Restaurateurs

Restaurateurs are a funny lot, not a lot of laughs but funny all the same. I've worked for them all at some point or other. There was the family who were The Sopranos years before that show was even conceived. That ended with a bomb and a gun to the back.

Happy days.

that's what your average restaurateur looks like

fuck it

that's what they all look like.....

Then there were the Pizza Hut years. Corporate restaurants are soulless and stifling environments to work in. Creativity and free expression are crushed in a way that the Glorious Leaders of North Korea would be proud of. A restaurant owned and run by a chef is always infinitely better than one owned by someone with too much cash and a daft dream.

I used to work for a guy like that. He bought his wife a restaurant, which I suppose if I'm being generous is quite a lovely thing to do. If I'm being cynical, and I almost always am, he was trying to save his marriage. Just a pity neither of them knew a tidlers fuck about the running of such a venture. He expected the money to flow thick, fast and constant. Pfft! As if! He should have been a waiter with an attitude like that.

Everyday was a battle with him. He once gave me a bollocking for hiring a guy who wasn't as ascetically pleasing as he thought the staff should be.

He made me sack him.

This was one of the lowest points of my professional career. It mattered not that the guy had years of experience, was great with his tables and was popular with the other staff. His less than "perfect" face just didn't fit. This, of course, was ironic as yer man, the owner, was so grotesque he made me do a sick in my mouth every time I saw him.

But ugly people don't make bad restaurateurs, but ugly souled people do. You need passion and creativity, you need to know your beans not just how to count them.

They had poached me from another restaurant and promised me the earth, the moon, and a go in his Ferrari if I came and worked for them. I got no earth. I saw nothing of the moon. And by the time I finished each day I gave not but a toss for his red coloured penis extension, or Ferrari as it's also known.

When they weren't badgering the life out of me about something ridiculous such as the length of the waitresses skirts, true story, they were sending their friends in to spy on me. This was intolerable. They would swan off to their villa on the Costas and then send their equally slimy and perma-tanned friends round to snoop on what I was up to. I would get a call, from Spain, about hand prints on the glass door or the need to change the toilet roll in the ladies.

This couldn't go on. After about three weeks I was given the heave ho. Her brother had finished his university course and was looking for a job. So he filled the large space I was crowbarred out of. I was gutted but also relieved. I didn't want to work for people who held their employees with such contempt. I laughed for a week when the restaurant closed less than a year later.

A while later I started with my most favorite employer, Ol Crazy Horse. He was, as his name suggests, as crazy as bag of badgers hyped to the max on Bolivian marching powder. His lunacy, for that's what it was, was brought on by a fantastic cocktail of grade A narcotics, an undiagnosed case of ADHD, and genius. This manifested itself in behaviour that on one hand made for the most awesome-o day at work and on the other made you want to run away and hide under the nearest car. He was up when he was up and he was demoniacal when he was down. There was no pattern and no no way of telling what you were in for when you went to work in the morning.

Both sides of his personality could be unbearable. But he had passion and he cared about the little things and about the quality of the food and temperature of the coffee. And in his more demented moments he did things like bar a 6 month old child and it's mother, but only after the child had been told to get out. Their crime? For complaining about the door being open. It was lunacy of the worst sort but did make for a fun day at work.

But that couldn't last. I mean there is only so much lunacy a chap like me can take. I knew the end was nigh when he took to wearing a Zorro mask for a few weeks. This was followed by a few days masquerading as Mr Potato Head resplendent, of course, with a huge Mr Potato Head mask. These were difficult times. I wasn't sure if he was having a good time or having a breakdown. In the end he went into rehab and I went in search of a new job.

He was and probably always will be my most favourite employer. I mean who else would shut up just so we could all go out on the lash or play "She" by Elvis Costello 20 times in a row just for the craic of it?

So who's your favourite boss been and have they ever taken to wearing a Zorro mask for a week or two? If so we probably worked together..........or heaven forbid there are two of them.