Dear Feastlings,
When I began working in restaurants, it was a simpler time. We had telephones, to be sure, but voicemail was not yet a thing. There were answering machines, curious beasts with miniature cassette tapes in them, and if you could understand the scratchy message, you could jot it down on a piece of paper, and make a reservation, for example, in a big book in which names, times and table numbers were written. If you didn’t understand the name, or they didn’t leave a phone number, there was no caller ID to help you figure it out.
Staff weren’t bent-necked and scrolling through texts and TikTok when things slowed down. Mind you, we weren’t necessarily productive, but it was infinitely more likely that we’d be taking apart a grill or an oven to give it a thorough clean than, say, playing a video game. In recent years, I’ve watched dishwashers furiously thumbing their phones as they stood over racks of dishes- “I’m working at the same time though!” “Really? Which hand is working? I see them both on your phone.” I want to wave my cane for emphasis as I talk about how we weren’t allowed to use the phone or receive calls at work unless there was an emergency.
We called our produce orders in to leave on answering machines similar to our own, and hope that the tape wasn’t extruded and they got the who message without having to use a sharpened pencil to reroll the tape on the cassette. We signed invoices that had hand-written quantities of preprinted food items, or, in the case of supreme technological advancement, one that was printed on a dot-matrix printer.
Music was played on a tape deck, checks were handwritten and submitted to the kitchen in a basket, and rung up by punching numbers on a cash register.
Technology is a wondrous thing. Now reservations are made online, as are our orders. Credit cards aren’t taken with an imprint and sent in to be paid weeks later, but transmitted through the internet instantaneously, and the money shows up in our account a scant two business days later.
We’ve abandoned our analog roots for technology, and the upshot is that any glitch in said matrix paralyzes us.
Yesterday, we had neither telephone nor internet for the entirety of the day, and while the telephone issue may well have affected us 44 years ago when I began my hash-slinging career, I can assure you that the internet could have been down until about 2004 before we noticed anything, and even then, it would have made little difference. But the day was spent speculating on emails and reservations, phone calls and orders, and in the end, there was no money to be deposited until whatever severed cable was repaired this morning around 8:30, so I scrambled over here to deal with the aftermath, and skipped my daily workout, the one that keeps me from lashing out at innocent people, and everything from a technology standpoint is resolved, but I’m hoping I can keep a lid on it until I get to exercise tomorrow.
Now that we have our capabilities back, I’ve been able to post this Saturday’s wine tasting,
a Father’s Day menu,
a menu for the Bonfires of San Juan,
and I can remind you of our summertime wine deals
and of the fact that Happy Hour has been reinstated.
I assume it’s only a matter of time before we’re incapacitated again, but fortune has smiled upon us, as we prepare our food the analog way, with ovens and stoves, so even if we can’t see the reservation software, we’ll be able to cook something up for you. Hope your summer is as pleasant as it can be.
Your friend,
Doug