An excerpt from my memoir "We Got a Bad Potato!"
I’m a huge fan of independent restaurants. My experience at Il Fornaio and a brief stint at a SF joint called Palomino in the 1990s, left a bad taste in my mouth for chains. Corporate interests, like Restaurants Unlimited, and the Compass Group measure their success in units of onion blossoms sold and they create these highly detailed employee handbooks that reduce the human element to zero, but the one “bad service” aspect they can’t seem to eliminate is the manager “servicing” the hostess in the office after hours. When chains aren’t hiring, and promoting sexual predators, they’re busy filling their proverbial butt cracks with fucking morons. Case in point, in 2008, when the economy took a shit, I got desperate, and even considered suicide, but ended up doing something worse: I applied at Roy’s house of Hawaiian Fusion. They’re so authentic. They have seafood from all the great fish cities, like Phoenix and Chicago, and serve radical artful haute-cuisine like “pineapple upside down cake”. Anyway, they had this elaborate psychological profile exam—you know how this is gonna end, right?-- and yet, they can still hire no-nothing managers with superiority complexes, or the flip side, obsequious taint lickers whose only job is to placate one star reviewers on Yelp.
And on top of that, you go to these chains and get Stepford service or shitty service anyway. I fucking hate chains like Roys.
Back to the interview/exam. So on the skills section; I had to check a box on wine knowledge. I checked “expert”. I was trained by Michael Bonnacorsi for fuck’s sake. The manager, this frumpy she-male, looked and said, “Oh, I see you are an expert on wine.” Yes I replied. She then asked me the usual bullshit questions, “What are the major grapes of Burgundy?” I answered one or two, thinking all the while, “Why did I check anything?” I mean, for fuck’s sake, their list is heavy on California Johannisberg Riesling! Then she asked me about the noble grapes of Bordeaux and I answered, “There are four: cabernet sauvignon, merlot, malbec, and cabernet franc.” She pounced, “You forgot Petit Verdot” I acknowledged my omission, with the same emotional intensity one might have if you omitted Timothy Dalton from the list of actors who have portrayed James Bond, but as the words flowed from my mouth, all I could imagine was her blood flowing out of a severed neck artery into the cheap ass wine glass conveniently embedded in her neck.
I didn’t get the job.
Speaking of not getting hired, one time I was hired then fired in one interview. This prick GM who, himself, had been fired by Wolfgang Puck's CUT, was overseeing the opening of an upscale Italian joint in downtown LA. It was the real deal, with a killer wine list. We hit it off well and he hired me on the spot. I was so excited—I needed the job bad—so I asked a few follow up questions about parking and the holidays—and he did something wholly unexpected. He said, in that comical accent that makes people hate Italians, “You-a ask-a too many-a questions…” and he put a big question mark through my application. I was fired! Something rare happened. I was knocked off the horse! I couldn’t respond. He shocked me into a speechless stupor. We were in an empty conference room on the 31st floor of an unoccupied skyscraper in downtown LA. Thoroughly beaten I skulked out of the ad-hoc office space. It wasn’t until I was in the elevator going down that I wished that I could have thrown him to his death. Really.
I hope the pharmacy is still open.
