When you get take-out, you may wonder what’s going on behind the scenes. You probably don’t, but you may. This is especially true if for any reason your order is wrong.
People, I understand – you have a busy life full of busy things. Your boss is a jerk, your kids are screaming for pizza, your wife is a frigid hell-beast, and your car is probably overdue for an oil change. Your one joy in life is a few delicious slices of greasy pizza just the way you like it: Detroit style, thick crust, extra cheese, crispy corners, hot and fresh, loaded with pepperoni, sausage, peppers – absolutely perfect.
So it makes perfect sense to me when you go completely ape-shit, knocking over tables, calling everyone in the store a “complete fucking retard,” and threatening to call the health inspector because someone accidentally got half a god-damned mushroom on one slice of your precious fucking pizza.
I want to tell you a little bit about me. Hi. You’re reading my blog. I make light of being highly educated and working in a kitchen, but on a normal day I’m okay with the work I have – it’s very Maoist of me. Sometimes, frequently even, I like the work. The problem is that after something like sixteen years in restaurant work, I’ve come to understand that most of my coworkers don’t.
There are basically three types of restaurant with which you, the diner, need concern yourself:
1) The Family Joint – often taking the form of a single corner café, the family joint is run by (you guessed it!) a family, literally started by a mom and pop who just barely secured a bank loan to buy a little place with an oven, a stove, and seating for thirty. They’ve worked that place for forty years, and someday they will leave it to their children. The children, having grown up washing dishes, waiting on their parents friends, and cooking nine different kinds of Salisbury steak special, will throw mom and pop in a home and sell the old shithole to a slimy developer who in turn will knock the place down and build a corporate sports bar which goes under in a year, leaving the neighborhood blighted and depressed for years to come.
2) The Serious Kitchen – this place does serious business, and the cooks are serious people. They’re formally educated by a real culinary school, and they have their own knives that they roll up in a neat little carry-case that never leaves their sight. When your meal is prepared in a serious kitchen, it’s going to be done right something like 99% of the time. If you happen to dine within that unlucky 1%, then 99% of that time, the kitchen staff will do everything in their power to fix the problem, and the remaining 1^% of 1% of the time will burst forth from the kitchen and stab you to death before sucking the blood from your suppurating neck hole because serious kitchen people are coked up like a motherfucker 100% of the time, coked up to the breaking point, coked up so that they haven’t slept in about thirty six hours because they are here to COOK SOME FUCKING FOOD YEEAAAAHHHHH!
3) The Stoner Kitchen – mostly, this is where you’re eating. It’s staffed by teenagers who typically work one, maybe two days a week just so that they can say they have a job because mom and dad would cut them off otherwise. The goal for these lackadaisical little shits is to get high out back and sort of float their way from one end of the shift to the other, slipping in and out of consciousness just long enough to acknowledge a request to mop the floor, and to then spend the next two hours mopping the same four square feet of floor space while droning on about the merits of Phish’s early work in a recursive loop broken only when the need arises to raid the make line for a double bacon extra cheese potato chip pizza with creamy ranch dressing sauce and extra crust.
So after your long hard day in tight shoes or whatever the fuck your problem is, you’re taking out your frustrations on the employees of one of these three establishments. This is a very good idea, because there is nothing more logical than venting the petty travails of your boring life onto a bunch of people who hate their jobs, don’t care about you, and who work with very, very sharp knives.
We’ve all got to be considerate – if you’re reading this as a restaurant worker, remember that you might be making your ten thousandth fish-and-macaroni plate of the day, but it’s your customer’s first. They’re paying your wages, hopefully leaving you tips, and they’re placing awfully high hopes on that little bit of meat and starch that you’re fixing up for them. You have the power to absolutely make someone’s day just by paying a little bit of attention, and giving it a little bit of love.
If you’re reading this as a customer, shut the fuck up and eat your fucking food before I remember that I’ve got seventy thousand dollars in student loan debt, I make about a dollar over minimum wage, and that prison is three hots and a cot guaranteed.
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