Adventures in Late-Night Dining

Back in the early eighties, I was for a time a room service waiter in downtown Minneapolis. But that wasn't the job that I had applied for. Times were tough, jobs were hard to find. A new 600-room hotel (at the time, called The Amfac Hotel, possibly one of the dorkiest hotel names ever) was about to open and other than management type jobs that had already been filled, they were hiring for all positions. There was a big hiring fair at the armory. There must have been two or three thousand people. Back then, no touch-screen kiosks. Just hundreds of job descriptions taped up on a wall. I had no clue what to apply for. I knew jack about working in a hotel. Maintenance? Sous chef? Auditing? I wasn't remotely qualified for any of those. I was just a nerd who'd foolishly dropped out of college. Up on the wall I finally found a job with essentially no skills required: bar-back.

So I filled out an application and waited in a long line. Finally got seated at a table across from the assistant manager of food and beverage. The guy was nearly impossible to understand. He spoke very fast, but had a speech impediment. It was like listening to Elmer Fudd on methamphetamine. For no reason that I could understand, he decided that I would be just the man to sit in a tiny little room answering a stream of calls from guests who wanted food and drink taken up to their rooms by people wearing bow ties. And so began my career in room service.

Lucky me, I got the graveyard shift. This meant two very busy times, with a lull in between. By the time that my shift was starting, most people had already eaten dinner but lots of alcoholic beverages went up the elevators, with insane markups. $8 for a Budweiser? What the hell, it's going on an expense account. After 1 a.m. bar closing time, an hour or so worth of irate calls from people who could not fathom why they couldn't get booze in the middle of the night, as should be the case in any civilized city. Then a few hours of relative calm before the morning rush of people who wanted breakfast sent up.

The hotel had an employee cafeteria where employees ate for free. But it was only open during first and second shifts. On graveyard shift, they all came to me.

In my tiny office I had a device that was used to type up customers' orders. It would print out a numbered receipt that I'd hand to a waiter, and it was connected by a cable to another receipt printer in the kitchen. The waiter would then match up their numbered receipt with one on the shelf where the cooks had placed the meals they'd prepared. So during the relatively quiet time between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m. employees would line up and place their orders. They could have pretty much anything on the extensive menu, with the exception of a few of the highest-priced dishes.

Every business has its pecking order. If you haven't worked in a large hotel, you might think that the housekeeping staff or maybe the janitors were at the bottom of the order, but there's another group that, as a hotel guest, you rarely if ever see. The guys who get stuck with the really nasty work of cleaning the food prep areas. I never did figure out why janitors did the rest of the building but a separate crew got to have all the fun of cleaning the grease pits. But a separate crew it was. In the early eighties in Minneapolis, the crew was entirely Hmong. I can't remember exactly what year in the late seventies or early eighties it was, but there was a sudden wave of refugees from Southeast Asia that came to the Twin Cities in huge numbers. Mostly Vietnamese, but it seemed like the local Hmong population went from zero to 10,000 not quite overnight. Many of the Vietnamese came from families who'd worked closely with Americans during the war, most of them spoke a fair amount of English. But the Hmong, whose people had also fought on the losing side, were mostly pre-literate peasant farmers with little if any English. I of course spoke no Hmong.

So the crew could speak among themselves but pretty much all their other interactions with the other staff went through the one guy in the crew who spoke decent English. They lined up to place their orders like everyone else. But I found that most of them did speak at least a smattering of English, enough to order a burger one night and some chicken the next day.

All except for one guy, the oldest member of the crew who, as far as I was able to learn, spoke exactly two words of English.

"Egg bacon."

Night after night after night, the same thing. Egg bacon. So I kept entering it in the machine. No subtleties of over easy or poached. Scrambled eggs and bacon. Again and again.

He'd stand before me with no expression on his face and intone the magic phrase. And then take his numbered ticket to the kitchen to get his egg bacon.

This went on for about three months. And then one night I snapped. Just could not do it one more time.

He stood before me and said egg bacon.

I typed up hamburger and fries and handed him his ticket.

The next night, he stood before me smiling and said egg bacon.

I typed up lasagna with a side salad, French and blue cheese dressing.

The night after that he stood before me with a wide grin, enthusiastically nodding and said egg bacon.

His spaghetti and meatballs were waiting in the kitchen.