A Strange New World

Life in the alcohol business

Just for a change, and fun for me, I thought I would relate some experiences I have had in the business of serving food and beverages, over the years. If you are wanting to open a brewery or brewpub and have never been in this business, you are guaranteed to go on a wild ride.

Anthony Bourdain’s book Kitchen Confidential, was written to shock I believe. When I picked it up however, all I could do is think “well, nothing I haven’t seen before.” I couldn’t begin to tell you all the stories I have about this crazy business, but I thought I might relive a few here.

Tom I’ve Been Shot. I was sitting in a booth after the lunch rush talking to one of the managers. It was about 3 in the afternoon, and there was only one table left in the restaurant. We were in the balcony meeting about something when one of our waiters called up from the bottom of the stairs that he had been shot. I ran down stairs and sure enough, there was blood coming out of his back. I told the manager to call 911, but the one table left in the restaurant happened to be two emergency room docs. Our waiter survived but is still probably to this day carrying around a small caliber bullet in his liver because it was too dangerous to extract. What happened was a cook showed up in the back kitchen where people change and he had a gun in his backpack. When he dropped the pack on the ground it went off, hitting the waiter in the back.

Whose pants are those? My best friend had closed up the night before. He was a manager along with me and our other roommate. I came in to open the next morning and hanging upside down stuck to the dartboard were his pants. Now what could have happened the night before? He never said.

B13 In this restaurant I managed we did a once a year formal dining event, fixed menu, super fancy. One of our regular customers, a pretty wild guy was sitting at a booth with his date. During the evening he walked over to another table with three women. The table is B13. While he was standing there talking trash with the women - and I don’t know how this even came up - one of the women said, “well why don’t you whip it out?” He did, and she started doing him right at the table, in the middle of a full dining room. A waiter told them to take it into a different room. I swear I’m not making this up.

Super Expensive Popcorn When we bottled beer in our packaging brewery it was not uncommon for the filler to smash a bottle. It was a mess, having to shut the beast down and clean up the broken glass that went everywhere. We also served popcorn in baskets in the tasting room. We would fill the lined baskets with popcorn then stack them up on top of each other and customers could grab a basket if they wanted and take it to their table. You know where this is going. So a customer is happily drinking beer and munching popcorn until he bites down on something hard - glass. It broke his tooth and he needed orthodontic surgery. I can’t remember how much we had to pay, probably blocking it from my memory, but more than you would think. It appears that an errant piece of glass was around the table where the baskets were. A basket was on top of it and it got wedged to the bottom of the basket, and became un-wedged when the basket was placed on top of another full basket of popcorn. By the way, this is only one of many stories where we had to pay a customer for some mistake. It just happens.

A reference please We promoted a waiter to manager at our high end Italian restaurant. Clean cut, well mannered and my partner knew his parents and they were good people. My wife Sandy said he was too nice and she didn’t trust him, but we liked him. That is until he ran off to Hawaii with the weekend deposits. Seems he was addicted to coke. The insurance people caught up with him and recovered some of the money and I think he got off on probation. A few months later we get a call from a restaurant wanting a recommendation on him. He actually listed us in his references! Later we heard he was arrested again for trying to rob a bank. Seemed like a nice guy.

Look at the Boodles Bottle Speaking of coke, if I ever wanted to see the current drug situation in the restaurant, all I had to do was go to the liquor room and pull out a bottle of Boodles Gin. The bottle is a flat rectangle, and if you look at the back you could almost always see cocaine residue where bartenders were snorting it from the flat surface.

I have to stop there. I could go on. The FBI thought we were running a drug and prostitution ring because limos would show up at our restaurant late at night. Or the busboys stealing full tenderloins by placing them in garbage bags to go out in the trash, then retreaving them after work, or the septic guy with his arm submerged in sewage complaining that his wife wouldn’t like that he smelled of garlic having to do this job in our Italian restaurant, or our brewer who had just died in a motorcycle accident showing up as a ghost that the new dishwasher saw - I’m not making this up - and had no idea who he was until he described him to the manager, or the lawyer who slipped on our floor and made us change the tile out, or the customer who went around the barrier we had erected in the middle of the day in the tasting room so a manager could open the hatch to retrieve something, and the customer fell into the opening, suing us, or the bet in the bar that a customer could keep it up during sex in the walk in cooler (a lot of people were in on that bet) I guess he could, or…..

Don’t get me wrong. This is a great business and one thing I can promise you is that you will never be bored and you will always be surprised.

Next week Dr. Frankenbrew has more questions to answer.