Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  It was a pompous restaurant but it was worth the $40 mains when he caught sight of us and turned an interesting shade of lilac. Really, what did he think was going to happen? That we were going to yell across the room: ‘It was so lovely to see you and your girlfriend at the Duke the other day. She’s a babe! See you next week?’ Please. But he was worried, so when Ben went off to the toilet he followed. Cornered him in the corridor, jabbed his finger solidly into Ben’s sternum and breathed close to his face: ‘Not a word of this, boy-o. Not a word.’

  He was never seen at the Duke again.

  I ask my waiter mate Vicky what she would like to make a capital offence when we rule the world and can smite customers as we please.

  ‘The mobile phones,’ she replies. ‘The bloody mobile phones. Every time I have a bunch of plates to put down, it’s like bloody Silicon Valley. If they’re so precious, why put them on the table? If I even nudge one they carry on as if I was giving their child a tribal tattoo. It’s insane.’

  Underpants? Not such a big deal, as it turns out. As Vicky says, ‘Wear underpants, don’t wear underpants . . . just so long as you’re not hurting anybody.’

  Waiters are a kind and understanding lot, on the whole. They don’t care about the sexy times you’re having underneath the table or in the chefs’ change room, although they may very well try to have a perv. What they do care about is the little things that make up the flip-side of the social contract. The death by a thousand annoyances that can turn a great profession—well, apart from the drugs, the alcoholism, the health problems, the hard work, the low pay and the bad hours—into a compete shit-fight. On the subject of phones, I’m with Vicky. They’re wonderful devices for uploading pictures of the food you ought to be eating instead of photographing, but they have no place sitting on the table. The table is a sniper’s alley of drinks and sticky condiments and hot plates waiting to put a bullet in that expensive communications device. Putting a mobile phone on a restaurant table is like leaving a baby on train tracks.

  Get drunk if you want, but be a nice drunk. And be sure to observe the line between drunk and too drunk. ‘There was a real lush at a place I used to work,’ says Vicky. ‘He’d come in and basically just pass out at the table, face down. So we’d put a dirty plate and used cutlery down around him, wake him up and give him the bill.’

  What else, Vic?

  ‘Anyone who leaves their chewing gum on the plate. Or under the table. It’s disgusting.’

  And? ‘And people who rip up coasters and leave the bits all over the table and the floor.’

  And? ‘And those women who order skinny lattes and chocolate cake. They’re just so annoying. I always feel like shaking them and yelling, WHO DO YOU THINK YOU’RE KIDDING?’

  And? ‘Oh god, and those people with allergies who have to remind you every time something lands on the table that they have an allergy, just in case you forgot the five times they reminded you in the past half-hour. And they have you totally freaking out that they’re going to die if they breathe in a miniscule particle of gluten or dairy or whatever floating around in the air and hold you personally responsible for it.’

  And? ‘And then they all go and order the cheesecake anyway. Seriously. Kill me now.’

  I’m with her. Misty-eyed with nostalgia for the good old days when people either ate the food that everyone ate or politely died. How much simpler it was. A clear-cut choice that would make the modern army of the gluten-intolerant think: ‘Hey, maybe pasta, bread, beer, couscous, soy sauce, tomato sauce, commercial salad dressings, some ice-creams, certain cooking oils and various imitation meats aren’t such a bad option, after all?’ Speaking as a concerned member of the herd, pandering to this dietary business means that we’re going backwards, evolutionarily-speaking. We’ve opened the door to dietary failure and said ‘welcome’. We’ve broken Darwin’s fundamental rule: adapt or die. Tattoo it on your wrist, if you’re not allergic to tattoo ink.

  Food allergies are little more than a hobby of the bored elite, anyway. Allergies and their bastard cousin, the intolerance, cluster in wealthy areas. Poor people can’t afford allergies. They have to save up to be gluten sensitive. For so many people around the world, gluten sensitivity is no more than a dream. If they work really hard, maybe their children or their children’s children have a chance at gluten intolerance, but they’ll have to be content with reading about how difficult it is to choose from the thousands of gluten-free products on the market and fondly imagine a life of loudly discussing flatulence and bowel irregularities like half the customers in my local health food store. Staring into a toilet bowl is the modern urban elite’s answer to reading the tealeaves. Maybe they don’t realise that only one in 100 people is truly allergic to gluten, which means that they’ll go on and develop an auto-immune disease like Crohn’s. (Darwin, incidentally, may have died from Crohn’s. Vive la irony.) But a staggering one in ten Australians (and one in seven Americans) now claims to be gluten intolerant. That means that at least nine out of 100 people are either lying or stupid enough to confuse toast binge discomfort with a legitimate medical condition. Let me reassure you: feeling like a boulder has taken up residence in your stomach and all major organs have been evicted from their usual addresses to make room is perfectly normal. It’s a by-product of something called ‘enjoying food’. It doesn’t make you special.

  I really wouldn’t care a jot if these people stayed home to eat their miserable cuisine of denial. Really I wouldn’t. But they won’t rest until they get anything less than world domination. Every time I make a restaurant booking and get asked the simpering question about dietary requirements, I’m reminded they’ve bent an entire industry to their will.

  So here’s my ten cents’ worth. The rise of faux food allergies is a reaction against a culture of plenty. Until the twentieth century it was fashionable to be plump. In some ages (the voluptuously dimple-bottomed maidens of Renaissance art who ‘loved their curves’ in modern women’s magazine parlance) and some cultures, it was fashionable to be positively obese. Being fat was a sign of wealth. Then food inconveniently goes and becomes abundant thanks to modern farming techniques and industrialised food practices, and waddya know: now it’s fashionable to be thin. Gosh we’re a contrary bunch. Being thin shows you have willpower (and a personal trainer, another domain of the wealthy) and that you’re not one of the plebs jamming fast food down your gullet faster than you can say ‘Would you like fries with that?’. Food allergists are simply following in the steps of a well-established tradition.

  I feel revoltingly sorry for any real allergy sufferers. A life without pasta or cheese is a life half-lived. One can only offer sympathy to people forced through no fault of their own into the arms of mock products like cheesley (actually, I can believe it’s not cheese, and I’m more than a bit horrified that it’s also known in the trade as analogue cheese). The legitimate sufferers ought to be mounting a class action against the fraudsters who’ve tarnished them with the picky-eater brush. As for the new-age nostrums about respecting everyone’s choices and—shudder—‘lifestyles’? Well—no. I will not. Entertain your food neurosis in the privacy of your own home but please don’t burden waiters with your faddishness. We are intolerant of your intolerance.

  As I was telling my mate Vicky, when I become President for Life, anyone claiming ‘dietaries’ in a cafe or restaurant will have to produce a doctor’s certificate on demand. A bit like getting a concession fare on public transport. Alternatively, they’ll just have to go sort it out with the chef themselves. That’ll separate the real gluten intolerants from the shammers. If you want to be a picky, annoying, sanctimonious, self-righteous, change-the-menu-just-for-me kind of a customer, be my guest: go into the kitchen for a chat. Door’s that way.

  Being a good customer is a pretty straightforward mix of common sense and uncommonly large tipping. Actually, saying please and thank you is a good start, although that can be problematic enough. I still haven’t figured out if it’s polite to s
ay thank you every time the waiter performs a task or if there’s such a thing as politeness overkill. These days I prefer to save the thank you’s for the big-ticket items, like ordering food and being stiffed on wine but not for things like cutlery changes and water top-ups. It was a hard decision to make but table conversation was starting to sound more like a text war. ‘And then he—thank you—fell over when he was getting out of the taxi—thank you—and Kev was all like, wassup bitches—thanks—and that’s when we—thank you—decided never to eat muffins—thank you—again.’

  Indecision is another restaurant curse, due to the medically recognised condition known as food envy. Some diners are so terrified of comparing their meal unfavourably with their companions’ that they’ll keep the waiter standing tableside for five minutes while they hear everyone else’s orders then change their mind two or three times before finally reverting to their original order and later regretting it. Annoying, yes, but not quite as annoying as people who forget what they ordered and leave the waiter holding hot plates and developing full-thickness burns while they argue about who ordered the veal involtini and who regrets ordering the veal involtini when the rotisserie chicken looks so much better.

  While we’re lining up annoying customers against the wall, let’s add the soy skinny decaf latte crowd. The universal consensus is just in: why bother? See also: people who order their coffee ‘hot but not too hot’. (Memo to anyone who does this: it might be a quantifiable temperature inside your head—as scientifically precise as ‘spicy but not too spicy’, am I correct?—but to the barista . . . not so much.) Bill splitters who dither over who ate dessert/ordered the expensive wine/ate two more chips. Anyone who turns up just before closing time expecting a three-course meal and polite service. Menu reciters. You don’t have to say, ‘I’ll have the pan-fried salmon with wilted spinach, cherry tomatoes and balsamic vinegar glaze.’ Just ‘the salmon’ will do, thanks. The doggie bag crowd. Nothing wrong with the doggie bag, but try to make it count. Don’t be a pain in the bum and ask to bag up one prawn, even if it’s just a naked ploy for an aluminium foil swan. As for people who try to involve their server in a light-hearted argument over who’s paying the bill—don’t try to force a credit card or wad of money into the waiter’s apron pocket like they’re some sort of food-carrying stripper. Sort it out among yourselves, please.

  Serial complainers. You know, the ones who always preface their complaint with ‘I don’t normally complain about anything, but . . .’ An alarming degree of overlap with people who think things are the waiter’s fault which are not the waiter’s fault. Like food that’s taking a long time to come out of the kitchen. Tardy food is generally not the waiter’s fault. Being angry with the waiter about food that is slow to arrive is like blaming the airport newsagent for a delayed flight. Nor is it the waiter’s fault that everyone loves to eat at 7 p.m. but no kitchen can handle an entire restaurant’s worth of customers arriving and ordering at the same time. That might explain why you were denied a 7 p.m. booking and arrived at the unfashionably early time of 6 p.m. but there are still empty tables at 7.30 p.m. Outrageous. Dial triple-zero.

  Everyone’s an expert about food these days. The number of hours spent debating whether a steak is rare or medium-rare could solve the whole Israeli/Palestinian conflict with time left over to catch a movie afterwards. And so what if you could make the dish at home for a quarter of the price? Well, maybe you should.

  When making a complaint about the food, it really does help to know your shit. There was a woman at the Star who complained the bouillabaisse was too fishy. Indeed it was somewhat fishy, because it contained fish. And prawns. And mussels and maybe even some crab. Bouillabaisse is funny like that. She also complained that the onion in the bouillabaisse was too crunchy (it was fennel). And it had taken her three-quarters of the dish to decide all this. But she won. She was a hairdresser across the road. She could have bitched to half the neighbourhood about it. So the fishy bouillabaisse was taken off the bill. And instead we bitched about her to half the neighbourhood.

  Contrary to all admissible evidence, people continue to think it’s a good idea to take children to restaurants. These are the same people who, during the heady, hormonal optimism of their first pregnancy, will declare, ‘Life isn’t going to change for us—the baby will fit into our routine, not the other way around,’ while all existing parents in earshot nearly pass out from smirking knowingly at each other.

  They’re the same people later seen at restaurants taking it in turns to do the walk-and-jig routine with a screaming infant while the other shovels food down as fast as possible so they can get the hell out of there and whose damn idea was it to come here in the first place.

  Parenting is the death of cool. That’s why adults tend to break into children and no-children factions. I haven’t seen my childless friends since 2008. I miss them, but it’s totally worth it not to hear about their lazy weekend spent doing nothing more than reading novels and binge-watching Game of Thrones. And I get to keep up with all their news on Facebook, anyway, where their tales of overseas holidays and spontaneous mini-breaks to sweet B&Bs in the country on blackberry-picking weekends are punctuated with lengthy complaints about unruly children at restaurants making like the brownshirts at Kristallnacht and pretty much fucking up the night for everyone.

  Like Whitney Houston, I believe the children are our future. The old people certainly aren’t. Yet it’s been a very long time since it took a village to raise a child. Parents these days are terrifyingly alone. My childless friends should be thankful no one is knocking on their croft door at 4 a.m., asking them to look after three small children while mum goes off to milk the goats and weave some sackcloth. It would be nice if they could take some of that gratitude, and uninterrupted sleep, and roll it into a whole-village approach, if only for the highly specific instance of being in a restaurant where a wee one is busting a few moves from the brat handbook.

  Because you know what, childless people? Parents can’t win. The individuals criticising them for letting their kids run wild in restaurants will be the same ones going tsk-tsk at kids in front of an iPad, brought out by the desperate parents to get their kids to shut up so strangers don’t judge them. It’s sad seeing a table of youngsters with their faces buried in small glowing screens, but I choose to regard it as a silent cry for help from forty-somethings who just want fifteen minutes to drink their chablis in peace.

  Returning to my original thesis, children are like puppies. They need to be socialised. That means they have to learn how to behave in restaurants or they’ll wind up piddling on the dining room floor when they’re eighteen years old.

  You’ve probably twigged that this is pure personal interest wrapped in the decoy of a greater-good argument. Well done. For my part, I’ll concede that if you can afford to go fine dining (or fayn dayning, for any readers from the leafy suburbs) you can probably afford a babysitter. But my selfish desire not to be stuck staring at the TV every night has forced me to re-evaluate some earlier prejudices. Hence the radical reappraisal that lower down the food chain, restaurants and cafes should be child-friendly.

  I’m not saying this because I love kids. I love other people’s crotch-spawn about as much as they love mine—that is, not at all. I might admire children’s adventurous spirit, but as a waiter I did not enjoy the exercise of that adventurous spirit when they ran behind the bar or stood right in front of the kitchen swing door so next time it opened they made like a pancake. I did not enjoy the way parents left wet, wadded-up tissues in cups, and empty yoghurt packets and banana peels on the table. Children are innately disgusting. Hold hands with one and you might as well be making out with a petrie dish. It’s not the parents’ job to make it even worse by scattering their disease-riddled rubbish everywhere. Take the national park approach—carry out what you carry in—and everyone will be a lot happier.

  I’m not advocating spending any discretionary dining dollars at the really child-friendly places. Generally spea
king, any business specifically geared towards children is to be avoided like anthrax. That way lies the bewigged charlatan known as Ronald McDonald. Or the old man who used to roam the streets near my house with a bag of boiled lollies looking for children to drug and boil into soup. Actually, he was probably a very nice man who wondered why a bunch of tiny, suspicious faces always rebuffed him with the severity of Romanian border guards, but our parents had done a very good job of warning us about people like him.

  I quite like the IKEA approach, where you can throw the youngsters into a pit of multicoloured plastic balls and go on your merry way to the $1 hotdog stand, despite misgivings that at the bottom lies the body of a toddler who’s been missing since 2011. But it’s important to aim higher if the family is to break out of the primary-coloured ghetto. It’s not a mission for the fainthearted. It’s only for those armed with comforts and distractions: colouring pencils and paper, small boxes of sultanas, an economy pack of wet-wipes. It requires enlisting the aid of a waiter who understands that children are just tiny little drunk people and that it’s not their fault they don’t understand reason. Cause and effect will come later and it will prove a great tool for threats, bribes and intimidation. For the little ’uns at the very start of their restaurant socialisation, it’s best to target their natural fear of authority. This is where the waiter comes in. Start by referring to the waiter as ‘the boss’. Every time the kid does something naughty, tell them that ‘the boss’ saw and was really unhappy, and you’re going be thrown out if it keeps happening. Plus you can get the waiter to pop by occasionally to check sternly if the greens are being eaten. What can I say? It worked for us. If that fails, try the trick where it looks like you’re pulling off your thumb.