by William Cracraft
October 7, 2002
The Restaurant
There are always things you remember through adulthood, like the time me n' Greg Hoeft went out the back door of the Perkins Restaurant we were working at and chucked half a dozen eggs each at his old '67 Camaro out in the lot. It was the dead of winter and the eggs froze to the car. Six months later I bought the car from Greg and the eggs were still on it. We sure had a good time at that restaurant.
One Saturday night during bar rush things got a little out of hand and all three of us high-school-aged cooks ended up on the roof chucking snowballs at cars on Excelsior Boulevard while a couple of dozen orders were at full sizzle on the grills. We launched a few salvos, then dropped back down the ladder in time to put up the orders and stave off a revolt by the waitresses.
One Sunday morning, Fred Nordahl made up a 20-gallon batch of buttermilk pancake batter in the big Hobart, and started slicing ham right next to it. Fred must have been a little hung over that morning, because he caught the edge of his thumb with the slicer and started to bleed pretty good. He yanked his hand away sending several large drops of blood into the yellow batter. It is important to note that the food coloring restaurants use to make pancakes yellow is dark red: out of the bottle it looks just like blood. I looked at Fred, and we both looked at the batter. Then Fred snapped the "on" switch and we both turned away.
My younger brother worked at the restaurant, but we didn't communicate often. We were too close in age and too far apart in everything else, so Ed was a model of taciturnity around me. One Sunday afternoon, I was watching the line while Ed was finishing up in back. Rosie the waitress, also a high-schooler, came off the floor and approached the chest-high window with a look of disgust crossed with disbelief and laughter. She slid over a chef's salad with the toppings disturbed. As I took it from her, I saw the steel drain from the big sink was nested in the lettuce. I knew immediately that Ed had made the salad and I had a prime chance to catch him out. "Hey, Ed!" I yells. No answer, but I could hear the distinctive shuffle a cook makes when he moves on an ever-slick floor.
He rounded the corner, immaculate whites, hair-net in place, hat at a jaunty angle. I looked at him expressionlessly and held out the bowl. He saw the drain and, seeing Rosie, realized what had happened. Equally deadpan, he plucked the drain out of the bowl, said, faintly interested, "I wondered where that went," and left the line. That could have happened to anyone.
One lazy afternoon, some months after the drain incident, a bee got on the line. I was working up a couple of orders, so couldn't pay it proper attention for a few annoying minutes. I put up the last of the food, turned, and tagged the bee with my spatula as it swung over my grill. It was a solid ping so I figured the bee was at least stunned. I couldn't find the carcass, so assumed the bee either survived or had landed behind the deep fryer, where we only cleaned on holidays. To my credit, I will categorically state that I cleaned the spatula after this incident. A few minutes later the unfortunately Rosie brought back a hamburger. The bee carcass had landed squarely in the makings along side the burger, where it went unnoticed until the diner started building his sandwich. There was only one thing to say, as I looked her in the eye: "I wondered where that went."
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