The Food Service Industry

The past few nights here at work, I have been reading a blog. This is just a random blog posted on the "blogs of note" part of the blogger main page, and I click on blogs that seem interesting from time to time. This blog included the word "rant" so I thought it would have a good chance of keeping my interest.

It did. I am now oddly obsessed with this person's blog. It is extremely well written, the vocabulary better than some novels I've read, and sooo interesting.

It's this 30-something year old guy living in NYC and working as a waiter in an upscale Tuscan Bistro. He writes about his experiences at the restaurant.

It's addicting I swear. If you are looking for a funny blog to read, where stories about stupid people abound, please go here: www.waiterrant.blogspot.com.

And because this man's blog made me think back to my experience in food service, you lucky readers will get the top five most memorable things of my 6 year stint working at Port's Cone and Grill.

5: The College Students
Ah, Hobart/William Smith. The land of riches and snobs. They were the most popular visitors to our establishment (excluding cottage people) and they always came in groups of 5-10.
One of them always gave us a fake name with which to tell them their food was ready (Maestro, Babe Ruth, etc) and since that was the only option, we'd have to call it out.
One in the group would always be a vegetarian.
One would always order something fucked up and difficult to make.
Some were nice, most weren't.
I learned to say please and thank you to everyone who has ever served me in some capacity because of the ones with airs of entitlement who never tipped or used manners. So I guess I'm a better person because of them.....sure.

4: "Makin Slaw Again"

For a time we had a cook working with us that entertained us to no end. He was a Hobart student named Gregg, and he had a pierced tongue and wild auburn hair. His girlfriend threw him out of her place for awhile because he kissed another one of our cooks, so he lived in his car. But I digress.

So one evening it's kinda slow and when it's slow we did re-filling duties on food and ice cream/drink products. We served a side of cole slaw with every dinner, so we often had to grab a newly made batch and dish it into the little side cups.

Gregg was doing this one night and making up his own words for "Turn the Page" while he was going along. He, oblivious to everything else, was shouting at the top of his lungs, "HERE I GO/MAKIN SLAW AGAIN" and so on. Eventually there were customers gawking at him and when he was finished with his song everyone clapped and whistled. One guy asked me if he had an agent. It was a fun night.

3: The Workers

I loved most of the people I worked with. One girl was a complete bitch, but the rest were great.

The Girls

Angie: My best friend to this day

Sara: The girl who worked there even longer than me. She trained me and was very outgoing but had a mean streak

Jenny: My O-Town song/cartwheeling buddy...I miss you.

Elise: Pretty, funny, Italian, really cool

Emily L: Went out with the boss...had to watch our mouths around her

Emily C: Total bitch while at work. I think she's related to me too.

The Girls I Trained

Sara/Laura: Sisters that lived up the street from me. The younger one was better so my bosses tried to come up with nice ways of firing the older one

Caitlin: Crazy drama girl, one of those girls who you'll see at college wearing dreads staring at a fork on the ground

Emily/Hannah: More sisters, these related to the boss. Emily is an awesome little emo girl, her sister was way too quiet for our raucous crowd

Laura: Told a lot of stories, probably most of them lies

The Guys

I didn't work with too many guys, which is probably because my bosses were horny perverts. Here's the short list:

Billy Mac: his mom was best friends with mine and he was short as hell, but drove a nice car

The aforementioned Gregg

Scott: Hugely fat guy, criminal record, had a crush on Angie, broke into the restaurant and was fired.

Joe: Cooked well but never spoke

Ryan: I went to grade school with him and still remember telling him when we "went out" in first grade "I don't love you anymore!" and running away.

Seth: Also a Hobart student, kinda quiet and unassuming but he was nice and he looked good. Had an equally attractive girlfriend

2: "Is There a Fly in My Chicken?"

One of the things I remember most about Ports was the fly incident. There's not much of a story but it still sticks out in my mind.

I believe it was a semi-busy night, it was a hot one, and we had two cooks working. They were churning things out and everything was fine until we saw the lady at the window holding her sandwich. We gathered around the lady en masse and watched as she showed us a very noticeable dead fly chillin on the hunk of chicken from her sandwich. Now to this day I don't know if the fly squirmed its way into the sandwich after it was cooked or if it got stuck on something in the kitchen and we gave it to her that way. But it was really gross to look at, and of course, she got a free sandwich.

1: The Lemonade

Port's was broken up into sections when I was working there. In the old days it was exclusively a convenience store, nothing more. Then my old bosses, Jeff and Dave, bought it and opened up Port's Cone and Grill. THEN they also opened up an inside fine dining restaurant. At one time it was all three things at once.

The big refrigerators/freezers were all in the back of the store and where I worked was a separate building, so we had to have "shopping lists" for the food we needed to bring over. In the morning before we opened we had to bring everything we needed from the store to the grill.

On this particular day, stupid customers came early and wanted food. One of the cooks hadn't even gotten there yet, and we were way behind on the setup. I was rushing around trying to get everything done. Now, I am not the most graceful person in the world. Not by a long shot. I walk into walls, I have at least 3 bruises on my body at all times. I went to the store to get our 3 gallon tub of lemonade (Ports prides itself on homemade lemonade) and was passing the cash register section of the store when...whoops...lost the lemonade. The top wasn't fastened on very well and the whole 3 gallons spilled EVERYWHERE. It then proceeded to spread out, covering every spare inch of floor it could. Now because I was so close to my boss' office, it got in there as well. None of us workers had time for the huge cleanup, so I was ushered out the door while I heard echoes of my boss screaming "SHIT! FUCK! SHITFUCK!" behind me. He ended up cleaning the whole thing up. Heeheheheee.