116 3rd St SE
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
On Topic: Small business and restaurants
Michael Chevy Castranova
Dec. 22, 2011 11:00 am
The Mexican restaurant had been open more than a few months, so it'd passed the basic requirement to be critiqued by the city magazine for which Lisa and I were writing monthly restaurant reviews.
And, as I recall, the food was pretty good. The challenge was we were prevented from sampling enough of a variety - no matter what my reviewing partner and I ordered, the waiter would reply, “Want more chicken?”
Then, for some reason, he'd bring water. First, a couple of glasses. Then, some 20 minutes later, he brought more glasses, filled to the brim.
A short time later, he brought to the table a whole pitcher of water. After awhile, he carried over two more pitchers. ... Surreal.
When we asked what the deal was with the water - of which we'd sipped very little - he smiled and asked, “Want more chicken?”
I know, it's not easy running a restaurant. That's why I'm always surprised when folks comment - and they do, a lot - that, if they could operate their own small business, they think it'd be “fun” to run a restaurant.
Fun? Talk to my cousin whose restaurant and catering business consumed surely 18 hours of every day, seven days a week, for I can't recall how many years.
He knew how to prepare food - his fried Italian greens were famous all over town. Emeril Lagasse tried to recruit him.
His restaurant, even in its frowzy neighborhood, always was packed.
It was the accounting that did him in. His accountant practiced some creative bookkeeping and absconded with some $200,000.
When faced with buying a functioning furnace for winter or paying his staff, he closed the business.
Basic rule of economics: You can offer the tastiest greens in all creation, but bad bookkeeping, or rotten delivery, can do you in - so we saw from our many restaurant-reviewing visits.
I have to add, though, much of our reviewing experiences over the years didn't involve so much bwa-haha evil service as they were downright surreal.
A server at one small place once told Lisa, after she'd politely noted her soup was especially salty, “Hey, don't blame me, I didn't make it.”
At another restaurant, we couldn't make head nor tails out of the supposedly authentic Vietnamese menu. None of the help spoke a drop of English.
We returned, this time with my fiend Bihn. He was born in Vietnam.
Even with translation, things didn't go any better. After several heated exchanges with the server, Bihn concluded, “She doesn't know anything.”
I took his summation to cover more than just the server's lack of knowledge of food at her place of employment.
At a Ukrainian restaurant - famed as much for its owners as its cuisine - we examined the menu closely and strategized our choices, in hopes of tasting disparate samplings.
But the owner, upon hearing our selections, said, “No, you don't want that.”
We don't?
Oh, no, she repeated, then informed us what she most strongly urged we should eat that evening.
We couldn't determine if she'd figured out we were reviewing her place and wanted to present what she believed were niftier dishes or she was pushing what was left in the kitchen that night.
But I can't remember anywhere else where the person taking the order actually put up an argument over our choices.
Some restaurants, of course, do have trouble with that supply equation. One place I stopped in with a friend for lunch told us it was out of our initial selections.
OK, how about the pasta?
“Uh, no, sorry, we're out of that,” noted our disheveled waiter, who appeared as if he'd spent the night under one of the tables.
How about just a sandwich, then?
Monty Python-like, he responded: “Nope, that's all gone, too.”
At which point I asked, well, what do you have?
Nothing, he admitted. The customers who were in the night before, he explained, “came in and ate everything.”
I understand a business - small or large - can't prepare for every eventuality. But you'd think hungry people in a restaurant would be among them.
But my favorite tale of a dining experience gone bad happened not to me, but to a former co-worker. The Reader's Digest version, as best as I remember it, goes like this:
Cynthia and her husband, celebrating their wedding anniversary, had just suffered through an especially gruesome meal - entrees under- or overcooked, slow service, mis-delivered items.
To top it off, after they grudgingly paid the bill, the waiter returned someone else's credit card - a Mrs. S. Harris.
My friend informed the waiter that he'd made a mistake, that her name wasn't Harris.
Oh, no, he countered. That's the card she gave him.
Cynthia insisted he take it back and find her card. He refused, continuing to exclaim that indeed was her rightful card.
A nearby waitress got involved, as the debate escalated. Voices were raised.
The manager showed up. He assured my friend her card would be found and returned to her, and their meal would be comped.
The knuckleheaded waiter was fired.
As Cynthia and her husband got in their car, she spotted the server exiting the restaurant. The waiter looked up and caught her eye.
He shook his fist at her and shouted, “You'll be sorry, Mrs. Harris!”