Who knows where it had been lurking
all these years? Oh, sure, every once in a while, we were exposed to it and,
once exposed had to deal with it; but never, I swear, in the doses dished out
now by Hordes of Impertinents. If rudeness were radium, we’d all be glowing in
the dark.
In the snappy lounge of a classy
restaurant, my wife and I wait for a table. While we wait, we order drinks: she, a
scotch on the rocks; me, a beer, a bottle of it. We get the drinks. My beer is correct. Not so,
the scotch. It is not on the rocks. It is with water. I point this out to the
waiter. She says, “I don’t think so. I believe what you have is a scotch on the
rocks. It is what the lady ordered.” Politely, I disagree. (Did she really say
that: “the lady”?) She disagrees. I disagree with her
disagreement.
Why am I going through all of this?
I ask myself. We are getting nowhere. Whatever happened to the customer being
right all of the time even when he or she is not?
Our waiter, who has decided not to
disagree anymore, snatches the drink (she is put-upon), returns eventually
(still put-upon) with the same drink. “Here,” she says. “Here is your scotch on
the rocks. It is how our bartender makes it.”
Nope. This is not how your
bartender (or any bartender in every restaurant throughout all of Christendom) makes a scotch on the
rocks. This is the way. Assuming she and her bartender do not know what rocks
are, I tell her what they are. “Ice. Rocks is ice and vice versa. You could
look it up,” I say. “OK,” says she, “but I’m warning you [no longer put-upon; now quite visibly pissed] he’s not going to like this.”
You bet.
Back she comes with a scotch on the
rocks. She has a condescending swish and swagger to her walk. She slams down the drink in front of my wife (aka, “the
lady”) and says, for the record, “Charlie here [the bartender here] says he won’t charge you for
the first drink.”
Not out of the goodness of his
heart won’t he charge us, but because he dares not. How come? Because it took
him three tries to finally get it right? No. Because of this. My wife sips her
drink; she says it’s the same drink only this time with ice in it: watered-down
scotch with ice. Will we quibble? No, we are finished with quibbling. No tip
will be our quibble.
Variations on this theme rise up
like gas from an assortment of foodservice swamps.
Right, Louis? Next to me at
breakfast at the annual Travel/Holiday Awards Reunion is Chef Louis Szathmary.
I have told him my story about scotch on the rocks.
“Let me tell you something,” he
says. “It is not always the customer who is right. The customer has been known
to make an ass of himself.”
That so? How so? This so:
Chef Louis owns The Bakery and cooks in it. It is a Chicago institution. It is that because Chef Louis is there all of the time. If he should decide, one of these days, to expand and open another restaurant and then another, and show up only once in a while at The Bakery, it would no longer be an institution. It would just be another restaurant among dozen others in the city.
It is prom night in Chicago. “A group of six kids comes into my
restaurant looking for trouble,” Louis says. “You can see the chips on their
shoulders. They are out to con the restaurant and amaze their girlfriends with
their clever repartee and their give and take with the wait staff. Not
immediately do I know this, but because I get kids and their dates in here mostly on prom nights, I know what to watch for.
“As the evening progresses, it
becomes very clear what’s going on. They are complaining about everything and
anything. They are swinging around their weight by fondling money, flashing
their expensive watches, and in general being total bores in their Miami Vice
get-ups while blowing smoke in the faces of their girlfriends—themselves, I
might add, affected with the same smart-assiness, obscenely and childishly
overjoyed with their good looks and the dresses they are almost falling out of.
“Having gorged themselves on almost
every course of my prix-fixe dinner, they uncover what they sense is something
bad in the food and begin complaining loudly. Mind you, I have been watching
this scenario unfold from the start. I have been in this business too long not
to know when I smell a rat. They tell the waiter that the food is awful and
they, under no circumstances, will pay for it. They hand him their plates.
There is not a morsel of food left on any of the plates. The girls are giggling.
The boys are smoking.
“It is at this point that I have
had it. I move to the table.”
As Chef Louis spins his tale, I now
have a vision of him moving to this table of delinquents. His cut is
formidable: the prototypical stout chef with awesome moustache sweeping his
cheeks like immense parentheses. At the table I imagine two smart-ass couples
focused on Chef Louis. Theirs is a blurred focus. I imagine, also, Chef Louis
focused on the couples; his is a narrow focus, razor-sharp and unblinking.
He fills the room. With arms the
size of howitzers crossed across his chest he commands respect; and when he
speaks it is with a voice deep and thick with intimations of his Hungarian
ancestry. He tells me what he says and I can hear the words flowing slowly so
that no one in the group misses a word, no matter how hard they try to fake
indifference or to mask their cowering:
“Now you get the hell out of here and never come back. Make sure you
tell all of your friends never to set foot in here.”
Actually, the word Chef Louis
cracks is a lot more colorful: used for
emphasis and effect; street talk for kids whose level of conversation (or what passes for it) rarely rises
above that of the gutter.
Everyone at the table is startled.
An angry owner, a Chicago icon, is not what they bargained for; the bum’s rush
was not supposed to be in the cards. For crying out loud, this is a goddamned
institution where the customer, it says so right here in this dining-out
handbook, is always right.
Not this time.
While trembling at this unexpected
turn of events—a trembling that combines fear with humiliation—they try to
regain their composure and, cockily, beat a cool retreat, all four flipping
fingers. Chef Louis follows them to the door and out of it.
It is breakfast. Even so, I invite
Chef Louis to join me at the bar for a scotch on the rocks.
“Better neat,” Louis says. “Rocks
dilutes the scotch.”
