Post by Mandy Lifeboats on Jun 3, 2006 18:32:55 GMT
I'm not sure where this came from! It's a bit long but I would really welcome some feedback
It all came back to me in a rush – an event I hadn’t thought about for so many years. Strange how things come and go in such a cyclical way.
It all started a long time ago – almost forty years. I was a first year student at university, studying English, and to enhance my meagre grant I took an evening job, waitressing in a local pub. The pub was something of an innovation in those days. It was owned by two brothers, with an unpronounceable Italian name, whose parents owned a café in the town. The brothers had been to America to look at the burgeoning fast food industry and had returned with their heads buzzing with portion control and standardised menus and bulk buying. They realised that with careful control you could guarantee to serve a decent, well-cooked menu, a service which was sorely needed in the days when few pubs served food, and in those which did, the cooking was usually done by the landlady with widely varying results. They already owned two pubs locally and were negotiating for a third in a nearby town. The décor, like the food, was identical, the waitresses wore similar outfits – not identical as the brothers were not going to splash out on outfits for us but gave us a small supplement to our wages to buy clothes in the pub colours, burgundy and navy.
The pub was managed by Richard, an efficient but volatile man who lived in fear of the brothers descending and finding him out in one of his little scams or catching him disobeying one of their edicts. The cooking was done by Shep, Shep had once worked at the Ritz, a fact which we were never allowed to forget. He knew all the great chefs and opined that he was better than most. His problem was that he cooked like an angel but struggled with twin demons that constantly threatened to overwhelm him. The demons were horses and booze and there was a complicated equation that determined the quality of Shep’s cooking. If the horses were running well and the drink was flowing sweetly, his food was unbelievably delicious, even with the stock ingredients and dishes which the brothers required. If the horses slowed down, or fell at the first fence or if he couldn’t lay his hands on a drink because Richard was standing guard at the bar and he didn’t have enough of his wages left to buy it, the quality of the food deteriorated, although it was still edible. If both occurred at the same time there would be mayhem, dishes broken, as he hurled abuse at his helpers and culinary disasters, such as when one diner found a whitebait staring up at her with its deep-fried, milky gaze from her steak and chips. Not only that it was whispered that if people sent undercooked food back, Shep would do unspeakable things to it before sending it out again. But Richard put up with these occasional demonic eruptions for the sake of the angelic fare that Shep normally produced. And for the fact that he worked for low wages and was prepared to cook the odd specials that friends of Richard would bring to the back door of the pub in unlabelled brown paper bags.
On the night in question, I was still quite new. I was wrestling with remembering which tables were mine, since to poach from another waiter or waitress was considered heinous. I was also grappling with an essay which I was due to hand in the next day on the influence of Chaucer on modern literature, not knowing where to begin it. I was paying scant attention to the diners themselves because I was engrossed in ensuring that they got the right food and that I didn’t leave anyone unattended. There was a small booth in the corner and when the person in it had left and I went to clear the table I saw a small card beside the plate. I recognised it as a Customer Satisfaction card.
This was another of the brothers’ revolutionary ideas – to ask the customers to comment on their food and the service. They had the cards printed, with boxes to tick to indicate satisfaction with the food and the service and the cleanliness of the facilities, and there was a space at the bottom for any other comments. I had rarely seen any of these completed, apart from when students got drunk and ticked all the “poor” options and wrote obscenities in the comment section, or when the odd disgruntled diner wrote “Chips cold” or “steak tough”, usually on one of Shep’s off-nights.
I picked up the card and found that it had been filled in at some length, in very small, incredibly neat writing – with a fountain pen by the look of it, in blue-black ink. It read: “The soup was tasty but needed a little more pepper. The meat was tender, although a little lacking in flavour. The vegetables were well-cooked with the exception of the cabbage which was slightly over-cooked. The bread and butter pudding was delicious.” None of the boxes had been ticked. I was amused by the precision of this critique but was quite unable to remember who had been sitting in the booth. I knew it was a man but Chaucer had blinded me to the detail. There was also a small pile of coins on the table. I picked them up; they came to thirty two pence. That seemed strange but then I remembered that the bill had come to three pounds twenty. Whoever the mystery writer was he had taken the trouble to calculate exactly ten percent of the bill for the tip. I liked that; it told me much about the unknown diner.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the Customer Satisfaction Survey. I decided that as it pertained to the food I would give it to Shep. I handed it to him and with barely a glance at it he swept it onto the bin with a pile of left-overs, muttering “Stupid sanguineous crap”. One of the helpers made a warning face at me and I slid out of the kitchen before Shep could get going. But I felt sad in a way that no-one had bothered to read the carefully composed message.
The following week, again on a Thursday someone came and occupied the little booth. I wondered if this was the same person. He was an elderly man, dressed in a worn tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a checked shirt and a pullover. His hair stood out in a haze around his head. He wore small, round-framed glasses, though which he peered short-sightedly at the menu. Before him on the table was a book which he was reading with enormous concentration, breaking off with evident regret to place his order, for soup, lamb casserole and apple pie. This done, he pulled the book towards him and took out a silver fountain pen with which he proceeded to write in the book. I was astonished, I wrote in all my books but they were cheap, often second-hand Penguin Classics. This was a thick, hardback book. I watched him when I had a few moments; he would read for a while, then stare, musing, into space before dipping down to write in the margin. When I brought his food he put the book aside, reluctantly, I thought, caressing the cover gently before turning to the plate before him.
I put him out of my mind. The pub was filling up and my thoughts were constantly invaded by the seminar I was due to present on landscape and the romantic poets. It wasn’t until he had left that I glimpsed the little white card beside the forty three pence tip (Four pounds thirty three, the bill said.) The card read – in the same tiny writing – “The soup was delicious and well seasoned but could have been a little warmer. The bread roll was slightly stale. The casserole was exceptionally tasty (Shep was in a very good mood after a big win and had stolen a tumbler of the house red to enhance the casserole) but the apple pie needed more sugar to bring out the flavour of the apples.”
For some reason I didn’t want the card to suffer the same fate as the previous one, so I took it to Richard. He grunted, looked at it and, to my amazement, ripped it onto many pieces and thrust it into the bin behind the bar. “For God’s sake”, he muttered, “don’t let the brothers see that”. From which I gathered that the lamb casserole, which had featured on the specials menu, was the offering of Richard’s friends, probably rustled from a hill farm out on the moors. Again I felt strangely sad for the man who had gone to so much trouble to offer his comments on the food, only to have them destroyed.
On the next Thursday the man came again. He didn’t sit in my booth as it was occupied by a couple who were endeavouring to eat steak and chips and grope each other under the table at the same time. He sat, instead at a table in Wendy’s section. Wendy was my fellow waitress, a full-timer. She lived her life in fear of being cheated out of her tips and watched her tables like a hawk. She made no secret of the fact that she thought that I was a parasite, living off the backs of the working class. She had already criticised me for being a student, for being slow, and for thinking I was better than anyone else because I spoke posh. I kept to myself the fact that I thought that she was lazy, had a squashed up, pig-like face and pungent body odour overlaid with cheap scent. When the man left, Wendy was in the kitchen so I sneaked over to his table to grab the white card that I could see lying there. In a flash, Wendy was upon me. “’Ere, she said, loudly, “You pinching my tips, you stuck-up cow?” “no” I said and pointed to the heap of coins beside the plate. She picked them up and counted them. They came to twenty nine pence. Her face was filled with petulant bewilderment. “Its ten per cent, I explained, helpfully. “I bet the bill came to two pounds ninety.” I could see her struggling to do the maths. In the end she flung the coins into her pocket hissing “Stingy old git” as she stomped off back to the kitchen. I kept the card in my pocket, glad that she had forgotten it and a little fearful as Shep had had a dreadful day. Ocean Lad, leading from the start had fallen at the final fence. He had broken a leg and had to be put down, although if he hadn’t been, Shep would have done it for him, so outraged was he at what he considered to be a deliberate act of equine malice towards him.
When I got back to my bedsit I took out the card and read it. The poor man had written: “The vegetable soup was very thin and contained few vegetables. The trout was so overcooked as to be inedible, while the vegetables were undercooked to the point of rawness.” No pudding, no wonder his bill was so low.
The following Thursday I expected not to see him after the trout fiasco. But at seven-thirty he arrived. His booth was unoccupied and he slid into it. He had another book with him, a different one. I was fascinated to see that he had quite a different relationship with this volume. He frowned at it as he read it, shaking his head slightly at times and then sat glaring at it as he composed his notes. He wrote fiercely, stabbing at the page with his pen and then looked up with a little smile of satisfaction as he started on the next section. I thought that I would not like to be the person who had written the book. When I went to take his order he looked up at me with a vague smile and pushed the book aside decisively as if glad to be rid of it. “What would you recommend?” He asked. This was a new departure and I was nervous. I thought through the menu. An outsider had won Shep a pocket full of drink money and he was performing seraphically. “Try the medallions of pork in cider sauce” I offered. “That will do well” he said, “and I will take the cream of mushroom soup and the cheesecake”. As I brought the pork out of the kitchen I added a sprig of parsley for decoration and placed it in front of him carefully. I worked hard at giving him good service, determined to win a good report for my – and Shep’s – efforts. But when he had donned his battered old hat and left I was surprised to see that there was no card by the plate; only the forty eight pence that I knew I would receive as a tip. Puzzled, I took the plate to the kitchen. As I entered I was suddenly aware of something odd in the air. Richard, Wendy and Shep were all standing by the door. Richard was sniggering, Shep was smirking and Wendy was giggling hysterically. It felt strange, like a joke that I wasn’t in on. Richard put on an air of false innocence and said “No billy doo for you tonight then, Sarah?” At this Wendy let out a cackle and said “Her boyfriend’s given her the elbow” and Shep said “Lacking in flavour, my sanguineous botty.” Like a magician, Richard produced a sheaf of Customer Satisfaction Surveys from his pocket and flourished them in front of my nose. “I decided not to put them out tonight” he said and the three of them collapsed against the table, howling with mirth. I felt tears welling at the sheer heartlessness of it all and rather than let them see I turned around and walked out. I never went back, even to collect my wages. I got another job in another pub where the landlady did the cooking and there were no Customer Satisfaction Surveys. There were plenty of jobs around in those days.
Eventually I finished University with a good degree and went into publishing. In due course I met a man who I thought fulfilled my expectations. He thought that I fulfilled his. The trouble was, they weren’t the same expectations and when the one dream we shared – the child, the children – failed to appear, we parted with scant regret on either side, he to a new wife and, eventually a large family, and me to continue an upward journey through the publishing world over the next thirty years or so, always surrounded by books and authors. Only once did that evening cross my mind, a few years back when I read of the death of Shep in a small paragraph in a national newspaper. Someone had obviously remembered him from his heyday at the Ritz. It seemed that the demons had won out over the angels because he had died in a shelter for the homeless. Poor Shep.
Which brings me to this evening. I had travelled to see an eminent author who I was hoping to lure to our publishing house and had left his home triumphantly clutching his latest manuscript. I was staying in a hotel and went out to find an evening meal since all we had had for lunch was tea and chocolate biscuits. I found a comfortable looking pub and went in. As I ordered my meal – braised beef – I was struck by something familiar about the place although I was many miles from home and from where I had been at university. I looked at the dominant colours – burgundy and navy. I looked at the back of the menu and was amazed to see “A Golden Platter Inn” followed by the name of the brothers. So they had realised their dream after all – a nationwide chain, no doubt serving identical food in each identical pub. I smiled beatifically at the waitress who came to take my order and she looked startled. I could see that she had a book stuffed in her apron pocket and I wondered if, like me, she was a student. As I waited I took out the manuscript and began to read it; it was as engrossing as all his work and I put it aside with regret when the food arrived. As I finished I rummaged at the back of the menu holder and there they were, the Customer Satisfaction Surveys. I took one out, got out my fountain pen and began to write: “The soup was fresh and very tasty……………………………………..”
It all came back to me in a rush – an event I hadn’t thought about for so many years. Strange how things come and go in such a cyclical way.
It all started a long time ago – almost forty years. I was a first year student at university, studying English, and to enhance my meagre grant I took an evening job, waitressing in a local pub. The pub was something of an innovation in those days. It was owned by two brothers, with an unpronounceable Italian name, whose parents owned a café in the town. The brothers had been to America to look at the burgeoning fast food industry and had returned with their heads buzzing with portion control and standardised menus and bulk buying. They realised that with careful control you could guarantee to serve a decent, well-cooked menu, a service which was sorely needed in the days when few pubs served food, and in those which did, the cooking was usually done by the landlady with widely varying results. They already owned two pubs locally and were negotiating for a third in a nearby town. The décor, like the food, was identical, the waitresses wore similar outfits – not identical as the brothers were not going to splash out on outfits for us but gave us a small supplement to our wages to buy clothes in the pub colours, burgundy and navy.
The pub was managed by Richard, an efficient but volatile man who lived in fear of the brothers descending and finding him out in one of his little scams or catching him disobeying one of their edicts. The cooking was done by Shep, Shep had once worked at the Ritz, a fact which we were never allowed to forget. He knew all the great chefs and opined that he was better than most. His problem was that he cooked like an angel but struggled with twin demons that constantly threatened to overwhelm him. The demons were horses and booze and there was a complicated equation that determined the quality of Shep’s cooking. If the horses were running well and the drink was flowing sweetly, his food was unbelievably delicious, even with the stock ingredients and dishes which the brothers required. If the horses slowed down, or fell at the first fence or if he couldn’t lay his hands on a drink because Richard was standing guard at the bar and he didn’t have enough of his wages left to buy it, the quality of the food deteriorated, although it was still edible. If both occurred at the same time there would be mayhem, dishes broken, as he hurled abuse at his helpers and culinary disasters, such as when one diner found a whitebait staring up at her with its deep-fried, milky gaze from her steak and chips. Not only that it was whispered that if people sent undercooked food back, Shep would do unspeakable things to it before sending it out again. But Richard put up with these occasional demonic eruptions for the sake of the angelic fare that Shep normally produced. And for the fact that he worked for low wages and was prepared to cook the odd specials that friends of Richard would bring to the back door of the pub in unlabelled brown paper bags.
On the night in question, I was still quite new. I was wrestling with remembering which tables were mine, since to poach from another waiter or waitress was considered heinous. I was also grappling with an essay which I was due to hand in the next day on the influence of Chaucer on modern literature, not knowing where to begin it. I was paying scant attention to the diners themselves because I was engrossed in ensuring that they got the right food and that I didn’t leave anyone unattended. There was a small booth in the corner and when the person in it had left and I went to clear the table I saw a small card beside the plate. I recognised it as a Customer Satisfaction card.
This was another of the brothers’ revolutionary ideas – to ask the customers to comment on their food and the service. They had the cards printed, with boxes to tick to indicate satisfaction with the food and the service and the cleanliness of the facilities, and there was a space at the bottom for any other comments. I had rarely seen any of these completed, apart from when students got drunk and ticked all the “poor” options and wrote obscenities in the comment section, or when the odd disgruntled diner wrote “Chips cold” or “steak tough”, usually on one of Shep’s off-nights.
I picked up the card and found that it had been filled in at some length, in very small, incredibly neat writing – with a fountain pen by the look of it, in blue-black ink. It read: “The soup was tasty but needed a little more pepper. The meat was tender, although a little lacking in flavour. The vegetables were well-cooked with the exception of the cabbage which was slightly over-cooked. The bread and butter pudding was delicious.” None of the boxes had been ticked. I was amused by the precision of this critique but was quite unable to remember who had been sitting in the booth. I knew it was a man but Chaucer had blinded me to the detail. There was also a small pile of coins on the table. I picked them up; they came to thirty two pence. That seemed strange but then I remembered that the bill had come to three pounds twenty. Whoever the mystery writer was he had taken the trouble to calculate exactly ten percent of the bill for the tip. I liked that; it told me much about the unknown diner.
I wasn’t sure what to do with the Customer Satisfaction Survey. I decided that as it pertained to the food I would give it to Shep. I handed it to him and with barely a glance at it he swept it onto the bin with a pile of left-overs, muttering “Stupid sanguineous crap”. One of the helpers made a warning face at me and I slid out of the kitchen before Shep could get going. But I felt sad in a way that no-one had bothered to read the carefully composed message.
The following week, again on a Thursday someone came and occupied the little booth. I wondered if this was the same person. He was an elderly man, dressed in a worn tweed jacket with leather elbow patches and a checked shirt and a pullover. His hair stood out in a haze around his head. He wore small, round-framed glasses, though which he peered short-sightedly at the menu. Before him on the table was a book which he was reading with enormous concentration, breaking off with evident regret to place his order, for soup, lamb casserole and apple pie. This done, he pulled the book towards him and took out a silver fountain pen with which he proceeded to write in the book. I was astonished, I wrote in all my books but they were cheap, often second-hand Penguin Classics. This was a thick, hardback book. I watched him when I had a few moments; he would read for a while, then stare, musing, into space before dipping down to write in the margin. When I brought his food he put the book aside, reluctantly, I thought, caressing the cover gently before turning to the plate before him.
I put him out of my mind. The pub was filling up and my thoughts were constantly invaded by the seminar I was due to present on landscape and the romantic poets. It wasn’t until he had left that I glimpsed the little white card beside the forty three pence tip (Four pounds thirty three, the bill said.) The card read – in the same tiny writing – “The soup was delicious and well seasoned but could have been a little warmer. The bread roll was slightly stale. The casserole was exceptionally tasty (Shep was in a very good mood after a big win and had stolen a tumbler of the house red to enhance the casserole) but the apple pie needed more sugar to bring out the flavour of the apples.”
For some reason I didn’t want the card to suffer the same fate as the previous one, so I took it to Richard. He grunted, looked at it and, to my amazement, ripped it onto many pieces and thrust it into the bin behind the bar. “For God’s sake”, he muttered, “don’t let the brothers see that”. From which I gathered that the lamb casserole, which had featured on the specials menu, was the offering of Richard’s friends, probably rustled from a hill farm out on the moors. Again I felt strangely sad for the man who had gone to so much trouble to offer his comments on the food, only to have them destroyed.
On the next Thursday the man came again. He didn’t sit in my booth as it was occupied by a couple who were endeavouring to eat steak and chips and grope each other under the table at the same time. He sat, instead at a table in Wendy’s section. Wendy was my fellow waitress, a full-timer. She lived her life in fear of being cheated out of her tips and watched her tables like a hawk. She made no secret of the fact that she thought that I was a parasite, living off the backs of the working class. She had already criticised me for being a student, for being slow, and for thinking I was better than anyone else because I spoke posh. I kept to myself the fact that I thought that she was lazy, had a squashed up, pig-like face and pungent body odour overlaid with cheap scent. When the man left, Wendy was in the kitchen so I sneaked over to his table to grab the white card that I could see lying there. In a flash, Wendy was upon me. “’Ere, she said, loudly, “You pinching my tips, you stuck-up cow?” “no” I said and pointed to the heap of coins beside the plate. She picked them up and counted them. They came to twenty nine pence. Her face was filled with petulant bewilderment. “Its ten per cent, I explained, helpfully. “I bet the bill came to two pounds ninety.” I could see her struggling to do the maths. In the end she flung the coins into her pocket hissing “Stingy old git” as she stomped off back to the kitchen. I kept the card in my pocket, glad that she had forgotten it and a little fearful as Shep had had a dreadful day. Ocean Lad, leading from the start had fallen at the final fence. He had broken a leg and had to be put down, although if he hadn’t been, Shep would have done it for him, so outraged was he at what he considered to be a deliberate act of equine malice towards him.
When I got back to my bedsit I took out the card and read it. The poor man had written: “The vegetable soup was very thin and contained few vegetables. The trout was so overcooked as to be inedible, while the vegetables were undercooked to the point of rawness.” No pudding, no wonder his bill was so low.
The following Thursday I expected not to see him after the trout fiasco. But at seven-thirty he arrived. His booth was unoccupied and he slid into it. He had another book with him, a different one. I was fascinated to see that he had quite a different relationship with this volume. He frowned at it as he read it, shaking his head slightly at times and then sat glaring at it as he composed his notes. He wrote fiercely, stabbing at the page with his pen and then looked up with a little smile of satisfaction as he started on the next section. I thought that I would not like to be the person who had written the book. When I went to take his order he looked up at me with a vague smile and pushed the book aside decisively as if glad to be rid of it. “What would you recommend?” He asked. This was a new departure and I was nervous. I thought through the menu. An outsider had won Shep a pocket full of drink money and he was performing seraphically. “Try the medallions of pork in cider sauce” I offered. “That will do well” he said, “and I will take the cream of mushroom soup and the cheesecake”. As I brought the pork out of the kitchen I added a sprig of parsley for decoration and placed it in front of him carefully. I worked hard at giving him good service, determined to win a good report for my – and Shep’s – efforts. But when he had donned his battered old hat and left I was surprised to see that there was no card by the plate; only the forty eight pence that I knew I would receive as a tip. Puzzled, I took the plate to the kitchen. As I entered I was suddenly aware of something odd in the air. Richard, Wendy and Shep were all standing by the door. Richard was sniggering, Shep was smirking and Wendy was giggling hysterically. It felt strange, like a joke that I wasn’t in on. Richard put on an air of false innocence and said “No billy doo for you tonight then, Sarah?” At this Wendy let out a cackle and said “Her boyfriend’s given her the elbow” and Shep said “Lacking in flavour, my sanguineous botty.” Like a magician, Richard produced a sheaf of Customer Satisfaction Surveys from his pocket and flourished them in front of my nose. “I decided not to put them out tonight” he said and the three of them collapsed against the table, howling with mirth. I felt tears welling at the sheer heartlessness of it all and rather than let them see I turned around and walked out. I never went back, even to collect my wages. I got another job in another pub where the landlady did the cooking and there were no Customer Satisfaction Surveys. There were plenty of jobs around in those days.
Eventually I finished University with a good degree and went into publishing. In due course I met a man who I thought fulfilled my expectations. He thought that I fulfilled his. The trouble was, they weren’t the same expectations and when the one dream we shared – the child, the children – failed to appear, we parted with scant regret on either side, he to a new wife and, eventually a large family, and me to continue an upward journey through the publishing world over the next thirty years or so, always surrounded by books and authors. Only once did that evening cross my mind, a few years back when I read of the death of Shep in a small paragraph in a national newspaper. Someone had obviously remembered him from his heyday at the Ritz. It seemed that the demons had won out over the angels because he had died in a shelter for the homeless. Poor Shep.
Which brings me to this evening. I had travelled to see an eminent author who I was hoping to lure to our publishing house and had left his home triumphantly clutching his latest manuscript. I was staying in a hotel and went out to find an evening meal since all we had had for lunch was tea and chocolate biscuits. I found a comfortable looking pub and went in. As I ordered my meal – braised beef – I was struck by something familiar about the place although I was many miles from home and from where I had been at university. I looked at the dominant colours – burgundy and navy. I looked at the back of the menu and was amazed to see “A Golden Platter Inn” followed by the name of the brothers. So they had realised their dream after all – a nationwide chain, no doubt serving identical food in each identical pub. I smiled beatifically at the waitress who came to take my order and she looked startled. I could see that she had a book stuffed in her apron pocket and I wondered if, like me, she was a student. As I waited I took out the manuscript and began to read it; it was as engrossing as all his work and I put it aside with regret when the food arrived. As I finished I rummaged at the back of the menu holder and there they were, the Customer Satisfaction Surveys. I took one out, got out my fountain pen and began to write: “The soup was fresh and very tasty……………………………………..”