Week in Wankers

Last Week in Wankers post was a bold-faced lie. It was actually a Week in Wankers from several months ago, but I never posted it because I was recovering from the grave wound I incurred when I shot myself in the face in frustration. Then I got the new job and, well you know, bitching about the dining scene took a backseat to professionally bitching about the dining scene.

I enjoyed my first shift back at the restaurant in two weeks, and enjoyed it even more because it would be another week before I have to do it again. In all fairness, I love the restaurant, love its heart, love my coworkers, and that love sort of disgustingly carries over like sewer run-off in a big storm to my guests, who eat and drink whatever I tell them is good, and so satisfy my egomaniacal need for validation. However, there are, as always, Wankers. And this was their week:

1. Another server (who seems to be chronically blessed with encountering the highest number of douchebags of any of us) had someone return a steak they ordered "rare." The complaint? TOO rare. Too rare. TOO rare. TOO RARE. I would like to take this moment to assure all skeptics out there that we did not, in fact, slap a raw ribeye on a plate and holler "Eat up!" Our grill cooks are from Texas, for the love of GOD, TEXAS! This means they can be executed for not knowing how to grill a steak to temperature. This is the subject for another post, to be called A Note About Temperature, or Why Americans Insist on Throwing $45 Down the Toilet.

2. Most people are TERRIFIED of wine. So much that the wine list trembles in their hands, and they spit words at me with panicky desperation, words they read someplace but don't understad like, "RED! SMOKY! UH, UH...DRY!!" So eager are they to relinquish the decision to me--and yet still look like they are the ones making a choice--that they agree to whatever the first thing out of my mouth is. I could say "Well, this wine isn't smoky, but it DOES have that shitty smell you associate with cleaning out a moldy fish tank" and they'll go "Yeah, that one!!"

This explains the astronomical success of Wine Speculator and Robert Parker's "scoring". DESPERATION! It's. Just. Wine. In Spain, they bathe in it. In France, they drink it from gasoline cans. Americans are like horny, insecure teenagers at a school dance when it comes to wine.


3. When you order our Caesar salad without its three housemade croutons, and without its 2 fillets of white anchovies, you are paying $10 for a side salad of Romaine hearts tossed in Caesar dressing, and are an idiot. Oh, and I eat your delicious white anchovy fillets in the back and fill up on brain-enriching Omega-3 fatty acids so that I and my offspring will take over the world and put you and your dumb offspring in cages hung from the ceiling, and poke you with bones.

4. Someone ordered a bacon risotto, which comes with a giant SLAB of house-made bacon OH MY GOD YUM on top of it. When it arrived, he picked the bacon up with his fingers, plopped it on a plate and announced to the server, "You can take that. I'm not a big bacon guy."
Said the not-a-big-bacon-guy. Said the not-a-big-bacon-guy who ordered the bacon risotto.