The Wreckoning » Uncategorized

Thanks for Nothin’.

aaronpblack — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 22:44:26 +0000

Trolling for customer appreciation down Sushi Row.

Back in America’s glorious days of wealth and excess, say, 2004, I was as guilty as the next nouveau riche hipster of foregoing the deals and bargains that involved the slightest bit of effort to realize. Rebates? Forget about it. No way was I photocopying a receipt and proof of purchase card or following Proctor & Gamble’s overly-specific, micro-printed instructions just to get a $2 check in six to eight weeks. My mailbox was crammed full of supersaver fliers that landed straight in the recycling bin. I don’t think I’d clipped a coupon since I helped my grandmother dissect her Sunday paper when I was eight. And I only shopped at Gelson’s and Whole Foods because I was certain the produce was better (it isn’t) and the meat was superior (OK, it is, but you pay through the nose for it) than what I could get at double-coupon lovin’ Ralphs. I was one of the those idiots who was too cool to carry a store’s discount card on my keychain or to walk out of a restaurant with a to-go box of perfectly good food that I had paid for and not finished. But now that being frugal is cool again, and the contents of the to-go box have become tomorrow’s lunch, I jump into economizing with the zeal of a crack head with found money.

Some businesses understand the significance of customer loyalty and reward regular patrons with a discount or freebie that really makes a customer feel appreciated. My local car wash offers punch cards which give you a couple of bucks off per wash, then after ten visits, your eleventh wash is free. Boom. Simple. That’s a deal that’ll keep me coming back and will hold a place for that little tattered card in my ultra-slim Tumi money-clip where every millimeter is sacred. For some reason, however, one sushi restaurant doesn’t get the concept of customer loyalty. And the results would be laughable if they weren’t so infuriating.

Sushi Spot, located in Tarzana at the far western edge of the stretch of Ventura Boulevard known informally as Sushi Row, distinguishes itself with excellent sushi, not with its in-house promotion. A friend and I have fallen into the habit of eating there before our Monday night poker game in Reseda. The head chef, Mika, is a believer in the warm-rice sushi popularized by Nozawa in Studio City and Sasabune in West Los Angeles. (Mika sharpened his knives under Nozawa before opening his own place farther west.) After several visits, the waitress asked if we’d like a club card. “Sure, we would.” Who doesn’t like a deal, right? We had certainly been eating there enough to warrant a little appreciation. So from then on, every week when our bill arrived, out came our cards and the woman would dutifully stamp them (one stamp per $15 spent.) I never took the time to read the fine print of what the great deal on the horizon would be, but I was sure a fine, friendly establishment like Sushi Spot would make toting the hideous, flimsy bit of viridescent cardstock around on my hip a worthwhile undertaking.

I was wrong. When I finally got around to reading back of the card as we pulled into the parking lot one night, not even the odors emanating from the adjacent pot dispensary could make the “deal” sound enticing. Here’s the pitch: One stamp for every $15 spent (excluding tip). After twenty stamps (a ludicrously high number) you get…wait for it…a whopping $20 off. Your next visit. That’s right, for spending $300+, the thanks you get is a one-time bump of about 6%.

I am a big believer that any discount of less than 10% is no discount at all, in fact, it’s a big “fuck you.” This might be the era of consolidation: Adidas bought Reebok, XM merged with Sirius, Google gobbled up everything else, but customers still have some choice, especially in something as competitive as the restaurant business. I’m one of those jerks who wants 10% off just for walking into a store instead of a competitor’s down the street. But if the store gives me a discount, or does something else for me, like throws in a freebie, or offers free repairs, or sweeps out my garage, then I will almost certainly be back. For giving me a few dollars off, that business earns the right to a lot more of my dollars in the future. We both go home happy.

Unimpressed by Sushi Spot’s promotion, but willing to take their lame discount over none at all, I pulled my tattered card from my pocket and placed it on the table when the bill came. With ten stamps already on my card, I was halfway to glory, even though the Promise Land that Sushi Spot was offering was worth less than a three-pack of dress socks or a case of tennis balls. The server took our cards with a smile, but a minute later returned grim-faced.

“Expired,” she said, pointing to the date-stamp on the top of my card. Sure enough, there it was, stamped like a due date on a library book. And right under, in bold no less, were the words “Offer is good for up to 6 months.” In my incredulity at the net value of the deal, I had overlooked the key stipulation. Not only is the promotion a shitty one, but you have to eat there hard and fast to make it happen. Twenty visits in six months—I don’t hit a gas station that frequently—just to save a double sawbuck after going in the hole for $300.

This was a deal devised by someone very opposed to making deals for anything.

Unfazed, I asked her if she would honor the card anyway and give me the stamps for the $40 I had just spent. She looked at me like I had just asked if I could fuck her sister. “No, you have to start new card.”

“I don’t think I’ll do that, “ I said, and slid my useless card back into my wallet, knowing it would be the cover girl of my next Wreckoning story.

Afterward I started wondering if Sushi Spot’s inability to grasp the concept that a reward to a customer for prolonged loyalty has to be not only meaningful, but attainable, was due to cultural differences. Would the deal the restaurant was offering, pitiful by American standards, be considered reasonable in Japan? My dinner companion that night had lived in Japan for many years and answered the question this way: “Hell no. This guy’s just cheap.”

Maybe so. (The owner certainly wouldn’t have learned good customer care from a sushi-nazi like Mr. Nozawa.) I’ve traveled extensively through the Far East and found that cutting a deal was not only acceptable, but expected. Everything was negotiable. I haggled for everything from hotel rooms to hot pots.

Ahi Sushi in Sherman Oaks offers an almost identical card promotion to that of Sushi Spot, but Ahi has the good sense not to have any expiration date and they let you redeem your card then and there when you get twenty stamps. As a result, I’ve gone through two of Ahi’s cards over the years and am well on my way through a third.

But the greatest example of a Japanese restaurant coming up with a kick-ass deal for this economic down turn can be found less than a quarter mile from Sushi Spot. Mon Restaurant, with its Reggae music and waitresses dressed like beer hall fräulines, throws down an all-day happy hour that would cause even the surliest swapmeeter to crack a smile: large beers for five bucks, from opening until 7 pm.

Now that’s a deal that means something.

Sushi Spot. 19658 Ventura Blvd, Tarzana, CA 91356. Excellent sushi. Lame promotion. Closed Sundays.

Ahi Sushi. 12915 Ventura Blvd, Studio City, CA 91604. Good Nigiri sushi, but don’t get fancy. Avoid the creative menu dishes. These guys will put mangoes on anything.

Mon Sushi. 19463 Ventura Blvd, Tarzana, CA 91356. Yaahhhh, Mon!

The Wreckoning Reborn.

aaronpblack — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 02:04:53 +0000

After a few months of licking my wounds and navel-gazing in the wake of the implosion of my former blog network and the spectacular flame-out of its shattered founder, (name withheld), The Wreckoning had landed right-side up on a new server. For two years, we found our legs while piggybacking on someone else’s shaky brand name, but now The Wreckoning is happy to be on its own. I’ll admit that at times during the last few months I thought of quitting, of wiping my memory and my hard drive clean in one glorious pass of an enormous industrial-strength magnet. I thought no one, including myself, cared.

But then two things happened. First, the weak economy gut-punched the restaurant business. A lot of the poseurs and interlopers closed shop and moved back in with their mothers. (So long, Citrus. Adios, Goa.) Only the strong survived. This was a good thing. This gave me hope. I had become disillusioned writing about the terrible treatment exacted on customers, the exorbitant prices charged for sub-par food, the forced air of exclusivity perpetrated by the fly-by-night phonies who prey on the uninitiated—not because it stopped happening, but because it wouldn’t stop. There was no end to it. So thank you, busted housing bubble. Mazel tov, recession. Cheers to you, bank bailout. These catastrophes helped usher in a much needed correction in the bar and restaurant marketplace. People weren’t willing to spend $80 on non-Kobe Kobe beef and without their inflated profit margins, the kids playing restaurant were emperors in new clothes.

The second thing was that after much malaise, I began to get gloriously, rapturously pissed off again. But the bile in my mouth tasted different, more varied. I had been whacked by the economic downturn myself. There was new frugality blooming inside me like an overstuffed Valu-Pak of mailbox coupons. I found myself on a constant search for “the deal”. My eye was even keener. My bullshit threshold was at a new barb-tipped low. In short, this is going to be fun…

Coming soon…the slow troll down the waters of Sushi Row.

Wreckoning Mailbag. Vol. 1 – September 13, 2009

aaronpblack — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 19:45:21 +0000

Since the Wreckoning launched over two years ago, the stories have incited a flurry of comments from readers, much of it warmly encouraging, a lot of it appreciative of the writing, but wary or even disdainful of a perceived snootiness on my part. A number of readers think I need to lighten up, that I’m “unfair” or “bitchy”. Some are adamant that I have no idea how a restaurant “really” works. One guy I’m pretty sure wrote to me in Klingon. It’s time to open up the Wreckoning mailbag and respond publicly to some of the things readers have had to say.

Let me say straight off that I appreciate every single comment, good or bad. I publish all of them (although I’ve lost a few over the years due to my own technical incompetence) and always try to respond personally to each one. Please include a name when writing, even if it’s “Bibs” or “Rotgut” so I can have something to call you other than “Asshole” or “Lunatic.” I promise not to correct your usage.

A large number of comments come from restaurant employees, past and present, who either want to share horror stories of their own or admonish me, with varying degrees of literacy, for a perceived lack of understanding and compassion for what servers and other staff have to put up with on a daily basis. As I’ve stated several times, I started at the bottom, working as a busboy (we didn’t even call ourselves bussers back then) in my teens and early twenties in hopes of someday landing my own station as a waiter. I did that for years. When I finally rose to the ranks of server…a dozen restaurants later, the level of frustration and humiliation was hardly different.

A reader of my last piece had this to say:

Not all servers are pretentious assholes, sometimes diners are pricks with extreme expectations. I am a server in Portland, I am not an aspiring actor, nor do I believe I am a career server. It is never my intention to provide rude service, it is never my intention to provide bad service, but i take pride in my relationship with my customers and their experience. In your blog, it is always an attack on the food or the service. I really enjoy your witty prose, but I am starting to wonder why you dine out at all if every endeavor seems to disappoint you in one way or another. You extensively blogged about something as insignificant as a bar transfer, and maybe once or twice have you written positively about an entire experience. As a former employee of the service industry, can you not have a little compassion? Was your experience as a busser/server/bartender/whatever so horrid that you must be critical of every little minutae. guess what? the world is not out to get you, i promise.

To conclude, I think I may stick with my small scaled, local, and unpretentious crowd over here than deal with the mediocrity that it sounds like you must deal with on a daily basis down there.

Oh, if only every dining endeavor disappointed me enough to write about it. I’d have three times as many entries and a book deal by now. And while I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong idea–I eat out a lot, but the majority of the time the servers, bartenders and other staff are perfectly fine. I just don’t write about them much because the blog wouldn’t be very interesting. I’m not a restaurant critic. The internet needs another snarky critic or another burrata-loving foodie like a seized-up Cash-for-Clunker engine needs sugar water. I’m trying to make people laugh and perhaps polish up a few observations into something meaningful. But there is a theme to the restaurant stories, an unnerving undercurrent that fuels my ability to write for this site. I’m here to call out the poseurs, the kids who are playing restaurant with your money. The Wreckoning is and always has been concerned with a very specific type of attitude found in a very specific type of establishment: namely, the places that care more about who they are serving and how much they can get away with charging than with the quality of what they serve or the attitude with which they serve it.

As for the claim that I “blog extensively about something as insignificant as a bar transfer” , I offer no argument; the insignificance is precisely the point. A restaurant that won’t transfer your bar tab to your table is like an opponent of same-sex marriage: they don’t have a logical leg to stand on. The bar transfer story inspired quite a bit of controversy.

Reader Jeannette had this to say:

The bartender and waiter ARE separate businesses.. Independent contractors, so to speak- The restaurant is the General Contractor, and the bartenders, servers, busboys, etc. are the “sub-contractors.”

No, they’re not. They are employees. They serve at the pleasure of the owner and are all part of the same company. As soon as restaurant gets divided into little territorial battles of “this is mine and that is yours” then it has lost the plot. But the blame for this lies with management for letting it get that bad in the first place. Again, I understand that there is dishonesty and distrust among restaurant workers, as there is in any business, but the solution is to retrain (if not fire) the perpetrators instead of letting a correctable problem become systemic.

When I wrote about the excellent restaurant Anchor & Hope in San Francisco, I got a lot if this:

TOO NICE! I like your bitchy reviews better. – Anonymous.

That reader wasn’t alone. The stories about restaurants that get everything wrong seem to be what most readers want. After I exposed Gladstone’s for the shit-tastic rip-off that it is, Kakutogi has this to say:

Christ, what an abomination. The conclusion damn near made me gag. Not the writing, the food.

The “conclusion” was a summary of one of the more harrowing dishes, Gladstone’s original seafood molcajete:an inexplicable cauldron of scallops, shrimp, lobster tail, panela cheese, bell peppers, onions, cactus, ranchero sauce and I have to stop because just writing this makes me want to hurl.

But post of the year honors has to go to a reader who, after wading through a particularly self-pitying post-breakup confessional of mine, summed up the entry succinctly in thirteen words:

No wonder you were dumped. You come off like a bitter, cunty fag.

I hear you, brother.

Posted by Aaron Black at 11:45 AM

If you would Beso inclined … – June 19, 2009

aaronpblack — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 16:16:06 +0000

Beso might be the last man standing when the economy finally recovers. If so, it won’t be because it’s that great of a restaurant. It won’t be because the food is great. The food is just good enough. It won’t be because it’s reasonable priced. It’s not. It’s just not as overpriced as some of the places that strive for the same clientele. (And most of those places have failed. People aren’t tolerating the fifty-dollar steak like they used to.) It won’t be because, as one bartender aggressively told me, “Dude, we are so much nicer than bartenders at other bars. We are so much nicer than we have to be!” He was almost spitting as he told me this, but more on that later. If Beso weathers the current economic storm, and all evidence says that it will, it will be because Beso does just enough right to not piss you off to the point of never returning.

The bartender’s bizarre, telling comment came one night when I was waiting at the bar for my friends to arrive for dinner. I asked what beers they served on tap.

“Nothing”, he replied. As a beer drinker, I’m especially sensitive to places that disrespect the suds.

“No love for the beer drinkers, huh?” I asked.

“We’re bottles only. It makes our job so much easier.”

Okay, red flag! Red flag! It’s not about your convenience, pal, it’s about mine! I’m the customer. But I just filed that one away. As it turns out, Beso stocks a decent selection of bottled beers. I ordered a Negra Modelo. He ripped off the bottle cap and smacked the bottle down in front of me.

“We normally serve it with a nice slice of jalapeño in the bottle. It’s really good.”

He might as well have been speaking Klingon. Jalapeño? Really? I’ll applaud the effort. Somebody took the time to figure out a little bit of personalized flair for something as mundane as cracking a beer. And I’m sure the result is quite invigorating, but you’ll understand if I pass. (He seemed to pout a little when I demurred.)

“No,” I said, “But I’ll take a glass.” Come on, don’t make me ask. Too much work for you again? But I will give them credit for not cramming a lime wedge that I didn’t ask for into the bottle. Can the bartenders of the world stop with that, please?

I asked how the place was doing. He looked at me confidently. “Good. Real Good…Other places are having trouble but we’re not. Later tonight, it’ll be blowing up in here.” I sipped my beer. He continued, “I mean, I can only speak for the bar, but one reason, I mean, dude, we’re so much nicer than bartenders at other bars. We are so much nicer than we have to be!”

Translation: “As big of an asshole as I’m being right now, I could be so much worse.” Noted.

Certainly rampant assholery is a favorite target of this website, and when customers are paying a couple of hundred bucks a head for the privilege of being treated like shit, I’m usually all over it. But to have the existence of such behavior acknowledged openly, well, I was stunned. Thank God my friends showed up about then. I left the recovered asshole to his jalapeños.

I’ve been seated at three or four different places in the dining room and they’re all about the same. The banquets along one wall are best and filled with beautiful people. Beso really manages to promote an air of superiority to diners by simply taking away their armrests. Astonishing. The only seating that really doesn’t work are the absurd arrangements in the bar area. Uninviting ottomans serve as chairs at tables that are uncomfortably low for eating (which of course, the unfortunates who don’t make into the proper dining room must do. Oh, the shame.)

The menu has some steady choices and some missteps. A conversation starter for sure is the “Tomahawk Chop”, a brontosaurus sized portion of bone-in beef ($64) that my friend Alan has ordered three times but has yet to finish once. He usually slices me off a pound or two. I’ll admit it’s tasty. The outer layer is perfectly charred to crispness while the interior stays pink and juicy, as ordered. The grilling station is separate from the main kitchen and adjoins the dining room like a sort of meat-based observation booth. Perhaps the proximity to the customers (or more specifically the fact that the customers can see their faces) inspires the grill cooks to amp up the effort. The results seem to work.

Overall the wisely smallish menu gives a very slight nod to celebrity owner Eva Longoria’s Mexican-American heritage without being disingenuous or precious about it. There’s a dish called Eva’s avocado guacamole with crispy tortilla chips, which my friends seem to like more than I do. The “avocado” in the above item might seem redundant until you see the next item on the menu, Todd’s artichoke guacamole with za’taar pita chips. I’ve no idea who Todd is, but I assume I’m supposed to*. I’m underwhelmed by this dish, but my friends seem to like it, so it sits half eaten on our table every time until the entrees arrive and table space becomes a premium. The other eponymous dish, Eva’s tortilla soup, sounds perfectly rustic but would be better suited for a writer who doesn’t hate tortilla soup. Otherwise, the addition of Manchego cheese, chorizo, salsa verde and pico de gallo to a few dishes upholds enough cultural identity to give the menu some personality without making the claim to be authentically Mexican. Perhaps, as I’ve written about many times in this column, this because is high-end Mexican restaurants don’t survive in LA.

A friend and I both went for the salmon steak one night. Although the waiter cautioned us that “it isn’t a filet,” we were still unprepared the pervasiveness of the tiny bones. For $34, how about making it a fillet, huh? Avoid it unless you like your meal coupled with busy work. Since then, I’ve stuck to the pork chop or the grilled striped bass and have been much happier. I’ve never been in love with the sides or the preparations at Beso, but I’ve also never left hungry. The deserts are lovely, but at a table full of guys eager to keep their shirts off all summer, grudgingly overlooked. The exception was the one time we had to wait in the bar longer than usual for our table. On that occasion the manager brought a complimentary assortment of sweets after our meal regardless. In was a classy touch, one that in other restaurants would be considered “way more nicer” than was necessary.

* “Todd” is restaurateur Todd English, Longoria’s partner in Beso. But seriously, are you supposed to know that?

Beso: Hollywood Boulevard. Located near the Vine St. Red Line station, which is a good alternative to the valets’ $7 fuck-you fee. Good bottle beer selection for a place that hopes you never order a beer. Acknowledge the niceness or don’t come back, fucker. (photo by Aaron Black)

Posted by Aaron Black at 8:16 AM

Transfers of Power – March 2, 2009

aaronpblack — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 17:43:48 +0000

There are two types of restaurants: those that will transfer your bar tab to your table and those that will not. Those in the former category send a confident signal that they have their stuff together. Those in the latter are admitting defeat before you even see a menu. I have never understood the rationale behind requiring a customer to settle up at the bar before moving to a table. It invariably hints at deeper, systemic problems within the restaurant’s chain of command and always seems a tad distrustful.

This happened to me last night at Magnolia, and it was not only annoying, but socially awkward. My date was already at the bar when I arrived. She had just ordered a drink, a drink I would’ve happily paid for had I been next to her. But at the exact moment I entered, the hostess walked to up to escort us to our table. She informed us we would need to settle our bar tab before being seated. After entirely more conversation than was needed, and after the uncomfortable moment of deciding if I should pay for her drink, even though to do so when I didn’t order one just seems plain weird, we managed to cancel the drink before the bartender had made it (like that should matter) and opted for a bottle of wine at the table.

It was roughly around the second glass of reasonable Pinot Noir that my date informed me that she couldn’t sleep with me that night because she had a “houseguest” in from out of town–a guy. A straight guy. A tall straight guy–who’s sleeping not in her guest room, but in her bed.

“Then why in the world are you out with me?” I asked. A better question, where the hell is he tonight? Did he have a date too? Mind you, I didn’t ask to have sex with her, nor was I expecting to. It was just rather obvious, because, well, that’s what she and I usually do with each other.

I was mortally offended, not that I wouldn’t be getting laid, but at her reason–and that she decided to tell me in the first place. And that she hadn’t cancelled, which would’ve been fine. And that she hadn’t come up with a better excuse than the truth. A wave of anger started to rumble deep within me. How glad I was that I hadn’t paid for that damn drink.

The drink. The bar tab. What were we talking about? Ah, yes–a restaurant that makes you settle up at the bar before being seated.

I can think of no legitimate reason why this should ever happen.

Are drinks slipping through without being paid for? If so, find the crack and fix it. If there’s a dishonest server or bartender in the mix, fire him. If there’s some glitch in the computer software or tracking process that won’t allow this type of transfer, then chuck the outdated, ineffectual system and get an upgrade. If the problem arises from infighting among the staff over whose tips are being taken or not taken, stop the bickering and grow up. Gratuity distribution should never, under any circumstances, be the customers’ problem.

And this customer was having his own problem. The woman across the table from me saw the look on my face. She heard the tone in my voice. I’m a progressive guy. My bed sees its share of boys and girls and, when it comes to sex, I’m about as judgmental as tooth decay. But this was just too 21st Century, post-gay, all-four-girls- from-Sex-and-the-City-morning-after-gabfest for me.

She’d screwed up and she knew it. She apologized. But the idea of picking up the check, which I was about to do out of some long-standing but in this moment completely irrelevant social construct, just made me feel like the biggest sucker on the planet. That’s when she grabbed my hand.

“I’ll get this,” she said. “Please, it’s the least I can do.”

And so I let her, wishing I had ordered a drink at the bar, preferably a nice 16- year Lagavulin with a large Chimay Grand Reserve as a chaser. She had a half-ass restaurant to thank that I hadn’t.

As we left, I started to feel bad. I’d let her have a good half hour of “how could you treat me like this” punishment. My self-pity was red-lining. I suggested we hit the bar next door for a drink. My treat. Besides, a nightcap would make her even later for her hook-up with the tall, non-gay asshole.

We drank together at the bar and laughed, remembering how much we like each other, but that we aren’t really cut out for a relationship. Just for fun I asked the bartender if we could move to a table and still keep our tab open. He looked at me like I’d fallen out of a tree.

“Yeah, of course.” He shrugged.

My pretend-date and I went back to my car and made out for ten minutes before saying our goodbyes. All seemed right with the world. I’ll bet her houseguest is back in New York by now.

I should really give her a call.

Magnolia – One of God-knows-how-many-restaurants that charges A.O.C. prices for Applebee’s-like service. Located near Vine on either Sunset or Hollywood Boulevard, I can never remember which. Expect to be treated with as much trust as at a check-cashing place.

Posted by Aaron Black at 9:43 AM

Valet Villains of the Valley – January 30, 2009

aaronpblack — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 17:59:07 +0000

Valet parking is one of those eye-rolling Los Angeles institutions that is probably here to stay, much like the inexplicable line of customers outside Pink’s hotdogs. Compulsory valet service is annoying and pricey for residents and a source of great derision among visiting LA bashers (to Hell with them anyway), but in a pinch, or when weather, time constraints, or serious shortage of parking arise, it’s a necessary evil.

Don´t even THINK of parking here

Let’s say I’m running late to dinner, and my friends are already at the restaurant waiting for me. Then I’m obliged to valet park. No fair trolling the streets for a free spot when I’m already keeping people waiting. I look at it as penance for being late. Maybe that $8 will get me out the house ten minutes earlier next time.

The most irritating instance of valet parking, however, isn’t the chic nightclubs and restaurants that charge top dollar to park your car. It’s the more casual spots, the nickel-and-dimers who charge a few bucks when they have no business offering valets in the first place. At no time do I ever drive away from a valet stand feeling like I got a deal, unless it’s at big talent agency or production company in Century City that provides the service for free. But those times I’m usually too busy stewing about the pitch meeting I just tanked to care about the ten bucks I saved.

In parts of town where parking is scarce, like Hollywood, then valet parking is useful. In trendier parts of the city, like Hollywood, it’s also obnoxiously expensive. Shelling out $10 to roll up to Hyde is part the glitterati game you buy into when you go to such places–as is the $12 martini. (Bottle service, however, is ridiculous under any circumstances. Three hundred dollars for a bottle of Skyy and some mixers? Suck me.)

At least the valet operations at those trendy haunts serve a purpose–finding a parking spot for cars in areas with little or no parking, and most important, allowing beautiful, underdressed women in six-inch heels and impossibly tight skirts to simply “be beautiful” without the indignity of having to baby-step a couple of long city blocks at the risk of twisting an ankle, freezing to death or being accosted by the corner meth dealer with leering eyes, a rude mouth and too much time on his hands.

According to Los Angeles’s traffic officials, a great deal of congestion in crowded areas comes from drivers circling the streets in search of free or metered parking. Valets, to a degree, cut down on such congestion. But in areas of the city where the parking situation is a little more forgiving, or in some places ample, then valets become unnecessary. And at restaurants that have their own parking lots, the presence of a valet is not only useless, but offensive. It’s nothing but a clumsy and inflammatory attempt to bilk a few extra dollars from customers.

For some reason, towns like Studio City, Sherman Oaks and Encino seem especially prone what I call the “Fuck-you valet” – compulsory, useless and more of a hindrance than a help.

Take Casa Vega , that license-to-print-money, dark cave of a cantina in Sherman Oaks that has an hour wait seven nights a week, despite mediocre fare and airport-quality margaritas. My own Baptist grandmother in South Carolina makes better nachos and she’s about as Mexican as a hockey game. Casa Vega has it’s own large, easily accessible parking lot a stone’s toss from the front door. You’re just not allowed to use it. You’d think a place that should be thanking it’s customers for 40 years of robust patronage would be happy with the profits garnered by its overpriced menu, but no. They want to round out the raping with a little post meal shake-down at the valet stand.

What is the point, really, of having valets at a restaurant that has it’s own large parking lot? The lot easily accommodates the restaurant at full capacity and street parking isn’t that bad around there anyway. Having a little more space for things like parking is one of the reasons people move to the valley in the first place. What’s worse, bordering on the criminal, is when you drop your car at the valet, then go inside to find that the wait is, say, a breezy ninety minutes. You decide you’d rather go elsewhere. You return to the valet, sometimes before your car has even been parked, only to find that they still want to charge you. Granted, sometimes they’ll let you go free (or with a tip) but it’s not a given. I’ve seen it happen.

I’m never one to throw compliments in the direction of Jerry’s Deli, but at least the one in Studio City, which has a smaller parking lot than Casa Vega on a stretch of Ventura that has fewer metered spots, still doesn’t charge for parking. Then again, where else can you pair a candy-appletini with chicken piccata and a side of kreplach and not cause the waiter to bat an eye. That place has a menu from Mars.

There are a few places along the boulevard that warrant their valet service. Cafe Bizou sits on one of the tighter stretches for parking and yet their valet is only a couple of bucks. And despite their dining chairs, which seem to have been stolen from the breakfast room at the nearest Raddison, the $2 corkage fee is a surefire crowd pleaser. Talk about knowing your clientele.

Getting in and out of Senor Fred is also helped by the presence of valets, but the attitude there is a little more mercantile. Like Firefly in Studio City, Senor Fred wears its over-pricedness like a badge of honor (as a tip of the hat to their desire to turn Ventura Boulevard into Sunset Boulevard of the north—a quest that never seems to take hold) and is reflected not just in their menu pricing, but at the valet stand as well.

Moving farther down Ventura into Encino, however, we find the two most egregious offenders of the fuck-you valet. And both of them are chains. Islands restaurant, a burger and taco enterprise that for years has remained appealing to value-minded customers offers “endless mugs” of soft drinks, enormous portions, and, in a recent development, free fries with all burgers and sandwiches–all served with friendly, south-of-the-border flair–or is it Polynesian? I can never tell, with their Mexican hamburgers and Hawaiian tacos. The Islands in Encino has perhaps the most spacious parking lot on the boulevard, and yet, even on a dull Wednesday afternoon recently, I was stopped at the entrance by a bored young man eager to park my car–for the required $2.

It would be so nice to park ones car in that spacious lot, stroll into the restaurant to gorge myself on Baja tacos and bottomless cold beer (alcohol refills aren’t free; I just pretend they are.) Then that fifty yard journey back to my car would serve as a digestive after-meal walk. I’d really feel like I was getting a deal. Instead, thanks to all those delicious frosty-glassed Coronas, I forget to have my ticket validated from Skip at the hostess stand and have to trudge back inside to get stamped just so I can pay three bucks for the privilege of having a complete stranger adjust my perfectly positioned car seat for his four second drive to the front door.

Honestly, what is the point?

And then there’s Encino branch of Buco di Beppo, a faux Italian eatery that stole it’s entire concept and family-style menu from Carmine’s in Times Square, right down to the menu board font and quaint Italianate photographs on the wall. Again, we find a restaurant that has it’s own convenient parking lot and forces customers to use the valet. I refuse. I park on the street no matter how far the walk, but I could sniff out a free parking spot in a cobweb of crosswalks, fire zones and emergency room drop-off lanes. But that’s me.

Here’s a perfectly reasonable solution. How about making valet in these places optional instead of mandatory? Plenty of elderly folks and lazy fatties with four pounds of alfredo sauce in their to-go tubs would still happily pay a few dollars for the convenience of curbside valet. As for the rest of us, get out of our way. We’re trying to park.

Ventura Boulevard: defending Los Angeles from the San Fernando Valley with a gauntlet of Ralphs supermarkets, coffee shops and cheap sushi. If you need an auto parts store, you’re screwed. Valet prices may vary.

Photo by Aaron Black.

Posted by Aaron Black at 9:59 AM

Rancor, then Hope – Dispatch from San Francisco – November 4, 2008

aaronpblack — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 09:44:41 +0000

The evening was gearing up to be everything a restaurant experience shouldn’t be: stressful, annoying and carried out on the restaurant’s terms, not those of the paying customer. We had a reservation at Anchor & Hope, the new offering in SOMA from the guys who brought you Town Hall and Salt House. (That’s how they bill themselves on the Anchor & Hope website.) But for Anchor & Hope, our table was booked a week in advance and still the best we could get was 8:45. That’s a perfectly reasonable hour in most cases, but on this night, I was with folks who worked real jobs and started their day with the roosters–not to mention two of our party had a $15-an-hour babysitter at home. By 5:30 that afternoon, were already starving and exhausted, so we called the restaurant to see about sneaking in a little earlier.

The young woman working the phones was about as accommodating as if we’d asked to take the china home with us. “There’s really no way I can get you in before the time you were given,” she told my friend. So when we countered by asking if we just showed up maybe twenty minutes early, would they see what they could do for us? The hostess replied. “You can come in a little early, but it’s still going to be 8:45 before we can seat you.”

Fair enough, it was a Friday night in a big restaurant town. And reservations are just that, reservations. Still, I was picking up some heavy attitude. This place had better be great to warrant this level of ego. (Is it ever warranted, really?) Anchor & Hope’s pedigree is worthy enough. Expanding on the brand created by local darlings Town Hall and Salt House can only be expected and doesn’t seem to have been done in an overly rushed manner. Town Hall, while a bit full of itself, is consistently good and proved reasonably accommodating to last minute reservations when I was living in San Francisco.

We arrived at 8:30 and checked in with the hostess, who reiterated what she had told us over the phone before motioning us to the bar area. Having a drink at the bar before a meal is a wonderful way to unwind, provided there is room for you at the bar, which of course there wasn’t. What resulted was forty minutes of constantly feeling like we were in the way. At one point my friend and I were trying to hold a conversation with an enormous basket of baguettes standing between us like some golden-crusted sea urchin (more on those spiny creatures later). It was a dramatic piece of decoration. But I hoped for everyone’s sake it wasn’t functional. One sudden wet sneeze and the whole evening’s bread supply would be speckled with a phlegmy dose of head-cold. As fate would have it, a server slipped between us a few minutes later and plucked out several loaves destined for consumption. We wouldn’t be having bread that night, we decided silently. (Let’s hope the management rethinks this little misguided storage decision.)

When you’re hungry, you want to eat. When you’re tired, you want to sit. Neither was happening.

Despite our enduring the restless shuffling and the hostess’s unnecessary coolness, everyone else on staff seemed ever so courteous and professional. We couldn’t even get up to the 35-foot long zinc bar to order because of the crowd, so the bartender made a point to recognize us and then walked around to our side to ask what we’d like to drink. It turns out there’s a great selection of interesting beers behind that long, beautiful bar that we couldn’t get close enough to touch.

It was a rainy, cold night. The only table that looked close to paying its bill was an inhospitable little outpost erected by the front door like a cruel afterthought. The four miserable people seated there clutched their coffee cups a little tighter every time the door opened and a bracing San Francisco breeze ripped through their bodies. The risk was too great. Aware that it could delay our meal even further, I approached the hostess perched imperiously behind her podium.

“I know you’re doing everything you can,” I lied, “But could we request that we not be seated at that table?”

The hostess nodded knowingly. “I understand,” she said. It was the first glimpse of humanity she’d let escape.

Mercifully, a few minutes later a better table opened up and we took our seats. Our waiter, Brady, turned out to be the general manager. And with his appearance, Anchor & Hope began to redeem itself. He apologized immediately, but more impressive, knew exactly what he was apologizing for. “Hi there. I know you folks were hungry and tried to get seated a little early, and here we are not seating you until twenty minutes past your reservation time. I’m really sorry about that. It’s been an unusually busy night, but that’s no excuse.”

Ok, so you had me at, “Hi there.” A heart-felt apology goes a long way in the customer service world, and Brady’s was no exception. All at once the stress of the last hour melted away. We had a great table. More fun beers were on the way. And some earnest words from the manager made us feel appreciated.

But Brady wasn’t done. Five minutes later he appeared with one of their signature appetizers for the table, compliments of the kitchen. But sea urchin, in any form, excites me about as much as putting on wet clothes. It’s the thought that counts, right? I folded my hands politely while my three friends dutifully and gratefully picked at the freebie.

Thanks anyway. (photo by Marcia Gagliardi, tablehopper.com)

Heavily tilted toward fish and oysters, the menu offered little that I could get excited about. Perhaps I was so hungry that seafood didn’t seem substantial enough, or perhaps the memory of the urchin had pointed me away from the ocean entirely. I opted for the pork, which was good, but nothing to blog about.

As we finished our main courses, a man came up to our table and identified himself as Dough Washington, one of the owners. He apologized for not getting to us sooner, citing an extremely busy night not only here at Anchor & Hope, but over at Salt House from where he had just come. He then apologized for the fact that we had tried to get seated early and ended being seated after our scheduled time. Brady had well briefed him; it was a nice touch. Then he offered to buy us a round of drinks. but our Midwestern Protestant upbringing waved him off. They’d done enough for us, I heard myself think. Fortunately, my Californian never-say-no-to-free-booze lushiness caught him before he walked away.

“You know, I think I’ll take you up on that.” I said. My friends didn’t need much prodding after that. Mr. Washington quickly returned with two glasses of champagne and two good local beers.

So at this point, we were content. The food was good, not great. But we had been well cared for after an initial annoyance and felt like all was right. So happy with the new restaurant were we that we even ordered dessert, something I’m genetically incapable of doing when a place has pissed me off. I just can’t.

And that’s when Brady hit the ball out of Pac Bell or AT&T or whatever-the-hell-it’s-now-called Park and plunked it into McCovey Cove.

“I know you folks were kept waiting tonight, sorry again. We brought you some appetizers. I hoped you enjoyed them, but I got the sense it wasn’t your favorite. And two of you ordered the pork, but you just didn’t seem too blown away by it. And we want you to be. So tonight, we just like to make you our guest.”

Pause. Did he just say he’s comping the whole check?

“You don’t have to do that.” Four adults said in perfect unison. But Brady was adamant. We hadn’t enjoyed our meals enough to please him and that was that. And he’d been watching.

So for watching, and for paying attention, and for trying to make things right, he earned himself a few customers for life–customers who will tell their friends about it, just like I’m doing now.

Anchor & Hope. 83 Minna St., San Francisco. Great beers. Avoid the bread, unless you’re already sick. Suggested dish: Order the pork, then act slightly, but not overly displeased. Good things might happen. Note: free stuff cannot be guaranteed.

This dispatch from San Francisco is part of an ongoing mission of the Wreckoning to explore the best and worst of other cities around the world. Coming soon…New York City.

Hope and Anchor photo by Joseph Lubushkin

Water, Water Everywhere – September 24, 2008

aaronpblack — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:19:17 +0000

It is our most precious resource, the lifeblood of civilization. In bottle form, it is a $12 billion industry. In its natural state–falling from the sky or melting from snow-covered mountains–it has become the stuff of myth. The piddling amounts we have in reservoirs remind us that, here in Los Angeles, we live in a desert. What we don’t bring to town in trucks, ships and cargo planes, we hijack from the Colorado River. We dedicate some of our best and brightest minds to figuring out new ways to harness it, whether through desalination or treating sewage (okay, gross). And still, with all the attention lavished upon drinking water, we can’t seem to figure out how to serve it in a restaurant.

Here comes trouble.

Lately it seems restaurants have eased off the hard-sell of pricey bottled water, but there are still plenty of places that offer up the annoying, “Flat or sparkling,” option and force the customer to guiltily confess, “No, regular water is fine,” as if we’d just agreed to bury a loved one in a pine box instead of a $12,000 silk-lined, pewter torpedo. The push toward all things green has made us conscious of those plastic bottles filling up our landfills, and removed the stigma from good old municipal (albeit filtered) water. Indeed, tap water is cool again, and that’s as it should be. As long as it doesn’t taste like rusty pipes, or the swimming pool at the local Y, I’m happy.

But there is a right way and a wrong way to serve iced water. Simply put, a water glass should be lifted off the table and refilled over the floor, not over the table. I can only begin to describe my annoyance when a server sticks a wet, dripping pitcher in front of my face and fills up my glass wherever it may sit on the table. Invariably, there is splashing, whether on my body or, more egregious, on my food. I’m completely baffled by the thinking here. As best I can figure, the sentiment must be that customers don’t want a glass they are using touched by an employee during a meal. Fair enough, but I’m not suggesting a server stick her thumb in it. No, a glass is picked up at the base, or if it’s a wine glass, from the bottom of the stem. As for coffee mugs, there’s a handle there. Best to use it.

I was a busboy for years, much longer than I was a waiter. Those hard-working men (they tend to be male) are my brothers. Yet when it comes to refilling water, they are simple doing what they’ve been told to do. The way a server handles or doesn’t handle a water glass is a decision made by management, not buy the people who do the pouring. Either a restaurant opts for the slightly more time-consuming, infinitely preferable method of picking a glass up off the table, or it goes for the splashy-splash method of whisking a cold, wet pitcher past your ear like a spawning salmon. It’s one way or the other, never both.

The worst offenders are the guys I call the Two-fisted Charlies, the guys with a pitcher in each hand, usually one for iced tea and one for water. With no free hand to pick up your glass, you can almost bank on a face-full of pitcher. These guys are all about speed–two hands, two pitchers, twice as efficient. And twice as messy. By the time they’re gone, the table is wetter than the tile floor beneath a stadium urinal.

Trying to counteract this from the customer side is something I’ve never successfully managed. When a particularly inaccurate pourer approaches my glass, I try to beat him to the punch by picking up the glass and handing it to him. Usually this act is met with confusion, as they often think I’m asking them to take it away. Or sometimes we end up doing this awkward bit of physical comedy as I hold the glass for him while he pours, which is something neither of us are comfortable with, and the splash results are worse than if I’d just taken my licks and let him do it his way.

Trying to explain what I want gets me no where. My Spanish sucks, and when I say it in English I sound like an assshole who’s giving an employee a hard time for doing his job. But on those few occasions when I effectively explain that I would like the gentlemen to please fill my glass away from the table and then replace it, he looks at me with a disbelieving stare that says, “Why on Earth would you want that?” It’s as if they’ve been conditioned to think they should never touch anything.

For those diners who agree with the prevailing idea that a busser shouldn’t touch one’s water glass during a meal for hygienic reasons, I’ve got news for you. Employees have already touched every single item near you: your plates, your silverware, and even your food, all with their bare hands. In fact, cooks touch your food all the time. And you’re still alive. So get over it. Those hands you think are riddled with Ebola viruses and staph infections are the same hands that have refolded your napkin when you were in the john. Anybody pouting over that one? No.

Once or twice, there’s has been enough water dribbled onto my food that I’ve asked to have it remade. Sorry, but a $40 New York steak, perfectly garnished with garlic butter, doesn’t need a bracing splash of cold tap water to top it off.

The other problem with filling glasses this way is that it’s pretty damn difficult to do it in a controlled manner. The varying weight of the pitcher with its fluctuating center of gravity, the cagey positioning of the glasses around the table–I’ve been know to obscure mine behind the floral arrangement just to get my passive-aggressive point across–and clunking mass of ice in the pitcher that just seems to throw off everything all conspire to make pouring water right onto the table a disaster waiting to happen. And let’s not even discuss the dangers of filling up coffee cups this way. If a restaurant is going out of its way to use a long-spouted pitcher, then ok. But those glass carafes like the ones homeboy is holding in the picture above are not meant for precision pouring.

Some restaurants get cutesy by wrapping the pitchers in an elaborate origami of linen napkins to minimize the drips from condensation. Great, now the spawning salmon is wearing a topcoat. It’s a band-aid, not a solution.

The real solution–start picking the glasses up by hand, refilling them off the table and setting them back down hygienically and unobtrusively–is not only doable, but far easier. The sooner restaurants start conditioning themselves to do this, the sooner they’ll learn that the backlash they thought they’d get from costumers is a bigger myth than an August thundershower in Hollywood.

Photo courtesy of the Continental Restaurant, Buffalo Grove, Il, where, to be fair, no one has ever splashed water on me.

Posted by Aaron Black at 6:19 PM

Gladstone’s: Still Awful After All These Years – July 30, 2008

aaronpblack — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 15:19:29 +0000

The Los Angeles Times gets it right in calling out a restaurant that gets just about everything wrong. The fact that Gladstone’s, the seafood institution on PCH in Malibu, will still be licensed to print money despite a scathing review, greedy and ambivalent owners and across-the-board bad food is exactly the kind of screw-you to the public that the Wreckoning simply can’t ignore.

There’s a special delight I take when a restaurant critic lambastes a terrible restaurant for being terrible. The big papers don’t do it often enough, always finding something positive to say in the wake of a dismal meal much like a dutiful mother offering words of encouragement moments after watching her child face-plant off a balance beam or kick a soccer ball into his own goal to lose a match. Perhaps this is because newspapers aren’t technically in the business of putting people out of business (even though theater critics do it all the time). But here in the blog world I feel no such pressure to be diplomatic. Professional? Certainly. Funny? Professionally. But kind? Not when you have the audacity to charge $75 for an iced seafood tower featuring flaccid, off-tasting shrimp floating carelessly in melted ice water, smoked salmon (huh?) that has browned and dried at the edges and poached mussels drowning in what is obviously bottled Italian dressing.

Should I pull punches? Not when your restaurant seats between 1500 and 3000 people a day, had a revenue of $14.5 million last year and still you serve Alaskan king crab legs (at $46.95 for a pound and a half) that have the taste and texture of rope. Am I being unfair? Not when your restaurant, located on prime beachfront property, serves breakfast, lunch and dinner seven days a week and still you feel the need to renovate and expand to pack in more people. Your patio is lined with tables and not one gets an umbrella–in Los Angeles, the anvil of the sun. Do you care even the slightest bit about your customers? Shame on you Gladstone’s.

Shame on any restaurant that is known more for its doggy bags (intricately wrapped foil creations in the shapes of swans, mermaids and other swimmy things) than for what’s inside of them. As Leslie Brenner’s excellent, spleening review points out, it’s because of what’s inside those bags that the need to put an artful spin on the mass exodus of uneaten food arose in the first place. And what exactly are so many people carting away from this barnacled bastion of greed? Side dishes, most likely. Huge clumps of mashed potatoes and cole slaw that get thumped clumsily down on plates to satisfy appetites that the overpriced, ill-conceived and frankly, scary seafood dishes couldn’t satisfy. I’m sure a lot of the seafood gets taken home as well; we Americans like to feel we’re getting our money’s worth (even when we know we’re not), but something tells me that a lot of the Parmesan salmon and overly-breaded crabcakes get tossed into the kitchen trash back at home, their foil mermaids still in tact. We Americans might value a buck in these difficult times, but we value our health even more.

“And for the gentleman, I think the bunny…”

The flair and precision with which these take-home item are wrapped up says plenty about the staff, as does Brenner’s waiter steering the patrons away from the most abominable dishes. “Frankly, they’re the worst crabcakes I’ve had, anywhere,” he whispered to the critic’s husband so as not to be overheard. Clearly, the servers know how bad the food is. It stands to obvious reason that complaints from customers, the glimmering flocks of swans and mermaids that leave the premises nightly and the mounds of food that goes back to the kitchen half-eaten or barely picked at by customers who had no interest in bringing terrible food back to their cars (and perhaps, God forbid, forgetting it until morning, as I’ve done countless times) would have all trickled back up the ladder to management and then the owners. But these crystal-clear signs that the food is bad have fallen on blind, or worse, indifferent, eyes.

Of course it’s quite a show watching 27-year veteran Miguel Carillo whip up a mermaid. That little bit of artistry is just about the only thing he or any of his fellow staffers have any direct control over. They know the food blows. There’s just nothing they can do about it, except warn you ahead of time and dress it up pretty when you take it home. The swans are pure distraction, nothing more.

In ordering the Gladstone’s clambake, Ms Brenner encountered a crab leg afflicted with freezer burn, which not only confirms the management’s cost-cutting laziness in depending on frozen food for a seafood restaurant, but is testament to sub-standard work on the part of the kitchen staff. Freezer burn is tough to miss and easy to avoid. That dismal clambake, by the way, costs $95, but you’re only told that if you ask. Surprise!

It’s a curious thing: when people visit the water’s edge, whether lake, river or ocean, there’s an expectation that seafood is the only logical dining option. When they get there, inevitably, there’s a seafood restaurant waiting for them, almost always a terrible one. I’ve never understood this. Sure, you’re looking out at the waves, thinking about all the sea creatures lurking out there in the blue, but so what? Do people really believe that better seafood can be found in Malibu or Hermosa Beach than, say, Monterey Park or Beverly Hills? Does the food court at the zoo serve panda or roasted cheetah? Here’s a newsflash: the tiger prawns and yellowtail on the specials board were not rolled off the docks outside the kitchen (if there even is a dock) and dropped into the sauté pan. Chances are, your lobster dinner came from one of two places: the fish market downtown, or a distribution warehouse near the airport. In fact, you’re more likely to find fresh seafood at a restaurant near those places than at one that trucks it all the way out to the Boo.

I’ve blissfully gotten my friends to let go of the pipedream that Gladstone’s is anything but a dingy tourist trap serving cafeteria-level food at three-star prices. Ms Brenner paid over $500 before tip for herself and four guests. I did my time there, in my 20s, before something in me snapped and I said, “no more.” The last time I ate there was Sunday brunch two years ago, at the urging of a friend who lives in Santa Monica. Because it was his birthday, I didn’t protest. Turns out I didn’t have to. The food did the talking. A leopard shark never changes its spots. And, Gladstone’s, amazingly, is still packing them in.

Gladstone’s Malibu. Located on Pacific Coast Highway. Just keep driving until you’re blinded by the glare of two dozen gold-foiled mermaids flapping about the valet stand. Best Dish: any bottled beer. Worst dish: Gladstone’s original seafood molcajete, an inexplicable cauldron of scallops, shrimp, lobster tail, panela cheese, bell peppers, onions, cactus, ranchero sauce and I have to stop because just writing this makes me want to hurl.

Posted by Aaron Black at 7:19 PM

STunK – July 6, 2008

aaronpblack — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 19:03:17 +0000

The kids are back to playing restaurant over at STK, and there doesn’t seem to be a competent adult in sight.

In an attempt to branch out from our familiar haunts, our Thursday Night Dinner Gang (not to be confused with the on-hiatus Wednesday Night Supper Club) decided to venture into the often dicey world of newly-opened restaurants. Los Angeles has no shortage of new arrivals–which is part of the problem. In an industry where barely half of the newcomers survive to their sophomore year, LA’s particular track record with restaurant openings is that a troubling number of them don’t seem to mind that their run will be short and their closure imminent. In truth, it’s hard to open a good restaurant. But keeping a good restaurant running for any significant period requires skill, dedication and a hell of a lot of hard work. So what’s a glib, cynical short-sighted owner to do? Sell short, babe. Many restaurant partners (to call them restaurateurs is to give them way too much credit) are perfectly happy to open with a splash, fill the sidewalk with paparazzi and charge the Hiltonistas exorbitant prices for Kobe beef sliders and truffle French fries. Many of the city’s fresh-faced restaurants are little more than “smash-and-grab” jobs, designed to rake in profits with substandard product for a very short time, then fold as quickly as they came, only to reopen elsewhere (or even in the same spot) spruced up in a different little black dress, speaking with a new accent and spinning a reshuffled playlist on the iPod.

The STK staff.

I’ve been to STK and the adjoining bar, the awfully-named Coco De Ville (sounds like a drag queen), twice. Both times, the scene was as sceney as it gets: burly, clipboarded doormen, patrons four-deep at the bar, music too loud for conversation, and enough stiletto heels to aerate a soccer pitch clicking past. Our dinner reservation, made two weeks in advance, was for 9 o’clock. All eight of our party had arrived by 8:50 and were greeted by a quartet of young, head-set wearing host-persons positioned behind a bank of computer touch-screens at the host station. I felt like I was checking in at the W. At 9:15, a lovely young woman with a stressed fake smile stapled to her face informed us that our table would be ready “soon.”

Alan, who made the reservation and was springing for dinner, asked, “How soon?”

“We’ve got some people finishing up, so not much longer.”

Tired of the hectic scrum around the bar, we reconvened on the patio, longing for the days when a reservation meant something. At 9:30 Alan went back to the host stand and asked about our table. A different woman–it was very hard to figure out who was in charge–told him quite clearly, that our table, “Would be ready in five minutes.”

Five minutes is a tolerable wait, unless, of course, the wait is considerably longer. At 9:45, Alan, normally unflappable, found a man who seemed to be a manager, at least that’s how he identified himself when asked.

“We’ve been waiting for 45 minutes for a table that I reserved two weeks ago. Your hostess told me fifteen minutes ago that our table would be ready in five minutes–”

“Five minutes?!” The manager, a guy in his mid-twenties, seemed genuinely shocked. “Who said that? She never should’ve said that. I didn’t tell her to say that.”

In his mind, the issue became absolving himself of responsibility, which is ironic, considering he called himself the manager, when the issue should’ve been appeasing eight, hungry, tired and normally spend-happy guests. But at this point, we were spitefully not drinking. Here would’ve been the perfect opportunity to buy us a round of drinks, or to apologize for the uncharacteristically long delay. Any gesture would’ve been welcomed over his defensively deflecting blame like a truculent teenager.

The conversation ended with not much resolution; the guy just walked off, perhaps to get back to his Xbox. A few minutes later, yet a third hostess walked up with a stack of menus to tell us our table was ready.

She led us to a center booth with eight place settings crammed around a table meant for no more than six. “Is there anything bigger, you know, that could hold our entire party?” Alan asked.

She informed us there was not, without ever losing he sense of smugness that she was doing us a favor by seating us in the first place. Delirious with hunger, eight grown men crammed ourselves into the booth. Adding a chair to the open end of the table, it seemed, would’ve been too accommodating.

I had a jacket with me, and rather than drape it over the banquette into the lap of the couple eating behind me, or scrunching it up into a tiny, wrinkled knot of corduroy and wedging into the scarce few inches around me, I flagged one of the hostesses and asked if she wouldn’t mind taking it for me.

She seemed cheerful enough at the question, but also confused by it, as if no one had ever made such a bizarre, eccentric request. She cautiously agreed and took the coat from my hands, but before she walked away I had the good sense to get her name. I had a sudden feeling that if I did not go to her specifically after my meal to claim said jacket, I would never see it again. Kind of like that stupid, annoying rule in crowded bars where you have to go only to the bartender who you initially gave your credit card to in order to buy more drinks or to close out.

As we studied our menus (”Hurry up and choose. I’m starving.”) I noticed a huge table–the best and largest in the restaurant–sitting unoccupied in the corner. A few minutes later, hostess number four ushered a bored troll of a man and his leggy pair of blonde, boobtacular escorts a third of his age to the big table, where the man sat, along with Trixie and Desiree, as I had named them, slurping oysters and sipping Champagne for the rest of the evening. I didn’t know who this man was, what or whom he owned, or how much of a vig he was steering out of the STK partners, but it was clear that his name inspired fear and the most obsequious service from the staff that most of the patrons would’ve been better off bussing their own tables than waiting endlessly for recognition from an employee.

Out table was no different. At no point did the “manager” (still makes me giggle) or anyone else drop by our table to apologize for the inexcusable delay or to even check on us. Rather, our server showed up, steered our attention to the most expensive items on the menu and seemed truly disappointed if we ordered anything other than the bone-in filet ($44) or the New York Strip ($42).

The food, when it arrived, was perfectly fine, which is one reason patrons might tolerate the preposterous service for maybe, oh, say, a month longer than they should before this whole glittering enterprise that is STK disappears into the ether and resurfaces elsewhere with a new one-word name, faux-something upholstery, and a new menu focused on sixty dollar tequila rather than sixty dollar Cognac. No matter what bit of costumery a restaurant like this wraps itself in, without the human touch and a little accountability, children’s hour will continue. And adults, sadly, will keep coughing up the allowance.

STK. 755 N. La Cienega, located in the asshole portion of Restaurant Row (not to be confused with the stodgy, out-of-touch section further down the street). Phone number withheld because reservations don’t seem to matter. Bring a sleeping bag.

Posted by Aaron Black at 11:03 PM

Print Friendly · Digg it · del.icio.us · StumbleUpon · Netscape