#65 "Happy Campers" June 27, 2013

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The Weeds

The phone won't stop ringing. It's on the fourth ring when I get up from Table 33 and sprint across the dining room to grab the phone from behind the bar. As soon as I pick it up, I hear the dial tone and see Ardes has come from in the coat room and has already picked up the phone, taking another reservation. At this point, I have been interrupted too many times to rejoin Staff Meal, and decide I should get dressed and ready to be on the floor. After all, Tim has a nearly full bar, two Marbletops, and it's not even 5:30. I change and as I am coming out of the coat room tying my apron, a four top walks in "just for drinks." I put them on Table 15 and go to the waiter's station to get them water and to make myself a cup of coffee. Usually, I have some time in between Staff Meal and Service in which I can relax a little and have a cup of coffee while preparing for the evening. I can tell that this is not one of those nights. Tonight I am already in The Weeds.

I get Table 15 started with some water and two Beefeater manhattans straight up, one with olives the other with a twist and olives on the side, a pint of Anchor Steam and a glass of Sauvignon Blanc. I take over Table 5 and Table 6 from Tim. Table 6 is Barbara and a friend of hers, so that's good. She's a regular and always has the same thing, but even she pulls me aside and asks for an order of frites. I put that order in, and on my way out of the kitchen I see I have two more tables. I put some sugar in my coffee and set up 4 waters for Table 10 and 12 and as I am doing that, Karen sits down on 11. So, I pour her water and her wine and put all of the waters and wine on the tray and pass them out. Table 10 tells me they are going to the theater and in a hurry and are ready to order, so I stand there with the rest of the waters and Karens wine still on the tray and listen to them order a beet salad with the sauce on the side followed by the chicken but with frites instead of potatoes and just a soup for the lady. Oh, and also two Manhattans, one dry, one regular, both up and made with Canadian Club. I make a mental note and hand Karen her water and wine, dropping the remaining waters on Table 12. I write out the order for 10 since we don't have a computer POS system and put it in the kitchen, because when you're in The Weeds, the last thing you want to do is forget to order food. I go straight to the bar and get 15's drinks and grab menus for 11 and 12 (even though I don't think Karen really needs one) and drop the drinks on 15. At this point they tell me that they think that maybe they'll order some "small bites" so I drop the menus for them and rush back to the menu stand to get another 4 menus. At this point, Table One is being sat with another 4 Top and Liz and her friend have snuck into Table 2B. So, now I pick up another 4 menus to make 8 for 4 different tables and drop them on 12, 11, (one extra on 15) and 1. While I was doing that, I got the drink order from 12, a bottle of Cotes Du Rhone, and then go get Liz's Extra Sour Gray Goose Gimlet and her friends Pinot Grigio order and tell Table 1 that I will be right back to get their drink orders. I forgot about Barbara's frites so I race back into the kitchen and pick them up, wondering where the heck everyone else is, and being a little sad that our runner doesn't show up for another hour, and Table 10's soup and beets salad is also ready, so I pick up all three things and distribute them to Barbara first, and then soup and beets to Table 10. I stop to say "hi" to Karen and explain that I am already in The Weeds, so that I might be a little slow when the guy on position one at Table 15 actually grabs the back of my apron and tugs on it. I turn around to him as he says, "I think we're ready to order." My blood boils a bit when the girls at the table say something along the lines of, "Oh, we are? I haven't even looked yet!" and the tugger says something like, "I'll just order some small bites for the table." At which point he essentially lists off all of the items on the appetizer menu and takes a vote at the table until they have ordered 2 appetizers and an order of frites. During this time, Table 3, 4 and 16 have all been sat, and so I have a full section and it's barely 6:00.

Flash forward to a half an hour later. The runner has finally showed up, although my section is full and then rest of the restaurant is filling up fast. It's just one of those nights where The Weeds poke through the pavement at an extraordinary rate and there is nothing you can do to stop them. I knew it was going to happen as soon as I walked into the restaurant a little after 4:30. The book was packed and the phone just wouldn't quit. That's how you know. You can feel it from the frantic energy in an empty restaurant. Now here I am, two hours later without time to even drink my coffee which sits untouched on the waiter's station, cold and stale. I see it and down it in one gulp, picking up drinks at the same time and racing over to Table 6 to get Barbara her bill. At this point I pick up Barbara's Gold Card and run it through our credit card machine. American Express has extra security so I take the extra time that it takes to process the order to process my section. I start from the front:

Table 1: Ordered food, waiting for apps, have drinks

Table 2A: Still looking at wine list although most definitely ready to order

Table 2B: Liz and friend on Round 2 of drinks. Probably ready for more. And frites

Table 3: Having drinks and looking at menus

Table 4: Drinking (light weights) very slowly

Table 5: Still here from about 5 and essentially taking up space. "Camping"

Table 6: Waiting for me to give her this credit card which is processing extra slow

Table 10: Eating entrees, going to be early for the theater

Table 11: Karen, ordered burger with half a bun rare-medium rare with frites sauce

Table 12: Eating appetizers, drinking Cotes Du Rhone

Table 15: Waiting for more frites after the first order wasn't enough, need more drinks

Table 16: Pleasent enough people. Waiting for apps....

And with that, the credit card machine whirrs to life: 

"Transaction Failed."

To Be Continued...

#64 In Color!!! June 19, 2013

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When Tim and I started this project 5 years ago, we had no idea how far it would go. We were essentially just messing around, drawing pictures at work like we had been for years before that fateful day where we liked a picture enough to take it home and work on it outside of the restaurant. That first picture that I took home is pretty simple, but has all of the insanity of later drawings in it. Take a look at it here.
Tim and I would draw on the Triple Dupe Pad nearly every day we were at the restaurant, always adding (and sometimes subtracting) to the whole thing. We would draw on them while we had our evening coffee before the rush, and then again at the end of the night while sitting on Table 8 drinking beers and talking about the evening that had just recently ended. As time went on, Tim and my schedule became less and less intertwined. We used to work three out of four days together, and so we were working on these drawings a lot during that time. As the years passed, our schedules changed so much that Tim and I only work together for a couple hours on Friday evenings when I come in to wait tables in the evening and he finishes up his shift as the dar bar tender. I am not sure if that fact of not working together has slowed down our output, but we have certainly slowed down the production of T&J drawings.
 I rarely draw these days during the pre-shift coffee break. This is usually because I am much better friends with the bar regulars now, and so instead of turning my back to them and drawing insane pictures of aliens harvesting heads, I catch up with them and visit. Then, at the end of the night, it's usually the same thing. Instead of the staff sitting on Table 8, like the old days, we all hang out at the bar and visit with our favorite regulars. It almost seems wrong to call these people regulars since a lot of them are friends who happened to be customers first. That is how I would describe these people to outsiders. Yes, we met in a server/served environment, but we have gone beyond that relationship and developed a full-on friendship. This happens sometimes in some restaurants and bars, but it happens at our place more, I think. The way the restaurant operates, and the longevity of the staff makes it the perfect place to become really good friends with the staff and regulars.
For instance, years ago, a woman named Karen started coming in to eat. She would come in and sit at Table 11 or 12 (depending on which one was open at the time). She would read on her Kindle and have a glass of wine and eat a little something. Well, after a couple of times waiting on her, I asked how she liked the Kindle (they were new at the time), and from that question on, we became friends. She would come in every Wednesday and Friday for years and years. We became Bookface friends, and we would talk for hours about everything from technology to the Opera and everything in between. Now, you are probably thinking, well, obviously a young waiter and a single woman becoming friends in a restaurant is nothing out of the ordinary. That sort of thing happens every day. The only difference is that Karen and I are completely different people from completely different times. She could be an aunt of mine or some distant relative that would be a peer of my parents. But, because of the restaurant, we are now friends. In the outside world that never would have happened, but in the restaurant it happens all the time. The fact that I have so many friends my parents age and older is directly related to working at the restaurant. And so, I guess it is a little sad that the T&J production has gone down but the reason for the slowdown is a positive thing. I mean, friendship is more important that productivity any day of the week.

#52 "Down in the Mouth" February 16, 2012

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This one is reminiscent of a bad dream. The kind of dream where you take out all of your teeth one by one and don't even mind doing it. You wake up and the rest of the day feels wrong, like there is something hanging over your head, or just beyond your peripheral vision that you can't describe, and when people ask you what's the matter, you reply, "I had the weirdest dream last night and I can't shake it." and they nod and say that they understand. Most of the times, people don't like hearing about your dreams because they are too personal to you and they don't corollate with the real world. Sure, sometimes your dreams are taking place in "real life" situations, in real cities or in real places, but most people just zone out when you tell them about your dreams. The only time people are really engaged in your dreams are the ones that these people are in, or least have a bit part in, and when you are recounting the dream,  you start off the conversation with, "You were in my dream last night."  But even then, these people assume that the two of you were having sex or something kinky, but usually intrigued and want to hear the whole thing. Then you start telling them about how the two of you were stealing acorns from a giant squirrel in Central Park and the listener soon loses interest.
The staff at the restaurant certainly has their fair share of work dreams and personally, I never bore of them. Not mine, of course, if I never have another work dream, it'll be too soon. Because when you have a work dream, it's never the happy times at work when you and the crew are sharing a good laugh or a smooth night where everything went great. No, it's always a chore and the work seems real and it's always the worst situations. I have very common themes in my work dreams and it's usually the same old crap from real life, but skewed and twisted so that it's even more annoying in the dream. And, like I've mentioned before, at least when real life is annoying at work, you are still getting paid. Thankfully, I rarely have these dreams, as I have heard that some people dream about work all the time, or at least once a week. That is too many times a week, as far as I am concerned.
My favorite dream that I have heard from the restaurant is from my co-worker Gary who had the most elaborate dream. In the dream, he was waiting tables, like normal, when his table ordered some drinks. He took down the drink order, went outside, and caught the crosstown bus on 14th Street. He took the bus crosstown to the East Side, and got the drinks at the bar, now located on the other side of town. Once he had the drinks, he loaded them onto his tray and got back on the bus, this time with a full tray of beverages, balancing the whole time back to the West Side. In typical customer fashion, when he delivered the drinks, one of the people in the party said, "Oh, that looks good, I'll have one of those as well." Gary then pleaded with the people saying, "You don't know what I had to go through to get these drinks!"
I personally love this dream mainly because I didn't have it, although it is one of the more amusing work dreams that I have heard. Mine are mostly drudgery and running out of glassware. I had a great one about dishes, but I have to save that one for later, because it was so funny that I integrated it into one of these drawings. You won't be able to read about it for sometime, because I think it's part of #81 or something. No, my work dreams are annoying even to me and so I rarely tell them to people outside the workplace. I think that telling people about your dreams is similar to telling non-coworkers about work. I am alway amazed when people come into the bar and start bitching about work. Granted, that's what bars are good for; you tell the bartender your woes and he or she can commiserate with you. However, I don't know your coworkers and the situations that present themselves on a daily basis at your job. You might be the jerk in the story, but since I am only hearing your side, I can only make half a judgement and agree with you that yes, work sucks an maybe Jimmy is being unfair in his treatment of you and your team. Because of this, I rarely talk about work outside of the restaurant except on this blog. Even on this blog, I try to stay positive about the workplace and try to look at even the negative parts in an objective light. This way, I can look at work from a new perspective when I am there and try to keep a positive attitude while working. Otherwise, I will turn into an embittered old man prematurely. Like, say, next year instead of two years from now.
This, however, will not make my work dreams cease to exist. No matter how positive I stay at work, I will probably always have dreams where I am in the weeds at the restaurant. Even if I left the business today, and never worked in another restaurant, I'm sure these dreams would resurface every once and a while. In fact, I recently had a dream where I started working at my first restaurant job after not working there for 20 years. I was the new guy again and I didn't know where some of the stuff was even though we were already busy and I was expected to know my way around since I had worked there in the past. It ended up evolving into some other nightmare, but when I woke up, I thought it was kind of funny, that 20 years later, I was still dreaming about my first restaurant job. I'm sure I had plenty of dreams about the old place when I actually worked there, but the restaurant had evolved and turned into the new places of my life. Then, all of a sudden, I found myself back there, where nothing had changed and I was out of glassware, the customers kept appearing out of nowhere, the dining room was angled at a dangerous pitch,  and I was right back in the weeds where I started. But you don't really want to hear about it anyway.

#41 "The 35th Annual Women's Mini Golf Invitational" September 6, 2011 in Color!

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With the color on this one I tried to keep the same palette as the triple dupe pad. I used the same color from the bitters on the eyes of the characters on the far left and right, and then the skin tone on all main characters is from the dupe pad itself. The rest of the color I thought looked pretty good all faded out and classic looking. This is still the only one that I used this technique with. Most of the usual coloring is done as colorful as possible, and though it has changed significantly over the years, it still remains vibrant and psychedelic as ever. The right side of this drawing might have fared better with more elements of psychedelia, but who can tell; that might have just made that side a gross generalization and  stereotypical "spaced out hippie" drawing. Pun intended. As it is, this is a little wink at the Cafe Loup itself. I was just checking the interwebs about some history about the Loup and there doesn't seem to be any written history about the place. It doesn't have a Wikipedia entry anyway. The history as I know it has been passed down by word of mouth, which is exactly what the current owners, Lloyd and Ardes want. In fact, that is how we advertise there as well, strictly word of mouth. So, I may be doing the restaurant a disservice by creating a history about the place here on this blog, but it is only a history of my experience there so it is incomplete, one sided, and possibly completely wrong. But here is the history as I know it. Back in 1977 a couple named Bruce and Roxanne wanted to open up a nice little French Bistro in Greenwich Village. They found a place on 13th Street between University and 5th Avenue across the street from Les Trois Petits Cochons, which translates into english as "The Three Little Pigs." Bruce and Roxanne thought it would be a good idea to set up their French Bistro across from this charcuterie and call it Cafe Loup, or "The Wolf Cafe." Cute, right? On a side note, the Loup still gets our pate from Les Trois Petits Cochons and if you can get your hands on some, I highly recommend it. So, Lloyd was the head chef there right from the beginning and he, Bruce and Roxanne served the Village for 12 years over there on 13th Street. In 1989 they moved locations, to the much larger space at 105 West 13th Street where it remains today. A couple years later, in 1995, Lloyd and Ardes bought the place from Bruce and Roxanne and have been running it since then. Almost 20 years! Amazing. I have only met Bruce and Roxanne a couple of times, but I guess they ran a pretty tight ship. Some of the people that still work at the Loup have been there since the early 90's and would be able to go into more detail about how it was working there back then, but I just don't know that much about that time. I do know that not that much has changed. I still get customers who come in and say, "I haven't been here since it was in the old location." Those same people remark on how the food is still the same and that it still has the same vibe that it had when it was just a small 20 seat place on the other side of 5th Avenue. So, the title of this drawing is a homage to the 35 years the Cafe Loup has been open. The stamp on the right hand side is the stamp we still use to stamp customers cash receipts and use on our envelopes. Of course, we don't have an Annual Women's Mini Golf Tournament, but I think if we did, it would look very similar to this picture. I think the Golf Tournament is a metaphor for something or other, I just don't know what it is for.
Your guess is as good as mine.