As a former server and teenaged restaurant dishwasher (and a damn
good one, I might add), I have first-hand experience in the folly of
using restaurant china that's too expensive or too awkward to handle.
Those costly plates break more often than the cheap stuff, folks, and
not just in the bus tubs and the good ol' Hobart dishwashing machine. I
never worked in a restaurant where someone -- sometimes even a customer
-- didn't drop a plate, or a whole tray of them, during a busy weekend
shift.
Lorraine's bigger gripe, and one which I share completely, is the
idiotic use of tiny but fashionable plates that are too small to hold
the food put on them. Like itsy-bitsy salad plates. Lorraine was
recently dining at the Blue Grotto
in Brookside. "I could not eat my Caesar salad because any time I would
stab a piece of lettuce with my fork, half of the greens on the plate
would slide off onto the table," she writes. "My dining companion had
the same problem. A few nights later, I was dining at a restaurant in
Westport and had the same problem. What's up with this trend?"
I would hate to think that in a difficult economy, restaurant owners
were trying to give the impression of being generous by serving
a standard portion on a smaller plate. But years ago, in a much better
economic climate, I worked for a rapscallion restaurant owner who did
just that. He bought, for a song, a case of off-sized plates that were
too big to be bread plates or dessert plates and too small to be salad
plates. "Use 'em as salad plates," he told us. "It'll make us look like
we're treating the customers right."
That's not what people thought, but he didn't care. When his
restaurant went out of business, he sold the plates to another
restaurateur who did use them as bread plates. But he served big rolls,
so it worked.
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