Chef for a Day
We seem to have a culinary problem down here on the café depleted South End. Oh, sure, the Diner is as constant as the rains in winter, but otherwise, every restaurant, pub, café or eatery withers on their vines in the inevitable drought of patronage. Could be there’s something in the water the Health Dep’t. hasn’t found, but I suspect it’s something less to do with the food and more to do with our gastronomical idiotsyncracies.
We’ve tried gourmet ‘vanity restaurants’, Bible reading seminaries inside the cafes, vegetarian menus, even a café that served macadamia nut waffles and good coffee before Starbucks addicted the now heavily caffeinated world. Lots of coffee but no bathroom. I guess maybe the waffles were expected to sponge up any bladdery excess. Course when me and my buddies got done with that excess, their parking lot looked like gutters of a Mexico City barrio. We’ve had high end and low end and plenty of hind end, and if there’s one thing they have in common, it’s failure. Usually fairly quick. If I knew why, I’d have my own TV show, Hell’s Bitchin, throw spatulas and obscenities, humiliate the staff, change the food, haul in Porta-Potties, make them a successful profit-churning money machine in the time it takes to yell 2 Burgers! Fries and a Pint of IPA!!
I ran a snack bar/grill in my early careers. Plus a dining hall. They hired me, a guy with a useless degree in English. Right there you can see the warning lights, sirens, a disaster coming down the tracks. We had a rash of food poisioning that got tracked down eventually to the potato salad I put under the warming lights. I like my spud salad warm. How did I know mayo has eggs and spoils PDQ?? You think I studied that stuff in Chaucer 101??
Nobody died. Not that I heard about. Life is a gamble. On the South End, so is the restaurant biz…. Anybody’s interested, I got a killer recipe for potato salad.
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