Restaurant Q&A, and Dumpsterbro

A lot of people worry about this.

Previously on Imgur: http://imgur.com/gallery/Ee1QH

I've never seen or even heard of someone seeing food get "messed with" or adultered the way a lot of people worry about. The most grievous thing I've seen is along the lines of knowingly giving a customer shitty (wilted, overcooked, whatever) fries if they're being a real pain in the ass.

For real, between not really having the time to fuck with your food, knowing it's an instant firing as well as potential criminal and civil charges if we get caught, and also not really harboring intense personal spite for a specific individual (customers are an endless, undifferentiated sea of scum), it just doesn't happen. For real.

Yeah, we joke about it, but that's it.

FOOD. SAFETY.

Just like people self-diagnose with allergies and sensitivities FUCKING CONSTANTLY, people also call it food poisoning if they feel funny at all after eating something.

Example: A customer who had been drinking Fireball all night was finally convinced to get something to eat and go home when the bartender cut him off and comped him some chicken fingers.

He ate the fingers, threw up within ten minutes, and came in the next day ranting and raving about suing us for food poisoning.

Maybe, just maybe, it had to do with the half bottle of Fireball in your guts?

(p.s. if you vomit immediately after consuming something, it isn't food poisoning, and if you get the shits the day after eating something, that also isn't food poisoning. Actual food poisoning is like having the actual flu - it's so much worse than you thought it could be.)

This isn't mom's kitchen.

A lot of people seem to think that a restaurant kitchen will actually be better-furnished and better-stocked than their kitchen at home.

It's actually the opposite. We have exactly what we need to cook and prep what is on the menu, and absolutely no more, in terms of equipment and ingredients. The kitchen is in the business of making as much money as possible (or losing as little as possible if you're driving bar sales), and any extra overhead kills that very quickly.

So when you get pissed that we won't bake you a birthday cake, remember: It's 50% because it's not even possible, and 50% because fuck you, that's an insane request.

Even something as simple as, say, an omelette when it's not on the menu can potentially be a huge hassle for the kitchen. They may not actually have any pans, depending on what the menu is, and the flat top might normally be set way too high to reliably do an omelette. So this omelette order would require turning the flat top down (a 1" thick solid piece of steel heated by massive gas burners and kept at a steady temperature through sheer mass and accumulated heat), dousing it repeatedly with water to pull out the heat you spent all morning building up, cooking the omelette, turning the grill way higher than usual to get the flat top back up to temp, and all the while praying to christ you don't get a big order because your flat top is now too cold to cook a bunch of food at once.

YOU SHOULD TRY BEING A SERVER FOR ONCE

A lot of princesses have had their feeling badly hurt by my server bashing. Like I said in a comment in one of the other posts, I don't hate servers per se - I hate dumbasses, and the Venn Diagram there has a huge overlap.

Guess what? I have been a server. I know how the job works, and what parts are difficult, and what parts are a fucking scam.

Most kitchen staff have never been a server, and vice versa, so knowing both sides of the house sometimes means I catch servers red handed, and sometimes means I can fix shit that they didn't even realize was wrong.

But telling stories about that time I saved the day on the super fucked up 12 top is not an entertaining story, it is stupid boasting.

By your powers combined, I am Captain Comp-it!

The cluster of bars and restaurants I work in is geographically a pretty tight place. We're in the middle of a pretty substantial niche retail and arts district, and the zoning is such that there's a knot of bars, restaurants, fucky little free range cupcake bakeries, etc. within a three block radius. So, a lot of service industry people end up frequenting the stuff near where they work, and everyone gets to know everyone to some extent, for better or worse.

I very rarely decide to "go out", but when I do I also rarely pay for anything. The thing I hear the most from bartenders and servers is "I wish I could hit customers, too!"

Dumpsterbro: Origins

Dumpsterbro is a fucking chill dude. I've talked with him here and there, and have learned a lot about him.

He's in his mid 50s, homeless by choice for the last 22 years. It started off as a backpacking/hitchhiking thing across the country, and then he spent some time going North-South from Mexico to Canada up and down the West coast, then riding the rails for a long time, eventually settling down around here about 15 years ago.

He just doesn't feel invested in a "regular life" as he calls it, and gets by well enough by his own standards.

He doesn't use drugs other than the occasional spliff, keeps out of trouble as best he can, and likes to people watch more than anything else.

He also has no qualms about stomping the shit out of anyone that mistakes his peacefulness for weakness. He once came up to the back door to ask if someone would call 911 for some other bum that had tried to rob him.

(Not an actual photo of Dumpsterbro.)

Better ROI than I ever got from most people.

He never, ever asks for money, and doesn't panhandle. He makes a little money here and there flipping stuff from yard sales or curbsides or dumpsters, and during the warm months he'll sometimes go out with truckloads of illegals from the Home Depot parking lot to do day labor.

A year ago he asked, very apologetically, if he could borrow sixteen dollars to renew his YMCA membership and pay off some library fines. He paid me back a week later and wouldn't accept me telling him to not worry about it.

A keen sense of obligation.

A couple saw him people watching and gave him a $50 gift card to a nearby restaurant. He invited me out for "dinner on my dime for a change".

I was oddly touched by this and ended up taking him up on the offer, with the caveat that he let me get him suitable clothes. So I took him down to the Goodwill and hooked him up with a set of winter and summer clothes and a pretty slick dinner jacket and bowtie to wear to dinner.

Tell me how you *really* feel.

He has some pretty hard observations about other homeless lifestyles, and has a special disgust for buskers who play a dog instead of an instrument.

He says that it's about 50/50 whether or not they actually take care of the dog, and says that even though he'd like one, and would certainly care for it like a child, it's just not fair to the dog to make it live the way he does.

Arrested, booked, charged, then dropped.

Back in the late 80s he was a street mom in Dallas. He was basically keeping an eye on a dozen or so other homeless people, corralling them into various shelters and trying to make sure they didn't end up dead or fucked up too bad.

The cops didn't like it, so he got arrested, charged under a couple of human trafficking statutes, and told to leave town or else he'd end up facing Federal indictments as well.

That was the last time he was ever a street mom, and it still bothers him that he was so intimidated by it.

Don't get me wrong, he's weird as shit.

He refuses to say why, but he doesn't go near bodies of water bigger than a shower, and won't eat any aquatic animals whatsoever.

Possibly related: When it rains, he always collects a little bit in a bottle or a bag, waits for it to stop raining, and then pours whatever he collected onto the ground, and says "Well, that's the last of it!".

He also keeps a tiny porcelain doll in a plastic pantyhose egg, and rattles it from time to time "for good luck".