Chowhound is a weekly column about what’s trending in Detroit food culture. Tips: [email protected].
Past life regression: Erica Pietrzyk, a current Detroit restaurateur and former “breastaurant” employee, recently responded to our June, 21 column, “Boob jobs,” in which I waxed curious over what life was like for women working in this segment of food service. She reached out to tell her side of that story.
“I was 18,” Pietrzyk, now 36, says. “It was my first server job.” Getting started, Pietrzyk was issued a uniform.
“They [her bosses] wouldn’t let me wear the shorts I tried on that fit. They made me go smaller,” she says. “Everything about our appearance was controlled and had to remain the same as ‘the look’ that got us hired in the first place. When a girl came back to work after giving birth, they gave her two weeks to lose the baby weight.”
As to her daily grind, Pietrzyk recalls having to hula-hoop outside to bring in business, and buying Hooters merchandise the girls were pushed to sell before going home.
“Sometimes, just to get out early, I’d buy a bag of their junk myself,” she says.
In fairness, Pietrzyk mentioned one noteworthy service incentive award.
“The girls all stamped customers’ coasters to verify table touches,” she explains (and this writer can vouch for that). “If a manager chose to randomly audit a table’s coasters, and all the girls had stamped it, everybody got a $200 bonus.” Do tell.
Staying the four months she did because “the work was easy and the tips steady,” at $150-$200 per shift, Pietrzyk still bristles over recollections of the libidinous louts she knew as both customers and superiors.
“Two of the Pistons [from the early 2000s championship rosters] would come in, wait around, and want me to go to bars with them,” she says. “They knew I was 18. I told them. ‘We can get you in,’ they’d say. I was like, right, let’s go get raped.”
On occasions where Pietrzyk did turn to management to report the inappropriate (“customers trying to touch me under my clothes”), she says her complaints fell on deaf ears of nearly-universally male management.
“What do you think you’re here for?” they’d respond, according to her. “And the one female manager I had was worse. She’d call girls ‘disgusting pigs’ for gaining weight.”
From a coffee-swilling swine Pietrzyk recalls (“He spent a dollar a day, tipped ten cents, and sat by the kitchen entrance, watching us lean over, washing dishes”) to the customer kicked out for public masturbation who was later welcomed back, Pietrzyk says she was more than ready to move on after being fired for changing her hair color.
“It was blonde. When I dyed it black, they told me to change it back immediately,” she says. “When I said I couldn’t, they said, ‘Sorry, then. We won’t need you anymore.’”
Onward and upward, Ms. Pietrzyk. These days her Polish food business is thriving. Her products are in Kroger stores. I’m scheduled to take a tour of her operation.
Don’t take this the wrong way, Erica: I can’t wait to see your pierogis.
And I was a winemaker once: When I arrived in Arizona in 1983, my original plan was to become a roofer. I’d served my last two Michigan summers as an apprentice (OK, grunt) to a cousin who did that work, so I took my tool belt and a bucketful of dreams and headed West. It was probably 130 degrees or so on the first Arizona roof I stripped, so I changed plans accordingly and went to work inside. After a short stint as a coffee shop server, I got myself hired as a waiter at an Italian restaurant in Scottsdale. I knew next to nothing at the time. The owner, Gary, on the other hand, was one of those smartest-guy-in-the-room types. He talked customers into overpriced specials and shitty little tables at the bar when the place was packed. He’d kiss his wife goodbye after she worked the door through dinner rush, then mash in the back room with his mistress after closing time. He was a piece of work. I was young and impressionable. For a minute, I admired him.
One evening, I came to the service bar looking for two glasses of White Zinfandel. It was 1983, and blush wine was just beginning to have a moment. Sadly, we didn’t have any. Gary the owner, who was tending bar, first let me have it for not knowing that.
“Does this look like a White Zinfandel place to you, Bob?” After sneering at me, he snickered, setting two wine glasses up and then proceeded to pour an ounce or so of cheap red jug wine into them, before filling them the rest of the way with the house white.
“Abracadabra! Blush wine.” Gary looked at me with utter contempt before dismissing me back into the dining room.
The next weekend, the same couple treated to Gary’s impromptu cuvee returned to the restaurant and sat in my station again. Sure enough, they ordered more blush. Gary wasn’t working the bar this time, so I mixed my own. It turned out way darker than the first round we’d whipped up, but I served it anyway, for fear of Gary’s wrath if he caught me dumping the evidence. When the couple ordered another round, I was relieved, but overcompensated in the other direction the second time, bringing them two glasses that were barely blushing at all by comparison.
At evening’s close, the couple walked out all giddy and affectionate toward each other. The girl paused to thank us and say goodnight.
“Thanks, guys!” She beamed, a little fuzzy tongued. “Maybe I had a little too much wine, but it’s delicious!” She laughed.
Gary kicked at my shin behind the bar, mocking at the comment and how we’d gotten away with something.
“Yeah, that label’s something else, guys,” the man added on. “And to think, it’s available in three different shades.”
Gary just leered at me after they left. I don’t know what he expected. It was my first two batches ever. Wine-making isn’t easy.
Subscribe to Metro Times newsletters.
Follow us: Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
