rant: fine dining

[haltz]

I tell guests that they can't stand in the service well. I've had enough of it over the years.

[33anda3rd]

Yeah, haltz, I do too. I'd assume your experience is the same as mine in that the level of entitlement/privilege the guest has is directly proportional to their understanding of why you'd like them to move.

I've been doing a lot of consulting lately. One of my clients has an upscale neighborhood place not far from Wrigley, near the Southport Corridor which is wealthy and white. The nights I've been in there during service at least a couple times I have to ask someone to move away from the service well so our other guests can be promptly served and the guests in that place have been like "oh, hey, sorry, I'll move" exactly zero times. It's always "well, I'm TRYING to get a DRINK" from some guy who walked in 20 seconds ago and expects 3oz of Grey Goose shaken extra cold (defying the laws of science), extra dirty with extra blue cheese olives and whose table is going to be ready in 13 seconds but he just can't [expletive] wait. OTOH, for a while I was working a shift a week at Billy Sunday, a hipster cocktail bar in Logan Square, for kicks and to keep the saw sharp, and in 8 months of Saturday nights there I had maybe 3 people stand in the pass and all three of them when asked to move were like "Oh, yes, I'm so sorry. Whenever you get a minute...."

Rich white people suck and will stand in the service well and do not give one eighth of one [expletive] if they're screwing up someone else's night.

[haltz]

My bro-in-law that took me to TDS and Fat Rice also loves Billy Sunday.

I deal with more of an entitled a-hole crowd but usually they'll step to the side when I tell them we need that space to get drinks out onto the floor. In our case, it's pretty dramatically lined with linens and a wall of garnishes, though. They usually realize that they're somewhere they aren't supposed to be. Then I start berating my partner working the front bar for letting them end up there.

Give the extra cold martini guy the full Dave Arnold thermal equilibrium spiel and watch his eyes glaze over.

Can we talk about people sitting in the middle two of four open seats now? That's also something that do not abide.

[33anda3rd]

Can we talk about people sitting in the middle two of four open seats now? That's also something that do not abide.

This I have more luck with than the service well. Four empty seats, people take seats 2/3 of the 4, I say "Folks, may I ask you to move one seat over one way or the other so we can accommodate the next couple who come in?" and I've never had a problem.

LOL I wonder if this is regional. St Louis folks get the service well/Chicago folks don't, and vice versa on the couple sitting in the middle of the four open seats.

[33anda3rd]

Give the extra cold martini guy the full Dave Arnold thermal equilibrium spiel and watch his eyes glaze over.

Haha, yeah, I think I'll just stick to commiserating with my peers over this guy.

Grey Goose martini (in his world this is just Grey Goose, vermouth is not involved), extra cold.

Sir, that defies the laws of science. Once the liquor reaches a certain temp I can't make it colder.

Just shake it for a long time so it gets colder

Sir, that's not how science works.

Just shake it for a really long time.

It won't get colder. Have you read "Liquid Intelligence"? The.....oh god [expletive] it ok I'll just shake this thing extra long, wasting my time so you "get" what you asked for.

[haltz]

Should say "that I do not abide," but yeah, I do get a lot of pushback on that one. Some people resist, saying that they'll move later if they need to, which is no good because then they'll have food and drinks and linens down and it's a pain in the ass, and also I'll watch couples pause, then keep walking when they don't see two together. Or they'll say there are other seats when even if all sixteen were open they could fill up in a matter of minutes. Arguments are a nice start to a hospitality experience.

[33anda3rd]

also I'll watch couples pause, then keep walking when they don't see two together.

That's the rub right there because you are losing two seats that won't make any money for the restaurant or you, and the people who won't move over are valuing their comfort for 90 minutes over your livelihood and that's all kinds of selfish and [expletive] up. If I were an owner in the place you work and you told me that happened on a Saturday when we're busy I'd go tell them "You can move over as requested and be served or you can sit there until you tire of receiving no service and you can leave." Full disclosure I did that once as partner in a place and it was just fine. The jerks left, called me a name, and four of the six people waiting took the four seats and enjoyed dinner at the bar.

[tlombard]

Give the extra cold martini guy the full Dave Arnold thermal equilibrium spiel and watch his eyes glaze over.

Haha, yeah, I think I'll just stick to commiserating with my peers over this guy.

Grey Goose martini (in his world this is just Grey Goose, vermouth is not involved), extra cold.

Sir, that defies the laws of science. Once the liquor reaches a certain temp I can't make it colder.

Just shake it for a long time so it gets colder

Sir, that's not how science works.

Just shake it for a really long time.

It won't get colder. Have you read "Liquid Intelligence"? The.....oh god [expletive] it ok I'll just shake this thing extra long, wasting my time so you "get" what you asked for.

Also, the more you shake it the more watered down it is going to get as more ice melts right? Not that the difference is going to be much (and probably not noticeable) but I can just imagine people like that then complaining about the drink being watered down if you shake it too long.

[33anda3rd]

You’d think, but when the liquor and ice reach the same temp the ice can’t melt anymore and the liquor can’t get colder.

Edit to kinda change my point. You cannot get a drink to the absolute equilibrium point because you can't shake or stir a drink in a manner that chills the drink efficiently enough to get there. You will get very close though and you don't need to stir or shake it extra time to get there, the regular method is fine.

Here's a fun thing you can do. Take a pint glass, pour in 3oz of any booze and cover it with ice cubes. Stir it, but stir it with a thermometer. You'll see the temp drop really fast right off the bat, then the temp will still drop but slower. You can stir for 2 minutes if you want (we stir cocktails for 15-16 seconds) but the drink will not get any colder and the ice will not melt any more.

When that person asks a bartender to make their drink "extra cold", theoretically were we to pick nits we could acknowledge that technically they are right. The drink might get like 0.1 degree colder if you shake it for an extra 10 seconds or so. But that guest is wrong because I'm very sorry to say he can't perceive the difference of one tenth of a degree. It's the same as calling a brand of vodka, all of which are by definition neutral and flavorless. If a guest wants to pay $4 more for the top-shelf vodka than the well stuff, be my guest but he's just paying for marketing, his brand isn't any more flavorful than the Modest Vodka in the well that costs me $16/L. These are both examples of a guest wanting something their way in which they don't necessarily know what they're talking about.

Edit again to just add re vodka, admittedly a tangent and a long one....

When spirits are made, a mash is made, you make beer basically. Soak grain in hot water to get the mash. That mash is then distilled. Bourbon must be at least 51% corn, rye must be at least 51% rye, rum is molasses, rhum is sugar cane juice, tequila is the juice of a blue Weber agave, etc. Vodka can be anything--corn, wheat, barley, potato, millet, anything. It has no rules like most other spirits in that regard. Bourbon cannot be distilled above 160 proof, by law. Distill to 161 and you can't call it "bourbon". Distillation purifies and removes congeners, little flavor bugs. The higher you distill the more congeners go out, and if bourbon went over 160 too many of them would be lost and too much flavor would go away. Vodka, on the other hand, must be distilled to at least 190 proof for the label to read "Vodka." It is then watered down to reach the bottle proof of at least 80. This is because vodka is neutral, so it must have virtually all of those little flavoring congeners removed--all the flavor is stripped out. So someone saying they prefer the taste of Ketel One is either one of like 2 people in the world with a palate freakishly good enough to detect it, or is fooling themself. Someone who tells you that they don't get as bad a hangover on Ciroc as they do Stoli is full of it. A person who drinks Tito's because it's gluen-free is only drinking it because Tito's has good marketing and uses "gluten-free", convincing the consumer that other vodkas have gluten. They don't, the act of distillation removes the proteins that cause people with celiac to react to it the way they do. Really, all vodka could just come in a clear bottled labeled "Vodka", but because it comes in a lot of bottle shapes and sizes and colors with different marketing tag lines ("Distilled only from Euorpean Winter Wheat") the public has generally been tricked into thinking there are differences.

[haltz]

Obviously it's impossible when stirring or double straining, but I've found that most people who want an extra cold drink are happy when you use [expletive] ice and pull back on the strainer turning their cosmo into a pink slushee. Now I want to test how well that drink holds its temperature.