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