Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

An interesting thread has erupted over on MeFi about some chef in the DC area who has decided to be, shall we say, less than accomodating to diners' requests. The respondents in the thread seem to fall into two camps: those who say, "I'm the one spending money on the meal, so I should get it the way I want it", and those who reply, "Take your money someplace where your needs are more likely to be filled. You don't go to an Italian place for fried chicken." (Of course, a running joke in my family is that my father once did precisely that, and when he later complained that the chicken was lackluster, we all made fun of him....)

I tend to fall in the middle somewhere, I guess. I worked in restaurants for years, but they were chain-places, where we were generally told to bend over backwards to do what the customer wanted, within the confines of health regulations. There's a definite difference between what you can expect and demand of the line cooks at Friday's or Chili's, and what you should expect from a singular place where the menu has been specifically designed by a single chef to reflect his/her own culinary interests. But we'd still get our share of strange requests, odd complaints, and sad results of the ignorant customer. (By "ignorant", I mean, people who weren't aware of some facet of our operation or our food in general. Sometimes this was benign; other times the whole affair could have been avoided had the customer bothered to read the menu.)

I recall the customer who beckoned me over once to show me the underside of his slice of pizza, so as to demonstrate that we'd burned the crust. It was a perfect golden-brown. I couldn't understand why he considered this "burned", but as was our policy, we re-made his pizza. The second one was, in his eyes, perfect. It was also identical to the first one. Go figure.

Then there were people who would act incensed when they looked into our kitchen and saw cooks placing the toppings on the pizzas without wearing gloves. They would get horrified and disgusted; they would denounce our unsanitary conditions and promise to call the health inspector. I have no idea if they ever actually did make that call, but they would have been informed in any case that in New York State, at least, glove-wearing is not required in the preparatory stages of food that is to be completely cooked. Now, had we been handling the salad-bar condiments ungloved, or touching the cooked pizzas ungloved, that would be one thing. But that's not what we were doing. Whenever these people would complain, I would volunteer to show them our most recent health inspection report -- we kept them all on file -- but no one ever took me up on that.

In a related vein are the people who call back an hour after they've eaten at a given restaurant to claim we've given them food poisoning. Well, unless it's actually a food allergy, it takes at least four hours for food poisoning to set in, so these complaints -- one every few months or so -- never came to anything. We did have one case that was scary. A guy was traveling, ate in our restaurant, and got sick about six hours later. Seriously ill. He stopped in an emergency room, and was diagnosed with food poisoning. He called us and called our health inspector, who visited us the next day; immediately after his call we isolated the item the guy had eaten and refused to serve it to anyone else until the matter was resolved, et cetera. It later turned out, when the guy got a second opinion, that he had actually been passing a gall stone. He called us to apologize; we said we were sorry for his suffering in any case, and all was well that ended well. As for that first doctor, well -- I'm glad the guy wasn't really suffering a heart attack.

Then there were the people who didn't know some things about food. My favorite complaint here, which came up often, were the folks who thought that when you order eggs "over easy", that merely means the egg is turned in cooking. Actually, that's what "over" means. The "easy" part refers to the done-ness of the eggs, so if you're used to eggs that are pretty well-cooked and you order "over easy", you're likely to be disappointed. This wasn't typically a big deal; we'd just explain it to the customer and make him or her two more eggs.

And sometimes people don't read the menu thoroughly. The biggest culprit here was at the family restaurant I worked in. We had a number of breakfast combinations, involving various permutations of eggs, meat, home-fries, biscuits and gravy. None of the combinations, at the time I worked there, included hotcakes; but the wording in the menu promised "Buttermilk biscuits". People would see the word "buttermilk", assume they were getting hotcakes, and...you get the idea. That chain has since reworded those combos and added a couple of new ones that do include hotcakes.

But for sheer weirdness, there were people at the pizza place who didn't understand that a 14-inch pizza cut into twelve slices has just as much pizza as a 14-incher cut into eight slices. People would ask, "How many slices in a large pan pizza?" I'd say, "Twelve". "And how many in the stuffed crust?" "Well, we cut that one into eight, but they're the same diameter, so it's really the same amount altogether." At this, the customer's eyes would cloud over as they try to work through the cognitive dissonance. And for some reason, my offer to cut the stuffed crust into twelve instead of eight would only befuddle them even more.

And I won't even go into the old lady who would put salt in her coffee...or the theories we concocted about the well-dressed elderly gentleman with the thick German accent...or the parents who insist on inverting their high-chairs to put a baby-bucket in them...or the folks who would actually get offended if we attempted to seat them at a table as opposed to a booth...or the people who would show up at noon on Sunday, our busiest day, and not understand why their party of nine would have to wait a while...or the guy who actually called our 1-800 complaint line to register his displeasure that we weren't able to serve him on a night when a big thunderstorm knocked out something like three transformers, darkening two-thirds of the town and forcing us to close for the night at 7:00.

If you want to see those all kinds that are required to make a world, just work in restaurants for a while. You'll see 'em.