One thing that I would definitely do if money were no object is to hire a cook. The older I get, the more I hate to eat at restaurants because so many of them have such pitiful health standards. Unless we have reason to go into the kitchen areas on occasion or can see the kitchen areas from the public portion, we really can’t see what goes on.
That is especially true for buffets. Even at what was easily the most upscale Chinese Buffet in one set of two medium sized cities next to each other, you might think it is okay. Yet, the last time I ate at it, I saw a kid, maybe 7 years old, take his plate of food he didn’t want back to the buffet, dump it in the buffet, and get something else.
There are two Chinese restaurants in a nearby town. I will reluctantly go into one of them, but I won’t set foot in the other any more after a firefighter from the town told me that the firefighters were eating there one day (the firefighters who are on duty all eat together) and saw the manager take food off a table after the people at the table left and scrape it back onto the buffet.
At one of the most beloved barbecue restaurants in my area (my absolute favorite restaurant when I was a kid), a local farmer/rancher would take his cowboys/hired hands there to eat on most Fridays in the late 1980s. They would order family style. The restaurant would keep bringing food out until you were done. The rancher was probably spending about $250 a week, on average, at that restaurant.
So one Friday there were all sitting there at a long table (several tables pushed together). There were plates stacked with sliced brisket, ribs, sausage, onion rings, and Texas toast and serving bowls filled with beans, potato salad, and cole slaw, With the number of cowboys/farmhands, they probably had three of each plate and two of each bowl.
They chowed down. When they ran out of ribs in one of the serving plates, the waitress brought them more. But when they got down to the second layer of ribs on the plate, they saw that all the meat had been gnawed off of them. It is likely that the waitress had taken the plate off of some other group’s table after they left and the other group had stacked it like that on purpose. The entire group got up and walked out without paying and they haven’t been back since.
Figure $250 a week for 40 weeks a year (to make it easy) – $10,000 a year. Over 35 years, that would be at least $350,000 in sales that restaurant lost out on, in mid 1980s dollars. And probably another $70,000 or so in tips for the waitresses over the years.
The restaurant is still open, but I don’t know anyone who goes there any more. There’s a new barbecue restaurant across a street – I may stop there the next time I’m in town.
I used to live in one small city with a Subway Sandwich Shop. The people at the Subway were pretty good but they had one really annoying habit. If you looked at the ice in your glass you would see green specks in it. That was because they used the same bucket they used for chopped lettuce to get ice to refill the ice maker.
For a while, on Friday nights, they had two women in their 30s working there and those two should never be allowed anywhere near a restaurant of any kind. The nice thing at Subway is that you can see the work area. These two never cleaned the work area their entire shift and before long it would be piled an inch or two high with all knds of crap from the sandwiches. They used to get mad at me because I’d walk up, take a look at their work area, tell them it looked like ****, and leave.
At another Subway, I ordered a tuna fish sandwich one day about 1990. The worker looked around for a scoop, couldn’t find one, grabbed a dirty scoop out of the sink, and put the tuna on the bread with it. I watched in disbelief as he did that and told him to throw the sandwich away. I then ordered something that he didn’t need a dirty scoop to make.
Not only restaurants, but these food areas in convenience stores are good places to avoid. The one down the street from me in my town has had problems in the past. For example, one night when it had snowed, an employee went out to shovel snow out of the way, came back in, took his shoes and socks off, and draped his wet socks over the rotisserie to dry out. Back then, if they needed ice in the ice machine, they would dump out the mop bucket, fill it with ice, and then dump the ice into the ice machine.
I have seen this last thing for myself. One day in about 1992 after the president of a company where I worked (I was head of R&D) stopped at a convenience store for a drink. I got a bottle of Gatorade while the president wanted a coke from the soda fountain. There was no ice so the store employee dumped out the mop water and used the mop bucket to get ice for the ice machine. Then the president filled his cup with ice and coke!
As we were driving down the road, neither of us said anything. I kept watching to see if he was going to actually drink the coke. After a couple of miles, he took a sip. After a half mile to a mile from then, he opened the window and poured the coke out. That when I said, “I was wondering if you were going to drink that.” He replied, “I thought it would be okay because they must do that a lot, but the coke tasted like it had Pine Sol in it.”
One thing that I might be tempted to do if money was no object is to open my open restaurant and hire a competent manager. The manager would be told that their top two goals are to serve good food and keep the place exceptionally clean – that if they couldn’t do that, they would be gone quickly. That way, I could go back whenever I wanted and inspect the place to make sure that they were keeping it clean and sanitary.
If not that, then maybe what a company down the street does. That company has maybe about ten employees. They have a kitchen area and a cook who comes in whenever the place is open to cook lunch for the employees. I’ve been there when they were eating and sure wished they would invite me to eat with them because it looked so good, but they never have. I wouldn’t mine doing that at my office.
