensive shoes, and dinners at trendy eateries so they can live some outsize Candace Bushnell fantasy. After their fancy cocktail soirees, you’ll find half these girls slinking back to rat-trap apartments anxiously looking up their available credit on the Internet. I once dated a cute Manhattanite who was always dressed to the nines and ate every meal out. A few weeks into the relationship she hit me up for money to help cover her share of the rent in an apartment she shared with three other girls. I declined and suggested she move to Jersey. She told me she’d rather die.

I’m thinking this lady’s claiming she’s a victim of food poisoning to make The Bistro subsidize her evening’s festivities. That probably explains why she’s back here an hour after she left. If this was the real deal, she would have called from home the next day to complain. Quite a few customers have tried to pull this stunt over the years, and I’m not about to let this girl skate on a $300 bill. I don’t care how cute she is. I return to the front and explain what I’m prepared to do.

“Madam,” I say, “The Bistro runs a very clean and safe kitchen. All personnel have been trained in safe food-handling practices.”

“Now wait a minute—” the young woman interjects.

“But,” I say, talking over her, “we
are
sorry for your discomfort. Even though we’re not admitting responsibility, we value your patronage as a customer. Therefore, the owner’s going to refund
your
dinner and dessert. That will remove seventy-five dollars from your bill.”

“But I want the
whole
bill refunded,” the girl says.

“That we cannot do.”

The girl tries giving me her best cold stare. While she’s wasting her time, I enjoy looking at her green eyes. I notice they’re flecked with gold. I start wondering how candlelight would reflect off her naked skin….

“Okay,” the girl says, interrupting my Spice Channel moment. “I’ll take the refund.”

“Thank you, miss,” I reply. “I’m glad we were able to come to an accommodation.”

I go to the back, perform some digital sleight of hand, and refund the girl’s $75. My tip? That remains unchanged.

“There you are, miss,” I say, handing the girl her altered credit card receipt.

The girl takes the receipt, turns on her heel, and walks out the door. So much for manners, but at least I get to scope her ass on the way out.

Since Fluvio will want to know about this, I leave a note in the shift log explaining what happened and what action I took. Then I go to the kitchen and confer with Armando.

“It wasn’t us,” he says, starting to get defensive. No chef likes being accused of making a customer sick—unless he meant to do it.

“I know you didn’t do anything wrong,” I say, soothingly. “But you need to know what she said.”

“She wanted her tuna cooked to death!”

“Some people,” I mutter.

I’m not saying customers have never gotten sick from something they ate at The Bistro. When a restaurant cranks out thousands upon thousands of meals a year, the odds are good
some
thing
bad will happen. If a restaurant follows safe food-handling practices and keeps things clean, this reduces the odds that bad things will happen—but it doesn’t eliminate them.

Some restaurants are better than others. The Bistro’s a very clean place, but I’ve been in restaurants where I’ve seen things that would make your skin crawl.

I once had the misfortune to work in a restaurant where the owner was so cheap that there was never any hand soap in the dispensers. Sometimes there wasn’t even toilet paper. The owner also felt that some of the health code rules were optional. For example, waiters were expected to foist a $2 house salad consisting of cheap greens, overripe tomatoes, and moldy red onions on every customer. Well, there were never any
gloves
at the station where we made these little salads. (Now think about the no-toilet-paper thing.) At the end of the night, after all the waiters had scrounged through the lettuce and tomatoes with their bare hands (there were no tongs either), we were told to put the produce back in the fridge and reuse it the next day! The next day the tomatoes would be slimy. If a waiter threw them out, however, one of the busboys would rat the server out to the chef. What a place.

What I’ll never forget was that place’s staff bathroom. Like Amici’s, staff were expected not to use the customer toilets. While not as small as the “phone booth of sodomy,” this staff bathroom was also a windowless cube that reeked of farts, body odor, and the cheap cologne the kitchen guys doused themselves with before hopping on the bus to go home. Illumination was provided by a solitary plastic lamp wobbling uncertainly on the side of the cheap, dirty sink. The underpowered toilet? It shifted when you sat on it. Finding used tampons and feces floating in the bowl was not uncommon. One night the bulb in the lamp blew out. Of course there were no replacement bulbs. The owner’s solution was to take a candle off the table and put it on top of the toilet tank. The wind from the door opening and closing, however, blew it out. I know what you’re thinking. What about using
flashlights? These cheap bastards didn’t have any of them, either. People were pissing in a pitch-black bathroom. They missed.

When I went into the darkened bathroom to take a leak, my shoes couldn’t get traction. The floor was slick with a congealment of urine and tracked-in kitchen grease. I decided to use the customer bathroom instead. When the lighting was finally restored later that evening, we discovered that some guy, possibly aggravated at the poor conditions, decided to lodge a protest by hosing down the wall with a golden shower. He didn’t even try aiming for the toilet.

Here’s a tip for you, dear reader. If a restaurant’s bathroom is nasty, the odds are good that the kitchen doesn’t bother maintaining Health Department–mandated levels of hygiene either. Sure, customers can be pigs and mess up a perfectly good restroom in five seconds, but look for these details.

• No hot water in sink
  
• No hand soap in dispensers
  
• Cheap rub-your-ass-raw toilet paper
  
• No paper towels
  
• Overflowing garbage cans
  
• No toilet paper dispenser, just a tattered roll on top of the tank
  
• A toilet seat shifted off its base
  
• Graffiti
  
• Semen stains
  anywhere
  

In addition to the skid-row bathrooms this restaurant possessed, it also had those awful strips of fly paper hanging down from the ceiling in the service area behind the kitchen. There have been great advances in pest control since the 1930s, but the owner of this place, in a never-ending quest to save a buck, obviously had never heard of them. Whipped by the breeze generated from constantly opening and closing doors, the fly strips fluttered in the artificial wind like glistening black-studded pennants
hung by primitive tribesmen trying to scare outsiders away from some kind of sacrificial burial pit. The mice writhing in agony on the floor as they tried to free themselves from sticky paper traps helped complete the forbidding effect. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that this restaurant’s customers were dying from the Ebola virus, much less garden-variety gastroenteritis. I quit after a couple of months.

And, since we’re on the subject of viruses, let’s discuss another nicety of the restaurant world, working while sick.

I remember reading somewhere that chefs have developed this macho ethos that compels them to work even when they’re injured or sick. Unless you’re dead, lost your hand in a meat-grinder accident, or are actively exsanguinating from a severed artery, you had better show up for work—you pussy! To some extent, that’s true. I’ve watched Fluvio cook in near delirium with a 102-degree fever and sweat as his sciatic nerve sent waves of racking pain up and down his legs and back. Armando pops so many antihistamines and Tylenol when he gets a cold I worry that his liver will pop out his navel before the end of the shift. Of course everyone in the restaurant works injured. Every cook has burns and scars tattooing his hands and forearms, testifying to his job history the way a junkie’s track marks bear witness to his addiction. I once saw a waitress come into work with a nasty hot-oil burn festering on her inner thigh. (I know because she showed me. Don’t ask.) I once sliced my finger open on the foil when opening a bottle of wine and bled all over a table. The outraged customers, fearing I had the Hanta virus or something, stormed out of the restaurant. I finished the shift with a bandage dripping Betadine on my thumb.