Kitchen Non-Confidential

In honor of my good friend Caroline's very last day at work (next week, she moves to Philadelphia for a year-long job), Todd and I took her to lunch at Vidalia -- a high-end Southern-style restaurant in Washington. Caroline opted for Vidalia's signature dish, the always excellent shrimp and grits. Todd and I ordered off the special $19.90 lunch menu; to start, I had the scallops over quinoa, and then the trout, which came with lima beans diced okra. (I've come to hate okra, but that's not Vidalia's fault. Okra is simply a gooey vegetable. Well, perhaps that is Vidalia's fault. Isn't one of the marks of a truly great restaurant whether they can make you like something you thought you didn't?) Like everything at Vidalia, the food was consistently in the B+ range. That is to say, Vidalia's food is pretty much like every episode of Wings -- always good, but never, ever stunningly great.

And thus, had it not been for the earthquakes, the meal would have been a sad one (at Caroline's departure) but otherwise uneventful. Three times during the course of the meal, the restaurant -- which is located in a basement space -- rumbled loudly. And this being Washington, the dining room hushed at each rumbling, the patrons wondering if Vidalia would be doubling as a bomb shelter by the time dessert came out. No one offered any explanation to the puzzled diners. No one stopped the French presses. No one acknowledged the shaking. This left us to think that perhaps our table alone was shaking, much like that lone raincloud that follows unlucky cartoon characters wherever they walk. But the other diners' perplexed looks reassured us that we were neither specifically unfortunate -- nor crazy.

Perhaps worse (if indeed the rumbling was nothing more than an air conditioning unit acting up), a loud "Fuck!" emanated from the kitchen. This "Fuck!" was followed by several other "Fuck!"s and some muffled yelling. The manager and the wait staff wandered into the kitchen to determine the cause of the "Fuck!"s. Each person emerged from the kitchen into the dining room with an embarrassed smile. One server's eyes darted from patron to patron as if to discern whether she was giving up that she knew what had gone down among the pans. Did the rumbling have anything to do with the "Fuck!"s? Or were they separate occurrences? (It's not just me. Insurance companies are always interested in such questions.) Whatever the case, patrons should not have to wonder -- not necessarily because they deserve to be told, but because they shouldn't have to hear "Fuck!"s coming from the kitchen in the first place.

I'm fully aware that kitchen fights break out all the time. This type of stuff has been well chronicled in books such as Kitchen Confidential and Waiting. Indeed, when I asked one server what was going on, he said that he wasn't at liberty to say (the correct answer, as opposed to the incorrect response of silence to the rumbling), but that I could read all about it in Kitchen Confidential. For the shock value, part of me was glad to see it (or, hear it) happen yesterday. But another part didn't want the curtain of gentility to be pulled away. I would say that that's especially true in a restaurant catering to high-paying customers, but it's equally true in a place that serves up $5 burritos. If a restaurant allows its patrons to hear kitchen fights and unexplained rumblings, those patrons will inevitably wonder whether that inattention to customers spills over into the food in ways perceptible or imperceptible.