“In the restaurant industries’ war on crime, the worst criminal offenders are pursued by the reporters of local newspapers. These are their stories.” *dun dun* Generally, I try to find some oddball stories during the course of the week to make you all chuckle on Saturdays. I tend to read stories on Friday afternoon and […]
Most Recent Posts
The Greatest Customer Complaint Response Ever
I had lunch today with my friends Emma and Senor Esparza. Â They ate at Justus Drugstore last night. Â Justus is on the outermost outskirts of what could be considered Kansas City. Â In the few years that it has been open it has developed a reputation of being well worth the drive. Â I personally have never […]
Weird Restaurant Stories 9/18
Welcome to the “It’s the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine)†edition of Weird Restaurant Stories. This week was full of mayhem, fire, and theft. Restaurants closed and restaurants reopened. As always they were documented by local reporters and read by me. I filtered out the generic stories to […]
My Response: 25 Things Chefs Never Tell You
I am trying to fight through the worst bout of writer’s block I have had since I started writing this blog. I started at least three different posts yesterday that ended up in the recycle bin. In my last post I promised to get back to some server related posts, but my brain has forced […]
Weird Restaurant Stories 9/11
Welcome to a very special episode of Weird Restaurant Stories. This does not mean that Arthur Carlson will try to take naked pictures of Gary Coleman while the girl from Striptease pops caffeine pills and Tom Hanks gets hammered on vanilla extract in Michael J Fox’s kitchen. Nope, this one is even more special. Today’s […]
Story Time: Injuries
From the statistics I get through WordPress, I can tell that about half my traffic comes from search engines. Which is cool and I enjoy seeing what people search for to end up at my blog. The other half is people who came here via a link someone posted or have the page bookmarked. For […]
Weird Restaurant Stories 9/4
Back again for another weekly roundup of strange news stories from restaurants around the country. This week’s list was remarkably easy to compile. Some weeks I feel like I have to stretch to find interesting stories. This week most of the effort went into limiting the list to my maximum number of twelve. Here are […]
Top Five Posts You Probably Missed
Being less than a week away from my 100th post has left me some time to think about how I want to recognize that milestone. I thought about a grand countdown. I thought about an retrospective on all of the changes I have seen in the restaurant business in my years. I had an idea […]
A Food Critic Intervention
There have been several instances while writing posts for this blog where I have felt the need to place blame for the things that drive me crazy about the restaurant business. I have always managed to stop short of that because I do not want this to be a blog that complains about the problems […]
Awkward Moments
Over the last 15 years I have spent in the service industry, I have had to change my approach. 15 years ago, I was a gangly 6-foot tall 125-pound server with a voice somewhere in the Justin Bieber range. I looked only slightly older than him. A head of grey hair has made me change […]
About The Author
David Hayden was born and raised in Kansas City, Missouri. He took his first serving job in 1996. Since that time, he has worked for over a dozen different restaurant companies. He has held both hourly and salaried positions at independent and corporate restaurants. He has waited on over 100,000 guests and trained hundreds of servers. He has been named "Best Server in Kansas City" the last three years by the local weekly paper.
