Head Chef Cletus.

One of my most pleasant memories of Stanknasty Cletus was on a weekend when he actually had to do some baking at the restaurant. Big Bertha always made really good desserts for the place. Wow, who would have thought a morbidly obese woman with the body of a mushy potato like sweet treats? On a side note, I watched this Netflix special of a comedian named Tom Sequra. This dude was absolutely hilarious! One of his jokes had to do with a Starbucks worker who was trying to sell him a special coffee. He said something like, "Well, you're really fat, so you know when shit tastes good, I will have that." Spot on. Bertha knew when something was delicious so that was her specialty. That was one good aspect to her being around from time to time, other than attracting the flies.

Big Mama Bertha wasn't going to be in town to bake desserts so she left Cletus in charge. That was one thing I refused to do. It was the least of my worries, and frankly, I don't like or trust myself to dedicate time to pastries and whatnot. Anyways, she told Cletus to make a few different flavors of cheesecake. No problemo for an aspiring 4 star culinary expert. (yup, sarcasm again)

I remember him taking most of the early afternoon donating every single bit of time to those masterpieces. He made 4 in total, each of different variety. He threw them in the oven and off he went to another prep item for that night, but first, he stepped outside for a quick breath of fresh air. I know right? He must have been exhausted! When he steps out, that means he takes off in his car for 15 minutes to drive around and get high, now you know.

So he comes back in and starts to prepare pizza crusts. This is another thing I do not agree with. I don't feel pizzas should be on the regular restaurant menu. The reason I am a firm believer in this is because you can feed 4 people with a pizza under $20. Well, that doesn't work very well in a smaller restaurant because the cost of our meager pizza products outweigh the benefit we receive from payment. Just going to throw this out there as a rough and simple example. Our cost for pizza ingredients is $5. We get under $20 and it feeds 4 people. That means everyone ate for under $5 each. Um, no, that's not good.

I'd much rather have those 4 people order single items that amount to a lot more, even if it's only an $8 burger and fries. You see the math? Well, most of the time a single item is going to be more than $8, so there you go. Pizzas are great and work well when that's what you specialize in and can reduce your costs by a significant margin. I would be fine if they were only served after the kitchen closed in the bar, but I digress. One night Cletus even said, "Wow, $250 in pizza sales! It's nice to have that extra revenue!" It's not extra by any means, just the opposite you turd sandwich. We likely lost revenue because of you glorious pizzas.

Ok then. Back to the topic of this post. The cheesecakes are baking quite well I presume as he walks back in the kitchen door from his "bake break", and he's onward to those beautiful crusts. I see him messing around with the ovens out of my peripheral vision and think nothing of it. He's probably just checking those amazing desserts. About 15 minutes go by and he is done shaping pizza crusts. He walks over to the ovens and opens the first. A significant amount of smoke escapes when the door opens. He exclaims, "Fuck!" , and starts pulling out cheesecake with beautiful black tops on them all. I ask if something went wacky with the ovens, like before with the vaporizer thingy, and he doesn't say anything to me, just keeps swearing over his scorched masterpieces.

Finally he says, "The ovens were too high." I tell him that I haven't touched anything. He says, "Nah, I turned them up to bake the pizza crusts." AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Here's the breakdown. He put cheesecake in at 375 degrees to bake for 45 minutes. He then went and got high. He came back and obviously forgot he had cheesecake in the oven a mere 15 minutes after he put them in. He adjusted the ovens to 475 degrees to heat them up for the pizza crusts. He then burnt the shit out of the cheesecakes while he pressed and tossed the crusts. Amazing! All the cheesecakes went straight into the garbage, but hey, at least we can serve some super cheap pizza! It costs us roughly $4 to make that dessert and we could get 8 slices out of each with a tag of $4 on each slice. But hey, he didn't fuck up the our biggest money maker, the pizza! And I won't even get into this, but he burnt at least 30% of the crusts he made over the time I was there because he'd forget to set a timer or be out of the kitchen when the timers went off.

Of course it made me mad, so much unnecessary waste. The best part of his incompetence is when he'd gripe about me putting too much sauce on some wings or something equally stupid. All I had to do was point to a garbage with burnt pizza crusts in it and say, "1 ounce of this sauce costs us pennies. Those black pizza crusts cost us $2 each." You'd think after a year of that he'd get the picture, but nope! He always had something dumb spurting from his caved in face. Every incident I can recall will be discussed eventually, though this is enough for tonight.

See you all again...in another day in the life of a line cook.