"ketchup quandary" news and stories

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.