worried. Then we asked the poor bastard if he'd be kind enough to grab a
box of shrimp out of the freezer for us, as we were short-handed, Dimitri
being missing and all, and four tables going out at once. I think you can
imagine what the manager experienced: hurrying back to the dank corner
of the cellar, a single, bare light-bulb illuminating the chest freezer; he
lifts the lid, only to find the nude, fishbelly-white, blood-splattered
corpse of our missing comrade staring up at him with dead eyes through
a thin layer of plastic wrap, the beginnings of a light frost under the film
making the already gruesome scene even more terrifyingly real.
We ended up having to give the guy a shot of ammonia inhaler; his knees
buckled and he was unable to return to work for over an hour. Dimitri, of
course, caught a terrible cold for his efforts, but it was worth it: the
manager left shortly after—and he didn't bother to nail up his work boots
on our Wall of Fame. But we cared little for managers or owners—or
customers for that matter.
By now, unsurprisingly, our restaurant was rapidly failing. I began to
see, for the first time, what I would later recognize as "Failing
Restaurant Syndrome", an affliction that causes owners to flail about
looking for a quick fix, a fast masterstroke that will "turn things around",
cure all their ills, reverse the already irreversible trend toward
insolvency. We tried New Orleans Brunch—complete with Dixieland
band. We tried a prix fixe menu, a Sunday night buffet, we advertised,
we hired a publicist. Each successive brainstorm was more
counterproductive than the one before. All of this floundering about and
concept-tinkering only further demoralized an already demoralized staff.
When the paychecks started bouncing, and the vendors started to put us
on COD, the owners called in the restaurant consultants. Even then, we
knew what that meant: the consultants usually arrive just ahead of the
repo men and the marshals. It was the death knell. We had tried. We had
failed. Naturally, we held the owners responsible. It was a tough spot, the
ambiance was no good, the music in the dining room sucked, the waiters