Baked Potato

Today's nugget is a beauty. One of the daytime lifers was a waitress named Mary Ann. She was a nice enough lady, but she was really out of place at the Hillcrest (if that was possible). She had worked lunches for years, and was there during my entire tenure. She was basically Maude Flanders, which would make her husband Ned Flanders and her two boys, Rod and Todd. Seriously. Dudley Do-right, and his family. They were a painfully white, God-fearing, classic nuclear family. It was always interesting trying to explain to her that one of the cooks didn't show because he was in jail, and the other one was sleeping one off outside, behind the garage.
-You can imagine at a restaurant where the clientele wasn't very discriminating, and management and hiring practices were spotty at best, that the food quality and handling practices dipped from time to time. Yes, I saw, and performed, some really nasty things in that kitchen. Nothing malicious or dangerous. Just lazy, for the most part. For restaurant people, this won't be shocking at all, and in the big picture, what I saw at the Hillcrest was not nearly as bad as things I saw at other establishments in my career. Like I said, the driving force was usually laziness, not malice, or even stupidity. You hear stories about under-trained kitchen folk alternating cutting up raw chicken and salad greens with the same knife, Well, duh. At the Hillcrest, it was usually more along the lines of a cook not wanting to bake off three more potatoes at the end of a shift for that last order, so he grabs a couple of bakers from the previous night's service out of the cooler, and throws them in the microwave.
-Well, this is what happened one day, and poor Mary Ann was on the receiving end of one of these "aged", re-heated baked potatoes. At the Hillcrest (like many supper clubs), the baked potatoes were given a simple slice with a paring knife when they were plated. At the table, the server would give the baked potato a quick four-finger squeeze, using the thumbs and pointer fingers to "open" up and present the potato. A little puff of steam would come out and the diner would dig in. Except, when Mary Ann squeezed this relic open, instead of steam puffing out, a cockroach crawled out, and scattered across the table, to a chorus of yelps and screams. Classic. Did I mention the place had a ridiculous roach problem?