New York Times blogger Bruce Buschel has done a great service by compiling a list of 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do – if nothing else, he's given fed-up diners one more forum in which to vent their ever-mounting aggravations. Thanks for the break, Bruce.
Most diners and servers would stand behind the majority of Buschel's prescriptions, which include not cursing (Rule 45), opening Champagne without making a ruckus (Rule 29) and knowing what the bar stocks (Rule 81). But his list is far from perfect. While Buschel's document would make a fine training manual for butlers, it fails to acknowledge the realities of running a restaurant. Here's what Buschel apparently forgot:
Some things are beyond a server's control.
One of Buschel's first recommendations (Rule 4) is to offer a free drink to someone who's had to wait a long time for a table. "The guest may be hungry and thirsty," he explains. May be? I think it's a safe assumption that anyone who shows up at a restaurant is craving food and drink. But I don't know of a single server who's empowered to start giving that stuff away.
The same goes for Rule 23, which insists diners be alerted to 86'd items before they open their menus. Since the hostess usually drops off menus when she seats a table, cutting her off would require Usian Bolt-speed (and necessitate breaking Rule 33 – Do not bang into chairs or tables.)
Hostesses, of course, should brief diners on which items are no longer available. But often they don't, just as the kitchen often turns out the first appetizer on a ticket a full 12 minutes before the second appetizer is ready. I completely agree that servers should "bring all the appetizers at the same time" (Rule 60), but I won't let a tray of raw oysters sit in the window while a new guy struggles to properly heat a dish of crab dip.
Growers in the nation's southernmost commercial apple-producing region are fighting a change in crop insurance law, which they claim could wipe out a 200-year-old industry.
Henderson County, N.C. -- a stretch of Southern Appalachia where the first apple trees were planted by a Loyalist on the run from the Revolutionary Army -- today generates about $24 million in annual apple revenue, representing 85 percent of the state's apple crop. But the region's 150-plus growers have been hard hit in recent years by calamities including frost, wind and hail.
Owings credits the Federal Crop Insurance Program, which reimburses growers for lost apples at a rate of $9.25 a bushel, with keeping area orchards solvent. He's worried a new proposal to significantly lower disaster payouts for lesser-grade apples could prove devastating.
The nation's only Giant Omelette Celebration will mark its 25th anniversary this weekend by adding one more egg to its 12-foot skillet.
The town of Abbeville, La., in 1984, joined the confederation of seven cities from Argentina to Belgium that annually commemorates Napoleon's order for a tiny town in southern France to produce an army-sized omelette. Bessieres upheld the tradition long after Napoleon's troops had gone, cooking oversized omelettes at Easter to feed the poor. The practice has thrived in places where locals fret about losing touch with their Francophone heritage.
But that doesn't mean the Abbeville cooks are entirely faithful to the recipe favored by Monsieur Bonaparte: Festival president Gordy Landry reports, "we add a Cajun flair."
"Most of the other giant omelettes are a little bit plainer and not quite so tasty," he continues. "In France, they just stick to the eggs. In Canada, they add some ham. But the only place that puts crawfish in is us."
Years after the nation's last Kenny Rogers' Roasters served its final bird, country music stars are again making a play for their fans' food dollars.
Perhaps because so many of them hail from the South, where good cooking is considered sacred, country celebs have long been inordinately fond of the eponymous restaurant ventures. Once as critical to an Opry member's cred as a Nudie suit, signature restaurants have lately been on the wane, with once-proud institutions such as Twitty Burger and Minnie Pearl Fried Chicken going the way of the cassette tape. But a series of openings set for this fall suggests country musicians may still harbor culinary ambitions.
White-hatted crooner Alan Jackson doesn't have an endeavor of his own, but showed up this week at a Nashville area Cracker Barrel to introduce a new line of spices, clothing and home goods, including an Alan Jackson rocking chair. According to Jackson's spokeswoman Nicole Dona, the singer likes to take his daughters to the homestyle chain.
"The family will still stop now and then when they are on their way back from the lake," she writes in a e-mail to Slashfood. "He loves the breakfast and also the meatloaf sandwich."
What matters most to a restaurant? Is it the guests, who pay startling sums of money to be there? Is it the local farmers who grow the ingredients that fill the pantry? Or the cooks who craft dishes worth buying?
No, no and no. Judging from the amount of care expended, there's nothing restaurants value quite so highly as ketchup.
Say a table orders two rounds of onion rings and a single serving of fries. By the end of the meal, those grease-happy diners will likely have burned through half a bottle of ketchup. But that bottle won't reappear in its half-empty state, nor will it be topped off from the giant bladder bag of ketchup that's a fixture on most restaurant kitchen walls. Instead, a server will slowly pour the vestigial ketchup into another under-filled ketchup bottle, creating one full bottle (and one bottle bound for the dish room).
Marrying ketchup is standard practice at every restaurant where ketchup is consumed, which – at least in this country – means every restaurant, period. With the almost imperceptible exception of hoity-toity places that make their own ketchup and serve it in ramekins, American restaurants rely on 10-ounce Heinz ketchup bottles – and expect their servers to keep said bottles looking fresh.
After spending more than two decades in development, a mandarin hybrid that some fruit experts are calling "the best thing they've ever eaten in the world of citrus" is now on the market, albeit in limited quantities.
When Gmitter joined the Florida faculty in 1985, he discovered his predecessor's experimental citrus groves had been destroyed. Only a block's worth of trees remained, and most of those were "ugly to look at and horrible to eat." But among the duds, he found a tree growing superb orange fruit. He and his colleagues used that tree to create the university's first-ever cultivar.
Since citrus breeding is slow going, the introduction of new varieties is relatively rare. But Peter Chaires, executive director of the company that holds licensing rights to the Sugar Belle, says the fruit could mark the start of a citrus golden age.
"This is the first one out of a long pipeline," Chaires says. "We have some interesting things coming, including an easy-peel mandarin. We'll see varieties for fresh consumption, varieties for the juice market and a lemon-lime hybrid."
Recipe writer Debbie Moose laments not having linguica on hand for a proper caldo verde, a soup she swears is perfectly suited for fall in the Southeast.
Triangle-area foodies go gaga for a Puerto Rican eatery nestled in the rear room of a suburban tchotchke shop selling scented candles and Raggedy Ann dolls.
Ever want to tell Food Network star and TGIFriday's pitchman Guy Fieri where to go? The Observer reader who submits the best essay on which three area restos Fieri should patronize during his visit later this month will win two tickets to his show.
The state of Louisiana, which produces one-third of the nation's oysters, has mustered the first quasi-official response to new FDA guidelines banning the sale of unprocessed Gulf oysters from April through October.
The strict new rules, designed to combat the deadly Vibrio vulnificus bacteria that swarms in warm water, require Texas, Florida and Louisiana oyster processors to freeze, heat, radiate or pressurize their oysters. But oyster connoisseurs worry their favored bivalves won't be the only casualty of post-harvest processing; Insiders suspect the law will also kill the Gulf coast's oyster industry.
There are statues of Colonel Harland Sanders standing sentry at KFC outlets across Asia, but the town where the legendary restaurateur opened his first café has long resisted memorializing the man many locals consider a fast-talking, two-timing scoundrel.
"There are a lot of people here who knew him from way back," sighs Suzie Razmus, newly appointed chair of the Corbin (Ky.) Tourism Commission. "How can I say this? He wasn't exactly ..."
Universally beloved?
"Yes, exactly," Razmus says, with the obvious relief of a publicity pro saved from uttering something more damning. "You hear stories about women and his colorful language that didn't sit well with a small conservative town. There are still people here that say he owes their great-aunt money, or he fired their grandfather."
A pair of Cajun seasoning companies whose names allude to domestic rough-housing are now preparing to scuffle in court.
The makers of "Slap Ya Mama" last week sued the entrepreneur behind "Punch Ya Daddy," claiming the upstart brand infringes upon their trademark. William Stagg, attorney for the plaintiff, says it's not what's in the cartons of Kirby Falcon's proprietary South Louisiana spice blend that concerns his client: It's the name and logo emblazoned on their labels.
"We don't really know what the recipe is, but we believe the packaging and image my customer has created for Slap Ya Mama is unique," Stagg says. "We believe this brand is calculated to capture our market."
Falcon's attorney did not return calls seeking comment.
According to a June story in Houma Today, Falcon developed his seasoning mix in 2007 while working the grill at his strip-mall lunch counter. He found a name for his product after his 4-year-old son yelped, "I'm going to punch ya, daddy." Punch Ya Daddy is now sold in more than 100 stores across Louisiana.
I have nothing but speculation and conjecture to back me up, but I suspect the heyday of the uniform is over. Because really, when's the last time you saw a cleaning woman in a too-short black dress and frilly white pinafore? It's nearly impossible to find a trash collector in a bow tie or a nurse with a starched cap these days.
But while official dress codes may have relaxed nearly everywhere, most restaurant servers are still expected to wear a uniform. Even workers allowed some sartorial leeway -- many employee manuals call for any jeans, any black pants or any red bandanna – are typically issued a standard apron. Uniforms connote professionalism, cleanliness and discipline; all fine server attributes, and all apparently forgotten come holiday time.
Whether it's a show of spirit or a cynical ploy to remind customers there's somewhere else they'd rather be, servers can be counted upon to modify their uniforms in keeping with the season. I'm guilty of wearing knee socks with jingling bells in December and heart-shaped jewelry on Valentine's Day. Still, I'm stunned by what some of my colleagues wear on Halloween night. Are customers really pleased when their servers have fake blood dripping down their faces or elk-sized antlers on their heads?
While cold-hearted Halloween detractors might blame candy corn and bite-size chocolate bars for bulging kids' waistlines and tooth decay, holiday celebrants once held Halloween foods responsible for determining whom they'd marry and whether their spouses would be true.
The notion of eating Halloween foods apparently never occurred to many 19-century Americans, who instead used nuts and apples to engage the occult. The nation's first Halloweeners burnt walnuts, scattered apple peels and chomped on apples hung from strings, all in hopes of figuring out what their future held.
Halloween got its start as Samhain, a pagan autumn holiday in the British Isles marked by "mumming," or the practice of wandering from house to house and trading performances for food. Feasting -- especially on freshly harvested apples and nuts -- remained a central activity as the festival evolved into Halloween: Apple potato cake, perhaps reflecting back to the day's near-coincidence with a Roman celebration honoring the orchard goddess Pomona, was among the most popular foods. Celebrants also carved turnips and tromped into cabbage fields, believing the shape of a root plucked on Halloween would presage the shape of one's spouse. More on strange and outdated Halloween traditions of the past, after the jump.
Sweet potato pie is a Southern food superstar, immortalized in song, celebrated in literature and beloved by American food authority President Barack Obama, who confidently called the filling his favorite while on the campaign trail. And then there's sweet potato cake.
Sweet potato cake is so thoroughly obscure that René Simon, spokesman for the Louisiana Sweet Potato Commission, claims he's never tried it: "I've lived in South Louisiana all my life, and I don't think I've ever had sweet potato cake," Simon tells Slashfood.
According to him, the Pelican State's sweet potato scene is all pie, all the time. "Here, America means mom and sweet potato pie," Simon says.
A new documentary chronicling Arkansans' infatuation with cheese dip has inspired a surge of statewide pride in what might be the region's signature dish.
Since Nick Rogers' short film "In Queso Fever" was featured on the Oxford American's Web site this fall, he's been making the local talk show rounds, reminding fellow Arkansans that their beloved Velveeta and Ro-Tel delicacy isn't widely available beyond the state's borders.
"Everyone's just shocked that if they were to travel extensively throughout the U.S., they wouldn't be able to get cheese dip," says Rogers, who works as an attorney in Little Rock. "The reaction I get from everybody is we had no idea cheese dip wasn't such a big deal everywhere."
Cheese dip is such a big deal in Arkansas that the Arkansas Times includes a cheese dip category in its "best of" readers' poll – and regularly receives more votes in that category than any other. When Conway native Kris Allen was named as an "American Idol" finalist, his hometown Stoby's Restaurant awarded him free cheese dip for life -- a prize many Arkansans likely considered better than a record contract.
Serious diners may revile the open restaurant kitchen as noisy and passé, but the worst behaved among them should thank their lucky stars for the unfortified layout. After all, it's much harder for a server to spit in their food with everyone in the room watching.
But no amount of interior decorating can stop servers from taking revenge on their most miserable customers. Cads who pat their servers' behinds and cheapskates who order water, sugar and lemon instead of paying for lemonade should know their hijinks don't go unnoticed: Even the sweetest-seeming server will punish offenses at the table -- usually smiling all the while.
Spitting gets all the press, but few servers at sit-down restaurants like to mess with bodily fluids: Spitting's considered a rather déclassé and uninspired way of getting back at customers. Savvy restaurant workers aim for pocketbooks, not their guests' immune systems.
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