So you want to open a restaurant. Well don’t bother spending three years at catering college. Here’s all you need to know.
Always remember: The idea of running a restaurant is NOT to make the diners happy. In primeval times hunting food was a life threatening adventure and people basically miss that. Dining out is the Yuppy’s way of returning to the wild. Restaurants are the jungle of the modern age.
Of course you have to make your restaurant look appealing from the outside. Candles, open fireplace, bed-warmers on the wall all establish the right atmosphere.
Once the diners are inside the cosy retreat the aim is to make them as uncomfortable as possible. All tables should be right next to the draughty front door, the noisy kitchen door or the disgustingly smelly toilet door. If you have corner with no doors, hang a huge Marshall speaker playing Peruvian funeral laments very loudly on the wall. Tables must wobble and chairs must be so close that every time a customer stands up the person behind them goes face-first into the couscous.
As soon as the customer sits down, shove a couple of menus the size of freeway billboards in their hand and ask them what they want to drink. While they dither over this, tap your foot, drum your fingers and sigh at their indecisiveness. After they blurt out something they don’t really want, disappear for about an hour.
This is where you’ve really got the customer by the noisettes
The menu should be filled with substances they never knew were edible, and which in fact are not.
> Baked pumpkin rind with pinecone flakes.
> Cicada legs in a phenyl broulee.
Names of dishes should be infused with suggestions of violence and torture:
> Bombe Alaska with flambe fruit.
> Beaten eggs.
> Rack of lamb with whipped potato.
All dishes must have pretentious and bizarre descriptions. No one says “salad” any more. It is: “A riot of fresh seasonable vegetables on a parsely confit with Tibetan vinaigrette”
Remember no verb or adjective is is too much.
“A debacle of clams topped with frisson of Alaskan caviar ”
OR
“An orgy of wild berries raped by a topping of King Island Cream.”
Nor is any dish too ordinary! For example, try these:
“A miscellany of roasted sweetmeats in rich stock baked in a filo cuvee, topped with essence du pomadore and crisp julienne potatoes” (Pie and Chips).
“A delicately minced melange of oriental vegetables steamed in their own jus and wrapped in crisped pastry wafers” (A Chicko Roll).
“Light fluffy squares of tranche du pain interleaved with exotic layers of spicy extraire de levure” (A vegemite sandwich).
After the diner has had an hour to peruse the menu the waiter should reappear and run through the specials on the blackboard. This is done incredibly fast and in some language not derived from the Indo-European group which means the customer has to ask the waiter to repeat everything, thereby looking foolish.
Once the customer has pointed to something the waiter snatches the menus away so fast they decapitate any passing patrons and leaves the diner to sit for two hours during which their wine glass is topped up every time it falls below one millimetre below one third from the top.
Rule 1. The dish must bear no resemblance to the description on the menu.
Rule 2. Sauces are designed to splash on diners’ clothes.
For white shirts, tomato based sauces are ideal. One molecule of a properly sloppy sauce will hit a shirt and spread out about five centimetres in all directions.
For suits and black dresses go for the Bechamel and carbonara sauces. The art is to make the sauce runny enough that when the diner twirls their pasta around the fork the sauce sprays off like a lawn sprinkler and yet thick enough to stick to the fabric like Araldite and dry into a hard unremovable button.
The piece de resistance of all messy dishes is bouillabaisse: guaranteed to dribble down the sides of the mouth and make the diner look like they’ve got a dose of full body impetigo by the end of the meal.
Rule 3. All seafood must consist 90% of calcareous shell, 5% of gizzard and 5% white meat.
Ian McFadyen is an Australian writer, actor, director, producer, academic and social commentator.
His work covers a wide range from books and essays on sociology, politics, criminology and science to plays and film scripts. He is also one of Australia’s best known humorists and comedy writers.