Chopped

I learned much about life my four summers as a worker in the garde manger section of a kitchen at a Jewish Country Club.  One of the things I learned was how stupid rich people could be.  Okay, I know that sounds very judgmental, but at the time I was a poor college student working for wealthy Jewish families with strange behaviors and requests.

Let me clarify.  As an employee in the garde manger I worked with cold food from 7 AM until sometimes 11 PM six days a week.  Four of us prepared the salad bar, crudite displays and fruit displays, prepped lobster halves, extracted crab meat, made salad dressings from scratch, and prepared individual identical salads for parties of up to 200 people.

While all this was going on we would be periodically interrupted by a frantic waiter holding a huge plate piled beautifully with fixins' from the salad bar, dressing included, with the command to "chop this salad, please."  The command was really coming from a rich patron in the dining room who for some reason believed sending a salad back to the kitchen to be "chopped" was a good idea.

"Please, let me interrupt my de-gutting 30 lobsters to chop your salad, ma'am" I would think as I slopped the whole plateful onto a wet cutting board.  Taking my "big knife" I would chop away until the salad was one half-digested melange of color and ingredients.  I would then transfer the whole mess onto the same plate and hand it back to the waiter.

Sometimes the very same plate would come back a second time, with "It's not good enough" as the tag line.  Resisting the urge to spit in the salad or place it into the blender, my fellow compatriots and I would give knowing glances before chopping the hell out of the plate ingredients and sloughing it back onto the plate again.  Rich people!  I would think.  What idiots.

Another report from a waiter had me chuckling one day.  Mitch, one of my best friends who also worked at TOCC the same summers, came back to the kitchen to tell me that a patron had believed that our crown cut melons were cut by a machine.  A machine!  "No," he had told the lady, "our kitchen staff cut the melons so they look like crowns."  "You're kidding!" she breathed.  Rich people!

Another day I was working in the main dining room opening oysters at the oyster bar.  I tried to stay silent and invisible.  But at one point two patrons were speaking about something and searching for a word.  "Onomatopoeia," I interjected.  "Why, yes!" said the smartly dressed middle-aged man glancing at me with a bit of shock.  "I am a college English major," I thought to myself.

I learned that just because you're rich doesn't mean you know everything.  And just because you're not rich doesn't mean you're ignorant.