And in the spirit -- and to celebrate Veteran's Day -- next Wednesday, several major casual-dining restaurants -- including Applebee's, McCormick & Schmick's and Golden Corral -- are offering free food to the nation's military vets and active-duty personnel, USA Today reports.
Outback Steakhouse is offering a free Bloomin' Onion appetizer and a drink to vets and current military personnel on Wednesday. Krispy Kreme is giving away donuts, and even Home Depot and Lowe's are getting in on the action offering 10-percent discounts to military.
New York Times blogger Bruce Buschel has done a great service by compiling a list of 100 Things Restaurant Staffers Should Never Do – if nothing else, he's given fed-up diners one more forum in which to vent their ever-mounting aggravations. Thanks for the break, Bruce.
Most diners and servers would stand behind the majority of Buschel's prescriptions, which include not cursing (Rule 45), opening Champagne without making a ruckus (Rule 29) and knowing what the bar stocks (Rule 81). But his list is far from perfect. While Buschel's document would make a fine training manual for butlers, it fails to acknowledge the realities of running a restaurant. Here's what Buschel apparently forgot:
Some things are beyond a server's control.
One of Buschel's first recommendations (Rule 4) is to offer a free drink to someone who's had to wait a long time for a table. "The guest may be hungry and thirsty," he explains. May be? I think it's a safe assumption that anyone who shows up at a restaurant is craving food and drink. But I don't know of a single server who's empowered to start giving that stuff away.
The same goes for Rule 23, which insists diners be alerted to 86'd items before they open their menus. Since the hostess usually drops off menus when she seats a table, cutting her off would require Usian Bolt-speed (and necessitate breaking Rule 33 – Do not bang into chairs or tables.)
Hostesses, of course, should brief diners on which items are no longer available. But often they don't, just as the kitchen often turns out the first appetizer on a ticket a full 12 minutes before the second appetizer is ready. I completely agree that servers should "bring all the appetizers at the same time" (Rule 60), but I won't let a tray of raw oysters sit in the window while a new guy struggles to properly heat a dish of crab dip.
Years after the nation's last Kenny Rogers' Roasters served its final bird, country music stars are again making a play for their fans' food dollars.
Perhaps because so many of them hail from the South, where good cooking is considered sacred, country celebs have long been inordinately fond of the eponymous restaurant ventures. Once as critical to an Opry member's cred as a Nudie suit, signature restaurants have lately been on the wane, with once-proud institutions such as Twitty Burger and Minnie Pearl Fried Chicken going the way of the cassette tape. But a series of openings set for this fall suggests country musicians may still harbor culinary ambitions.
White-hatted crooner Alan Jackson doesn't have an endeavor of his own, but showed up this week at a Nashville area Cracker Barrel to introduce a new line of spices, clothing and home goods, including an Alan Jackson rocking chair. According to Jackson's spokeswoman Nicole Dona, the singer likes to take his daughters to the homestyle chain.
"The family will still stop now and then when they are on their way back from the lake," she writes in a e-mail to Slashfood. "He loves the breakfast and also the meatloaf sandwich."
What matters most to a restaurant? Is it the guests, who pay startling sums of money to be there? Is it the local farmers who grow the ingredients that fill the pantry? Or the cooks who craft dishes worth buying?
No, no and no. Judging from the amount of care expended, there's nothing restaurants value quite so highly as ketchup.
Say a table orders two rounds of onion rings and a single serving of fries. By the end of the meal, those grease-happy diners will likely have burned through half a bottle of ketchup. But that bottle won't reappear in its half-empty state, nor will it be topped off from the giant bladder bag of ketchup that's a fixture on most restaurant kitchen walls. Instead, a server will slowly pour the vestigial ketchup into another under-filled ketchup bottle, creating one full bottle (and one bottle bound for the dish room).
Marrying ketchup is standard practice at every restaurant where ketchup is consumed, which – at least in this country – means every restaurant, period. With the almost imperceptible exception of hoity-toity places that make their own ketchup and serve it in ramekins, American restaurants rely on 10-ounce Heinz ketchup bottles – and expect their servers to keep said bottles looking fresh.
I have nothing but speculation and conjecture to back me up, but I suspect the heyday of the uniform is over. Because really, when's the last time you saw a cleaning woman in a too-short black dress and frilly white pinafore? It's nearly impossible to find a trash collector in a bow tie or a nurse with a starched cap these days.
But while official dress codes may have relaxed nearly everywhere, most restaurant servers are still expected to wear a uniform. Even workers allowed some sartorial leeway -- many employee manuals call for any jeans, any black pants or any red bandanna – are typically issued a standard apron. Uniforms connote professionalism, cleanliness and discipline; all fine server attributes, and all apparently forgotten come holiday time.
Whether it's a show of spirit or a cynical ploy to remind customers there's somewhere else they'd rather be, servers can be counted upon to modify their uniforms in keeping with the season. I'm guilty of wearing knee socks with jingling bells in December and heart-shaped jewelry on Valentine's Day. Still, I'm stunned by what some of my colleagues wear on Halloween night. Are customers really pleased when their servers have fake blood dripping down their faces or elk-sized antlers on their heads?
Erin Meister trains baristas for North Carolina-based Counter Culture Coffee and sporadically maintains the blog Meet the Press Pot from her home in New York City. This is part of a series for the caffeine-addicted.
Ah, the triumphant leaning back in your chair after a great meal at the season's "it" restaurant, pushing away the licked-clean plate and wishing you could loosen your belt in polite company. "Why sure, we'd love to see the dessert menu. And I'll have a cappuccino."
But then the cappuccino comes. It's got bitter, thin espresso topped with stiff, dry peaks of overdone milk covered in heaps of cheap cocoa powder. And, well ... it's not worth the $6 they're charging for it.
Does it have to be this way? Can there be such a thing as truly great restaurant coffee? Find out after the jump.
Expat foodies have been known to sniff out American favorites in every corner of the world, whether it's bagels, burgers or cupcakes. According to a review we read, even in China, it looks like a seriously good American burger can be had at Bistro Burger. Made from 100-percent Angus beef, imported from the States and ground on the premises, this Shanghai burger has the potential to be better than most you'd get in the U.S. We don't know what the meat to fat ratio is, but we'd be willing to try them regardless.
In addition to ordering a variety of international themed burgers, homesick visitors and expats can take advantage of the restaurant's October promotion, where they can "get a free milkshake with any burger." Apparently, authentic milkshakes are a big deal in these parts, due to the fact that many are made with ultrapasteurized or nonperishable milk, whereas Bistro Burger uses the fresh stuff.
The review also raves about the eatery's chili cheese fries, pronouncing them the "best" in Shanghai, as well as homemade apple pie packed with honest-to-goodness imported U.S. apples and Brooklyn beer. Who says you can't find the comforts of home halfway round the world?
Despite smoking bans at restaurants in cities across the country, the restaurant matchbook is experiencing a "fragile renaissance" of sorts, the New York Times reports.
"When a state or municipality imposes a ban, we see a hesitation in reordering and a fall-off in new business," Mark Nackman, the owner and president of AdMatch, an importer based in New York City told the Times. "Then the volumes start to creep back up, so that within a year or so we see some resurgence in statewide sales. Matches have universal appeal, and that's the mystery -- that one little package could resonate with familiarity, maybe beauty and a feeling of value."
It helps that they're highly collectible. Do you have a matchbook collection or have a favorite matchbook from your dining travels? Spill it in the comments.
The Brooklyn, N.Y., cheesecake institution Junior's, founded in downtown Brooklyn in 1950, prides itself as "New York's Best Cheesecake," but it's now scrambling to clean up its reputation after photographs posted on the Internet over the weekend show some rodents enjoying a snack in the bakery's window display.
In a welcome respite from subpar airport fare, "Iron Chef" Masaharu Morimoto is partnering with hospitality and food service company Delaware North to provide fast-casual eateries serving Japanese bar food in airports across the country.
The bistros, appropriately titled Skewers, will serve an assortment of yakitori -- skewered grilled or deep-fried meats and vegetables -- served with rice bowls for portable consumption, as well as soups and salads. The restaurants' settings would take the form of two different models -- a take-out counter and a traditional sit-down approach -- and both would feature open kitchens.
According to Vito Buscemi, director of Concept Portfolio for Delaware North, the line has "great menu variety and great presentation -- all the meats and vegetables are grilled right in front of you. It's very quick, convenient and healthy, and we think it's going to have mass appeal."
Serious diners may revile the open restaurant kitchen as noisy and passé, but the worst behaved among them should thank their lucky stars for the unfortified layout. After all, it's much harder for a server to spit in their food with everyone in the room watching.
But no amount of interior decorating can stop servers from taking revenge on their most miserable customers. Cads who pat their servers' behinds and cheapskates who order water, sugar and lemon instead of paying for lemonade should know their hijinks don't go unnoticed: Even the sweetest-seeming server will punish offenses at the table -- usually smiling all the while.
Spitting gets all the press, but few servers at sit-down restaurants like to mess with bodily fluids: Spitting's considered a rather déclassé and uninspired way of getting back at customers. Savvy restaurant workers aim for pocketbooks, not their guests' immune systems.
Cheese with that pie? It might taste good, but it's definitely not required by law in the Dairy State.
The Wisconsin State Journal debunked the myth that Wisconsin requires apple pie to be served with cheese at restaurants in the state. The paper asked Connie Von Der Heide at the Wisconsin State Law Library whether or not state law required cheese to accompany the pie after a reader inquired about it.
"It certainly sounds plausible since after all this is the Dairy State, but the answer is no," she said. "The 1935 Laws of Wis., ch. 106 came close; it required serving a small amount of cheese and butter with meals in restaurants (effective from June 1935 to March 1937)."
What crazy food laws have you heard of? Let us know in the comments below.
For workers who are paid to interact with customers, servers spend an inordinate amount of time on the floor. It's nearly impossible to get through a shift without having to stoop to sweep up cupfuls of Cheerios up-ended by a fidgety toddler, table scraps discarded by loutish diners who apparently take their etiquette cues from William Hogarth paintings or -- most frequently -- puddles of pennies.
I've worked in greasy spoons where hot dogs sold for 85 cents and coin transactions were the norm; I hardly expect a customer to charge a quarter cup of coffee. But in nicer restaurants, where servers don't bark orders across the room and salads don't arrive to the table encased in plastic wrap, coins are nothing but trouble -- any server who's picked up a check presenter and immediately showered their feet with the coins tucked inside it knows exactly what I mean.
Some of the blame clearly lies with the coin-fearing credit-card companies that issue said presenters, designed to accommodate only plastic. But there's really no reason for most restaurant customers to use change in the first place. What's the harm in leaving $72 when the bill's $71.88? Can a server not be trusted for a moment with an extra 12 cents?
I find coins so messy that I typically ignore them, even if it means I end up shouldering a portion of a table's bill. If a guest gives me three twenties to cover a $58.43 bill, I'll return $2 – knowing most guests will leave me both singles. While some of my fellow servers are far more punctilious, I still haven't figured out a good way to sort coins in my apron or rationalize the dead weight of a few rolls of dimes.
Fast food restaurants know where their bread is buttered -- with the kids! The chains have been using toys as little-kid bait for decades, and it's an effective tactic: Children have an adorable propensity for confusing junk for treasure, which is why kiddie meals can be the highlight of their day.
Most of these meals fall into two categories: interactive advertisements for recent blockbusters or beloved television shows, and lame.
We're focusing on the latter, those toys over the years that were uninspired, nonsensical, or just plain disappointing. Each of these so-called "collectibles" currently languishes in the corners of garages, the bottoms of landfills and in the remote, digital wastelands of eBay.
Ben Ali, the founder of Washington D.C.'s historic Ben's Chili Bowl, has died at the age of 82.
Ali founded the landmark eatery on U Street with his wife, Virginia, during the Eisenhower administration, and it's become a hangout for presidents -- President Obama visited on Jan. 10 -- and entertainers -- Bill Cosby, Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. Cosby was the only person to get a free meal at Ben's until Obama's election, when Ben's put up this sign in the window: "Who eats free at Ben's: _Bill Cosby _The Obama Family," the Associated Press reports.
The restaurant is renowned for its chili "half smokes" -- beef sausages larger than the average hot dog that are smothered in chili -- as well as its bowls of chili. The James Beard Foundation named Ben's Chili Bowl an "American Classic" in 2004. And the menu, Gourmet.com notes, isn't for the faint of heart. "Our chili will make a dog bark," it begins.
What Can I Get You Folks? - Server Revenge
Reality-Show Celebrities Serve Up Chef Curtis Stone's 'Hundred-Dollar Burger'
Foods Celebrity Chefs Hate
