blakegwinn

Just a few quick things off the top of my head: Pouring a taste of beer or wine if they are having trouble deciding, recomendations on what isn't so hot that day (I would steer a non-regular away if possible but wouldn't risk out and out bad-mouthing something it if I didn't know the person well), going to bat with the chef over a substitution or something that he doesn't like to do, something that is behind the scenes but has a big effect is always putting your table as a priority, (ie, if I walk through the restaurant and you ask for more bread and another table asks for refills on drinks, your bread will be coming out first), I've even whipped up sauces (BBQ and Cocktail) real quick that we don't have on hand for some regulars, giving single people the Goodfellas treatment when they come in with someone (or when a married couple comes in keeping quiet about the lady the guy brought in last week! ) continuing to keep drinks fully refilled well after you have finished (before I get burned, I work in a place were turnover is PARAMOUNT to making money, if I worked at Citronelle, I would probably be doing that for everyone), I even give tips on other places to eat ALA Miracle on 34th St. (I know you always get the roast chicken, have you been down to Palena?). Getting certain tables or bypassing the wait is tough and sometimes a problem because at a non-reservation restaurant you run the risk of REALLY putting someone off if they realize they were leapfrogged, no matter how much you like the people who just walked in, comps are also hard for me because I need to put the ticket into the computer to get just about anything and once it is in the comp. it takes a manager to take it out and I will have to have a reason. Liking a regular is not a reason, especially when 60 percent of our business is probably regulars. One thingthat actually brings this back to topic is soliciting the manager to take care of a problem with a comp. I know that seems contrary to my whole post above but really nice, good rregulars rarely complain loud enough for the manager to feel the need to comp. They are trying to keep under their comp budget and much to my chagrin use it up on the whiners because they are afraid they will write a letter to the owners or something. They know that with regulars a sincere apology will usually do the trick.

You know just from conversations with my brother, a manager at the type of large national chain you reading this probably hate with all your being, a lot of this coincides with the rise of corporation restaurants like his. He says there are so many times when a customer is blatantly wrong, just out and out lies, but if they complain to corporate they will throw them a gift card despite any protest from my brother. These large corporations have no problem throwing 50 dollar gift cards around like candy, in a way locally owned stand-alones can't afford. If I wrote a letter to Applebees right now and said, "I didn't like your restaurant. I had a terrible time when I visited on Dec. 16th., Sincerely, Blake" I would be willing to bet I would rreceive a gift card in the mail soon. As a manager in this atmosphere, just like a waiter in a comp happy restaurant, this can feel like you are completely getting hamstrung. Imagine you are being nothing but polite to the WORST asshole in your office as he bitches you out over imagined insults and then when you finally get away and go to tell your buddy about it he promptly takes the guy out to lunch.

Gotta admit that sounds like a pretty sound system to me even in the present time...

Cider question but I thought this was the right place, Anyone know where to find Wyder's cider. I got the last 6 pack at Chevy Chase and they said that was the last one they will be getting. Beth loves this stuff so I want to find a new supplier.

I admit I am young and was not an experienced diner through the 60's 70's 80's etc. but can someone shed light on to what the status quo for mistakes was back then?

You might be able to purchase them somewhere. I don't think they make those in house. And I believe one of the varieties (I have seen two) contain duckfat.

Whoa wait a minute, were you presented the regular menu at the bar? Is this policy now or just a mixup? Very interested....

This might have been discussed already on this board and I definitely remember one or two TOM chats about this, but after reading an angry comment from a poster who "only received a free dessert because their steak was pink" on the RTC thread I was left wondering, when did the dining public start to feel so entitled? Only a free dessert for a pink steak? I just had someone go off on me because we don't provide free birthday cake. I agree its a nice touch, but an oft abused and costly one. I can understand disappointment but to spend 10 minutes bitching me, the server, out because you don't get something free? It just seems crazy. Free birthday deserts along with occasional free drinks from a bartender, comps after an order mess up etc. etc. used to be a show of hospitality now it is an expectation from the customer. It's crazy. I think it is a wonderfully nice gesture of a manager to take care of something for you if something gets really messed up (IE everyone else in your party finishes before you get yours or there is a cockroach in your food or something) but people want their entire meal comped now if a plate is 5 minutes late or the steak needs another 2 minutes on the grill. Steaks are especially hard because everyone has different views of what the temps are. I have someone who comes in every week, real nice guy, but damn it if he doesn't order his steak medium every week and send it back as underdone EVERY time. I like the guy so it is just funny. I eventually just started putting it in as Medium Well when I see him and he hasn't complained since. But I guess my point is, the price of something is printed right there on the menu, if you receive that item why would we expect not to pay or get something free? Where else is this normal? I would love to buy a book, read it, and then go into Barnes and Noble and tell them I want a free book because it wasn't as good as I had hoped. Or tell the lady at Giant I would like my cereal for free because I had to wait too long in line. If something goes wrong and you don't like the way it is handled, you don't demand something free. You pay for what you received and make the decision to not go back and by all means bitch to all your friends and family, write letters, whatever you want to do. If someone demanded things in any other branch of retail like they do in restaurants it would seem sooooo ridiculous.

Can we change the name of this thread to "Andre the Giant: A Real Life Bill Brasky."

You know one point on that AskTom post from a waiting standpoint. The number of Martini's ordered to me is irrelevant, behavior is everything. If someone is sitting quietly and not acting drunk or doesn't appear drunk they can order 15 for all I care. But if someone has two and is being obnoxious to other diners and/or appears drunk then they get the boot. For example Andre the Giant used to knock down a liter of vodka on a cross country flight and not even show any signs of being drunk. My friend in college had some kind of blood disorder and used to be an ASS after he drank 2 beers. Also real boozers can always bring flasks anyway (NOT speaking from experience or anything....) and swig in BETWEEN cocktails or before they even come in.

One of my brother's bartenders is looking for a new job in DC or MD. Anyone out there currently looking for a bartender? My brother said he is a real good guy and helped him open the new Ruby Tuesday in Columbia Heights but now he wants to take a step up from Ruby Tuesdays. I think it says a lot that his current manager is trying to help him find a better job. My brother originally just asked if we had any openings at Deluxe. We don't but I told him I would post on the board to see if anyone knows of anything else.

Yeah Teddy K does come in every once and again. He had gone sober, or at least the Kennedy version of sober I guess. White wine only. There are a ton of local and some national newscasters also. Oh and by the way, Lindsay Czarniak..... WOW, 10 times hotter in person. The Bush twins were the same way. Never thought they were anything special but seeing them in person definitely changed my mind.

Well as a matter of fact, I will give you a quick rundown of the CD Wisc. and be completely objective. First of all YES Two Amy's is fantastic, I am friends with a lot of the employees, and it is one of my favorite "go-to's" in the city and I actually recommend that to people all the time over CD. However, I can't speak for the rest of you, but sometimes I am just not in the mood for it. Deluxe has some perfectly passable comfort food and on days like these I just feel like a braised lamb shank a bit more than a cockles pizza. So I think it does have a niche. And one note on Cactus, I know more than a few Egyptians/Middle-Easterners who eat there every day they have off because it reminds them most of the daily cuisine in Egypt. I am not a HUGE fan but I thought that was interesting. You really should order off the specials menu and stay away from the Tex-Mex staples like enchiladas, burrito etc. Ok back to Deluxe, I am going to write a complete review/dining guide for you. What I tell people is that we don't really have anything that falls flat on its face but we don't really reach for great culinary heights either. So I say 8.5 for execution and a 4 for level of dfifficulty. We are really good about substitutions, changes etc. More so than most any restaurant I can think of and I think one of our greatest strengths is your ability to customize a dish which I do ALL the time for myself. Add a piece of tuna steak and avacado to that salad, get the steak with sauteed spinach instead of mashed potatoes etc. That is what makes it a surprisingly great place to eat healthy. I almost always get the Tuna Mignon with no sauce no gratin potato and sauteed spinach and black bean relish on the side. Or roasted chicken with green beans and tomatoes instead of mashed pot. We are very kid friendly in my opinion. I think most of the servers are also great at spotting return business and a lot of times you will see 4 or 5 staff members stop by another servers table to have a short conversation with someone we all know. Dish-wise my favorite right now is probably the sea-bass but I drop the corn sautee it comes with and substitute spinach and leave off the buerre blanc also. Then I just ask for some OO and drizzle it on top with some lemon. VERY good. I know that has alterations but after you have been eating there for three years you experiment a lot. I think one thing we do better than most is pot pie. I usually get that when I come in with Beth. Again nothing fancy but good execution. I am really liking the lamb shank these days. The roast chicken is usally another staple of my meals (some days it can be a bit dry but that is the exception not the rule). Our mac and cheese and roast tomatoes are my favorite sides. Not a fan of the asparagus. Meatloaf is the most popular but I just think it is passable (nothing is better than mom's right?). The tuna and salmon are both dreal nice cuts of fish for a pretty low price. I am not a fan of the shrimp we are getting right now. We switched to american shrimp and sadly they do NOT taste as good as the foreign ones we were getting. But that could change at anytime. I love the broth we use for our mussells and we serve enough of them to keep the stock rotating frequently. But I am always leery of mussells to begin with. I would leave the pasta dishes. They are both decent but you could make the same with one of those ready made skillet bags that you can get in the freezer section. Burgers, good. Lamb sandwich and prime rib cheddar melt real good. Tuna Steak sandwich and Nicoise salad (with salmon not tuna) good. Not a big fan of the Sunday night ribs but I am from KC so that might be skewed. A lot of people love them. The specials are all hit or miss. Some I really like usually the weekend specials are a bit less utilitarian. If I am there find me and ask me and I will let you know Soups are usually real good. Dessert is nothing special I would say except for the special cheesecake which is decent and the mixed berries which always seem to be of uncannily (word?) good quality even out of season. All the appetizers are decent but my least favorite is the most popular, spinach dip. The onion strings are ADDICTIVE, the ahi tuna is my favorite but more expensive and the quesadillas are a pretty common staff purchase. And as for brunch I am pretty blah about it. Don't get me wrong it is perfectly good but nothing I couldn't whip up at home in under a half an hour. If you do go, I recommend getting the steak frites and substituting eggs for the fries (Yes we will do that!!! No one knows it but me though). Monday night all bottles of wine are half price. And yes Antonio you can occassionaly do some mild celebrity spotting. I have waited on the Bush twins and Gheorghe Muresan, Michael Wilbon, Bill Frist, Tim Russert and other politicos frequently stop by. I would say service is really good but it is hit or miss. We have about half of the staff who have been there for a long time, know everyone and really do care about giving good service but we also get in some seasonal and new hires from AU to fill out the schedule due to schlubs like me who only work weeknights and scattered weekends.

Damn I wish I was seriously debating calling in to work last night. That might be sad but I am not sure. Any other changes to the regular menu since their Thanksgiving break that you noticed?

I just got back into town today and was so disappointed when I logged on DR and went to Tom's chat and there was no further mention of either of the two "MAJOR" pieces of gossip alluded to last week. In the words of Teddy KGB, "Just like a young boy coming in for a quickie I feel so unsateesfied!!"

If I ever got an eye roll I would just say "Oh I'm sorry, I am a recovering alcoholic three months sober. My wife said I can move back in with her and the kids at 6 months, but you know what, you look upset that I didn't get something to drink so get me a double whiskey please."

He is right on some of this stuff I guess but he still sounds like a bitter asshole to me. One of the reasons I work at a rest. is to talk about food and the dishes. I make recommendations all the time. And for the nice customers and a lot of the regulars I warn them if something wasn't looking great that night, like sometimes one of the staff had the mussells preshift or somthing and they weren't at the top of their game. Or the new guy making the pasta dishes doesn't seem to have it yet. (Another reason to be nice to your servers!!) I definitely don't mind answering questions about ingredients. Is every diner supposed to know the subtle differences between two different oyster beds in the same area now? I might go home and google it also but I would like to have SOME idea before I plunk down 30 bucks for a dish. Humbug on the guy who wrote this.

I suggest getting it out before somebody does ask.

And I think in the long run there is a "trickle up" theory. As more people are exposed at the bottom you will see increased distribution and availability of alll wines from swill to swank. And Don I think your metaphor is giving Britney waaaay too much credit. I think if OG was giving out samples of Kool-aid spiked with plastic bottle vodka you would be right on... Some of the ones on their sample wine list are not half bad though. I mean yeah most on this board wouldn't usually drink them but I saw Estancia pinot noir on there and shred me all you want but I have downed a few bottles on occassion.

Show me a restaurant that this isn't at least partly true and I will show you a boarded up storefront.

You know those almost too outlandish to be believable escapades you piece together with your friends the next morning after a night out? That was the whole summer. My Las Vegas chronicles, including all Olive Garden related chapters are best told together and are probably better served over a dogfish head at the bar at RTC sometime than this board. A few thoughts about OG's wine program though, they do try pretty hard to teach servers about wine, even the different server sections were named after different wines. They require servers (at least when i worked there) to offer wine or make a suggestion 3 times during the meal. (And we were secret-shopped on that one) Always fun in a town where there are a lot of Mormons and recovering alcoholics who told you specifically they don't drink. We did do a lot of wine tasting as servers and were very good about giving samples to customers. Most of our customers (and servers for that matter) did not know a lot about wine and might have picked something up from these efforts. I think we all lose perspective because we live in DC. In most of the country outside of the big Metros, restaurants like olive gardens and ruby tuesdays and applebees might be the only sit down restaurants a family goes to in a year. And when I go home I am hard pressed to find anything more than boones farm at a liquor store within a ten mile radius from my house. You can decry the quality of the wines they have all you want but wouldn't a sublime bottle of vino kind of be wasted on someone who hadn't had exposure to anything but Sutter Home? Everyone has to start somewhere. I started drinking Busch Lite, and thought Guinness was disgusting. I started drinking boones pinot g. and I thought zinfadel was gross. Drank screwdrivers and thought bourbon was HORRID. As I drank more and more though my tastes developed into what they are now. OG does have some decent bottles that they can buy in MASS quantities and distribute nationwide that I think are just fine for people starting out in wine or who normally never drink wine but want a bottle just once to celebrate or something. I think most of you said it yourself, you have never, would never, step foot in an OG, so they are not writing that wine list for the likes of the people on DR who debate the qualities between different vintages of grapes from a specific vineyard. I think it is perfectly written for someone in a small town whomay only dine out once a month at one of the 3 restaurant options in town, and would like to try some wine other than Boones. The article said that "they serve complimentary wine samples to 5 million people a year". Despite the quality* (all in the eyes of the beholder!!) of those wines I still think they deserve the award. Who does more for wine knowledge in this country, a restaurant chain that GIVES 5 MILLION tastes of serviceable wines a year, many to people who rarely or never drink wine, or a place like Charlie Palmers who may have 10 gajillion small production gems in their cellar but only serve those to a select few stuffed shirt guests who already consider themselves wine experts and probably memorize the tasting notes from Wine Spect. every month. I agree with you that in DC olive garden's wine program is not doing much to further wine knowledge, but in Monee, IL or Independence MO they are actually doing a lot to introduce people who normally wouldn't drink wine to one of our favorite activities on this board so I say KUDOS.

You know I really have like spring garden. Ordered from there about 3-4 times since I moved and find it far superior to Oriental East or whatever the name is in the Blair complex. I believe most if not all the dishes are not made with MSG. I love that because I seem to not get that weird crappy stomach feeling I usually get from MSG overload when I eat chinese take out.

Um.... More than a few years back I was a wine ambassador myself for 3 months in Vegas. Just thought I would throw that out there.

I will try to get over there sometime soon. Quick side note, Adega is really growing on me. Do they not have the nicest staff you have ever encountered at a counter service eatery?? I was floored at how friendly the girls at the counter were.

Has someone already started a thread for this new place? I didn't see one. Anyways it got a sound thrashing by someone on Tom's chat and I was just wondering if anyone else had tried it out. I saw it opened and was reallllly hoping for a go to sushi place near home.