This is a true confession from a really bad waiter:
After sucking down a few too many Moscow mule cocktails, a friend revealed a secret he’s kept locked in his heart for years. While working as a server at a busy downtown Manhattan restaurant, my pal said, he once became rattled by the incessant demands of hungry, rude and spoiled customers. He dropped a hamburger on the dining-room floor.
Then he stepped on it.
He picked up the marred morsel, brushed it off, and stuck it back on a plate. Then he served it.
“Best burger I’ve ever tasted,” he quoted the unwitting sandwich recipient as saying.
My tongue loosened by too many glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon, I disclosed that while working as a waitress in Manhattan, I once was reprimanded by my manager. I was chewed out not for a sanitary infraction, but for involuntarily gasping at the sight of cockroaches swarming over the dining area’s server station. Gross.
For a long time, forcing myself to dine out required me to forget everything I knew about restaurants. I had to assume that every bread roll served by a genial college student had not spent time on a dirty carpet.
Then in 2010, we were saved! Under the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, a man who really likes to eat out, the city’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene instituted a grading system for the city’s more than 24,000 restaurants. So an eatery that’s graded “A” following an annual inspection isn’t likely to have an unspeakably dirty kitchen. One graded “B” is nastier, and one that receives a “C” might as well shut its doors. Then there’s the designation “Grade Pending,” a state during which restaurant owners should clean up before inspectors come calling again.
Is it time to rejoice? Hardly.
Two wildly popular food-slinging establishments have recently run afoul of the health police. But rather than take their lumps like adults, the owners and employees whine.
One is Dominique Ansel Bakery in Soho, which gave the world the $5 Cronut, a cross between a croissant and a doughnut. It was shut by the Health Department April 4 and reopened four days later after a video was posted on YouTube showing a mouse scurrying through the bakery’s kitchen.
Health inspectors then found “hundreds of mouse droppings” in the place, a Health spokesman told me. The staff did a top-to-bottom cleaning, recemented Dominique Ansel’s floors, and plugged holes that mice might crawl through.
It kept its “A” grade.
Infuriatingly, bakery workers painted themselves as victims.
“In the past year, we have woken up daily knowing that our success has made us vulnerable to more malicious attacks than any small, one-shop business should ever have to suffer,” read a post on the bakery’s Facebook page signed “The Dominique Ansel Team.”
“But we refuse to believe that we live in a world where success turns people into targets of spite and contempt.”
Bakery spokesperson Amy Ma told me that employees suspect the bakery was “set up” with a mouse by a mean customer or disgruntled ex-employee.
Customers got an apology.
The upscale restaurant Per Se, located in the Time Warner Center, boasts a three-star rating from the Michelin Red Guide and charges $310 per person for its tasting menus. (Tip is included, but not tax or wine.)
After doing poorly on a Feb. 19 health inspection, Per Se, which now must post a “Grade Pending” sign where customers can see it, was threatened with a “C” grade. But after an administrative hearing, Per Se’s rating was upgraded to a “B” by the Department of Health and it was hit with $870 in fines. This for one of the city’s most revered hash houses?
At issue are two pans of potatoes cooking in canola oil that a health inspector found to be held at 112 to 118 degrees, rather than the lawful 140 degrees. Plus, a chef was seen drinking water in the kitchen from an open container, there was a leaky faucet and a dusty fan guard.
Owner/chef Thomas Keller put out a defiant statement in which he said cool potatoes are the accepted method for cooking pommes rissolée.
“I continue to stand by our chefs, our cooking techniques and our methodologies, which have been implemented in our kitchens for the past 20 years.’’ He vowed to appeal the ruling.
Eighty-eight percent of city restaurants are rated “A.”
The system works.
Gwyn’s kooky gobbledy-goop
Does Gwyneth Paltrow have an unconscious desire to re-couple with her man? The actress tweeted a picture of herself hugging son Moses in honor of his eighth birthday. In it, she flashed her wedding band, still on her left ring finger.
Gwyneth and rocker hubby Chris Martin announced their split in a statement on Gwyneth’s lifestyle Web site, Goop.com, headlined “Conscious Uncoupling.’’ Post columnist Richard Johnson reported that Gwyn had wanted to continue with a pretend marriage, but Martin refused.
Can this weird marriage be saved?
O policy not selfie evident
Forget Selfiegate. Pictures taken with the president will not be banned.
Last week on a visit to the White House, Red Sox slugger David “Big Papi’’ Ortiz took a portrait of himself with President Obama. He failed to tell the leader of the free world that he’d signed an endorsement deal with Samsung, which used the selfie to promote the company’s cellphones. On Sunday, White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer said on TV’s “Face the Nation’’ that “maybe this should be the end of all selfies.’’
He was kidding.
White House spokesman Jay Carney said there are no plans to ban selfies, but added that lawyers talked to Samsung’s counsel about using the president’s image for commercial purposes, a no-no.
In December, a grinning Obama posed for a selfie with hot Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt and British Prime Minister David Cameron at a memorial service for former South African President Nelson Mandela. First Lady Michelle Obama frowned.
I guess that one’s cool.
Oops, sue teen brats herself out
New Jersey brat Rachel Canning, who sued her parents for tuition and spending money, is back to her wild ways. Pictures posted on Rachel’s Facebook page this month show the 18-year-old Catholic high school senior at a party chugging from a red plastic cup and hanging with Lucas Kitzmiller, the guy Rachel’s parents forbade her from seeing after, they claimed, he took her out drinking and cut school with her. In one photo, at least two males appear to be passed out.
Rachel, who went to live at a friend’s house last fall, returned to the house of her folks, Sean and Elizabeth Canning, last month and dropped her lawsuit against them. She won a $56,000 college scholarship and seemed to be on the straight and narrow.
It didn’t last.