Editor’s note: Due to popular demand, we are increasing the frequency of Chowhound, our column about what’s trending in Detroit food culture, from bi-weekly to weekly. Tips: [email protected].
Surviving an extinction event: COVID-19 brought meteoric change to the restaurant world. The landscape’s permanently altered. Buffets and salad bars have disappeared. Full-service concepts still evolving on the run struggle to survive with skeleton crews, bare-bones service, and pared-down menus. Years into this murky mess, yes, some dust is clearing, but wholesale food prices never really settled back down, and what feels like an entire workforce has been wiped out. Capable, reliable restaurant staff have gone the way of the dinosaur. Missing are countless many who once worked monster kitchen hours or braved the bad-behavior slings and arrows of troglodyte customers, whose dining room manners might have devolved during the apocalypse. Now, hiring managers concede: they’ve lowered the bar from polished and professional to borderline literate and bipedal. Savvy staff who once knew food and wine have given way to warm bodies who can barely bring themselves to serve bread and water. Blame the ignorance and apathy at work now on whatever you will. Maybe food service alpha-talent in all its conscientious virtue was raptured up to greater rewards elsewhere. Perhaps the manpower hit still hobbling hospitality businesses will prove temporary. Perish the thought that people who once filled their rosters (hard-working, social, personable, paying their way through life and/or school) don’t exist much anymore.
Chef “X” of the Joe Vicari Restaurant Group (anonymity requested), whom I met recently over such conversation, says it’s gotten rough enough that he’s considering throwing in the career towel early. Chef cited some persistent problems.
“Work ethic is dying. Everyone wants part time. And short shifts on the few days they’re available. And if you can’t meet every request, that’s it. They quit. I’ve done this job all my life. I’m no crazy disciplinarian. There’s no want to work, and I’m tired of covering for it.”
Preach on. This is gospel.
Here’s how hiring goes in food service these days: First, one spends a fortune on an indeed.com ad, which triggers a flood of responses but only a trickle of applicants whose resumes warrant an attempt to contact for conversation or an interview. Of those few, half prove unreachable by call or text. And almost always, one or more scheduled interviewees don’t show. Even if you do ultimately tender a job offer, the odds are even that the new hire isn’t nearly all they claimed to be on paper and won’t stick with the job past the first time-off request you can’t approve. By and large, they’re short-term problem children: Socially stunted, mentally immature, emotionally fragile, umbilically tethered to their phone, and constant attendance truants. Can I get an Amen?
Sing us your song, piano man: Reviewing some fancy-schmancy restaurants recently gave me two opportunities to appreciate the talents of Joel Seah, a pianist I heard playing at both The Whitney and Joe Muer downtown a few nights apart. Over seafood, I enjoyed Seah’s cheeky rearrangement of Disney’s The Little Mermaid score into something sounding more like Tchaikovsky. Sipping a cocktail at Whitney’s Ghost Bar, his stirring rendition of a West Side Story love song left me nearly crying in my tequila. After introducing myself to Seah, I asked to hear more of his story.
“I’m the audible ambience,” Seah, a piano prodigy born in Singapore, chimed right in. “I size up the crowd and then tailor a musical backdrop around it. I’m not there to play over the pleasures of a lobster dinner, but to make the experience as a whole taste better.”
Complimenting Seah over the sets I listened to, he spoke to what he finds so rewarding about his work.
“My music life’s like a movie,” he says. “I play. People start to sway and smile and sing along. That I’m able to make connections like that without saying a word can feel very sobering, especially when someone approaches you afterward to tell you how you’ve touched them and why.”
I’m sure there’s a story behind every song request, Joel. Play me Johnny Cash’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down” next time, then I’ll tell you mine.
Dangling another pianist story: Mary Elaine’s at the Scottsdale Phoenician Resort was a five-star, five-diamond, fine-dining destination where I worked as a captain some 20 years ago. It, too, featured a live pianist who played in our luxe lounge, adjacent to the dining room. One evening, our general manager, Frank, noticed an elegant, elderly woman goose-necking around the room from her table.
“May I be of service, Madam?” Frank inquired, just so. It was that kind of place. We waiters wore custom-tailored Armani suits, sold $7,400 bottles of wine, and shaved white truffles tableside over other ridiculously-priced delectables on Wedgewood China. It was a great gig, but formal to a fault.
“I can’t for the life of me see a pianist,” the bejeweled and bewildered lady let Frank know. “Where’s the pianist?” As fate would have it, Madam’s view of the lounge was blocked by an impressive horse sculpture. Ever obliging, Frank positioned himself just over the lady’s shoulder and pointed.
“Look underneath the horse,” he said. From a line of sight perspective, Frank was correct. Beneath and beyond the belly of that sculpture one could clearly see the lounge’s pianist, but hanging also in the air there, the masculine appendage carved onto the undercarriage of the anatomically correct, stone stallion.
“How dare you!” The woman gasped. “I said pianist!” No one ever stewed for as long a second or two in such uncomfortable silence as Frank. Then, the woman’s husband and I saved his ass as he and then I both broke into helpless horse laughter. It took Madam another moment or two to see the humor in it but she did, which started Frank breathing again, and apologizing profusely until all he could do was laugh, too.
Moral of this story? I’ll borrow a line from an old TV episode of M*A*S*H that speaks to not taking things too seriously:
“Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice: Pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”
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