Ice-breaker

When I was 21 years old, I moved back to my home town and got a job working at what was - for my home town - a kinda fancy restaurant. It was listed in the local "Gourmet Restaurant Coupon Book" and they had Surf and Turf on the menu, so if you didn't look too close, and you didn't know they made the base for the lobster bisque by boiling the caps of the old ketchup bottles, you might think it wasn't half bad. The first night I showed up for work, I was the only employee in the front of the house. All the waiters and bussers had chosen that time to quit, so there was no training ... nothing but a really frantic owner calling people on the phone and trying to find out why they weren't at work. I wound up just winging it - reading the menu right along with the customers.

The cooks were really nice to me, though one of them was also especially flirty. I wasn't exactly sure if I was gay or not -- pretty sure, but not really out, and not dating. The flirty cook was the sous chef, Rodney, and he was probably about the age I am now, late 40s, when I worked with him. He loved to make suggestive comments about menu items - double entendre kind of stuff - and goose me or surprise me in the walk-in cooler. He wasn't threatening and he was so good-humored, I didn't mind, even if I did blush from head to toe sometimes.

The best prank he ever played on me was on a night I was opening the restaurant for dinner. We were closed for a couple of hours after lunch, but I'd come in a half hour before re-opening to set up the salad bar - a huge red curtained pagoda in the middle of the room - and make sure the tables were all in order. All the various salads were stored in the walk-in, so I wheeled a rolling table in to gather them up to set out in the crushed ice around the perimeter of the pagoda. (Rodney always filled up the ice ahead to support whatever ice sculpture he had carved for the evening's centerpiece.) This particular night, I had brought the salads out to the dining room, and pulled back the curtain to reveal an enormous phallus. Made completely from ice ( and with remarkable detail) it must have been over two feet tall. Rodney couldn't have hoped for a better reaction when I dropped the curtain and let out a shriek. He was hiding around the corner in the bus station, laughing so hard he'd rolled himself up in a ball. When he recovered, I think he turned the sculpture into a dolphin, but I was always a little apprehensive after that about what I'd find behind the curtain.

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.

Being Unmanageable

There have been a couple of times that I've been suckered into "cross-training" for assistant manager positions. It wasn't that I ever intended to be an assistant manager ... I was just trying to get some hours while we were slow. One hotel made it a policy for a while to cross-train the entire wait staff. There wasn't much to the training - just minor closing paperwork stuff - but I do remember one manager who took this training very seriously. He had devised a series of trick questions that he would run by his trainee randomly throughout the night. The only point to the questions seemed to be to get the person to answer incorrectly. For instance, he would paint a scenario like "A customer comes up to the register to pay their check. What do you do?" As you went through the steps of asking the customer about their dining experience, processing the method of payment, etc, he would hold up his hand, eyes twinkling with excitement, and say, "Wait! Trick Question!! The customer doesn't bring their check to the register! The waiter is supposed to do that!" It was his big ol' "Gotcha" moment and he just lived for it. Consequently, even when we knew were being set up for one of these little traps, we just humored him. He had so few pleasures. It was especially fun when got him to "trick" us 2 or 3 times over the same thing. Shucks. When would we ever learn?

One of the hotels I worked for participated in a program with a University that facilitated placement of individuals attending their Hotel and Restaurant Management School in exchange for tax credits. These students were going in debt so they could work twice as many hours as the people they would "manage" for a fraction of their earnings. You've just got to admire that kind or dogmatism. I like to think we did our best to save them, but there were some who probably still slipped through our fingers who were just beyond help.

The students hadn't been taught anything about how to wait tables, but the course appeared to be heavy on methods of discipline and these kids could hardly wait to jump in and kick some waiter ass. I remember one of the gals who worked for a semester with us would run white glove inspections of the service areas after closing, often resulting in ridiculous directives, like the time she told another waiter and me to throw away ten pounds of coffee that had been prepped in filters for the morning restaurant, banquet and room service rush. She insisted we were not going home until that coffee had been "removed." Well, you can't put it back in the bags, even if you did drag them out of the trash, so I turned to the other closing waiter, pointed my finger at the stack of filled coffee filters and commanded, "CURTIS! EAT. THOSE. GROUNDS!" and then we both laughed ourselves silly.

Another management candidate was fascinatingly unpleasant in both appearance and demeanor. Very pale skinned, at least six feet tall, quite heavy set with an unruly mop of curly red hair that she kept tied in a nylon stocking (as in pantyhose - I'm not kidding) she would thunder through the dining room and scream at whichever server had been seated, "FOUR!!!" or "TWO!!" regardless of whether you were already in the process of taking your table's drink order or introducing the specials. She had been trained to let servers know how many people she had seated in their station, but she was unable to bypass this "training" when it was no longer needed. Precisely because she was such an imposing physical presence (with a voice like a litter of cats in a wringer washer) she did more than just startle the crap out of the customers, she frightened them. If she's working in the food and beverage industry today, it would almost have to be someplace like a cafeteria in a reformatory school.

I've worked with almost every variety of managers: Compulsive liars, coke heads, control freaks, sadists, drunks, corporate puppets, thieves, sexual predators, and the occasional reasonably sane individual. Restaurant and hotel managers were mostly people to work around, rather than any kind of asset to the bar and wait staff. I wasn't the kind to leave just because business was slow or tips sucked, but if I had to work with an unmanageable manager, well, "I was looking for a job when I found this one."