The kitchen was clean, we walked out to the bar.
We’d finished service, stripped the stations, scrubbed the stoves, put everything back in its place. There was a particular silence to the kitchen at that hour.
I went to the bar for something — a bottle from the well, a word with the bartender, I forget. What I remember is the man on the barstool.
He was a lawyer — the counsel for the owner of one of the largest restaurant chains in the country.
It was late. He was supposedly off the clock.
He told me about a cola the company had developed — cheap to make, so they’d pulled the old one from every location in the chain and replaced it with their own. The chain was the largest in the country at the time, over a thousand restaurants. Replacing the cola they bought with an in-house one was enough to put a serious dent in the income of the company that made it. They sued. The chains owner, whose name named the restaurants, told the lawyer he knew he was going to lose. The lawyers job was to drag the case out as long as he could — every month of delay was another month of profit on the cheap cola — and then, before the fit hit the shan, settle! He recounted it like a fan telling an inside story about a rock star.
Then he stopped and looked at me.
“I envy you guys,” he said.
I looked at him. I said, “Are you nuts? We make next to nothing. Our hours are long. The work was hard. At the end of it we went home greasy and tired. He earned more in a month than most of us would see in years.
He nodded toward the man on the barstool beside him — who was more than a little drunk.
“I’m here with him every night,” the lawyer said. “He’s the son of the founder of a very important bank. He’s the president. He has a drinking problem, and my job is to make sure he doesn’t cause a scandal.” This is my work, and I daily deal with the worst aspects of human behavior.”
He went back to his drink.
Walking home, what he said stayed with me. It still does. We saw him as rich. He saw us as enviable. Go figure?
Vincent Price came to Boston. He came in to the Ritz Cafe to eat every evening before his performance. I was the Night Cafe Chef at the time.
One night I noticed one of the busboys talking with him. Price laughed, and the busboy laughed, and they shook hands.
After service I asked what had happened.
The busboy had noticed that Price walked to the theater every night through the Boston Common — the park in the center of the city. Price was elderly. The Common after dark and wasn’t the kind of place I wanted to walk alone, never mind an old man. The busboy graciously warned him.
“What did he respond?” I asked.
“He put his hand on my shoulder,” the busboy said. “Looked at me with a twinkle in his eyes and told me: ‘My dear young man, they have all seen my movies. They are afraid of me.’”
Serving others is nuanced — sometimes personal, sometimes in the things a guest never sees. In Kitchen Notes: how a professional kitchen keeps food safe, adapted to a home kitchen. Look for the two-hour rule, but more on that on the other side of the paywall. And, how the sponge by your sink is almost certainly the dirtiest thing you own.
Kitchen Notes is available to paid subscribers.
