Monster Chiller Horror Restaurant Playhouse #1:
By: Valerie Kittell
Tags: Short Story, Humor, Life, Restaurant, Work

Monster Chiller Horror Restaurant Playhouse #1:

The Overbooked Restaurant

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash

In college and for a number of years thereafter, I supported myself waiting tables. My initial positions were in “family” type restaurants that required wearing nurses shoes and a striped pinny adorned with a giant badge that said Ask Me About Our Famous Pie. After a year in these trenches, I was elated when I scored a position at one of the very few fine dining establishments in my smallish college burg.

My attire as a server was now black pants and shoes, white shirt, black vest, black bow tie and a discreet black bar apron with pockets in which to keep an order book and wine-opener. Very elegant, I felt like Cinderella plucked from the ash bins and taken to the ball.

The owner of my new gig ran a well-known pizza/Italian restaurant on the other side of town when he decided to embark on his upscale adventure. Although successful, mostly as a result of being the only place around open until 3:00 am, the proprietor had a reputation for being “difficult”. In what was probably an unwise business decision, he entwined the name of the smaller pizza-type restaurant into the name of the new establishment, as in Difficult Guy’s Pizza and it’s fine dining sibling Difficult Guy’s Restaurant Extraordinaire.

It turns out that there really wasn’t much of a call for an expensive, upscale fine dining restaurant in the town beyond what already existed. Business was extremely slow except for Saturday nights or when there was a conference in town creating an influx of expense accounts and people who didn’t carry a grudge against Difficult Guy. Weeknight business averaged maybe twenty to thirty covers a night, just enough to keep the business on life support due to the high average cost per customer.

In the restaurant business there is one truism you can count on : Serving staff always wants to go home early, especially in slower restaurants.

The servers begin sidling up to management five minutes into their shifts and say “If you cut someone off, could it be me? I have an exam tomorrow,” or something similar. Then staff start quarreling among themselves about who left early the day before. The hectoring of management will be relentless, until finally, they give in and send two servers home and keep two on.

Twenty minutes later, the door opens and in walks fifteen conferees and two unrelated tables of four and six guys who want to watch the game and eat at the bar. Because that’s how the restaurant universe works. It is foreordained that at any given time a restaurant will be either over or understaffed.

Oh, did I mention they also let the bartender go home early and DG’s wife is tending bar and she doesn’t know what “muddle” means? The twenty nine customers will all get wretched service and leave to spread tales of their woe to locals who will respond “You went to Difficult Guys Restaurant Extraordinaire? Wow, wish I’d known, I’d have warned you. Next time go to the Little House of Ivy on the Commons.”

Because I needed the money and never left early and was actually a decent waitress, I managed to survive on my tips and didn’t leave the sinking ship, although many did. There was constant turn-over, which was especially bad because this restaurant had a menu which involved things like a Caesar salad tossed tableside, Steak Diane flambeed in a chafing dish, Chateaubriand served from a trolley, etc., a real challenge for even long experienced servers and cooks. The menu was huge. We had duck, we had lamb, we had scampi. Oh, wait, the Scampi.

I hope you don’t think this is scampi! Source

Our Scampi was similar to langoustine, and cooked in a Madeira reduction, NOT shrimp or prawns in garlic butter sauce; Difficult Guy enjoyed nothing more than going out into the dining room and pontificating about the difference between Scampi as known in the Mediterranean region and Europe in general vs “scampi-style” shrimp as served in inferior American restaurants.

Bets would be taken in the server station over how hot the discussion would become and whether the customer had the fortitude to withstand it without tossing back their martini and calling for the check before ordering entrees. The staff begged DG to simply change the name of the entree, to no avail. One of my co-workers wrote a very funny little handout called “So You Want To Order Scampi” which laid out the etymology, the carcinology and the epicurean history of the dish complete with illustrations and a pop quiz. Unfortunately a copy was carelessly left at the bar, and after extensive investigation that rivaled the search for the Zodiac Killer, the author was outed and fired.

But I digress. The title of this episode, is after all, The Overbooked Restaurant. How did Too Fancy For You, ever become overbooked?

Two words — Graduation Weekend. Imagine if you will, a small university city over saturated with pizza and burger joints and underpopulated with restaurants of the caliber required for major celebratory life events involving large numbers of family members. The calls for reservations began coming in months before and not surprisingly, DG’s wife, the Inept Bartender, proved even more inept as Reservations/Host/Scheduler for the annual Biggest Restaurant Weekend of The Year. They owned another restaurant in town, so there really is no excuse for what occurred that weekend, that year, in that town.

When DG’s wife finally began collating her various Post-it Notes and loose scribbles and multiple notebooks to cobble together at the last minute the reservation plan for the Big Day, it was discovered that she had insanely overbooked the place.

With all the dining rooms open, the place could seat around 200. She had reservations for around 800 people, clustered in prime time and in large parties. This is critical because large groups take more time in turning over tables. It’s possible that this restaurant could have served close to the amount of people it booked IF they had been spaced coherently timewise and if the menu had been reduced, neither of which happened. She had no way to rectify the situation as she had rarely collected phone numbers for confirmation, which wouldn’t have mattered anyway, since this was before cell phones and all of the numbers would have been useless because they were home numbers and right now all those happy glowing parents were NOT AT HOME. They were here, in-town, clogging up every street and hotel and inn and store and shop and soon they would be at our door.

The horror of what was about to occur was made known to the staff by the junior hostess, the one who worked almost every day and understood spacing and turnover and who had not been allowed to handle the BIG DAY bookings. When she saw the reservation sheet and the numbers and the times, she knew she was about to experience a day similar to that of the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae (she was a history major). She realized that our puny server and kitchen forces would eventually be overcome and overwhelmed by the hordes of graduation celebrants. She understood that her goal and ours in this fiasco was reduced to the most primal of all instincts — survival. And so it began.

The very first round of customers had a close to normal experience; they were similar to people who could say, “Well we had a perfectly wonderful passage on the Andrea Doria just last month.” But, their unremarkable sojourn bore no resemblance to what was going to befall their replacements. The later comers were about to turn off the Oregon Trail of normalcy onto the shortcut undertaken by the Donner Party. They too would experience despair and hopelessness and starvation, although they would avoid cannibalism. (Credit here again to the history major hostess who outdid herself with historical similes).

Inevitably, early into dinner service, all hell broke loose.The kitchen was already running out of food because, who could predict that everyone would order the most popular entrees? Who knew that Caesar salads were so enticing and that four sets of tossing tongs would be inadequate? Who knew that three trolleys would not accommodate the flurry of tableside orders? Who could ever imagine anyone taking control and eliminating tableside entrees altogether? (Something that should have happened, but didn’t). DG was STILL giving his scampi treatise, like an unhinged General Custer ignoring his outmatched troops falling like bowling pins ( credit again History Hostess whose onsite commentary recalled the reporter in Lakehurst New Jersey watching the Hindenburg dock).

Word reached the server front lines that two line cooks had disappeared out a side door. As the infrastructure crumbled around us, we servers had to go back to tables that had been been waiting over an hour for food and tell them that what they had ordered was not available. With each additional table seated, the list of what had been “86’d” grew longer and longer.

And the tables of customers were trapped! They had no options or alternatives, every restaurant within a 60 minute driving distance was booked to capacity. Even the fast food places had lines that wrapped three times around the building. As observed by the English major, they and we were like characters in a Sartre play.

It was predictable that someone would snap. Surprisingly, it was one of our longtime servers, Candy, a grizzled non-student veteran, who announced in the the walk-in cooler “I can’t take it “ and marched out into her section of the dining room where she clapped her hands and asked for the attention of her diners and made the following announcement:

“I just wanted to let you know that I am leaving. I don’t have any idea whether you will eat or not, although I tend to doubt it. Good-bye.” And she walked out the front door and left. She was followed by clans of people waiting in the lobby who finally recognized they had a better chance of obtaining sustenance if they went to a church and prayed to Saint Anthony of Padua (comment of the Religion major).

This act brought down the house of cards. Tables who had not yet received food (the majority of tables) stood up to leave . Difficult Guy ran among them threatening to sue everyone who was leaving, although how he was going to do that since he had no documentation other than Smith, Party of 15 was difficult to discern. Some servers also followed Candy’s example and left in her wake.

There’s not much left to tell. Finally accepting defeat and debacle and in an eerie Nostradamus type foreshadowing of a TV show called Hell’s Kitchen which would invade the airwaves decades later, Difficult Guy shouted “Shut it down!” He actually evicted customers who were eating and planning to pay as well as the small group of Pollyanna-type incurable optimists who were still loitering in the lobby thinking they would finally get a table and a meal.

Who will be surprised to learn that when I showed up for work the next day, there was a “Closed For Renovations” sign on the front door which stayed in place until the building was sold to a major food franchiser?

After suitable breast beating and voicing of regret, I was allowed to dust off my white nurse shoes and striped pinny and re-attach my Famous Pie badge, and trudge back to work at the family restaurant that I had deserted for the siren call of Fine Dining. All’s well that ends well, right? Not so fast.

Join me next time for the second installment of Monster Chiller Horror Restaurant Playhouse:

No, We Can’t Do That