ITT: Suu and Cain compare restaurant horror stories.

[Suu]

I go first!!


My owners are nice people...they can't run a business for shit. They aren't clueless, but the economy took a toll on the bistro last year, and since then we have been going downhill. We had to go into receivership to make sure the bills were paid, and were taken to court by our landlord. Yeaaahhh..

Anyways, last night the chef walked out because after almost a month, the new dishwasher that we were told has not come in. I was told it was the receiver's fault because he didn't sign off on it, but it wouldn't surprise me if it wasn't ordered either. So the chef was sick and tired of having to tell our Guatamalan dishwasher that he had to keep scrubbing by hand. Soooo...The owner stepped up to cook. She even walked right in with a chef's coat.

(Please note this women worked for Julia Child, and for some reason learned NOTHING. Her skills with a knife scare the FUCK out of me, and I'm pretty bad with a knife.)

So when I walk in, my manager pulls me into the corner and goes, "Just a heads up...Ray walked out and Talli (bartender) is in the hospital. Julie is in the kitchen...DON'T YOU WALK OUT ON ME TOO."

We devise a cunning plan that will put her on the bar and me on the floor and finish up the necessary sidework which unfortunately means I have to bring 4 buckets of ice up the stairs because she won't do it. Anyways...My first table was a mother and her teenage son. It was an easy order...a caesar salad and a couple of med-rare burgers. Piece of cake.



The woman...can't even make a proper Caesar salad. She didn't dry the lettuce, she didn't toast the croutons, and she forgot to add Parmesan cheese. Naturally the customer complained, although she was nice about it. Then the burgers came out, what a fucking nightmare. Julie put them on the grill too early after I told her not to (the other cook was in now and was too busy trying to get the kitchen actually set up...did I mention the kitchen wasn't set up?!). So I had to bring one of the burgers back and have the other cook remake it.

By this time, The owner's family, and by family I mean the husband, 2 kids, sister, and 2 nephews walk in and want dinner. They seat themselves and I make the kids set the damn table for me because I'm too busy with another table now and dealing with my recook. Julie walks out the recook for me and then proceeds to join her family for dinner instead of going back into the kitchen and helping Julio the cook, who is a surf bum from Hawaii but works really hard. He hasn't been there long enough to know how to make difficult stuff yet, so the manager jumps back on the line to help him, leaving me the entire dining room and the entire bar. Fortunately, it was pretty slow and all the tables (except the owners) were low maintenance.

My first table was offered free dessert because of the mess ups, and still left me a nice tip, but when the boss sat down with her family with wine, they sort of looked at me like, "You've gotta be kidding me, right?"

The owners' kids are 11 and 14. They aren't too young to know better or autistic like the oldest nephew who made quite the mess. But the 11 year old, the little spoiled fucking prince, kept going up to the fruit tray and getting more cherries for his cousin, who was already bouncing off the walls. We had to YELL at him to stop it, and then he made a huge mess of calamari and fries on the floor (this is, again, the 11 year old peewee do-no-wrong football star, not the 5 year old hyper autistic boy). The 11 year old also decided to yell at me from across the restaurant and snap his fingers at me...but his father thinks it's funny. I told him that if he did it again, he would have to vacuum my whole floor. I also made him ask me for another drink using the grammatically correct "May I have another Coke, please?"

The 14 year old is better, she can be whiny, but for the most part she's helpful and I asked her to clear the table when they were through, so her and her aunt (boss's waitress sister, who knew she had to get the owners out of there ASAP before the manager and I killed them) bussed and reset the entire table. So after they successfully left me with a floor of moosh, I finished up with my last 2 tables and bar customers. As soon as everyone left, we locked the doors an hour early, blasted the Pogues, mixed margaritas and starting scrubbing the fuck out of the kitchen and cleaning the carpet. They had left their own restaurant in a disaster. Oh and of course, didn't pay their bill, which had to be voided off and my tip be paid out, which we're not supposed to do because of the receiver.

I just don't even want to go back there today. If it wasn't for the fact that my W-2 will be in, I'd probably call out. (And the manager would probably kill me.)

[Cain]

Holy shit.

Our new boss can cook...just not very fast at all.  He took 20 minutes to do a single smothered chicken, while this poor woman had to wait and watch the rest of her friends digging in (yes, he didn't even send them all out at the same time).  He also tends to set the garlic bread on fire.  For the past week, we've been taking it in shifts to run down to the nearest store and buy as much tartare sauce, tomato sauce, mayonnaise and the rest as possible, because they never put the goddamn orders in.  Our chef actually spent half an hour on the phone this morning, trying to sort out getting something, while I was upstairs, attempting to break into the company safe so I could pay for the few deliveries that had turned up.

They're going to try and do a new thing with our pay too...which is needlessly complicated.  Instead of getting paid every week, they are going to look at paying us monthly, to make it cheaper (they get an accountant to do the payroll).  Only, we are still going to be paid weekly.  Confused yet?  Supposedly we will get what we would normally earn every week, and then any extra as a lump sum at the end of the month...only that is going to be a nightmare when you consider the days people take off, when we close early, when snowstorms bring the country to a standstill and so on and so forth.

Our bosses wife cant actually remember her own shifts.  Last week, she down twenty minutes late and was like, "oh, I'm meant to be on the bar today, aren't I?"  This week, she decided to go off to the brewery, and didn't get back until the last 10 minutes of the shift, leaving three of us to run the entire pub (you really need four at least, hence why I was hired).

Their lax standards already seem to be having an effect.  We got off to a bad start in January anyway, business wise, but...well, we had one customer on Monday.  One last night.  A few more on other times, but the busiest it has been this week is 20 people on Monday night, which is not very good at all.  This business will probaby go under in March, when the brewery demand their first payment.

[Suu]

I think last night we did maybe 18 covers, not counting the owners' 6 top. This is common for January though. RISD Winter Session just ended and Brown doesn't start again until next week. But college students can suck a fart out of my ass anyway.

Summer is TERRIBLE. I need to be out of there by the end of April if I intend to do any traveling this summer as planned. If they reopen for lunch, I'll be totally fucked, because I know I'm one if not the only one with lunch availability, which means I'll lose night shifts. $30-$40 for a Tuesday and Wednesday night SUCK, but it's better than nothing.

[Cain]

Yeah, I mostly work lunches and, well...the last time I went home with above £10 in tips was New Year. Admittedly, UK, but that is pretty poor.  I used to average out at about £16 a week, which was a nice bonus, but with our bosses apparently scaring everyone away, I'm taking a real hit.

Hopefully the brewery will throw them out in March and find someone competent to take over.  But our brewery is both stupid and malevonent, so I'm not betting on it.

[Suu]

So is this like a microbrew pub then?

We should swap jobs for a week...make a reality show of it.   The difference in tipping customs alone would make for a lot of laughs.

[Cain]

Sort of, yeah.  We're with Hall & Woodhouse, who admittedly produce some fairly good beers, even if they are run by utter pricks.

That'd probably be fun.  Most of our customers are old farts, so they're never a problem beyond indecision and small appetites.  But that makes it boring, for those days you really want to take out some frustration on a difficult bastard.

[Suu]

Yeah, you would hate the people I get. Rhode Islanders are notoriously cruel as is, so it was hard for me to not want to snap the neck of the woman I had the other night who, after I dropped the check and asked if they needed anything else, decided to look at her husband and say, audibly, "Why don't you ask her for a blowjob?"

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Yeah, you would hate the people I get. Rhode Islanders are notoriously cruel as is, so it was hard for me to not want to snap the neck of the woman I had the other night who, after I dropped the check and asked if they needed anything else, decided to look at her husband and say, audibly, "Why don't you ask her for a blowjob?"

I bet that was a barb at him, and you were just collateral damage.

[Suu]

Yeah, you would hate the people I get. Rhode Islanders are notoriously cruel as is, so it was hard for me to not want to snap the neck of the woman I had the other night who, after I dropped the check and asked if they needed anything else, decided to look at her husband and say, audibly, "Why don't you ask her for a blowjob?"

I bet that was a barb at him, and you were just collateral damage.

It was. They were fighting all night, because in RI it's customary to take your domestic arguments to restaurants instead of at home. I should start scoring them or something.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Yeah, you would hate the people I get. Rhode Islanders are notoriously cruel as is, so it was hard for me to not want to snap the neck of the woman I had the other night who, after I dropped the check and asked if they needed anything else, decided to look at her husband and say, audibly, "Why don't you ask her for a blowjob?"

I bet that was a barb at him, and you were just collateral damage.

It was. They were fighting all night, because in RI it's customary to take your domestic arguments to restaurants instead of at home. I should start scoring them or something.

Sure.  She caught him fucking around, and she's making him pay for it publicly.

I can see why it would piss you off, but I'd have been fired for laughing out loud.

[Richter]

Isn't that soliciting for prostitution?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Isn't that soliciting for prostitution?

Only if there was money involved.

[Triple Zero]

does tipping count?

[Suu]

This IS RI. Prostitution is legal.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

This IS RI. Prostitution is legal.

I thought that only applied to your politicians.