Dipping Sauce

Have you noticed it's everywhere now? Even gravy and ranch dressing and preserves become various kinds of "dipping sauce" on menus. Maybe it's just that there are more foods with sauces, or foods that need sauces, or more finger foods?

I don't know why the term annoys me sometimes. I'm afraid I'm getting that crazy old man "Get off my lawn!" disease and I'm gonna wind up on some random child's porch telling them about Country Time Lemonade some day. I suspect it might be that I am resistant to the trendiness of it. I react similarly to the terms "Meme," "Tone-deaf" (when not applied to music), and people getting their drink "on" or their party "on" or their game "on."

Also - and this is even more crazy-sounding - it might be just the sound of the word "dipping."; it's got kind of a chirpy, pretentious "ihh" to it that makes me think of tea and crumpets and pince-nez. I imagine the request for "More dipping sauce!" sniveled through the self-righteous nostrils of an unctuous, irksome ornithologist with yellow gravy in his beard. I always hear it in the "Knights Who Say 'Ni'" voice.



"More dipping sauce! More dipping sauce!"

Stop saying that.

Cluck

Just like clothing fashions, there are foods that are wildly popular in restaurants for a brief span of time and then virtually forgotten in a couple of years. Blackened redfish became such a trend in the 1980s that the redfish was in danger of becoming extinct. Sale of redfish is banned in most states in the U.S. even today. Except for making an entire species disappear, I don't see any harm in people getting excited about trying something different. I admit, it could suck if I happened to be working in a restaurant that hadn't caught the new wave of interest quite yet, and it's amazing how nasty some customers can become over even simple things like not finding focaccia bread on the menu in a pancake house, or herbal tea in a bar.

The trends that I remember best were the salad dressings, and I think of them almost as eras in my life as in, "The Catalina Era" or "The Honey Mustard Era". There were also honey-lime, balsamic vinaigrette, creamy peppercorn and caesar and probably a few others I've blocked out. If the restaurant I was working in didn't have one of these during its reign of popularity, everything was "just ruined" for some diners, and no amount of fresh baked rolls or assorted crackers could console them. Thank God I was too young to wait tables when ranch first came on the scene - the heroin of all salad dressings. I would hate to ever have to tell someone, "We don't serve ranch dressing." Can you imagine the tears?

I mentioned that the trends didn't bug me when I was waiting tables, but as a banquet waiter, I suffered dearly. When one kind of food makes it to superstardom, it becomes the main course of at least half of all banquets being served. That means there is easily a 50% chance that it will become the employee meal of banquet waiters working that season - every freaking day of the season. It's hard enough to deal with all the chicken (it's usually the cheapest thing on the banquet menu so it gets ordered a lot) but when you're eating chicken prepared the exact same way day in and day out, it becomes like prison food. Herb Chicken with Summer Squash Vegetable Medley and Roasted Baby New Potatoes had a run rivaling The Sound of Music on Broadway. I got to where I could barely serve it, let alone eat it. During the Herb Chicken Years, I even nearly ended a relationship before it had a chance to begin because my date made "this new recipe for herb chicken" as a surprise for me the first time I went over to his house. Looking back, I can see why his feelings might have been hurt when I said, "You KNOW I work in banquets! How could you DO this to me?" Chicken is an entirely different food to people with office jobs.

The Only Boy

When I switched to working days at the pancake house, I was almost always the only waiter among four to nine waitresses on a shift (we had two dining rooms). Though I was still pretty young, I was growing up fast around these women, fetching birth control pills and tampons out of their purses, helping them pull up their pantyhose, and being the brotherly shoulder to cry on in the women's employee restroom plenty of times. Once, I even re-set a waitresses knee that popped out of its socket. I still can't believe she asked me to do it and that I was stupid enough to try. Thank goodness it popped back in and that I didn't break it.

The gals played plenty of pranks on me, but it was all in fun. Once, Debbie sent me out to one of her tables on the pretense she was too busy to ask a customer, "Are you ready for you Baby Apple?" A smaller version of the German Apple Pancake, usually ordered for dessert, had gotten the nickname "Baby Apple" among some regulars and the staff, but it didn't occur to me just how stupid that sounded until I mentioned it to someone who hadn't even ordered one and didn't have a clue such a thing existed. When I got back to the kitchen Debbie was in a fit of giggles. "Did you see the look on his face? Did you see? Ha ha ha ha ha ha!" That same waitress used to steal a piece of bacon off my side orders sometimes just to get the cooks to yell at me when I said I was short a slice. I knew damn well she had bacon in her pocket, but I didn't tell on her. I liked working with her and she had a fun, off-beat sense of humor. We worked a graveyard shift together once when she gave me five bucks to walk around the dining room with a kids toy wind-up radio on my shoulder, singing along while it played "When You Wish Upon a Star." It was easy money. Woulda taken me at least two tables in that place to make as much.

There was another waitress, Becky, from Alabama. She was really sweet and didn't mean any disrespect at all when she told me that I was the first gay person she'd ever met. Though it made me a little uncomfortable when she'd introduce me to her tables as "My gay friend, Guy," she was a good sport about the pranks I pulled on her. I knew Becky wore half slips, so from time to time, when she had the juice machines as part of her sidework, I'd wait until she climbed up on a milk crate to pour the juice concentrate from a huge carton into the top of the dispenser and I'd run by and yank her half slip down to her knees. The crate was too tall for her to jump down so she'd wail until someone would take the carton out of her hands so she could pull up her slip and climb down. My other favorite was to linger behind a couple or three waitresses when they were gathered together talking and tie their apron strings to each other or to one of the legs of the counter. It was rare to get three at once, but funny as all heck when one or all would start to walk away from the group. They got to where they were so panicked about it that they'd flinch if they saw me walking away and reach back to make sure they weren't attached to anything or each other.

Sometimes we fought like barnyard cats, and those women could swear better than anything I've ever heard at the movies. The fights rarely carried over to the next day because we couldn't afford to let them what with all the grumpy morning customers. The only way to make money on that shift is volume and we had to be able to count on each other. I'm sure I'd have a stroke if I tried to work that hard now, and it's probably just as true now as then that the men in those places really prefer a waitress instead of a waiter with their morning coffee, but I do miss being the token boy in that pink collar world.

Slime Dog

I worked a little in food service before I was a waiter; Taco Bell and a ball park concession stand every summer for five years and my first "real" restaurant job as a dishwasher at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlour in Eugene, Oregon. Farrell's is getting popular again, at least in some areas (I don't think the one I worked at is there any more) and in the 1970s it was a really big deal. They have a full food menu, but their specialty is gay 90s era ice cream soda fountain creations served in real silver dishes and heavy beveled glass. The whole staff dressed in black and whites with "straw" hats (they were really Styrofoam) that had red, white and blue bands on them. The overall effect was sorta like an indoor political rally for William McKinley (or William Jennings Bryan, if you were a Democrat like my ancestors).

To make the atmosphere especially festive, there were constant pranks played on the customers: A large ice cream sundae called "The Trough" was served in a silver boat resting in a wooden caddy made to look like a pig's trough, and the dishwasher, bussers and cooks were enlisted to grunt and snort in the microphone whenever one was served. Also, announcements would be made over the P.A. telling folks there was "a blue car in the parking lot" to get people up, thinking they'd left their lights on. The best known of all the antics was the serving of what was called, "The Zoo." It was a huge silver bowl with several scoops of various flavors of ice cream and sherbet, covered with bananas, cherries, whipped cream, nuts, and little plastic animals (until, I understand, someone choked on a giraffe and they had to stop doing that). The Zoo served 8 people and was presented by two runners carrying it (running with it, literally) all over the restaurant on a gurney while someone played a bass drum and sirens wailed. I was often one of the runners.

The silly stuff about the job was fun. I was only 16, and I hadn't gotten bitter yet. The job itself was really hard, though. The real silver dishes held on to their heat from the dish machine, and they were painful to handle. The dishwashers were called "Slime Dog" because our aprons were always covered in slime from the food and ice cream (we took these off when we ran food), and the job was lonely. Only one dishwasher worked each shift and they worked constantly, so there wasn't much human contact beyond, "Slime Dog, we need more soda spoons!" Also, the only black shoes I owned were platform heels and my feet would ache like crazy after a shift.

I didn't work at Farrell's for very long. I got a job in an office and I thought I'd never work in restaurants again. Silly me.

It's Supposed To Taste Bad

Our new food and beverage manager, Carol, was eager to make some changes. It didn't matter to her or the brilliant general manager who promoted her from the front desk that she had never worked in any capacity of food and beverage in her life - not even as a cashier at Dairy Queen - she was gonna straighten things out, particularly in the banquet department.

One of Carol's first moves was to get rid of the coffee that all of our customers loved and replace it with Starbucks. At the time, Starbucks was what all the yuppies were lusting after - the status symbol of coffee drinkers who didn't really like coffee in the first place, but sure liked holding that Starbucks cup so everyone could see how "hip" they were. Starbucks' banquet/institutional coffee service demands that only Starbucks' equipment is used, coffee is never to sit on any kind of warmer, and that it be served using Starbucks' own thermal pots, so we had to practically re-design the whole banquet kitchen to accommodate the switch. An early clue as to how successful this change was going to be could be found in the training Starbucks provides to waiters to convince customers that their coffee is actually "higher quality" than the coffee that the customer prefers. It's essentially a convoluted way of telling them they don't know their butt from a bulldog.

You know the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"? Well, Carol didn't. Half of the comments we got from clients were complaints about the coffee. It wasn't just because Starbucks coffee is bitter (it is), it was that it didn't stay warm in the pots they provided (that we were required by contract to use) and the pots were unwieldy (probably 20 inches tall) so they made it nearly impossible to serve at a round top without pulling the cup and saucer completely away from the table (dangerous in banquet service) and the pots leaked. (We learned the hard way: Pouring from a pot that tall put the bottom of the pot in the face of the patron to the right, sometimes clipping them on the chin, and caused the pot to drip on their plate.) Bitter, lukewarm coffee poured from a leaking pot is really hard to sell as "higher quality" to anyone, let alone groups that had been meeting regularly at our hotel for years and were perfectly happy (even pleased) with the coffee we had been serving all along until the status queen showed up.

There are some very basic first rules to a successful banquet: Good coffee, good bread, and a full water glass. If you've got all those things going for you, you can screw up a lot and still manage to please most of your customers. By the time Carol went on maternity leave (to give birth to her designer baby, no doubt), she had all but destroyed the client base we had by getting rid of the homemade bread rolls in favor of some brand name earth grain crap that had to be warmed and was frequently found to be molding upon delivery, and imposing her Starbucks fetish on the department. The waiters were so busy dealing with complaints about the bread and coffee, they barely had time to pay attention to anything else. Even stranger is that the new bread and coffee were so much more expensive than what we had been serving, but the new stuff had brand names Carol thought were more "in line with the clientele we would like to attract."

Carol exemplified the shift in those yuppie years from integrity to pretentious phoniness that still prevails, and not just in food and beverage. One of the last full time jobs I had was in sales, and I was under pressure to perform to a strict quota. I explained to my manager that I was looking for features in the product that I could sincerely identify as valuable to my clients. He said, "Oh I can help you with that. I have some sales pitches that sound really sincere." You know, that boy will probably never understand the difference.

Cow Patti

When the health craze was making one of its rounds of being in vogue in the early 80s, the restaurant I worked for came up with a recipe for pancakes with bits of granola stirred into the batter. They were going to call them "Trail Cakes" until a few of us already familiar with that term recommended they reconsider.

Blue Ribbon Texas Nibblin' Double Dribblin' Oink Oink Plate

I never liked working on the 4th, but it wasn't because I had any particular burning desire to watch fireworks or barbecue or mark the holiday in any way. It's just the forced merriment of holidays in general, combined with the question that is always hovering in the air, "So, are you doing anything special for the 4th?" If they were asking me, the answer was, "Working." If I was foolish or insensitive enough to ask them, the answer was usually, "Just this." Oh, man. You really do have a crappy life if this is special.

Regarding "Specials: The 4th of July specials almost always had some "Blue Ribbon" or county fair kind of theme to them and it really sucked when they advertised the heck out of these specials all week and then ran out halfway through the shift. It's just mean to run out of anything "special" when your holiday crowd is made up of so many people who don't have families in town or didn't get invited to neighborhood barbecues. That's the one time you've gotta come through. It's especially mean when the restaurant has named the special (now 86'd) something rhyming or stupid that nobody wants to say in the first place. First you make a 40 year-old man say words that sound like they came out of a Dr. Seuss book and then you tell him he did it for nothing? They would be so much happier if you just said, "Same old shit today ... don't get your hopes up." Or even better, don't open the restaurant on the 4th of July. There are some of us who would rather go to a bar and drink about our independence than work on that day. We could take advantage of their 4th of July beer specials, 'cos Lord knows they never have to deal with depressed people on the holidays.