An Employee's Guide to Terrible Restaurant Management: an Ode to Butternut Squash

I've been thinking a lot about my brief and dubious employment at Butternut Squash vegetarian and vegan restaurant in Chapel Hill earlier this year (February-March 2010) and of the sorts of things that I found disreputable and irresponsible as business owners that the two Brits, Kelly and Maisie, instituted arbitrarily and rudely onto the staff.

Convinced that they cook and serve the best vegetarian food around (NOT true, anyone eaten at my house?), the owners' requirements for sustained employment at their establishment consist of: complete subservience to their every whim, from randomly changing the dress code and berating you for not adhering to the new dress code, actually personally insulting you and your style choices to threatening to cut your hours for neglecting to ask the kitchen staff what they wanted to drink and serving it to them instantaneously upon arriving to work.

It's certainly the only restaurant I've ever worked at that disallowed arriving to work 15 minutes early in order to finish opening side work before customers arrived (though they rarely did). At 4:45 my second day of serving at Butternut Squash, I parked at University Square (where Granville godawful Towers is, a certain indication of bad taste) and walked down to the front door of the restaurant, opened the door and was told by my boss that "staff may only use the back door." After I came inside, she approached me to say that it was inappropriate of me to show up for work early and I would not be clocking in until 5:00 exactly. It was just she and I and her daughter at the restaurant, no kitchen staff preparing the "fresh" vegetables for dinner. It was doubtful that we would have any customers at all, actually.

I must say, I got a lot of reading accomplished working at Butternut Squash. I certainly couldn't pay rent or pay the stupid electric bill, but I did look at fashion blogs from London on the computer at the host stand, which Maisie played solitaire on daily. The soup remained Butternut Squash soup with no garnish the entire two months that I worked there, and their tofu truly sucks, along with the $12.50 (!) seitan skewers (always burnt, but the peanut-lime sauce was good [but more about that later]). Vegs are nice people, usually tipped me 20% despite the mediocre and overpriced food. Totals never got above about $60, even for four people with appetizers and entrees, which really limits your money-making abilities. They insist upon further restaurant failure by not serving beer and wine, the primary way most restaurants make profits.

I'm pretty sure the last straw for them was when I asked Kelly, the chef, how the ginger flavor was added to the stir-fry and she showed me her ginger oil. I went out and bought some, mentioned it, and the owners tacitly decided to never talk to me about the food again. I told them I cooked myself and they said they were never going to tell me any of the ingredients again because then I could just go out and open up my own Butternut Squash. The problem with that is that my restaurant would be a million times better than microwaved brown rice with the peanut-lime sauce from a can. But after that, they were paranoid as shit and looking for something to fire me for, a difficult task since if you are not a fucking idiot then I will be an excellent employee, especially serving. However, if you are a fucking idiot (see: Domino's Pizza, Subway, Port City Java, Four Corners) then I will not obey your stupid rules (see: wear a uniform and baseball cap, don't paint your nails, don't ask for any time off ever not even to see your family, etc.) and I will not respect you or your stupid corporate establishment.

I don't think the ladies who own and run BNS are evil or even stupid, they're just delusional about their vision and don't understand the necessary components of a well-staffed, well-run, and profitable restaurant, and this benefits no one. Further, they insist that there is no other way but theirs, despite their extreme lack of experience working in restaurants and their more unfortunate extreme lack of communication and social skills with anyone except each other. They're lazy cooks and terrible managers, and I recommend eating somewhere more worth your money if you insist upon eating out.

Paris is less than OR equal to the U.S.

So, it may have taken me almost 5 months and a bushelful of random life experiences (Dean's List, rampant domesticity, Viewpoints, to name a few) to figure it out, but I now get why I was sort of (pardon my French) blase about the whole Paris thing.

You know, one goes to Paris assuming that its heyday of expatriatism and the tumultuous art/music/lit world has persisted into modernity and even the 21st century. What one does not expect is the elitism of capitalism has stretched its tentacles over everything in the whole city, where everything is based upon material wealth and possessions (so-called "fashion") and "art" exists only as the terrible jokes of contemporary art that one would put in a Hollywood movie (anyone seen Iron Man 2? That "painting" that RDJr. moves aside for his Iron Man poster that Penny/Gwyneth gets so upset about? It's a strip of black down the center of a canvas. This is 2010. Fuck that/you/your taste.).

Anyway, the point is that if you're rich and totally boring and uncultured, uninterested in compelling ideas and things other than buying clothes and spending a shitton of money on boring food and assume because it's French that it's all wonderful, then #1. your critical skills essentially do not exist and #2. you'll flip for Paris. However, those of us unburdened by the frivolity of extreme wealth are forced to wander the streets, cold and munching on the end of a baguette, seeking answers we thought would be here but have faded as the McDos pop up on every third block. My advice: give up on Paris, but if you're there, spend every second in art museums and parks.

It's like America: all obsessed with themselves, their silly Western language and American top 40 music. Voila!