My Worst Jobs, Part 3 - Brewburger

I started to write this piece about the four+ years I worked in NYC at Carl Fischer /“The Fish” [episode 5 of My Worst Jobs]. Then I remembered that I had one other job that summer of 1977--the summer of Son of Sam and The Great Blackout.

Through a friend's connection, I became a waiter at BrewBurger at 44th and Broadway, in the heart of Times Square. In the 2.5 hellish days I held that job, I never mastered timing, the menu, or efficiency. I was continually scrambling between the kitchen and my tables to patch up mistakes. I was incapable of balancing more than two plates or bringing out courses in their correct order. As desert would appear, I would also be bringing the forgotten salad. I never actually had one happy table. In retrospect, waiting was a job for which I was constitutionally unfit.

BrewBurger appeared to be some sort of Outfit money laundering front. The real estate was expensive and the food was inordinately cheap and plentiful. BrewBurger was extremely popular with tourists and the bridge and tunnel crowd.

Nothing was more popular than the $4.95 Burger, Fries, and Bottomless Beer combo. On my very first day, I had a table of six beefy college boys from the Midwest drop in for the special. The bottomless beer was a waiter’s nightmare. To prevent pitchers of beer going to waste, the beer was served in schooner glasses. Two or three glasses were always in need of refills. In between shuttling lukewarm orders of the wrong food to my luckless customers, I ferried fresh glasses of beer to the bulletheads. They generated more trips to the kitchen than the rest of my neglected tables put together. After a couple hours of this, they staggered away from the table, leaving me a buck tip for their food and sixty beers.

No matter who came in, they expected attentive service and instant refills. This was fine dining, Manhattan style.

The restaurant would shut down briefly around three or four o’clock, to restock the kitchen and prep dinner, hose out the vomit filled urinals, vacuum, and tidy up the table’s condiment trays.

Each table contained three jars, in addition to the standard Heinz Ketchup and French’s mustard. One jar contained a pickle relish. Another held corn relish. And the third was filled with sliced bread and butter pickles. After washing the banquettes and table, your next duty was to restock condiments. Sounds simple enough, eh? These condiments had been sitting on the table through four, five or six seatings. Any sane person would have buried them, or at the very least emptied them and run them through the dishwasher. BrewBurger, however, had a policy of how, when and why the condiment jars should be cleaned and refilled.

No matter how suspect the contents, I never saw a condiment jar that crossed the line at which BrewBurger considered it unfit for human consumption. Someone stubbed a cigarette butt out in the corn relish? You gingerly spooned out the cigarette, along with the tainted relish most proximate to the butt. To return the jar to its pristine state, you merely topped the jar off with fresh relish from the five gallon plastic bucket. A quick stir with a spoon, and everything was good as new. Foreign matter in the pickle jar? You emptied the juice out, rinsed the pickles with fresh brine, and topped it off with fresh pickles and brine.

If this was happening in the front of the restaurant, who knows what outrages were going down in the kitchen? Uneaten fries were dumped into one of those ubiquitous five gallon condiment buckets, presumably to be refried and served later. “Hey,” as one of the waiter said, “no worry. They go back in the 350 degree grease again. That’ll kill off anything too weird.”

Midway through Day Three's frenzied lunch, I had been woofed at by an increasingly angry and menacing manager five times. I had four tables worth of food waiting under the heat lamps, and three table’s lunch orders I need to get to the kitchen. One table was ready for refills. I jammed the orders in my pocket, tossed my apron in the corner, and walked out the front door into the blazing sunlight in Times Square.