Once upon a time in Atlanta…

For breakfast, I ate a Russet potato which was steamed in the pressure cooker for about 10 minutes. It was kept out of the water by placing it in a basket placed atop a trivet inside the stove-top cooker.

Most often, in any pressure cooker, the food being cooked rests in the water. However, I wanted to find out what the food would be like if it did not.

The potato had been thoroughly cleansed and rinsed in the usual manner some weeks earlier, which for me, includes a capful of common, unscented, household bleach in addition to Dawn® brand liquid dishwashing soap.

My general rule is, all fresh fruit and vegetables get that treatment because:

1.) You don’t know how many people handled it at the store having not washing their hands after toileting, and;

2.) You don’t know about the conditions in which it was grown, if e.coli or other really bad cooties might have been present, or if it “picked up” something in transit.

While recalls of vegetables tainted with e.coli or other pathological bacteria are neither rare, nor common, per se, they are ONLY on the outside of the food, never within. So, every vegetable – including green leafy ones – tubers, and fruits of all kinds – are all

Ever Had A Bad Restaurant Experience? Here’s What You Can Do.

Ever been to a busy restaurant?

Who hasn’t?

By “busy,” I mean one with many customers/patrons while you’re there. It could be any style restaurant, of course, such as a fast-food place, but more particularly, I mean to refer to restaurants that have wait staff.

In such a busy restaurant, the place will typically be crowded, practically all seats will be filled at every table, and if there’s a bar counter with chairs, it’ll be filled up too. And  on football game days, some restaurants are filled to capacity, often just as much as they’re filled on weekends year round.

It seems eating/dining out is a type of American pastime. It’s common to hear others say “go there, try that, try the new dish” at this, that or the other restaurant.

Doubtless, at some time or another, at any type of restaurant, we’ve experienced slow or poor service, and even poor quality of food in some of them. Even the well-known Waffle House chain restaurant can have moments when they’re overwhelmed with customers, thereby stressing the cook and wait staff.

So, think about how long it took you to be seated, then be waited upon, then to get your drinks, and then food, and how well (or not) your needs were attended do during the meal.

With any crowded restaurant, the large number of patrons can overwhelm the wait staff, and the kitchen staff. Yes, it can be frustrating, but you’re hungry and/or have made plans or reservations, so you don’t want go to another restaurant – and often won’t. After all, you’re already there. And it’s a hassle to do that. Right? So, you settle, suffer, and endure the poor service.

The source of the problem, and the primary matter to be addressed is inadequate staffing. What is a proper ratio of waitstaff to customers? And what is a proper ratio of kitchen staff to customers? How many chefs and line cooks does it take to support a given amount of tables during peak hours? How many bussers and host staff are needed? How many bartenders? An effective staffing ratio is the answer to those questions and others related to effective, efficient service in a full house restaurant.

In a restaurant that seats 100 people, it would be absurd to imagine that only 1 waitstaff could effectively meet the needs of all 100 patrons. Similarly, it’d be equally preposterous to think that only 1 cook could effectively or simultaneously prepare enough food for 100 patrons. That’s completely ignoring the number of

Walking on Holy Ground: Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken Cafe & Museum, Corbin, KY

While in Kentucky, make certain you visit the National Corvette Museum, in Bowling Green.

—

Journeys

In Kentucky, Fried Chicken History

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: August 24, 2012

WHEN making his rounds as a traveling salesman for a Chicago printing company, Duncan Hines would occasionally pull off the Dixie Highway in Corbin, Ky., and eat at Sanders Cafe. In the 1939 edition of “Adventures in Good Eating,” his pioneering restaurant guide, he recommended the cafe and its adjoining motor court as “very good place to stop en route to Cumberland Falls and the Great Smokies,” highlighting its “sizzling steaks, fried chicken, country ham, hot biscuits.”

The Sanders Cafe and Museum in Corbin, KY / Jonathan Palmer for The New York Times

The cafe is still there, only now it incorporates a museum and holds down a spot on the National Register of Historic Places, for one huge, unignorable reason. The owner, chef and resident genius of the place was none other than Colonel Harland Sanders, who, on this hallowed ground, cooked the first batch of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Cumberland Falls does not work the magic it once did, and Corbin itself is not high on anyone’s list of tourist destinations. But the Colonel Harland Sanders Cafe and Museum is a modest must. In addition to capturing a pivotal moment in the mass-marketing of American vernacular food, it evokes a dreamlike time, before the arrival of the Interstate System and its proliferation of fast-food restaurants and chain hotels, when traveling the American highway was a thrilling, high-risk proposition, with marvelous discoveries and ghastly disappointments waiting at every turn.

In its present form, the Sanders Cafe and Museum was born in 1990, the 100th anniversary of Colonel Sanders’s birth. JRN, a Tennessee-based company that operates nearly 200 KFC franchises in the Southeast, was about to open a modern KFC restaurant next to the old cafe. To mark the great birthday, it put out a call for artifacts and memorabilia that would allow it to celebrate the Colonel, his cafe and his fried chicken.

All sorts of stuff

Could this be the worst “dining” experience in America, or… even worse?

Does Eat Place, Greenville, Mississippi, front door

Torn between numerous thoughts, I struggled with the headline, and opening paragraph.

The headline “Public Food Establishment Not Fit For Human Consumption” would be adequate, I suppose, but I really like this lead as a headline much better: “I feel like I should’ve eaten a cucumber sandwich.”

That was actually a SMS which I’d sent a good friend of mine, who had mentioned that earlier in the day, he purchased some cucumbers at a local Farmer’s Market, was pondering how to prepare them, and was considering preparing cucumber sandwiches. Naturally, I gave him a fair amount of good-natured ribbing over the matter (suggesting perhaps that he should consider joining a ladies tea party group) particularly given that he has a penchant for sausages & “fair food,” sometimes aka “carnival food.”

How did I feel after that decidedly “ungastronomic” experience?
A picture is worth a thousand words.
Here is but one.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nevertheless…

Back to the Greenville, Mississippi fiasco.

It may be best to characterize the experience with a few terms:

• Clip Joint

• Nasty

• Filthy

• Overpriced

• Nickel and Dime

• Avoid at All Costs

Having read the reviews on UrbanSpoon.com, I was somewhat prepared – with strong emphasis upon the minimal aspect.

The following video is