Why I Can't Change The Menu. Even If The Bride Wants Me To.

Friday and Saturday evening shifts are a notorious crapshoot in room service land. There are drunken room parties, where the room service department functions as the party's personal bottle service provider. There are solo diners and solo drinkers, frequently pajama clad or in various stages of undress. Sometimes there are cranky, spoiled, cooped up children. There are guaranteed to be cranky, spoiled, cooped up adults.

One such weekend night around 6 I got a call from one of the more expensive suites. It went something like this:

Guest: Can I order the oatmeal from the breakfast menu?
Underemployed: We stop serving breakfast at noon.
Guest: Do you have a fruit plate?
Underemployed: No we don't.
Guest: No fruit at all. Not a single strawberry?
Underemployed: No. Our menu items are as written.
Guest (poorly attempting to direct her mouth away from the microphone of her room telephone) : No fruit. You want a grilled cheese?
Guest (to Underemployed): It's for the Bride, she really wants oatmeal. I mean, you have it, right? It's for the Bride.
Underemployed: I understand, but we stop serving breakfast at noon. The kitchen is no longer prepared to serve breakfast. But I will ask the chef.

Underemployed puts the guest on hold, and looks at her co-worker. Rolls her eyes. Waits another 20 seconds. "No way I'm going to Chef with this," she whispers. With that, she presses the red blinking extension on her telephone.

Underemployed: I'm sorry. The kitchen is unable to serve the oatmeal at this time.
Guest: I know you have oatmeal in the kitchen. Just put some in a bowl with hot water, a side of skim and a sliced banana.
Underemployed: We don't serve instant oatmeal. Our oatmeal takes hours to prepare and is only available till noon. Is there anything from the dinner menu you would like to order?

You know we have oatmeal? Guest, you don't know shit about what we have in the kitchen.

What we do have in the kitchen:

-More eggs than I've ever seen in my life.
-An entire wall of a walk-in fridge dedicated to different cheeses, each labelled by date and weight.
-Lots of olive oil, kept in squeeze bottles on the line.
-A skin-tingly cold freezer with shelves of batters, doughs, and various experiments from the pastry team.
-Presumably illegal Ecuadorian and Mexican prep cooks, currently cleaning out large pig faces for head cheese, crumbling day old filone bread for bread crumbs, and slicing an intimidatingly large mountain of leeks.
-The Sous Chef of the restaurant upstairs, a serious-minded and wildly direct man who has fired room service employees despite the fact he doesn't regularly work with them.
- Line cooks who are busy setting up their mise en place for the dinner rush.
-Crates of lemons- to be squeezed for the fresh lemon juice used at the bars in the lobby and restaurant, as well as recipes in the kitchen. Crates of oranges- to be squeezed. Crates of grapefruit- to be squeezed and for various desert recipes. These are regularly inventoried.
-Rules. I am really not allowed to sell off menu items.

What we don't have in the kitchen:

-Crappy, you-can-buy-this-at-the-Duane-Reade-down-the-block instant oatmeal.
-Time to personalize every order, creating off menu items from ingredients we don't have at the ready.
-A secret stash of food that is off the menu but available to costumers who know the password.


This doesn't mean when at a restaurant, you shouldn't ask. You should, however, accept the answer. Any time a customer asks for extra ingredients or off menu items, I have to ask a chef (usually the Sous Chef) if it is doable and, if his answer is yes, how much he would like to charge. If he says no, that's where the buck stops. I can't go on the line and cook anything myself, friend of The Bride.