You may remember me: I came in a little before 7:30 on last week with my 6-year old son to order a pizza. By the time we got our pie, it was nearly 9:00 PM, and as a result I left you a tip that was less than 10%. I’d like to explain why.

I got my first job at the age of 13, washing dishes in a restaurant. Over the next 15 years, I worked my way up through the ranks of prep cook to garde manger to line cook. I’ve worked in closed kitchens and open kitchens, and although I’ve never been a server, I’ve done enough front end work in restaurants that I understand how difficult your job can be.

And make no mistake, being a server is hard work: you’re on your feet the whole time, you have to have a smile on your face no matter what, the tray of food is heavy, and the floor can often be an obstacle course complicated by little children underfoot. On top of that, your efforts to provide good service may be undermined by circumstances beyond your control in the kitchen.

Honestly, I don’t know whether the shitty service we received was your fault or the kitchen’s fault: that’s because you never bothered to come by our table and explain why our food was delayed.

When people go to restaurants, they expect to be taken care of. Not the TGI Fridays “May I Annoy the Living Shit Out Of You” model, but unobtrusively and consistently, asking if we need refills or (more pertinently to this post) informing the customer of anything that might delay his or her meal.

If you had made the slightest effort to communicate with me, just dropping by and saying “the oven went cold and the pizza is taking longer than it should”, you would have gotten my standard 20% tip, because I would have felt taken care of. Maybe even more, because I like to reward good service. That would have been especially true if you’d said something like “can i get you guys some bread or something to tide you over?” Rightly or wrongly, i blamed YOU for the shitty service: had you dropped by the table, you might have been able to lay the blame on the cook, who doesn’t depend on gratuities to pay the rent.

That is not what you did. You acted like our table didn’t exist. You did the same thing to the much larger party sitting next to us That’s why, after Sam and I came in at 7:30 and got served at close to 9:00, you managed to get a dollar on a $20.00 ticket.

You shouldn’t need your customer to explain the basics of customer service when it’s the core function of your job.

Sincerely
Brendan Skwire
disgruntled customer

Last night, after seeing Brendan Cooney’s masterful score for “Battleship Potemkin” (a one-night-only performance), Christina and I hurried over to Nara for birthday sushi. The restaurant closed at 10:00, so at 9:25 we were pretty assured of a nice meal to cap off the evening. The waitress greeted us at the door, led us to a table, and gave us a couple of menus.

Then she left, and never came back. We could see her alright, having a perfectly lovely conversation with the guys who roll the maki, but she didn’t so much as offer us a glass of water for the next ten minutes.

It wasn’t like the restaurant was filled to capacity. Far from it: the only other guests were at one of the long banquet tables, a gaggle of screaming girls from UPenn whose parents clearly never took the time to teach their ivy league progeny how to behave in a restaurant. They were so loud that I literally had to yell at the top of my voice for Christina to hear me. In addition, these shrieking young ladies had already been served.

I spent 1984-1998 working in restaurants. I understand how hard it is to give customers individual attention when the dining room is packed. But this wasn’t the case at Nara.

Dining out it expensive, and doubly so when it comes to sushi. When I’m paying top dollar for my food, I expect to be treated like a valued customer. As I sat at the table, hungry and at a later hour than I usually eat dinner, I remembered that this had happened to me before at Nara. The first time is a fluke; the second, is a pattern.

Finally we got up, and as we walked out I delivered a loud “GOOD BYE” to the cooks. The waitress never turned around once. By this time, it was pushing 10:00 PM, which is when restaurants typically close in Philly on weeknights. Christina suggested heading to South Philly to find eats, but I rejected that: who wants to gamble a 20-minute drive if there’s no guarantee of food at the end? I suggested hitting a bar for some grub (not that I wanted pub food, but whatever, I was hungry), but she pointed out that with the Phillies about to make it to the World Series for the second year in a row, we probably wouldn’t get a table. And she was right: every bar we passed by was packed with screaming fans.

Instead, we headed home and I made myself an impromptu eggplant parmegiana. As it cooked, I went to every website that reviews restaurants and trashed Nara for their shitty service.

Once again, that’s Nara, located at 40th and Spruce, downstairs. Shitty service, dingy atmosphere, screaming Penn students.

You’d be better off eating out of a dumpster behind a fishmarket, and the feral cats would probably be friendlier than the staff.

A glance at the Republican job bank page on Texas Rep. John R. Carter’s website paints the whole, bleak picture with what it doesn’t show: real jobs.

“It’s a double-whammy,” said Brad Traverse, whose staffing website, www.bradtraverse.com, is a popular destination for job seekers on the Hill. “You have more firms who are both looking for Democrats and eliminating the Republican lobbyist positions. And from what I’ve heard talking to people is there’s a kind of a dearth of good, qualified Democrats to take some of these lobbying jobs.”

Younger staffers may have an easier time matching their $30,000 to $50,000 salaries elsewhere, but senior chiefs of staff making six-figure incomes will find it quite difficult to replicate that pay as Republican operatives in a Democratic town during an economic downturn.

“This is a very bad time to be looking,” one House aide said on the condition of anonymity. “There are a lot of people looking and not a lot of jobs out there for them. People can still find stuff; they just have to lower their expectations.”

You’ll pardon me if I don’t shed too many tears for the GOP, aka “the party that destroyed the American economy twice.” Thanks to the GOP, more people than ever go without health insurance. More people than ever are out of work thanks to GOP employment and trade policies. (I myself spent a good year and a half out of work in 2004-2005 jobless recovery). More people rely on credit cards to stretch their paychecks, incurring interest rates that are killing them, thanks to longstanding GOP policies that benefit corporations, not people.

I hope every single one of these GOP stooges learns first-hand what it’s like not to have anything. Not only does it serve them right, maybe they’ll learn a thing or two about being in the underclass, about compassion, and about community…

Oh wait. Republicans never learn anything. Well, it’ll serve ‘em right at least.

Soup is good food(we dont need you any more)
You made a good meal(we dont need you any more)
Now how do you feel(we dont need you any more)
To be shit out our ass
And thrown in the cold like a piece of trash

Now that she’s engraved a [backwards] letter B into her cheek maybe she can get a job as the Red Sox mascot.

Or maybe it’ll serve as a reminder not to be a BUTTHEAD, and to use her BRAINS in the future.

One thing’s certain: Ashley’s not workign the front of the house at IHOP anymore: with that facial adornment, she’ll be lucky to find a job as a dishwasher.

I like my day job better than my night job. The work is a bit more interesting and there’s a lot to do. The restaurant does a good deal of catering to UPenn, deli platters, sandwich orders, and the like, and most everything is made from scratch. There’s also a good deal of prep work for the evening shift as well. I want to learn how to work their line so i can have a bit more flexibility with my schedule and command more money. I get to wear a white coat at the day job instead of a greasy teeshirt.

The dynamics are different in each kitchen. The evening job is in a very small space: you could fit that kitchen into mine at least 4 times, and perhaps even 8. On one wall, from left to right there is a 2 burner grill, a four burner stove/ oven, a small 2-basket Fryolater, and a small cold station that fits about tows of about 5 six-pans each. On the opposite wall, going right to left is a swinging door, a small hand sink, the trash barrel, and a triple sink. The pipe below the middle sink leaks badly so we rarely use that one. Storage is tight. Moving around is even tighter, and everyone’s stepping on someone else. The back stairs serve as a sort of storage area for our plastic, but lights have never been put in back there. As a result, it’s a treacherous messy pile of plastics that collapses abou three times a night. We serve a hot menu limited to a hamburger, done three ways; a vegan burger; 3 types of sausage; an oyster po’ boy; and jambalaya (made fresh). We do two cold sandwiches, and two salads.

The owner who is most frequently there was either a bartender or bar manager at another venture the partnership owns, but I do not know how much experience he has running a kitchen. Some of his practices are just not kosher: for instance, he doesn’t believe in roatating out bread. That’s just common sense. Another time he got rid of a batch of jamabalaya, about $300 worth of sales, because it had kielbasa in it instead of andouille. We’re not fine dining, and the odds a customer would have noticed the change in one batch are not even worth talking about. And he nitpicks, which drives me crazy. Every day, without fail, we’re reminded to do the dishes or to sweep the floor. It doesn’t help that one of the new guys complains about everything to our boss: I don’t know if he’s trying to curry favor or what, but it brings misery on the rest of us.

The kitchen at my day job is a joy to work in. It is a long, open rectangular room. Going from left to right is a complete dishwasher’s station; a triple sink; a prep area; a pasta station; 2 6 burner stoves and overhead broiler;a fryolater; a convector oven; and another prep/ bakery area. Opposite are the doors to the dinign area, the walk-in and freezer, and the refrigerator. There’s a waitstation further down the wall. Between the stoves and the walkins is a long counter which is made of stainless steel like everythign else int he kitchen.

The restaurant is owned and run by three very effeminate gay men in their late forties/ early fifties, who have been working together for the past 25 years. One of the delivery guys told me “Over the years they’ve gotten totally sick of each other’s bullshit.” While I’ve seen them make pointed and snide remarks to the staff on occassion (as any boss does), they save their real wratch for each other: the result is some odd cross between the Three Stooges and Christopher Guest as “Corky” in “Waiting for Guffman.”

“You’re SUPPOSED to be wearing rubber gloves when you work with CHICKEN, or have you learned ABSOLUTELY NOTHING in 25 YEARS of restaurant work?” yelled one guy yesterday.

“I found the gloves, I found them so stop BARKING at me,” yelled the other guy.

“SHUT UP SHUT UP! I’M NOT LIIISTENING!”

The delivery guy shot me a glance. “See what I mean? It’s like working in the kitchen with three bitchy high school girls!” He added, “Last week they threw ramikens at each other.”

The chef at this place drives you pretty hard: last Saturday, after being employed with them for 4 days, he had me run an entire catered event by myself. He’s had me stay late the past two days as well. I enjoy it though, because I am relearning things I’d forgotten over my five-year hiatus, and I am learning a bit more about proper set-up too, which will be a good skill to carry on. I like working with him though.

On the other hand, neither job pays enough, and I am dog-tired for at least an hour when I get home from either. I just finally decompressed from work, and it’s 10:00 at night. I want to go out and get a beer, but it’s so late…