There is no better job in restaurants than sous-chef. This second-in-command position makes everything happen in the kitchen. The sous directs the actual operation of the feeding machine, trains and teaches, and can generally be counted upon to keep order in the midst of the near chaos that is every service period in a busy operation. The sous has just enough authority and not too much responsibility. Though nearly everyone defers to the sous, he or she generally manages to avoid the ultimate responsibility of cost overages, human resource crises, and fretful ownership. Whereas executive chefs are the ultimate temporary employees, at-will retainers who are sometimes gone in an eye blink, sous-chefs, if competent, can ride out most storms by just keeping their heads down and getting the job done. At worst they may be a member of a departing executive chef’s entourage, following the alpha chef to his next assignment. I really liked being a sous-chef.
After the copywriting debacle I naturally gravitated back to the milieu. Though I tried freelance writing for a time, my landlord didn’t feel that I should defer rent payments until my paltry royalties arrived. The paltriness of the remunerations was richly deserved, as a glance through your collected back issues of Interstate Truck Trader will show. Luckily, most of the trucking plagiarism I cobbled together for this august journal went unread, as the majority of the publication consisted of lurid ads for backstreet massage parlors and escort services. I sent out bales of submissions to other, tonier publications and stopped saving rejection letters after I had a drawer full. I was forced to quit smoking just to save money, and without sweet nicotine as my muse, my literary career seemed doomed.
But you can always get a job in a restaurant, and since a friend from my Ambassador days was an executive chef at a suburban country club, I visited him and let him talk me into a part-time job making sandwiches for rich golfers. Not thirty days later, my friend’s sous-chef showed up for work gloriously drunk and was loudly fired in the middle of the kitchen. Without missing a beat, the executive chef turned to me and asked whether I wanted the sous-chef job or not, godammit. I accepted.
There were a few old hands from the Ambassador there, so most of the crew was familiar to me. My abrupt elevation opened a vacancy in the pantry, however, and at the height of the golf season this position had to be filled immediately. One of the other cooks brought in a candidate he had met at downtown Minneapolis’s Gay 90’s. He was a thin, boyish-looking man about my age named Michael.
Wel-l-l-l-l, I was wondering when I’d get back into this little story. Way too much hetero-sweatero garbage so far. A girl like me can’t seem to get any consideration!
Most of what he’s been saying is true … but bor-ing. Gawd. Anyway, yes, they hired me to make sandwiches and do display work and so forth out at the Minneapolis Golf Club, which isn’t in Minneapolis at all but out on the end of the bus line in some stupid suburb. It took forever to get out there on the bus, but I did my crocheting or slept the whole way.
The kitchen crew was OK, but the general manager of the place was an old nelly in a three-piece suit with a Phi Beta Kappa key on his watch chain. A real queen. I might have even tricked with him once, but I must have been really drunk at the time. Anyway, whenever I got sick of those straight people in the kitchen, he’d let me do some serving in the dining room, which kept me from going absolutely insane. As a new guy and a fag as well, I took a lot of shit. I’d walk in on Monday, and some punk would yell, “Hey Mike! Ya get any pussy this weekend?” and I’d have to answer, “They were pussies, all right.” Or some shit. The best was when this very straight bar manager—such an ass!—was trying to strike up a conversation with me while I was making his sandwich. He asked me if I had a nice day off yesterday. “Oh yes!” I gushed. “I met a couple of guys at the 90’s, and we ended up getting into a lovely three-way.” He never bothered me for a sandwich again.
Since the buses barely ran out there at night, I’d usually ask the sous-chef if he’d give me a ride downtown to the 90’s after work. After all, he lived in South Minneapolis, and it was only five miles or so out of his way. He told people that he made me ride in the trunk. I think he was pretty amazed that I never went directly home after work. He didn’t want to hear about what I was doing every night, unless I came in with my glasses broken or had a welt on my head. But as long as none of it affected my work, nobody cared.
Our sous-chef changed employers a few times in the early ’80s, and I always went along with him. He must have thought I made him look more manly or something. He was kidding himself! So when he and the executive chef went on to run the kitchen in a restaurant by Lake Calhoun, I went along. When that place closed, he got the sous-chef job at Schiek’s Café, and you know I followed him there. Hell, that place is only two blocks from the Gay 90’s! I sometimes think he took that job just so he wouldn’t have to give me any more rides.
* * *
Friedrich Schiek left Germany with an armload of recipes and a dream of opening a high-class establishment. Reaching Minneapolis during the Civil War, he found that only a few boardinghouses and ramshackle hotels served to feed the population of what was then a frontier boomtown. He worked in some of these establishments, slowly putting away some seed money for his dream restaurant, and in 1887 Schiek made the dream a reality.
Schiek’s Café was a dimly lit but highly ornate Victorian confection. Schiek brought in wood-carvers from his native Germany, as well as Italian tile and stained-glass artisans, to embellish his restaurant. On a muddy street in downtown Minneapolis, the café originally served hearty German fare, fine wines, and schooners of local beer. The place immediately became the finest restaurant in the city, largely by default, and later maintained that status as its chefs broadened the menu to include all sorts of European specialties. Schiek enhanced the appeal of his restaurant by installing a separate ladies’ entrance, which conducted them through a circuitous route, avoiding the smoky saloon portion of the premises, directly to the dining room. Friedrich’s sons carried on the tradition after his passing, and though it relocated several times and changed ownership periodically, Schiek’s Café maintained its reputation for exquisite cuisine in plush surroundings for nearly a century. Before the onset of Prohibition, it set the standard for fine dining in Minneapolis and elevated the general standard for restaurants locally as its competitors strove to match Schiek’s. Even today, the elegance reputedly continues, although recently in the guise of a gentlemen’s club, Schiek’s Palace Royale, and nekkid ladies have replaced food as the primary attraction on the menu.
The building that housed (and houses) the latest incarnation of Schiek’s Café was originally a bank. It was built at the close of the nineteenth century, when bankers believed that an imposing edifice was their best advertisement for the bank’s safety and stability. The walls were marble, and the floor was mosaic. Dark wood was everywhere, and crystal chandeliers hung from a curlicued dome that soared above the premises. The stateliness of the bank building alone could not guarantee, however, the safety of the depositors’ funds. The old bank was connected to the rest of the Minneapolis downtown area by a labyrinth of tunnels, where couriers could do the bank’s business out of the purview of desperadoes. During Minneapolis’s growth spurt just before World War I, the bank outgrew its palatial space and relocated after selling the building to the Schiek family of restaurateurs. They converted the building into a plush, multichambered dining facility just in time for Prohibition and the Great Depression. The restaurant’s fortunes rose and fell for the rest of century.
Ownership changed repeatedly after Prohibition, but they kept the Schiek’s name. The café was revived under a series of proprietors, finally reaching its height of fame in the 1950s and 1960s. A local businessman named Ben Berger had bought the ailing café and invested enough money in the place to bring it up to the elite circle of Minneapolis restaurants. Charlie’s, Freddie’s, Harry’s, Murray’s, and the Dyckman Hotel were the restaurant’s main high-end competitors, but Schiek’s alone could boast the musical stylings of the Schiek’s Sextet, a string ensemble made up of moonlighting musicians from the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. The food was decent but grounded in middle-class cookery, as were all the other upscale restaurants of the time. By the 1970s the critical mass of customers in Minneapolis had migrated to the suburbs, and downtown restaurants began closing one by one. Berger sold off Schiek’s and went off to tend his other enterprises, including some successful pornography outlets. The old bank building housed a series of failures through the 1970s, including a purveyor of red sauce wretchedness that billed itself as the Spaghetti Emporium, which miraculously managed to bankrupt itself serving pizza and pasta. A new consortium of owners purchased the building on the cheap shortly thereafter and decided to resurrect the only thing that had ever made sense at that location. Schiek’s Café was reborn.
What I am calling “middle-class cookery” had its origins in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and in its own way, this style of cookery was revolutionary. Not only was it driven primarily by women, unlike the French haute cuisine of a hundred years before, but the newest scientific breakthroughs contributed to its popularization. And for the first time women were prominent among the contributing scientists.
The explosion of scientific discoveries in the Victorian era was nowhere more profound than in the medical sciences. The treatment of physical ailments was at last free of superstition and the archaic practices that had held sway for centuries. Instead, medical men earned a new credibility and prestige as empiricism replaced snake oil and effective treatment supplanted the bone saw. Medical practitioners even went beyond the symptoms of disease and sought to discover its causes. Since the ingesting of foodstuffs was the one universal practice among the ailing public, there was a sudden scientific impulse to discover whether food choices could be analyzed and scientifically associated with the choice between health and disease. The science of nutrition resulted, taking over, in the medical hierarchy, from the science of phrenology.
Largely denied access to medical schools, educated women with a scientific bent found their niche in the budding nutrition discipline. There was no lack of theories to pursue in this new science, and oftentimes the ideas tended to cancel each other out. Germ theory argued that foods should be cooked to a sanitary mushiness, whereas the discovery of vitamins argued against overly processed preparations. Disciples of Horace Fletcher (who were actually called “Fletcherists”) postulated that every mouthful of food required a minimum of one hundred chews in order to be beneficial to the body. Bleached white flour was seen as the closest thing to a perfect food. Some, like the Kellogg brothers, even equated dietary purity with spiritual perfection. Nutrition science has never really shed its evangelical underpinnings.
The lady nutritionists also found themselves becoming social workers. Finding malnourishment in the immigrant ghettoes of American cities, they attributed dietary deficiencies to the gastronomic preferences that the newcomers had brought with them from the Old World. Spices were obviously aphrodisiacal, accounting for the higher birthrates among immigrants. Fresh fruits and vegetables from the pushcarts that plied the teeming streets carried germs of unknown and dreaded provenance, and nutritionists promoted commercially processed and preserved foods as the antidote. Huge, heavy breakfasts, instead of bread or bagels, would help immigrant children in the public schools. Eating white foods—rice, potatoes, chicken, and veal—would settle their fiery foreign temperaments. The new powdered baby formulas would lower infant mortality, brought on by suckling at the polluted breasts of non-Anglo-Saxon mothers. But there was one ingestion problem that the lady nutritionists could not allay unaided: Irish whiskey, German beer, and Italian wine still stood as obstacles to nutritional perfection on earth.
Nutrition science formed the intellectual underpinnings of middle-class cookery. The “servant problem” of the early years of the twentieth century made this cookery de rigueur in most middle-class homes. Immigration quotas were drastically lowered in those years, while job prospects for lowerclass women broadened considerably. Sweatshops had been unionized and cleaned up. Typist and switchboard operator jobs were becoming available. Even factory work, especially during World War I, was no longer off limits to women who needed employment. These positions, though often menial in their own ways, still offered reasonable pay and regular hours, unlike those of domestic servants, who were always at the beck and call of their parsimonious employers. The supply of those seeking domestic-service jobs dropped drastically, and as Adam Smith might have predicted, the cost of the remaining domestics rose so that only the truly wealthy could afford them.
For middle-class women this meant a return to the kitchen. Husbands and families still made tremendous demands for regular meals and social occasions, but now the wives of the managing class had to largely go it alone. In some towns and cities, congregate dining schemes, actually involving the cooperative purchase and staffing of dining houses, were attempted, but they failed to catch on. In other places caterers were employed but were too expensive for everyday service. Moreover, after years of reliance on hired help, genteel American women could not be expected to take that step down the social ladder.
American business and industry came to the rescue. Spurred on by the new nutritionists, commercial food companies flooded the market with new food products. They championed the scientific purity of their products to a public still horrified by muckraking books like Sinclair’s The Jungle. Innovations in shipping, preservation, and packaging meant that even corner stores could carry the latest offerings. These products were designed for convenience and the strictures that food scientists were popularizing. More important, for the first time national manufacturers, with their advertising power, began to dominate the market. The labor-saving benefits of various brands could now be conveyed directly to the harried housewife, as could the nutritional wonders that could be performed. Since they were national brands, they had to appeal, of course, to the broadest spectrum of potential consumers, so midrange flavor profiles were ideal and ease of use was essential. These products undoubtedly were a godsend to the homemakers of the time. Since, in most cases, gastronomic expectations had never been raised by semiskilled hired cooks, there was not much room for disappointment when their places were taken by well-meaning wives. A bowl of cornflakes was quicker, easier, and supposedly about as nutritious as bacon and eggs. Powdered whipped-potato mix beat the hell out of peeling actual potatoes. Canned vegetables were always on the table in five minutes. Gas stoves and other new cooking technologies made meal preparation quicker and less laborious. Within two decades middle-class cookery, with its roots in the British Isles and its scientific pedigree fully branded, was the national gastronomic vernacular. Only in the increasingly assimilated ethnic communities and in French-inspired restaurants did cooks exceed popular expectations. Alas, their time was running out.
My arrival at Schiek’s in 1981 was propelled, almost literally, by the demise of my previous employer. As sous-chef at the Top of the List, a restaurant on the uppermost floor of a high-rise apartment building overlooking Lake Calhoun, I had an elevated opinion of my progress and prospects. This establishment and the apartment building, along with lots of other pricey real estate, was owned by a local fat cat who had married into a fortune and was determined to enjoy it all. And so he maintained the skyscraper dining room as the jewel of his real estate and hotel empire, where he could impress his guests with an Icarus-like view of Minneapolis, with his many and varied holdings studding the landscape. Like most restaurants with a view, the vista outside the windows was considered sufficient to bring in the dining public.
In truth, the food on the menu followed the general course of middle-class cookery to which I had become accustomed since the beginning of my restaurant career. In the Minnesota heartland, over a thousand miles inland and insulated by forest and prairie, the food served to local diners was much as it had been since the Jazz Age. Meat and potatoes alternated with fowl and potatoes, with the occasional fish and potatoes thrown in during Lent. A typical night out consisted of several rounds of cocktails, followed by a relish tray of oxidized carrot and celery sticks and an inevitable iceberg lettuce salad, often studded with artificial bacon bits the color of old scabs. Then the pièce de résistance would thud onto the table, perhaps an eighteen-ounce serving of prime rib or a porterhouse the size of a newborn. Each creation was accompanied by a foil-wrapped baked potato (gold foil in nicer restaurants) and a tub of sour cream, which might alternately be incorporated into last night’s baked spud as the notorious twice-baked potato. Frozen vegetables could be had à la carte. This feast could be washed down with a tumbler of Mateus or Lancer Rosé, no vintage, just off the tramp steamer from sunny Portugal. Then followed baked Alaska or perhaps a flaming cherries jubilee, prepared tableside by a maître d’ who could reliably, and often, vouch for the quality of the Kirschwasser. Finally, a few more drinks or some no-name coffee would propel the diners out of the restaurant and onto the freeway, occasionally in the right direction.
The meal described above could be had at any decent restaurant in any city or town across the United States at any time after the imposition of Prohibition (minus the booze). For those of us who worked in kitchens, the learning curve for producing such meals was a short one. The ingredients we worked with were straightforward and universally available, and the skill level required for their preparation, beyond basic butchery, mostly involved timing and endurance. In a very real sense, the mastery of supper club cooking was akin to the crash course that middle-class women went through when their domestic servants evaporated. The quality of the product met most expectations, even those of the owner of the restaurant atop the high-rise building.
What the owner of the Top of the List wasn’t expecting was, however, the onset of a fatal case of small-cell cancer of the lung. When told to get his affairs in order, closing a money-losing restaurant appeared near the top of his list, right after “get chemotherapy.” The employees reached street level jobless, and each went his or her own way to find something new. The very next morning, after a valedictory siege of a nearby bar, I boarded a bus downtown to visit the unemployment office. Also aboard the bus was an acquaintance from some crew in some restaurant in some time past. He too was looking for work, in a desultory way, and had heard a rumor that Schiek’s Cafe was looking for—wait for it—a sous-chef!
A crushing blow for fine-dining restaurants in the United States was the passage of the Volstead Act on October 28, 1919. The Eighteenth Amendment was ratified soon after, and the nation launched into the Noble Experiment—Prohibition. A remarkable political consensus approved proscribing the production and sale of alcohol. Northern Republicans and southern Democrats joined the Prohibition Party and Progressives in general in abolishing the vice of imbibing spirits. Certainly, various religions championed the cause as well, notably the Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and other pietistic sects, but Prohibition stands as one of the culminations of the Progressive Era, along with woman suffrage. Though northern capitalists and southern hellfire preachers were Prohibition’s most vocal champions, American women, especially middle- and upper-class women, were its primary beneficiaries.
Fine dining at the time was universally French or at least French inspired. Such cuisine required the use of wines and liqueurs for both its creation and enjoyment. Moreover, the restaurants that offered this expensive, demanding, and labor-intensive menu needed the extra income that the sale of alcoholic beverages brought in order to make ends meet. This consideration meant little, however, to Protestant middle-class women, also some of the most fervent advocates of Prohibition. For them the abolition of alcohol service in restaurants meant that they could enter those establishments without being tainted by scandal. Restaurant dining would no longer be the preserve of men, and one more bastion of male exclusivity would cease to exist. Just as important, a trip to a restaurant could be a couple’s locus of socializing and entertainment, liberating the wives from their kitchen duties.
The problem was that the restaurants themselves were struggling for survival. Even if they managed to maintain their former haute cuisine in a bastardized dry configuration, demand for that style had virtually evaporated with the alcohol supply. As women and families became a bigger portion of the restaurant clientele, they showed their preference for the style of cooking—middle-class cookery—to which they had become accustomed. A general revulsion with all things European after the Great War contributed to the desire for simple, plain, and familiar dishes, the kind of things that had sustained Americans since their arrival on these shores. Restaurants that could adjust to this shift by dumbing down their menus had a chance to survive. Those that did not simply closed, and their staffs moved on to tearooms, department store cafeterias, and other more egalitarian dining houses that sprang up to fill the void. Tragically, saloons were transformed into soda parlors. The irony is that, while the numbers of the dining public grew, the variety of dining experiences on offer shrank considerably. The ethnic restaurant segment did expand and become more popular, but these places were largely looked down upon by genteel Anglo-Saxons. Their preferences remained in the realm of middle-class cookery, a prejudice that would long survive Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, and my own entry into the world of restaurant practitioners.
With all the other sous-chef jobs on my résumé, it was pretty easy to land the position at Schiek’s Café. By then I had a feel for managing small groups of barely professional cooks turning out unspectacular food for an undiscriminating public. None of my expectations matched, however, the reality on the ground at Schiek’s. First of all, the executive chef and most of the crew consisted of young, eager cooks, some of whom had actually attended culinary school. Even those without formal training nurtured a passion for good food and a willingness to innovate in creating dishes that went beyond middle-class cookery. The first stirrings of a revolution in the culinary arts had finally made it to the Midwest, and new restaurants with new ideas were opening up all over town. Apparently, as usual, I hadn’t been paying attention.
The revival of all things food related as a source of passion had been going on for a few years. In the previous decade nouvelle cuisine had swept France and advanced across the Atlantic. Its practitioners, with a nod to nutrition science, had concluded that the older forms of traditional cooking, with rich sauces, fussy preparations, and multiple courses of massive portions, were hopelessly passé. Instead, French chefs began advocating leaner, more natural preparations for which they could charge even higher prices to their credulous clientele. Two blocks away from Schiek’s, the New French Café opened as the main local purveyor of the nouvelle.
The American media had already prepared the public for a change in the old order. From the mid-1960s onward, Julia Child was appearing all over public television with her French Chef program. Julia’s (she was always “Julia”) Mastering the Art of French Cooking was a best seller. Almost single-handedly she had demystified fine cooking and opened her viewers and readers to the possibility of dining creatively and well as the natural order of things. And cheaper, faster air travel meant that more and more Americans vacationed where this had always been true. Carrying things even further, another innovator, Alice Waters, opened her restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley in 1971. Waters emphasized the preparation of locally produced, mostly organic foods. Her inspiration too was French, but Chez Panisse pioneered what came to be known as California cuisine, a cooking style that rapidly spread inland from the West Coast.
As if things weren’t complicated enough, a new wave of immigration was taking place in the wake of a decade of warfare in Southeast Asia. Suddenly, lemongrass and nam pla (fish sauce) were becoming commonplace ingredients, joining relatively recent arrivals like salsa and falafel on restaurant menus. As always, the new immigrants started their own ethnic eateries, but their influence was felt throughout the industry.
The 1980s were a turning point for American restaurants. By this decade most families had both parents employed outside the home, leaving little time for meal preparation. Increasing affluence and interest in dining possibilities brought back the restaurant as a social focal point, a phenomenon unseen since two centuries before in Paris. Throughout the United States there was an explosion of restaurant openings. Chain restaurants went beyond their fast-food origins and evolved as dinner houses. Ethnic restaurants flourished, transforming whole neighborhoods into dining nodes, accessible by car from everywhere. Independent restaurants, often driven by chef-owners, proliferated, offering the public more choices and more faddish places to be seen at, served at, and bragged about. Traditional middle-class cookery, though far from extinct, became just one more option on an expanded menu of possibilities for the diner.
I had stumbled right into the middle of a revolution, and I didn’t even know it. Now what?
Ah, you’d better let Michael answer that before you get your undies in a bunch—ooh, not a pretty picture at all. Anyway, when I heard that my old sous-chef at two other places was now at this hotshot Schiek’s Café, I started bugging him for a job. After all, a girl has to make ends meet. He finally talked the chef there into hiring me to make desserts when the pastry chef flamed out.
It was a pretty normal setup: Most of the cooks were straight; all the waiters were gay; and there were just a few fag hag waitresses for color. A bunch of the cooks were artists or musicians or students, and there were plenty of crazies all over the place. During lunch and dinner, we served all the business people and lawyers, and at night, after dinner, the place turned into a disco, full of hairdressers and Iranian guys wearing way too much cologne.
Bringing a fag into the kitchen violated some taboo or some shit—gay guys were supposed to be waiters—so early on I took more crap than usual and gave plenty back in return. I remember one night when this big bouncer—he was really built—walked through the kitchen, and one of the cooks yelled, “Hey Mike, how do you like that one?” So I answered, “If I stick my dick in his ass, he’ll probably just flex and snip it off!” which had most of the cooks laughing. All except one redneck kind of cook who turned, got angry, and yelled, “Michael, if you don’t knock off that fucking faggot talk, I’m going to take you out in the alley and kick your ass!” So I squealed, “Oooh, my kind of MAN:”
After that I got along great with everybody, at least until the exec chef left and the sous-chef got promoted to the top job.
Though there are no monuments, veterans’ associations, or commemorative medals, few participants will ever forget the Happy Hour War of 1984. Survivors are still reticent to discuss the horrors experienced or the scars still suppurating on their souls. For those who have attempted to put these painful events out of memory, I apologize for reopening the wounds here.
The primary battleground of the Happy Hour War was downtown Minneapolis, and the root causes of the struggle could be found in the darkest recesses of every entrepreneur’s psyche. A brief upturn in the economy after the first Reagan recession increased business at downtown bars and restaurants, sometimes dramatically. The proprietors of the establishments who survived the previous year or two of middling business found their cash registers tinkling again. Their Pavlovian reaction was not satiety but the irrepressible urge to cash in even further. They sensed there was money loose on the streets, and they were going to get their share.
As competitors, however, the restaurateurs realized that raising prices to increase revenue meant that savvy customers would shop around until they found a bargain. That was out. Resorting to trade journals and hospitality organizations, the owners discovered that people were in the habit of eating three meals per day most days. Though they could slip a brunch in here or there, it was unlikely that the dining public could be persuaded to expand its daily meal schedule to include a fourth or a fifth meal. Two-for-one coupons, take-out options, and media promotions proliferated, and they brought in customers, but most failed to increase profits because they offered discounts on the food only, the item that cost them the most. Merely increasing discounted food sales was no ticket to profit.
The real money was in liquor sales. The real problem was convincing people to drink more, but that’s never been much of a problem. Late afternoon liquor sales had been rising, and nearly every booze vendor was doing whatever they could to continue the trend. In this, they were aided materially by the chronic undercapacity of the Minneapolis metropolitan area’s freeway system. Rather than wait out the rush hour traffic that was stationary on the area’s third-world road net, downtown office workers headed for a watering hole to pursue an alcohol agenda until the roads cleared. Happy hour drink specials, two-for-ones, and even three-for-ones proliferated downtown, and cubicle dwellers were nightly rubbing lubricious legs with their coworkers.
The Minneapolis city fathers, horrified that anyone might actually be having a good time, sensibly began counting up the carnage engendered by those lingering too late at happy hour before embarking on a decidedly unhappy journey homeward. Threats and imprecations were showered on the bar owners for sending hordes of bleary-eyed Dodgem car drivers onto the freeways. Police patrols were beefed up. The specter of the breathalyzer hung over the celebrants. The saloon proprietors began to sense a cave-in at the gold mine.
In a desperate effort to slow the rate of alcohol absorption while maintaining the afternoon drinking craze, most bars and restaurants considered adding food to the mix. Chefs all over downtown were ordered to create new appetizer menus for their bar trade. Tiny hamburgers proliferated. Deep-fryers were clogged with molten mozzarella sticks. Ersatz dim sums came steaming out of kitchens. Spies were dispatched to neighboring restaurants to see what the competition was producing and how much they were charging the patrons. The rivalries heated up. All appetizers were reduced in price; then the price was cut in half, fixed at one dollar—free with a limited-time coupon! The cutthroat competition mushroomed like stuffed mushrooms, and when prices for the bar food could go no lower, the frenzied proprietors decided to do away with pricing altogether. The food would be given away for free, and dammit, THEY WOULD COME.
War is hell, or at least heck, especially when a chef is trying to maintain a reasonable food-cost budget. When the decree came down that every weeknight twelve feet of banquet table space in the bar was to be filled with free goodies for the drinkers, it seemed likely that I would spend myself out of a job. But the owner of Schiek’s could not be made to see reason. Still, a brief argument convinced him to allot a pretty generous food budget to be written off as a worthwhile expenditure in his bid for victory in the Happy Hour War. Free money means fun.
The kitchen staff, augmented for the purpose, was soon having a wonderful time producing all sorts of unusual delicacies. We ground up carloads of pork butts for exotic sausages. We bought cheese from Ireland, butter from Normandy, and most of the 1984 squid catch for ceviche and fried calamari. Kalamata olives? Not exotic enough. A keg of Mount Athos might be more interesting. How about smoked sea scallops? Baby octopus in olive oil? Can we make our own mozzarella sticks with hand-pulled cheese and panko bread crumbs? Sure. Why not? We’ve got the budget.
This madness continued for a couple of months as all the nearby outlets put out their free hors d’oeuvre buffets and hoped for the best. Happy hour business would increase in one place just as word of a better spread elsewhere would draw the customers away to another. What’s more, the war was having a decidedly deleterious effect in another part of our business. Instead of sticking around and buying a real dinner, a great many of the happy hour crowd merely loaded up on free finger food and then went bloatedly reeling off onto the streets, leaving our dining room empty. Most of us realized that we were playing a zero-sum game.
Not the owner. He was determined that ONE FINAL SURGE would bring him victory in the Happy Hour War, and he would go forward in spite of cost, casualties, or credibility. He reasoned that most of his happy hour customers were single, young, urban professionals (“yuppies,” as they were just beginning to be known), so what better way to secure their allegiance than by hosting the MOTHER OF ALL HAPPY HOURS? Besides offering a nightly two hours of cheap food and drink, he would institute a monthly singles’ night and do his happy hour thing into the wee hours. There would be drinking, dancing, and a couple hundred eligible singles mingling around the Schiek’s cash registers. He would play cupid and Toots Schor to all the beautiful people in Minneapolis. After singles’ night every other bar owner would be forced to acknowledge his triumph.
Meet that Special Someone
Singles Night at Schiek’s!
Free Hors d’oeuvres
When the big night arrived, our skeleton kitchen staff prepared trays of appetizers for the two hundred upscale customers we were expecting. We got four times that number. Not only had we underestimated the turnout, but it turns out we had even more grossly overestimated the “upscale” part of our projections. The place was jam-packed with desperate, ravenous, inebriated, terminally horny revelers. The halfway houses and trailer parks were emptied that night as every lonely gnome who could scrape up bus fare descended on the hapless restaurant. Losers and leaches, hookers and harelips, widows and wetbrains gyrated in the airless bar and dining room. Wedding rings slipped into pockets, and newfound lovers slipped into stairwells to seek clumsy consummation. The bar was so crowded the patrons couldn’t head-butt their way into it, and the cocktail waitresses left in despair when they could not penetrate the penetration-minded throng.
The hors d’oeuvre buffet, the nicest we had ever prepared, was instantaneously stripped by the lecherous locusts. They were soon whooping and shouting for more food, and the wild-eyed owner ran into the kitchen seeking something, anything, to put on the table and quiet the outcry. The reduced kitchen staff began pulling anything edible (and cheap) out of the coolers and freezers, heaping things onto trays and into ovens and generally fighting a losing rearguard action against insurmountable odds. Michael was fuming as he slapped together new cheese and vegetable trays under intense pressure. “By the time I get all this shit finished, there’ll be nothing left but fat guys at the Gay 90’s!” he wailed. Since the service station was set up on the opposite side of the building, any runner attempting to bring food replenishment from the kitchen had to thread his way through a seething sea of hunger and concupiscence in order to accomplish his mission. I forced my way though on several occasions, shouting, “HOT STUFF: COMING THROUGH!” in the din, to no avail. On one of my last missions, as the supplies were running out, I had my only satisfaction of the evening. As I attempted to bully my way through the crowd, a balding, puka-shell-wearing hipster tried to reach over my shoulder to grab a chicken wing from the pan I was carrying. Bringing my right elbow up sharply, I caught this slime sharply under the chin hard enough to jangle his yellow teeth and then kept moving as he lisped curses after me. After that, we just ran out of food.
For the owner, singles’ night was a chastening experience. Not only had he seen very little revenue for his troubles, but he had to preside over closing time and the spectacle of the most loathsome remaining singles finally hooking up. There had been no yuppies and little money, and his restaurant had been trashed by the milling mob. The next day he raised the white flag. No more singles’ nights, not even any more happy hour giveaways. Humiliated, he would return to operational sanity. We in the kitchen savored the defeat.