Review of “Service Included” part deux

To continue………….I just finished reading “Service Included,” Phoebe Damrosch’s memoir about waiting tables at the acclaimed Manhattan restaurant Per Se.
Loved the book, funny food stories, love the realism, could have done without the out of the restaurant life. Sorry there chicky, your life outside the restaurant is not nearly as interesting. But I bet Phoebe [...]

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Review of “Service Included”

I just finished reading “Service Included,” Phoebe Damrosch’s memoir about waiting tables at the acclaimed Manhattan restaurant Per Se.
I have to totally side track here for a moment and switch my head over to my other business which is IT geeketteness. The Per Se website is well………… it’s interesting. Entirely Flash based with no apparent [...]

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Part Psychologist, Part Actor and Part Houdini

When I first started in the industry I didn’t have much regard for waitstaff. During my first stint in a restaurant, the owners made us rotate all of our positions after we had been employed there for a certain amount of time. I started as a dishwasher, graduated to prep cook and then line cook. [...]

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The Stock King

When I working in New York State at a small fine dining restaurant as a line cook, the Chef there was a temperamental old French chef who could curse a blue streak, you could hear the paint peeling off the wall when he got going. As a young cook it was a horrible experience to [...]

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Salespeople are not the Bad Guys

Your foodservice salespeople are the most important factors in a good business relationship with your vendors. A salesperson, regardless of how you may feel about them on an individual level, can either be the most help to you or can be a hindrance.
When you take over a restaurant, whether it is a currently running establishment [...]

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Cremated Steak

A year after I graduated from the CIA, I worked as the Sous Chef at a well known fine dining establishment in Stowe, Vermont. Every Saturday we had some regulars come in to eat religiously at 8:00, two semi-retired couples from CT. One of the gentlemen always ordered the same thing, one tenderloin-Cremated, boiled, tourneed [...]

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No Reservations

Last night we sat down to watch “No Reservations,” the remake of the 2001 German film, “Mostly Martha” with Catherine Zeta-Jones, Aaron Eckhart and Abigail Breslin. I’m afraid I liked the original better, perhaps the use of unknown actors (at least to me) made it more interesting as I had no preconceived notions as to [...]

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Are we entering a recession? It’s possible!

Up here in the Sunapee region of New Hampshire, things are very slow in restaurants locally. A new PDF out there from Restaurant Revolution, using online restaurant coupons, heavily promotes the use of coupon cuisine.  A fantastic idea and well written PDF ad release but also quite expensive in the more rural areas. Is the [...]

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