Dinner and Wine Party

Day off. One of the benefits of being a fine dining waiter is you often have access to free or deeply discounted wine. Whether a guest leaves you a half bottle, the boss gives you an appreciation gift, you corral all the partials from a big wine tasting, or you get a deep discount wholesale price on a case, it’s something that can be had.

Tonight won’t be one of those nights, but it was supposed to be. A friend’s friend met through her restaurant was going to hold a vertical tasting of his collection of Chateau Souverain Cabernets at our house tonight, because he knows we appreciate and understand wine. (A vertical tasting is having several bottles of the same wine from different years, and tasting/contrasting them.) When we heard of his plans, we went and invited a bunch of our friends . . . oops! Didn’t even think it would be more appropriate and considerate to let the Wine Guy set up the guest list. Understandably, once he found out what we’d done, he cancelled – though he’s still coming.

So instead we have to pick up a few bottles of Columbia Crest (what we call Everyday Drinking Wine = cheap but decent), precede it with a warm-up martini, and go it on our own. I bought bone-in rib eyes, potatoes, and broccoli for dinner. The friend from another restaurant is bringing cheese and crackers.

These get-togethers are really fun. What’s not fun about a good meal and getting drunk and B.S.ing with friends for an evening?

Otherwise today, I worked on the script for a bit, checked my Fantasy Basketball teams, read blogs, read the paper, and mopped the floor.

Now it’s just waiting for the fun to begin.

Cheers!

The Waiter’s Weekend

Everybody’s heard the phrase, “This is my Friday.” A waiter’s Friday is usually Saturday or Sunday. The quintessential waiter weekend day is Monday. That’s why enterprising restaurants have “Industry Night” on Mondays, sometimes Tuesdays. Industry nights typically (around here at least) 50% off for employees of any restaurant – just bring your pay stub. Sometimes the deals involve drinks and a late-night happy hour.

In a lot of respects, Mondays are a pretty crappy day to have a weekend. For the rest of the world, Monday is viewed as a great opportunity to close up shop on the slowest day of the week. It’s a little like roaming a ghost town when you’re out and about on a Monday, expecting to get stuff done, or simply have fun. If places aren’t closed entirely, hours are often shortened. It’s a regular occurrence to be stymied in an errand or two and dinner plans when I’m trying to do stuff on Monday.

Also, your ‘regular job’ friends are out of your loop and you’re out of theirs. Whenever I want to do something, I plan it for Monday-Tuesday – they’re working and have to get up early. When they plan something, it’s Friday-Sunday – I’m working.

On the other hand, never being available weekend nights is an incredible money-saver. When I was younger, especially, my friends used to do a lot of partying, going to clubs in L.A. and such. They’d spend a couple hundred a night just drinking and eating Taco Bell when they struck out. I’ve probably saved $50,000 by not going out on weekends.

And that ghost town vibe can also be pretty cool. Traffic is light. If you do find an open restaurant, there’s plenty of free tables; you get great service (usually) because it’s not too busy. If a regular weekend day is mellow, it’s waaay more mellow to have it on Monday.

So today I slept in till noon (I was up till about 3:30 last night fussing on the computer and playing guitar). I paid a bill at the bank, went to Starbuck’s and read the paper while listening to John Prine and Jeff Beck, respectively, on the iPod.

Home again, more aimless fiddling on the computer with email and fave blogs to read. Checking my Fantasy Basketball teams to make sure the lineups are straight before tomorrow’s season openers. Changed strings (finally!) on acoustic guitar, sang a Bob Dylan song to the now shimmering sound. Finally settled down and wrote more outline revisions on the script for over an hour. And now here we are.

Later I’ll probably shake up a martini and dick around more on the computer. I have Forgetting Sarah Marshall on DVD, so I might watch that. Last potential activity: using some ‘trade-out’ gift certificates I have for a local restaurant. (Trade-outs are when one restaurant owner/manager trades certificates with another, typically to give away to employees as ‘thank you’s’ or as sales contest prizes.)

Don’t worry. This will get entertaining soon. What do you expect, anyway? It was a day off. How am I supposed to get new stories away from the restaurant?