86'D
Restaurant Romance Gossip
The best gossip is shocking, juicy, and has receipts. As a restaurant employee, I’ve seen and heard some wild stories but the tale I choose for today is a recent scandal and one that I felt could remain the most anonymous while providing accurate details.
I could talk about the time we all watched a jealous female chef lock the new hot hostess in the walkin after she unknowingly flirted with her boyfriend, who was another chef. (Don’t worry, we were all glued to the camera monitors, so were able to get her out of there pretty fast.) She did leave and never come back though.
There was also the time a restaurant two blocks away from my restaurant kept mysteriously having our dishes appear on their menu just days after we debuted them on our menu. Come to find out to everyone’s surprise that their head chef was the wife of one of our line cooks.
There’s also countless stories of flirtations turned hidden relationship turned fiery breakup turned revenge hooking up with the best friend but the details on those get fuzzy and to be honest I’m involved in a lot of those plot lines and today we’re going fully anonymous.
So here’s one of my favorite salacious stories for your burning ears that took place about a year ago.
Photo By Jimmy Fontaine
There was a saute cook at my restaurant who lasted about 6 months.
Let’s call him Jack.
Jack and I were never friends and I doubt he even knew my name so it’s with my best guess that he could be anywhere from 24 to 30 years old.
He was quiet with a devilish glint in his eye and walked around oozing confidence for no apparent reason. He had bad tattoos, worn tight acid wash jeans, and would swagger around in dirty Jordans with his muscles bulging out of his rolled up chef shirt. You could smell the toxic bad boy vibes from 100 miles away.
He was also always late to work because he shared a car with his girlfriend, which I guess meant he had to be 20 - 40 mins late everyday?
I’ve come to realize that in an office job 20 mins isn’t always late but in a restaurant? 2 mins is late. There’s aren’t many rules but tardiness is usually a fireable offence on the spot. 2 mins is a huge difference when you can cook a whole pasta dish in 4 mins.
On top of being late he also had dirty fingernails, would never wear his mask (this was peek COVID), talked a lot of shit to everybody, and would mess up the orders on busy nights. Nobody was really vibing with him in the kitchen or the servers.
Something seemed off about him but just normal enough that, combined with the horrible staffing crisis during this time, he wasn’t getting 86’d (fired).
Then one day my favorite cook, let’s call her Marie, came up to me while I was waiting in line for the bathroom. Jack comes out of the bathroom and she cuts in front of me to open the door and points at an industrial size bleach bottle sitting on the bathroom counter.
Odd. Our busser never left cleaning products out like that so out of place and exposed to the public. I told her thanks for letting me know and that I would put it away and talk to the busser about it. She shook her head, lifted the bottle and just said “Jack”, and put it back down forcefully.
Clearly she thought Jack was taking the bleach into the bathroom and leaving it out. She also clearly didn’t want anyone to hear her tell on him or the fact that she was keying me into what was going on.
I was a little confused. Okay so he’s... stealing bleach? That fit with his weird behavior, but if you were stealing that obviously, wouldn’t you at least go to the trouble of putting the bottle back or try to hide it? Not leave it out on the bathroom counter?
Again, it was enough to be classified as strange but not enough to fire someone and I didn’t have any more evidence than Marie’s cryptic half message.
I brought it up to my boss that I thought he left the bleach bottle out (to cover Marie’s tip off) and she too was like… okay? Are you sure it’s him? And also why?
My boss did notice it smelled extra strong lately like cleaning products but thought something had been spilled. It is a restaurant after all, things get messy pretty regularly.
Confused as well I felt silly for pointing it out to her and just asked her to watch out.
The next day my boss came up to me in a hurry and said “guess what?” with her eyes wide like saucers.
“What”? I said having forgot about our conversation the day before.
“You clean needles with bleach.”
“Oh my god.”
“Yes!”
“No!!”
“Yes! He’s doing heroin in the bathroom! And right before his shift too! That’s probably why the orders keep getting fucked up! He’s high as hell back there!”
Okay so now it made sense why the bleach was out, but we still didn’t have any proof.
He also would leave work during the shift to run across to the corner store before they closed at 8pm and come back with a new toothbrush, still in the packaging, hanging out of his back pocket. When someone asked why he had to leave mid shift to get a fresh toothbrush he said, “cause my girlfriend is mad at me and she said she would call the cops if I tried to come home tonight.”
Okay so not just bad breath?
Everything we found out about him lead to more questions than answers.
Why was she threatening to call the police on him? Why was he set on not rocking the boat, did he know she was in the right? Also apparently they live together? Was she still dropping him off at work because he was definitely still using her as his excuse as to why he was late all the time.
At this point it was all just gossip and plausible exaggeration.
Then the next week before service as we were polishing wine glasses and the place was empty, we see cops peering through the locked glass door and motioned to my boss to open up.
They asked if a Jack Peterson worked there.
Everyone tried our hardest not to let our jaws hit the ground as we exchanged rabid fire silence shocked eye contact with each other from across the room.
“What is this about officer?” she said more calmly than I ever could.
“We have a warrant to speak with him” he replied sternly.
She went back into the kitchen to talk to the head chef Louis. He looked at the cops outside and went to get Jack. The three of them went outside and we all strained our ears as hard as we could to catch what they were talking about.
The cops were reading him a piece of paper and he was nodding with his hands folded across his chest and his eyes fixed on the sidewalk.
The cops left without him and he miraculously walked back inside with Louis and kept setting up his station for service.
I was dying to figure out what happened and why they let him go! It seemed like a serious chat so how did he get away without even pulling out an ID or signing any paperwork? He barely said anything at all according to our bad lip reading skills.
A few days later, the gossip circulated that it was a restraining order from his girlfriend.
Then my boss got a call during dinner rush hour at 6:30 on a Saturday.
“Is Jack there?”
Now, it is extremely rare for someone to call a restaurant looking for a chef unless it’s an emergency. Because duh, cell phones, but more importantly if you’re close to a chef you know they can barely leave the line to go to the bathroom during a rush let alone come and answer the phone.
My boss yelled “who?” over the loud dining room.
“Jack! I’m his girlfriend and I need to speak with him.”
“Um we’re really busy right now, he can come to the phone.”
“Please, it’s an emergency.”
Knowing about the police visit and restraining order it made things awkward, confusing, but also somewhat believable? Maybe there really was a bad emergency happening so my boss went to the kitchen and told him she was on hold.
Without hesitation he left his station and grabbed the phone.
They chatted for about a minute and then he returned, seemingly unphased, as we all continued to stare at this bizarre behavior.
He finished the rush and about an hour later, left to get another toothbrush from across the street and this time came back with toothpaste too.
More questions than answers.
Then one night I was working the togo window where delivery drivers for Ubereats, Grubhub, and DoorDash would come to pick up orders. Every order is confirmed by the apps and drivers have to show us the name and order number on their phones to get the food.
Around 8 pm on a Friday, an older woman walks up with long gray hair, missing teeth, a cane, ill fitting clothes, and pretty bad limp. She looked between 60 - 70 years old and had strong evil Disney witch vibes. I was thrown off by her disheveled look and slow moving walk as most drivers are pretty clean cut and in a hurry to get the order and keep driving to make more money.
She showed me the correct name and order number so I gave her the bag and then she handed me a cracked phone and said “can you charge this for me? It’s my phone that Jack’s borrowing and if he wants a place to sleep tonight he needs to call me to pick him up before 10.”
I froze.
“Jack, like Jack who cooks here?”
“Ya, I’m his girlfriend and he needs to use my phone if he wants a ride home tonight.”
Unsure of what this woman would do if I said no but also not wanting to get in the middle of this I just said sure and put in on the charger.
She said, “can you get him for me?”
I looked back at the crowded room full of people, the kitchen staff moving around in lightning speed, and the growing line of delivery drivers behind her knowing it was probably worse to leave the window than look for him.
I handed her a sticky note and pen and asked “can you write your message on this note and I will give it to him?”
“Okay, but I need to come inside to use the bathroom.”
Oh no.
“Sure!” I said again wanting to move this along as fast as possible to try to avoid a scene.
“Thanks” and she hobbled inside to the restroom.
This was the girlfriend we’ve been hearing about?
Not a girl at all but a woman at least 30 years older than him, who also happened to be a delivery driver that happened to get an automated delivery pick up order from this specific restaurant? An extremely suspicious coincidence but all the information she gave me checked out.
She theoretically could have faked the ticket number but they are constantly updated and randomly assigned so that felt too clever for a such a low stakes scam.
If they were really living together he could make her all the free food she wanted, why get the apps involved?
To reiterate the timeline again; she filled a restraining order against him, then called his job looking for him, and then showed up in person during peak busy hours. All from a grown ass woman with grey hair longer than her waist. Chaos.
The more insight we got, the more confusing the throughline.
A few weeks later I was leaving work and saw her again, this time underneath him as they made out in front seat of a parked rundown Toyota just outside the restaurant. His spry body on top of hers in the driver's seat with the cane resting on the passenger side next to his backpack.
I ran down the block to call my coworker in salacious excitement. I’d never seen something so gross and so confirming in one moment. They really were together, she really did drive him around, and she was also in fact a delivery driver.
He was fired shortly after that for not showing up for a shift.
I’m so glad he got 86’d and doesn’t work there anymore for everyone’s safety but the gossip during those brief months was amazing.
Shit We’re Loving: Experience
Blaze’s Pick: Job Searching
Good lord it is hard out here! I feel like everyday we’re hearing about another big company with mass layoffs, LinkedIn jobs have 800 applicants, and banks are folding. The economy definitely looks unpredictable and scary right now and the restaurant is scrambling to scale back labor.
I’m combing job websites and looking for a new career path and it’s been hard to figure out what my next move is going to be. I’m grateful for my experience so far but I feel like it’s time to shift with the changing of the tides.
Please pray for me and millions of others job searching right now and holler if you have any leads!
Maybe it’s finally time for grad school.
Show Your Support: Polaris Project
In 2023, OTF will now spotlight four charities, showing our support on a quarterly basis instead of monthly. Though this does mean we’re not highlighting as many organizations as before, this will allow for more time on the important aspect of writing, while still doing what OTF was created to do which is support writing and each other. For the new quarterly SYS organizations, OTF will donate $200 to each hand-selected charity. This quarter, for January, February, and March (or our Winter Quarter), we spotlight the Polaris Project.
Founded in 2002, Polaris is named for the North Star, which people held in slavery in the United States used as a guide to navigate their way to freedom. Today, the project serves victims and survivors through the National Human Trafficking Hotline while creating targeted systems-level strategies to disrupt and further prevent human trafficking. One of these strategies is to illuminate how human trafficking really works, in real time. To learn more about this, Polaris offers a free Human Trafficking 101 crash course that showcases how human trafficking really happens (spoiler: not like the movies) and shares survivor stories that provide real-life context and perspective. For the quarter, OTF has already donated $200 to Polaris and encourage you to give and/or promote what you can.
Need help now? Call the US National Human Trafficking Hotline (operated by Polaris) at 888-373-7888, or text “BeFree” to 233733, or access Polaris’ Live Chat.
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