Categories
Humor Restaurant Life

51 Universal Restaurant Truths

1)    We don’t have enough folded napkins to set the dining room.
2)    We didn’t fold napkins because there aren’t any napkins in house.
3)    Management thinks the staff is stealing silverware.
4)    Most of the missing silverware ends up in the garbage.
5)    The staff drinks more bottled water than tap water.
6)    The staff drinks more espresso than guests do.
7)    The restaurant is low on wine glasses because someone broke an entire rack of them.
8)    Management said more wine glasses are supposed to be coming in tomorrow… three weeks ago.
9)    None of the wine glasses in the dining room match.
10)   Somebody left a dirty decanter sitting out overnight.
11)   The decanters are all chipped.
12)   The one pepper mill in the restaurant does not properly dispense pepper.
13)   The one pepper mill in the restaurant, aside from not properly dispensing pepper, has no peppercorns in it.
14)   The restaurant’s wine list is not updated.
15)   The restaurant’s website is not updated.
16)   The meat served for staff meal cannot be identified.
17)   One of the servers used the last tip log sheet and didn’t make extra copies.
18)   Someone forgot to stock backup printer paper for the POS system.
19)   The POS system will freeze during the busiest part of the night.
20)   The Health Department will arrive for an inspection during the busiest part of the night.
21)   The line cooks, who never wear hats, will put them on for twenty minutes when the Health Inspector arrives.
22)   The line cooks, who never wear latex gloves, will put them on for twenty minutes when the Health Inspector arrives.Restaurant-truths23)   The Health Inspector is an asshole.
24)   One of the busboys is hungover.
25)   All of the busboys are hungover.
26)   The dishwasher is still drunk from the night before and sweating tequila.
27)   The dishwasher has colossally ripe B.O.
28)   The dishwasher has gold teeth.
29)   The dishwasher didn’t show up today.
30)   Two people traded shifts and neither of them showed up because they forgot they made the switch.
31)   More than half the staff forgot to clock in/out and the manager has to adjust their hours.
32)   The manager, in addition to managing, is in the office doing blow.
33)   The manager, in addition to managing, is also selling drugs to the staff.
34)   The manager, in addition to managing, is also actively interviewing for other management jobs.
35)   Everyone hates their schedule.
36)   Everyone complains about their schedule to the manager who, in addition to managing, doesn’t care.
37)   Managers stress hospitality then spend the entire pre-shift meeting talking about the importance of turning tables.
38)   Managers stress going above and beyond for guests, then spend the evening’s service harassing the waitstaff about dropping the check on tables that aren’t ready for it.
39)   The sommelier is always complaining about the wine cellar being disorganized.
40)   The bartender is always complaining about having to do inventory.
41)   Bar inventory is a nightmare because the staff has been pouring themselves drinks.
42)   The kitchen thinks front of house are a bunch of spoiled rotten twits.
43)   The front of house thinks the kitchen staff should shut the fuck up and switch sides if they think it’s so easy.
44)   There is always Latin music blasting in the prep kitchen.
45)   The employee locker room is a shithole.
46)   The bathroom in the employee locker room is a shithole within a shithole and never has any hand soap or toilet paper.
47)   The toilet seat in the employee locker room is broken.
48)   A member of the waitstaff will put on unbearably bad music at the end of the night to encourage latecomers to leave.
49)   A member of the waitstaff will inconspicuously turn up the lighting in the dining room to encourage latecomers to leave.
50)   Restaurant people around the world have amassed a significant collection of umbrellas from the ones you’ve left behind.
51)   You didn’t tip enough. (Sorry, we don’t count umbrellas).

Categories
Humor

The World’s 20 Best Restaurants – 2050

1. DA’ SOLO – Ancona, Italy

solo-diner

Italian Chef Giuseppe Ciabolongo’s remote one-seat restaurant, nestled away in the hills of the Marché, has the distinction of being this year’s top restaurant. Reservations must be made ten years in advance since Da’ Solo only serves one guest per night—a solitary feast which often lasts over fifteen hours. Eager gastrophiles must be patient since the restaurant is only open four days a year, on the Summer and Winter Solstice and the Vernal and Autumnal Equinox.

2. TWIG & BERRIES – London, England

twigs-and-berries

Native Londoner Mildred Cooms serves a menu of exclusively animal genitalia and reproductive organs at her trendy London gastropub. The uterine design of the dining room soothes guests with a womb-like comfort as they dig into Chef Cooms’ signature Spit-Roasted Duck Testicles with Cod Sperm Béarnaise.

3. FIELD OF DREAMS – Fargo, USA

FODresto

The Farm-to-Table movement gets turned upside down at this rustic eatery in the middle of a soybean field in rural North Dakota. Former New York Chef Arlen Meecham tests his culinary skill by importing genetically-modified hothouse produce and factory-raised meats presenting them in a beautiful pastoral setting designed to trick locavores into thinking they’re eating organically.

4. BISTRO DERRIÈRE – Marseille, France

suppositories

Guests at Jean-Pierre Lispenard’s neo-French bistro eschew forks and knives enjoying a multi-course tasting menu delivered rectally. Lispenard relies heavily on molecular gastronomy to distill complex flavors into suppositories which are administered to his guests by a staff of registered nurses. The talented sommeliers can also pair wines with retro-fitted bidets beneath the banquettes that bathe your undercarriage with a focused selection of biodynamic wines.

5. SPENDERÖRGAN – Frankfürt, Germany

brains

As a young medical student German Chef Johannes Guttmann began preparing meals of human offal for classmates by smuggling organs from dissected cadavers from the university morgue. His obsession gradually took the shape of this exciting new pop-up restaurant in Frankfürt where visitors receive a medical examination upon arrival before each one agrees to contribute a vital organ to the evening’s meal.

6. KAISEKI SEBUN – Hokkaido, Japan

japanese-kid-chef

Chef Kumiko Nakarata started cooking professionally at six months old when, as an infant prodigy, she was invited to stage at Le Bernardin in New York City. Having just turned seven (Sebun is the Japanese character that represents her age), Ms. Nakarata is the youngest chef to appear on this list by over twenty years. Her restaurant—set along the Pacific Ocean in Hokkaido, Japan—is a destination for seafood lovers all over the world and tourists who come to see the youngest three-Michelin starred chef in history. Sebun changes its name to a new number every year to commemorate Kumiko’s birthday.

7. LEFTŒUVERS – Oslo, Norway

landfills-a-history-of-waste-disposal

Meals begin at “Freegan” Chef Lars Jørgensen’s Scandinavian eatery in Oslo with each table foraging their own ingredients from a nearby landfill. Aside from turning food waste into haute cuisine, the restaurant was designed to be entirely self-sustaining, running all of its electricity on biofuels and kitchen grease. Trash from your meal is discarded directly into the landfill every night to be scavenged by tomorrow’s hungry gastronomes.

8. INADEMEN – Amsterdam, Netherlands

vaporizer

Dutch for “inhale,” diners need only breathe to enjoy each course of their prix fixe at this über-modern space designed by the husband and wife team of astro-physicists turned chefs, Sven and Hälle Nillstrom. At the communal table, your food is delivered in the form of flavored vapors you inhale through e-cigarettes. After toking your main course, you’ll be invited to the Nillstrom’s psychedelic hash bar next door for “dessert.”

9. CORO – São Paolo, Brazil

A team of 75 classically-trained Brazilian chefs prepare your meal in a kitchen the size of a soccer field. Unlike most professional kitchens, the chefs don’t work together. Each individually prepares one of your 75 different courses then the chefs—also classically-trained musicians—gather to invite you into the kitchen for a choral concert of epic proportions.

10. MUDPIE – Mexico City, Mexico

mud

Chef Luisa Romero Ballatín-Cortez extols the health virtues of cooking with mud in her new restaurant on the outskirts of Mexico City. Chef Ballatín-Cortez spares no expense importing the finest mud from all over the world as far as the Himalayas and encorporates it into her unique Jaliscan-style cuisine. Diners come from near and far to experience such delicacies as Sri Lankan Mud-braised Wild Boar Enchiladas and her famous Oaxacan Red Mud Mole.

11. EMBRYŌ – Bangkok, Thailand

balut

Animal fetuses and underdeveloped life forms are the specialty here at this subterranean restaurant in the seedy Soi Cowboy district of Bangkok. Four-hundred pound Chef Alex “Big Baby” Sriphatkorn built his own hatchery adjacent to the restaurant in order to harvest unborn animals he can cook immediately in his natural wood-fired ovens. Although “Big Baby” has become an international celebrity—most notably for his food-themed viral rap videos—look out for PETA activists who frequently protest outside the restaurant.

12. 171℃ – Bogotá, Colombia


Instead of preparing the food sous vide, Chef Simón Mascherano prepares his guests sous vide by mummifying them in plastic wrap and submerging them into temperature-controlled water baths. His technique ensures that none of his precious flavors can escape through the diner’s pores during the meal. He literally seals in your juices. After a highly published drowning case, Chef Mascherano moved his restaurant from Medellín to Bogotá where the higher altitudes allow his water baths to boil more gently at the perfect temperature of 171 degrees Celsius.

13. X/Y – San Francisco, USA

sex-chromosomes

Have you ever stopped to consider the sex of the plant, animal or marine life you are eating? Most diners don’t, but Chef Angela Marx takes the matter very seriously at this San Fransisco eatery. She allows her guests to choose the gender of their steaks, chops, lobsters and even certain plant life. Try the “Girl’s Nite Out” ten-course tasting to experience Chef Marx’s menu of all female life forms. Sommelier Margueritte Thiebault takes special care to make sure the all-female winemakers wine pairings are seamlessly tailored to the menu’s feminine food.

14. FOCI – Various Undisclosed Locations

vrheadset

Created in 2048 in conjunction with Google Ventures, FOCI began as a Kickstarter project of Chef Kosmo3, a computer hacker with no formal culinary training. His futuristic kitchen brings the virtual reality experience to fine dining where diners consume a luxurious multi-media tasting menu without actually eating anything. Real-time biofeedback that reaches the kitchen’s “servers” through your Bluetooth-enabled cutlery allows the virtual chef to feed you images of what the body craves without the need for opinionated waitstaff.

15. CHEF:BÔT – Osaka, Japan

Adventurous diners can experience chef-less dining in Osaka, Japan where human cooks are replaced by 3D printers that prepare your meal tableside. Choose from a digital menu of iconic dishes made famous throughout the history of modern cooking. The restaurant’s patented Transparent Kitchen™ can create exact replicas of virtually any haute cuisine. It gives a new meaning to the concept of open kitchens.

16. THE MILLENNIAL KITCHEN – Napa Valley, USA

avocado-toast

After a forty year hiatus from cooking, legendary Napa Valley Chef and pioneering locavore Alphonse Treadwell revives the comfort food that made him famous in the Oughts. His humble kitchen specializes in his once trendy but now retro dishes that have fallen out of favor like Avocado Toast, Pork Buns, Korean Fried Chicken and Cacio e Pepe.

17. LILY AND SAND – Dubai, UAE

dubai-flotilla

It took over fifteen years to construct this giant 300,000 square foot flotilla in Dubai that seats over 5,000 guests at once making it the largest free-standing restaurant in the world. Guests must take a helicopter and three different ferries before arriving in the luxurious dining hall designed by architect I.M. Pei’s goddaughter. English Chef phenom Ian Chatterton’s Persian menu focuses on aquatic life and includes the most expensive dish in the world—a spit-roasted dolphin encrusted in 24-Karat Gold, yours for only $40,000.

18. DINE X – Outer Space

xrocket

Billed as the first intergalactic culinary experience, Space X and Elon Musk have joined forces with the Culinary Institute of America to launch fine dining out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Patrons are rocket blasted into orbit for three hours where they can enjoy an intimate meal in a custom-made Space X dining capsule. Lay back in your Kevlar suit while you enjoy delicate space-raised meats barbecued over sizzling hot moon rocks and freeze dried desserts, both specialties of former NASA-engineer-turned-Astro-Chef Zoltan Janucyzk’s aeronautical kitchen.

19. GUSTIBUS – Philadelphia, USA

hospital-meals

Visitors must check into the Dining Pavilion adjacent to the University of Pennsylvania Hospital at their scheduled reservation time. After receiving an epidural, a highly-skilled medical staff inserts small arthroscopic cameras into the guest’s digestive tract so he can joyfully witness his meal being digested in real time. The cafeteria-inspired menu was developed by a team of nutritionists at U. Penn—featuring such Heartland delicacies as Grass-Fed Salisbury Steak and Lancaster County Mushy Peas. Each diner is issued a secure portal to live-stream the camera feed from inside their stomach via Snapchat.

20. FORECLOSURE – Cayman Islands

foreclosure-for-sale-sign

Restaurant patrons must sign over the deeds to their homes to be invited to dine at this palace of modern cuisine in the Cayman Islands. Offshore accounting allows visitors to exploit tax shelters to offset their loss in personal wealth. In the spirit of the meal, the dining room is filled with repossessed furniture purchased by the restaurant from IRS auctions.

*Note: This list is fictional and purely for satirical purposes. Any similarities with real life restaurants, restauranteurs or chefs are purely coincidental. Maybe.