Loose Cans

Blue cheese (English Stilton in this case) does go fabulously with a Martini. That is all.

You may have heard Arbusto's latest lovely admission: "Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we," Bush said. "They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we." Video here.

I am eating an all-pig sandwich. Reheated pork loin, bacon and ham. Trichinosis, yum.

I have mentioned this to many people--anyone who will indulge me, in fact, if even for a moment--but I've yet to mention it on the blog: I hate my boss. I mean I HATE my boss. Not Amir, the owner whose threatened advent hangs like a ghastly pall over the waitstaff. Amir isn't even close to this guy because Amir is never there, deo gratias. This guy, Eli, is the new manager who replaced Sraia who, while an inefficient manager, was, at the very least, generally pleasant, friendly, easygoing and, which is most important, hospitable. Sraia went back to Israel, so they hired this guy from the City of Dis.

Unfortunately Dante does not give the Vain their own little spot in his hell. If he did, Eli would, without doubt, be the most deserving candidate for such office I have ever--and I mean EVER--met.

Firstly, I've never worked with, or even met, anyone who so flogs his credentials. Every day we are subjected to his curriculum vitae. "I've been a waiter and bartender for years." And you've been a manager how many times? Funny how he never mentions that figure. Huh. Could it be...zero? He actually says things like, "I am the best bartender in New York" or "this is the best cappuccino in New York" without a trace of irony or self-deprecation. If he's serious, then oh, man, is he mistaken. Whoo-ee, is he mistaken. I know my liquors better than this guy, and I'm, oh, just a little underage. I know more cocktails, most likely, and I could wipe my ass with his counting technique. He overpours like a fiend (cardinal sin, ordinal uno). But that's just the fundamentals. He's even worse with the guests. He has not a hospitable bone in his body. He is humorless, pushy and unsympathetic, and he firmly believes that all he has to do to entreat young trendy people into bars is to ask the waitresses to show more cleavage and occasionally comp attractive women. He gives a terrible vibe. He never smiles. He's this tall, lanky, conventionally attractive (all the waitresses say he'd be attractive if they didn't know him), vaguely shaven, son of a bitch unfortunately born without a sense of humor. He's terribly boring, but that's really the least of his faults. His vanity and his insecure officiousness are the worst. He told us, "I'm a lawyer. I earned my degree at Manchester Law School, one of the ten best law schools in Europe." Well, when there ARE only about ten English-language law schools in Europe, I guess that's real fucking impressive there, Eli. Also, as Tim remarked, that doesn't make him a lawyer, it makes him a barrister. He can't practice here. But why quibble?

He's tactless and unhelpful. He's childish when it comes to something he clearly doesn't know how to do. Example: I take deliveries. I'm the only one who can process them, because it has to be done on my computer. If the place is busy, say, and I have a backload of drink orders, plus bar clients to attend to, I cannot answer the phone. I need him to get it and take the order. He does so. It is apparent that he has no idea how to work the computer. That's fine; I needed someone to show it to me, too. So when the clamor dies down, and I have a moment, I offer to show him how to work the machine. He staunchly refuses, insisting that he knows how to take a delivery. I can't just say, "Um, no, clearly you don't, and when you fuck up the way you've done all week, it makes my life way, way more difficult than it needs to be, because I've got to clean up your mess, you incompetent jackass." Every time he interferes behind my bar, he causes havoc. He just fucks things up and goes outside for a cigarette. Ooh, I hate him!

Now that I think about it, though, his demeanor isn't the worst. The worst is his total disregard for the actual, physical restaurant around him. He has never, ever said anything about what distinguishes Monaco from other restaurants. He sees it as the Platonic form-of-forms restaurant, totally ignoring the details that make it appealing. His models for how it should be run are--I am not making this up--McDonald's and Disneyland. Oh, fuck you. You read one issue of Restaurant Weekly and suddenly you're a fucking expert? McDonald's and Disneyland. Only the two most faceless, soul-less enterprises in service history. Monaco is the brightest, most pleasantly colorful restaurant I've ever been in. It's brightly lit, and the vivid oranges and yellows and the bizarre, opulent, giant, crystal-dripping chandelier give it a most appealing ambiance. He's never said anything about how the place IS, only how he wants it to be. How does he want it to be? Trendy and mobbed by strutting, lubricious women he can leer at (because he doesn't talk to them, he just leers). His plan for how he wants it to be (trendy, dark, mechanical), unfortunately, doesn't take into account how it is: open-air, moderately pricey (especially where drinks are concerned), colorful and personal. He likes to turn the lights down. WHY? In the staff meeting, by way of illustrating how people can happily wait for their food and drink (this is a big issue, with which he is pissing off both the kitchen and the servers), he told us about how he had been at a club in the meatpacking district the previous night, and how he had waited 15 minutes for a $13 martini. Because there's no difference between a small, well-lit restaurant and a pitch-black, strobe-lit warehouse. How can you even think of drawing that idiotic comparison? Oy. Such a headache, he gives me.

His big "innovations" were, for the bar, the beginning of a happy hour which, thus far, has failed to yield the promised $20 extra per shift, and for the servers, the use of sections (as opposed to table rotation). The sections has been a disaster, because we don't have a host/ess who tells people where to sit, because people can seat themselves, and because if there are two servers on shift, and one has the inside and the other has the outside, the one on the inside isn't making bupkes, because the outdoor cafe is the big selling point. He's just so damn DUMB. Dumb people in positions of power. Christ, it must be like working in the White House.

My swine sandwich was delicious, by the way. I'm working tomorrow night from five. Come on by.

Bless you, Will Ferrell.

Reprising his role of Dubya when most we needs it.

Also this. For some reason this is the only issue that still gets my blood hot. I just can't fathom how people can reason otherwise.

We here at Loose Cans Productions are proud to present a new opus by the finest living playwright in America, Tony Kushner. It's called Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, and it rocks very, very hard. It's about Laura Bush, who I always thought was kinda hot, with that alluring Methodist-librarian thing she's got going on. It's short, one scene, and brilliant. Go and read and be impressed.

The link doesn't take you to the play, but to a scene Kushner wrote specifically for the benefit at which it was performed (the other night at the American Airlines Roundabout theatre. The scene refers to the play, so you have to click the link to the play first. It was done by Patricia Clarkson, John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig) and Kirsten Johnson, who incidentally was fabulous in Much Ado About Nothing Last night. The whole show was spectacular. Sam Waterson and Jimmy Smits in particular were excellent. But anyway the scene is really funny: Laura hits back. It's a dialogue between Kushner and Laura, with Kirsten Johnson coming in near the end to deliver one of Kushner's trademark millennial, Wagnerian visions. Go.

4pm till 1am catering gig last night. Crushing. Good money, ghastly work. Jewish, mostly Israeli, wedding. Huge. A madhouse by anyone's standards. Understaffed, with, all told, twelve of us to fight off hundreds. Not bartending, and when not bussing, bending over backward for the queen mother of the fucking bride, her royal highness, shuttling up and down stairs between kitchen and cocktail party area (two flights of stairs) either trying to locate the special packaged kosher meals AND kosher silverware, or picking up hors d'oeuvres trays and, literally dripping with sweat, bearing them through ravenous clutches of grabbing old Israeli men, salmon roses on naan crisps with cucumber relish, sesame-encrused, pan-seared tuna with wasabi, Moroccan bastillas with vegetable curry and chopped almonds, coconut chicken skewers, vegetable samosas with a cilantro chutney, spinach and cheese spanikopita, sweet and spicy duck in a radicchio leaf. Nothing I would have touched. Worse yet, the guests, hundreds of them (we passers were three, then five, against an army. A hungry army), horrible, all of them, would, the moment the appetizer-bringers appeared at the stairhead, swarm like locusts over the trays. Eight, ten hands, fifty fingers would overwhelm the tray, knocking it this way and that, and when they were gone it looked like a forest fire. Nothing left. Barren. This also meant that the people at the back got nothing, and, on the rare occasions we made it back there, bitched us out about it. We tried to explain politely that Do you SEE these people? They're like wolves. So some of us took to raising the trays up high up high and more or less sprinting through the crush to the back. This made the stunningly greedy people up front, who had, by that time, consumed their collective weight in appetizers, as well as bits of my fingers, very unhappy. Tsk tsk tsk. "Not nice, not nice." Fuck you. It reached an absurd climax when this table of squat, thick-fingered men, who were under the impression that the hors-d'oeuvres were being cooked and conveyed entirely for their own personal consumption, actually WRENCHED THE TRAY OUT OF MY HAND.

I was in shock. I was saying, No, no, I need that, we don't have enough, and actually trying to hold on to my tray. And-three men, we're talking about--they just yanked it right out of my hands. "Give me, give me." Not even a Please. These are grown men we're talking about. It was violating, it really was.

Finally, the cocktail hour ended. It was just 9pm. We'd been on our feet, oh, five hours, and the party was just beginning.

Then dinner. Four buffet stations. Halibut, beef, lamb, or chicken. I was on Halibut, with Israeli salad and lentil salad. And then there were these same fucking sexagenarians, wielding two plates, claiming one was for the wife, who apparently has not got legs to walk on, cutting the line. Cutting the line. Jesus Christ, didn't these people ever go to kindergarten? Wait your turn. At least it wasn't as bad as the cocktail hour (though it seems that in catering, my colleagues led me to believe, it doesn't get much worse than that). But then after a half-hour, we needed more bussers. Then began three solid hours of bussing. At least I didn't have to interact with these people (I cannot imagine all parties have guests so unanimously and bitterly reviled by the catering crew. These guests were hard-core), I just swept around with my tray, picking up uneaten food and dumping it blithely. The band was good for a beat and little else. There are just some songs that Jewish wedding bands, especially ones who specialize in bad klezmer, should not attempt. "Super Freak" is one of these. So is "Brick House." Also, "Soul Man." That one hurt. Plus the male singer, who was about 27, and short, with sideburns, and who was under the mistaken impression that pants that are way too short somehow translate into "intelligent and/or attractive," appeared to be in dire need of constipation medicine. He was twisting in the most pained way. It was pretty amazing.

There was this one table where this obviously deranged young woman, about 26, felt an burning need to put everything on the table, especially those fucking rose petals, either into her glass or onto the floor. We took approximately seven glasses away from her. The floor would be left till later. This is okay. Strange, but okay. But then some comparable nut started taking the candles off the tables and delivering them to her so she could blow them out and dump the liquid wax INTO HER GLASS. Where it of course hardened instantly, making it impossible to get out without protracted excavation. She did this to a number of glasses before I took them all away. All of her glasses. No more for you. Jesus fucking bleeding Christ. We did not, thank heaven, have to concern ourselves with the cleaning of the glasses. The rental company takes care of that. Their problem. As a co-worker said, "What do you care?"

Finally it ended. The malingering guests were punted out the door. The cleanup operation went at warp speed because here it was 12:45am and what were we still doing here? We doffed our chef-style jackets (finally!), all emblazoned with the curious legend, "The Raging Skillet" (at the beginning of the night, I wondered aloud what it was made the skillet so enraged. By the end of the night, I knew), blew through the cleanup, dumped the heaviest trash bags the world has ever known, sucked down open bottles of champagne and white wine, got paid, and got the hell out. Then stood on the sweltering platform at 2nd Avenue, waiting for the F train, for half an hour. I wanted to die. I finally got home, after fortuitously swift switches to the D, then the A, at 2am. In my pocket I had a check for $230 and a bottle of Rose's Lime Juice, which I needed for the bar here, and which I very happily, and deservedly, took.

And back at Monaco tonight. Rest? Who needs it?