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In college I worked at a hole-in-the-wall deli for about four months. The first sign I should have quit was when the owner told me, a college student with no money, would have to buy my shirt from him, the owner of the deli. For the $18. This, of course, is back when minimum was $4.25, and as a line cook, got that. No tips, because of course, the line cooks don't get jack.
I say "hole-in-the-wall" because it wasn't actually a dive. It had been nicely done with cabinetry, really clean lines, but the two guys running it acted and looked like rejects from Top Chef who barely made it to the audition on time.
The Kitchen Manager was a sous chef who got fired from his last job at the Hilton. What did he do? Make soups. Lots of them. That nobody ordered, and eventually went bad. Sometimes the soups were recycled into other soups. And they were poured into five-gallon buckets and left in the walk-in to cool. That nobody died of food poisoning was shocking.
The Owner was a self-professed Chicago Jew in his mid-thirties who wanted to run a completely kosher shop. With bacon. And ham. Oh, and those really good pork products. Yes, a really good Jewish deli. Ya-huh.
But I stuck around because neither of them were very bright, and neither of them paid that much attention to the receipts. If I happened to fill an order, bring it to the rack and the customer who ordered it happened to have a receipt rung up by me previously, then that person could just go ahead and grab lunch. Say, five or so of my closest friends. And they also had a permament stock of whippets for whipped cream, but which more often than not got happily used by the kitchen crew for relaxation purposes.
They also couldn't figure out how to clear the one toilet. Funnily enough, I suggested using a newfangled thing called "a toilet plunger" instead of calling a plumber when it overflowed into the seating area. They opted to push the floating masses into the bathroom with a mop and seal it with a towel and hang an "Out of Order" sign on the door. Illegal, but not out of character. We closed early that day, and I scarpered long before they got it into their heads that I was to have my shirt laundered after filling in as "cheap plumbing expert".
Oh, I should also mention both of these guys had pretenses of working in haute cuisine, but wound up having a meat-on-bread sandwich shop with illusions of grandeur. One promised the other they'd make it to the top, baby, yeah.
Not in a college town hiding turds from your exploding toilet and overcharging your staff for the priviledge of wearing your crappy logo shirts, you won't.
To top it off these guys wanted to make this dive a culinary icon of the downtown food area, and were spending hours each day on the phone to people around the city and the state trying to get people to review the food with favorable results. Finally, they got one, and they got him on the RIGHT DAY. Which happened to land the day immediately after La Sewage Explosion'. Magnifique.
The night before The Food Critic, I talked to the bakery guy who made all the croissants the week before who was going to quit, and we also talked with the other guys in the back who knew we were all getting screwed. Bakery guy said the raw sewage was the last straw for him the night before, the other kitchen guys were also ready to quit. The servers had their tips garnished 25% for house take, because "they both worked the front". Like I said, these guys weren't exactly doing any favors to their crew, and the one thing a small restaraunt -has- to do is to get their people on their side or the house will go under. If you own the place, you don't get tips. Those are for your employees, and our servers - all underemployed college students - needed them way more than the Head Guys did.
So, the day after the toilet explosion, the manager called us all around and said, "We have a customer coming in from out of town. He's VERY important, so we made a sandwich just for him. Make sure you do it RIGHT."
Yeah, okay. I'm paid $4.25 and just before taxes I have to work two full eight hour shifts just to pay off my fucking shirts. That'll happen.
So he comes in and orders a sandwich. But no, he can't have the sandwich that was on the menu, he needs extra cranberry sauce and some vegetarian-fed organic bacon and light on the cream cheese blah, blah blah. And instead of having the sandwich on the bread that is specifically designed to hold the ingredients - slippery, smooth, creamy and altogether slippery that would squirt further than a pent-up porn star if they weren't within the center of essentially two giant halves of English muffin, he wants it on:
A fresh, lightly toasted baguette.
Oh, fuck THAT noise. I do the best I can with what I have. I split the baguette leaving enough on one side to hold the thing together like a taco, go light on the cream cheese, skip a couple of ingredients because I just don't have the room, and slip in the damn bacon that we cooked the night before, thinking the gaminess might substitute for lean organic bacon.
Oh no.
He returns the sandwich and says, "I said light, not ghosted on the cream cheese. And I can tell that bacon isn't organically-grown. Put some effort into it! I want to love the sight of it as well as the feel and taste!" Oh, great. We're feeding the only pretentious food critic known to man who schlums at a half-assed pseudo-kosher deli run by two fucknuts. Someone give me some sunscreen, I'm basking in great...ass.
Buddy, I work with what I got. Okay. I added cream cheese and switched the bacon, putting a little sugar on it.
Nope, round two.
By round four the manager is staring daggers at me, and I finally raise my hands up in surrender, and make the PERFECT sandwich for him. I deep-fry the bacon in ghee. I lovingly coat each side with all the ingredients in a perfect layer. By the time I'm done, the whole thing could be picture perfect. Angels would sing hosannas about this sandwich.
The manager and the kitchen guy are staring at it. They've never seen something so well-done come from our hands. Of course not. You pay us bare minimum and all the beer, wine, and imported proscuitto we can steal, fuckos. (Though truth be told I never stole a full hunk of meat. I just fed people who were hungry, including me.)
I deliver it with grace to the guy's place. He huffs and says, "FINALLY". He eyes it, takes a little camera out, snaps a picture, and picks it up to take a bite.
Whereupon my careful engineering slops the contents all over his extremely expensive suit, right down to his extraordinarily strange request for a lighter aioli that may or may not have been, in actuality, some lemon-curdled milk mixed with whatever the drain trap had in it at the time.
He stands up, throws down his napkin, and charges to the bathroom - which is overflowing with raw sewage again because Tweedledum and Tweedledummer weren't smart enough to hire a plumber OR lock the damn door.
And here he just unleashes. He calls Public Health. He screams at TWEE And TWEED. And then he leaves.
But before Twee and Tweed can turn around and scream, Bakery guy says, "That's it. I fucking quit. This is disgusting*." Server one drops her apron and shakes out the tip jar the minute Bakery is out the door. Server two waits long enough to finish an order and grab the cash for our shifts from the till for the week before dropping her apron off and saying "I need a smoke break." (Oh yeah, payroll was almost always "advanced" - another nice way of saying paid under the table - from the till, and if Twee did it, he shorted, even though we got "checks" every week that probably cost more to print than the amounts printed on them.) Salad guy shrugged, tossed his hat up and stabbed it through with a chef's knife, pinning it 4 inches into the hand-carved butcher block that looked (and smelled) like the concept of "bleach" was never introduced, grabbed his gear and walked.
Now it's just me and Twee and Tweed with a panicky lunch rush finishing their lunches and both of them staring at me with "don't go" forming on their lips. Maybe, just maybe, they could save this. Maybe this couldn't be happening.
But it was.
"Oh, and by the way guys, I forgot to tell you. I start work at my new job tonight. So thanks for lunch."
A month later the place was for lease.
I say "hole-in-the-wall" because it wasn't actually a dive. It had been nicely done with cabinetry, really clean lines, but the two guys running it acted and looked like rejects from Top Chef who barely made it to the audition on time.
The Kitchen Manager was a sous chef who got fired from his last job at the Hilton. What did he do? Make soups. Lots of them. That nobody ordered, and eventually went bad. Sometimes the soups were recycled into other soups. And they were poured into five-gallon buckets and left in the walk-in to cool. That nobody died of food poisoning was shocking.
The Owner was a self-professed Chicago Jew in his mid-thirties who wanted to run a completely kosher shop. With bacon. And ham. Oh, and those really good pork products. Yes, a really good Jewish deli. Ya-huh.
But I stuck around because neither of them were very bright, and neither of them paid that much attention to the receipts. If I happened to fill an order, bring it to the rack and the customer who ordered it happened to have a receipt rung up by me previously, then that person could just go ahead and grab lunch. Say, five or so of my closest friends. And they also had a permament stock of whippets for whipped cream, but which more often than not got happily used by the kitchen crew for relaxation purposes.
They also couldn't figure out how to clear the one toilet. Funnily enough, I suggested using a newfangled thing called "a toilet plunger" instead of calling a plumber when it overflowed into the seating area. They opted to push the floating masses into the bathroom with a mop and seal it with a towel and hang an "Out of Order" sign on the door. Illegal, but not out of character. We closed early that day, and I scarpered long before they got it into their heads that I was to have my shirt laundered after filling in as "cheap plumbing expert".
Oh, I should also mention both of these guys had pretenses of working in haute cuisine, but wound up having a meat-on-bread sandwich shop with illusions of grandeur. One promised the other they'd make it to the top, baby, yeah.
Not in a college town hiding turds from your exploding toilet and overcharging your staff for the priviledge of wearing your crappy logo shirts, you won't.
To top it off these guys wanted to make this dive a culinary icon of the downtown food area, and were spending hours each day on the phone to people around the city and the state trying to get people to review the food with favorable results. Finally, they got one, and they got him on the RIGHT DAY. Which happened to land the day immediately after La Sewage Explosion'. Magnifique.
The night before The Food Critic, I talked to the bakery guy who made all the croissants the week before who was going to quit, and we also talked with the other guys in the back who knew we were all getting screwed. Bakery guy said the raw sewage was the last straw for him the night before, the other kitchen guys were also ready to quit. The servers had their tips garnished 25% for house take, because "they both worked the front". Like I said, these guys weren't exactly doing any favors to their crew, and the one thing a small restaraunt -has- to do is to get their people on their side or the house will go under. If you own the place, you don't get tips. Those are for your employees, and our servers - all underemployed college students - needed them way more than the Head Guys did.
So, the day after the toilet explosion, the manager called us all around and said, "We have a customer coming in from out of town. He's VERY important, so we made a sandwich just for him. Make sure you do it RIGHT."
Yeah, okay. I'm paid $4.25 and just before taxes I have to work two full eight hour shifts just to pay off my fucking shirts. That'll happen.
So he comes in and orders a sandwich. But no, he can't have the sandwich that was on the menu, he needs extra cranberry sauce and some vegetarian-fed organic bacon and light on the cream cheese blah, blah blah. And instead of having the sandwich on the bread that is specifically designed to hold the ingredients - slippery, smooth, creamy and altogether slippery that would squirt further than a pent-up porn star if they weren't within the center of essentially two giant halves of English muffin, he wants it on:
A fresh, lightly toasted baguette.
Oh, fuck THAT noise. I do the best I can with what I have. I split the baguette leaving enough on one side to hold the thing together like a taco, go light on the cream cheese, skip a couple of ingredients because I just don't have the room, and slip in the damn bacon that we cooked the night before, thinking the gaminess might substitute for lean organic bacon.
Oh no.
He returns the sandwich and says, "I said light, not ghosted on the cream cheese. And I can tell that bacon isn't organically-grown. Put some effort into it! I want to love the sight of it as well as the feel and taste!" Oh, great. We're feeding the only pretentious food critic known to man who schlums at a half-assed pseudo-kosher deli run by two fucknuts. Someone give me some sunscreen, I'm basking in great...ass.
Buddy, I work with what I got. Okay. I added cream cheese and switched the bacon, putting a little sugar on it.
Nope, round two.
By round four the manager is staring daggers at me, and I finally raise my hands up in surrender, and make the PERFECT sandwich for him. I deep-fry the bacon in ghee. I lovingly coat each side with all the ingredients in a perfect layer. By the time I'm done, the whole thing could be picture perfect. Angels would sing hosannas about this sandwich.
The manager and the kitchen guy are staring at it. They've never seen something so well-done come from our hands. Of course not. You pay us bare minimum and all the beer, wine, and imported proscuitto we can steal, fuckos. (Though truth be told I never stole a full hunk of meat. I just fed people who were hungry, including me.)
I deliver it with grace to the guy's place. He huffs and says, "FINALLY". He eyes it, takes a little camera out, snaps a picture, and picks it up to take a bite.
Whereupon my careful engineering slops the contents all over his extremely expensive suit, right down to his extraordinarily strange request for a lighter aioli that may or may not have been, in actuality, some lemon-curdled milk mixed with whatever the drain trap had in it at the time.
He stands up, throws down his napkin, and charges to the bathroom - which is overflowing with raw sewage again because Tweedledum and Tweedledummer weren't smart enough to hire a plumber OR lock the damn door.
And here he just unleashes. He calls Public Health. He screams at TWEE And TWEED. And then he leaves.
But before Twee and Tweed can turn around and scream, Bakery guy says, "That's it. I fucking quit. This is disgusting*." Server one drops her apron and shakes out the tip jar the minute Bakery is out the door. Server two waits long enough to finish an order and grab the cash for our shifts from the till for the week before dropping her apron off and saying "I need a smoke break." (Oh yeah, payroll was almost always "advanced" - another nice way of saying paid under the table - from the till, and if Twee did it, he shorted, even though we got "checks" every week that probably cost more to print than the amounts printed on them.) Salad guy shrugged, tossed his hat up and stabbed it through with a chef's knife, pinning it 4 inches into the hand-carved butcher block that looked (and smelled) like the concept of "bleach" was never introduced, grabbed his gear and walked.
Now it's just me and Twee and Tweed with a panicky lunch rush finishing their lunches and both of them staring at me with "don't go" forming on their lips. Maybe, just maybe, they could save this. Maybe this couldn't be happening.
But it was.
"Oh, and by the way guys, I forgot to tell you. I start work at my new job tonight. So thanks for lunch."
A month later the place was for lease.
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