An odd menu requires a delicate balancing act

Think of what you’re getting into when you design your menu—it’s not only about the food, but the cooks. If you demand a peculiar set of skills, be prepared to pay a peculiar price to keep it.

When I was in my barely-legals a few decades back, I worked at a place in Minneapolis called Professor Munchie’s. There may be one or two of you old enough to remember it—28th and Hennepin, at the gateway to a quiet residential neighborhood known as Uptown, in the days before Calhoun Square and its various efflorescences.

It was one of the venerable burger joints that sprouted up around then, a couple of which still survive. For a fairly reasonable price, all of these places offered hand-cut fries, hand-pattied burgers, better-than-average buns and decent cheese, and did it in a bright, comfortable setting. It was a new wave at the time—the old dark bars were getting light and ferny, fine-dining houses thought tubular steel chairs were cool, and burger joints decided they had something to prove.

Each of them seemed to stake out a certain auxiliary territory to separate themselves from the others, and at Munchie’s, it was omelettes. They were made in the loopiest way—four beaten eggs in an eight-inch pan, let the bottom set, lift it up and let the uncooked part slide under and turn the bottom over and set it back on the uncooked egg. It’s now the top, if you’re following me. Then when the new bottom has set, and the inside is still raw between your two layers, you flip what has now become your omelette so you’re certain you have a seal, and slide it onto a plate. At this point it gets decorated with what-have-you, and tossed into a hot oven for 10 to 12 minutes.

Assuming that all the steps had been done correctly, the omelette would rise like a soufflé to a pretty astounding height, which it would maintain under the heat lamp for approximately 70 seconds before it fell like a rock. The cooks were supposed to give clear warning shortly before an omelette came out of the oven, and having properly given such, were permitted a great deal of latitude in how they expressed their displeasure when it was left to die in the window.

Just looking back at that makes me tired. It did, however, change the nature of the burger-and-fries experience: If your date was having eggs, it could take you 40 minutes to get served. Might as well get a malt with that and have a cigarette or six. Did I mention that we cracked and beat the eggs to order? No sense speeding things up, it would shorten the lines and ruin the buzz.

This kind of menu forces a restaurant to walk a delicate balance. You don’t need cooks with a whole lot of repertoire, but you do need them to be really good at a limited number of things, timing being foremost. I can remember seeing a help wanted ad years ago for the old Parkway Café on Hiawatha which had the same thing in mind: “We are looking for the best breakfast cook in town.” They got him, too; It was a union shop and paid well in the mid-’70s. I once went into the packed dining room after waiting 20 minutes for a table, and had my order taken and my food out four minutes later. There was one cook in the kitchen, and his arms moved like an octopus on crack, but he looked bored and was smoking in the nonexistent time between tickets. Breakfast cooks were like that—some of them couldn’t manage at lunch or dinner to save their lives, but eggs did something to them. They’d stumble in hung-over at 5:00 a.m., head to the office where they hid their egg pans from the other cooks, spit, swear, and have a shot, and stagger out clothed in glory and wearing the apron of the elect. From six to 11 they ruled the world.

At Munchie’s, our luck with cooks was hit-and-miss. We had the usual complement of the too-young and the too-dumb (I saw a kid open the valve on a hot fryer to let the fat out into a pickle bucket. It went right through the bottom without slowing down). We also had an art-school wizard who could make a burger look like a trumpet fanfare and a Vietnam vet who was in the workhouse when not in the kitchen and was stoned every day he worked—and was so amazingly fast and clean that he wound up working the two-man line alone. He ended up getting more and more hours, eventually doing two shifts a day, replacing four cooks with one, so it was quite a blow when he walked. Unpaid overtime. Pissed him off.

So think of what you’re getting into when you design your menu. It’s not just food you need to think about, it’s the food dudes, as well. If you’re demanding a peculiar set of skills, be prepared to pay a peculiar price to keep it once you find it. And if you don’t want to pay the price, realign the skills. There are all kinds of ways to make an omelette.

There was one cook in the kitchen, and his arms moved like an octopus on crack, but he looked bored and was smoking in the nonexistent time between tickets.