Claw and Disorder

Tales from the Restaurant Trenches

When I was 19, I landed a job alongside ex-cons, stoners, and—quite possibly—the Korean mafia. It was my first waiting tables gig, a seafood (and sushi) restaurant on the end of the Newport Beach pier. Sushi is in parentheses because California rolls made up 99% of the sushi served. Referring to California rolls as sushi is like referring to Taco Bell’s “Cheesy Gordita Crunch” as Mexican food—the authenticity is suspect.

Our head “chef” learned his trade in prison, and when I started, he had been clean and sober a couple years and thoughts of breaking and entering only rarely crept up in his imagination. When Scott Weiland of Stone Temple Pilots did a stint in LA County, chef’s parole officer got him an autographed headshot, which he tacked up over the pot we used to boil lobsters and crabs. “Hey, Norm. You ever wanna see STP? I could probably make it happen.” Celebrity by proxy, I suppose.

Our manager got his start as a high school football coach but transitioned to hospitality after being fired for aggressive coaching tactics (he went all Joe Jackson on a kicker for talking back). Hospitality was the obvious next step in his career. And, yeah, he treated every dinner rush like our livelihoods were on the line—4th and inches in the 4th quarter of the Rose Bowl: “Never mind your dislocated finger, serve that carafe of wine, boy, and clear that table. Full hands in, full hands out, mother fuckers!”

The serving and bartending staff were a mix of community college dropouts, perpetually stoned surfers, and divorcees. About a dozen of us altogether, and I’m sure our staff kept the lights on for Planned Parenthood and any number of local drug dealers.

The busboys were named Jorge and Jose. They were a Mexican Laurel and Hardy. Maybe five feet tall, and as skinny as he was short, Jorge did everything at 100 miles an hour. You could run a small town on his energy, which he produced with an ear-to-ear smile despite a set of teeth that looked like the handiwork of a mule kick to the face. He dreamed of one day marrying Academy Award-winning actress “Kimberly Bass-in-gur.”

“How does your wife feel about that?” I asked him.

“Eh, what can she say? Marrying Kimberly Bass-in-gur is my American dream. Let my wife have her own American Dream.”

“What if her American Dream is to marry Alec Baldwin?” Jorge frowned and drew his finger across his throat. “Would you kill Alec Baldwin? Or your wife?” I asked.

“Sí,” he said.

Jose was the opposite of Jorge in energy and appearance. Big, chubby, and perpetually hungover, he tried to bend our ear on his thoughts about the economy when he should have been bussing our tables.

One of our servers, a guy from Jersey who moved to Newport Beach to pursue the “surfing and drinking chapter of his life,” hated Jose. “Move your fat ass, pen-dekko,” he would scream. Jose would giggle, thinking it was all in fun, a light-hearted ribbing among amigos, but on several occasions we stopped the Jersey native from shoving Jose down the stairs. And thank God for that, because I’m certain the management would have simply dumped his corpse off the pier or, more likely, chopped him up and fed him to the ravenous crabs and lobsters in the dining room aquarium.

The restaurant management, though this was never confirmed, may have had ties to Korean mafia. This rumor started when one of our servers noticed that all cash sales were voided in the computer at the end of each shift. I’m not an accountant—my wife doesn’t even let me pay bills—but I’m confident those are pretty fishy bookkeeping strategies. Suffice to say, I spent most of my shifts serving grilled swordfish topped with bedlam or steamed Dungeness crab with a side of chaos.

The restaurant was a tourist trap. Locals knew better and kept their distance. Two stories on the end of the pier, the “formal” dining room, kitchen, and “sushi” bar were on the lower level while the bar, patio, and a catwalk fit only for Twiggy-like frames were on the upper level. The restaurant existed despite no word of mouth and a $0 marketing spend. The only money I imagine we spent to stay in business was a cash, cocaine, or call girl bribe to the health inspector who ignored our laissez faire, devil-may-give-a-shit approach to things like E. coli and airborne food illnesses. Here are just an unsanitized handful of our health and safety indiscretions:

• Pier fishermen regularly cleaned mackerel in the downstairs bathrooms. A bar of dirty starfish-shaped soap sat in a porcelain cradle. I worked there for two years, and I don’t know that that bar got much smaller than it was on my orientation day.

• Stoned servers with the munchies placed lighter-than-they-ought-to-be fried shrimp platters in the middle of four-tops having knocked back a few shrimp in while hauling the food trays up the stairwell. Some servers were bold enough to still be chewing as they said, “Fried shrimp galore, enjoy!”

• Salad dressing containers—ranch and bleu cheese, Italian and French—were stowed in an ice bath all day and packed into a fridge at night. They were never emptied or cleaned, just added to. I’m confident the same blue cheese dressing we served in 1998 had a little patient zero bleu dressing from the Newport Pier Seafood (and Sushi) grand opening.

• Pigeons, some whole, many one-legged or one-eyed—a few one-legged and one-eyed—often perched on the patio railing, dive-bombing unsuspecting midwestern tourists who allowed themselves to be distracted by a west coast sunset.

Little bastard.

We servers hated the pigeons. We engaged with them in eternal warfare. Their brazen scavenging incited our anger and hatred. As I write this, I can already hear your judgment, but until you’ve been the victim of dozens of pigeon shit storms, you can’t possibly understand the struggle.

Occasionally, we’d try to catch a pigeon, usually as they pilfered French fries or oyster crackers from a table that had yet to be bussed. “Fucking Jose, you fat pen-dekko!” our Jersey native would grunt.

When someone did manage to catch a pigeon, the servers would gather and ritualistically watch as the captor fired the pigeon off the end of the pier like a football. No pigeons (I assume) were hurt when we did this. They just became little avian spirals, and once they lost velocity, they’d flap their wings and take flight. It was almost charming.

It did go sideways once. A particularly irate bartender caught a pigeon and heaved it from the deck of the patio, and the poor bird just sort of flopped onto the surface of the water. The grumpy bartender must have squeezed it too hard when he was lining up his Joe Montana grip, but when the bartender started crying at the sight of the dead pigeon, we tried to rewrite the narrative.

“It was probably just old,” we said.

“No, I killed it,” he said. “I’m such a prick.”

“It might have been malnourished. Pigeons can’t live on bread alone.”

“My wife asked for a divorce last week, and I took it out on that poor pigeon.”

The Jersey native couldn’t take any more crying: “Dude, the term is scape goat, not scape pigeon. Get your shit together.”

Of all the shenanigans at Newport Pier Seafood, one stands above the rest. Someone ordered a steamed crab. This was good. Steamed crab was among the more expensive menu items, and a larger check meant a larger tip, in principle—15%, maybe 20% if I did a great job. We had a process in place for serving steamed crab.

1. Choose the crab. In this case, the father of the party nominated his seven-year-old daughter. I escorted her through the dining room to the tank where we kept the live crabs, saying, “Make way, a steamed crab reckoning is about to commence!” We were instructed to make a show of it. “The theater encourages more steamed crab purchases,” our manager said. “It should feel like a half-time show.” The seven-year-old daughter pressed her nose against the tank glass and pointed at the biggest crab in the tank. Pay dirt!

2. Secure the crab. The lobster claws were banded. The crab claws were not. We were trained to grab the crab like a sandwich, pinching it from behind. So I dipped my hand into the water, slipped my thumb under the crab’s caboose, and gripped my fingers on the back of its shell. Usually, the crabs were low energy because we didn’t feed them. They went into the tank and slowly starved as they waited to be chosen and dropped into a pot of boiling water—a crustacean life is a tough one. For some reason, though, this crab was going all William Wallace on me, twisting and squirming, snapping and jabbing, screaming “Freedom” in his silent crab fashion. Thankfully, Jorge appeared at my side with a pair of tongs.

3. Weigh the crab. Jorge placed the crab upside down on the scale. To get an accurate reading, the crab has to be still, and William Claw-lace(?) had no intention of cooperating. He continued to fight, his hard shell flopping against the stainless steel scale, the dining room starting to take notice. Just as the William Claw-lace nearly fell to the floor, Jorge caught him, but not with the tongs. He caught him with his bare hands, and William Claw-lace let him have it. He gave Jorge the same treatment Jorge would have given Alec Baldwin and his wife in the event that she achieved her American dream. The crab pinched Jorge’s pinky finger. “¡Tu puta madre!” Jorge shouted, flinging the crab across the dining room floor. Because we didn’t feed the crabs, the malnourishment was real, and in this case, one of William Claw-lace’s claws broke off and tumbled to the feet of the seven-year-old daughter. She screamed with an intensity that would have made Edvard Munch begin mixing his paints. She reminded me of Kathleen Turner’s scream while voicing Jessica Rabbit in the climax of Who’s Framed Roger Rabbit?

   Meanwhile, William Less-than-claw-lace scurried across the dining room. I swear I could hear him say, “You’ll never catch me, coppers!” But Jorge and I did eventually manage to capture him—after all, we’d had a lot of practice with pigeons.

   

   An intimate look at William Claw-lace before his incarceration and sentencing to death by boiling.

4. Start the crab. Once I had the crab weighed, all I had to do was dump him in the boiling pot and tell Scott Weiland’s new BFF that a crab was cooking.

5. Comfort the customer. This was an ad hoc step in the process. The seven-year-old daughter was inconsolable, so Jorge brought her a lollipop. He stretched out his arms, offering a hug, and she looked like she was going to accept, which made Jorge smile. The seven-year-old daughter caught glimpse of Jorge’s dentally challenged snaggleteeth, a collection of enamel destined to become a witch doctor’s necklace, and she let out another scream. Given the SOP of Newport Beach Seafood (and Sushi) I’m amazed that more tables didn’t become bona fide nightmares like this one. In fact, this experience initiated me into waiter nightmares. If you know what I’m referring to, chances are you’ve been in the trenches, too. More on waiter nightmares another time.

A few weeks ago, my wife and I ordered a breakfast burrito from a taco truck in between my daughter’s volleyball games. We paid on their little touch pad, and we were offered an opportunity to tip. The lowest percentage was 25%, and it went up to 35%. I would have killed for 25% when I was serving. I did kill for 25% when I was serving—so many lobsters, so many crabs, and I was definitely accessory to a pigeon murder.

If you’ve never worked in a restaurant, you’re the lesser for it. The absurdity and the melee, the never-ending clown car of characters who staff kitchens and dining rooms, the high-stakes game of dealing with the hunger of strangers—it’s enough to fuel a creative imagination for years. The chaos theorists will tell you there’s order in pandemonium. Maybe so, but the only order in our chaos came when we asked, “What would you like?” And it wasn’t order in the chaos, it was the order that drove chaos.

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Thanks for reading. If you laughed or smiled (or were mildly offended) please subscribe and share—it really does me and this little writing project a solid.

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Creativity begets creativity. Often I’ve forgotten good stories until someone’s comment jostles them loose from my memory. So in the interest of creative sustainability, a few questions for you:

1. What are your crazy work stories?

2. Best meal of your life? Worst?

3. Thoughts on tipping?

And if you enjoyed this shenanigans recollection, maybe put your peepers on some of these:

• The Mobility Guru: Where I may or may not have been the victim of spiritual, psychological, and physical assault. Hard to say.

• Making Friends with Agony: Where I may or may not have had words with a Girl Scout who was in pursuits of her stupid merit badge.

• The Canyon Zombie and My Beautiful Wife: Where my wife and I pursued a zombie in our canyon while making memories with a 911 operator.