"Bulletproof," I remember him saying. "This place is bulletproof."
Looking back on it now, that really marked the beginning of the end.
When the relatively new manager made that remark it caught me off guard, I was used to
working in a place that was committed to bringing the best to it's customers. The best
produce, the best wines, the best service, it really was the best of everything. The
restaurant wasn't budget conscious, but then, the best rarely is.
That restaurant had been around for perhaps five years before I joined it's staff; it was
well known both near and far, a veritable fixture in the foodie journals. It won so many
awards that they sat stacked in a pile on a chair in the office like last Sunday's
newspapers at a coffee shop. I remembered my first bar meeting and the accompanying
realization that even then, with 10 years of bartending of experience under my belt, I was
the least knowledgeable of the group. That would all change in the next four years.
We called the new manager "Stiffy", partly due to his personality and partly due to his
habit of walking around the restaurant as if his knees didn't bend properly.
He had been brought in at the bequest of one of the owners not as a visionary but as a
cost cutter. An old waiter once told me, "you always want to work for a company that is
on its ascent, when everything is geared towards making things better, because at some
point they all begin to descend. When they do it is all about tightening your belt and
cutting costs," which as anyone can tell you, is no fun at all.
Stiffy marked the crest of that restaurants wave. He had a background in accounting and
no real people skills, but then his job was not about managing people, it was about
managing costs. He started with little changes, substituting cheaper lettuces for the
"organic" salads, moved on to cheaper cuts of meat for the steaks, then "fresh frozen"
fish for fresh fish. Oddly changing the menu descriptions took months to fix, even though
the menus were then printed every day. The menu read fresh fish and organic "whatever"
long after they were no longer used. We substituted cheaper wines for the ones listed
and cheaper liquors for the specialty cocktails.
After each change we, the staff, waited for public outrage, but nothing happened.
Business continued as usual, and in some cases increased. But we knew what was
going on, but in the interest of gainful employment many of us kept quiet.
After switching to Jell-O brand pudding for the "famous homemade" pudding featured on
the dessert menu "Stiffy" hid the offending paper packets in the liquor room so that none
of the staff would know, clearly demonstrating a "consciousness of guilt".
It was on this particular subject that Stiffy made the "bullet proof" remark to me. It
became his mantra, for each successive change, he would claim that the restaurant's
success was unstoppable even going so far as to describe the restaurant as
"unsinkable".
The staff recognized it for what it was, arrogance. Arrogance and greed. Some of us
also remembered another unsinkable endeavor; the ill-fated Titanic and her sister ship
the Britannic both considered to be "unsinkable" and both now sitting o the bottom of the
sea.
For that ill-fated restaurant it would not be a cataclysmic disaster but a series of much
smaller ones. In a business built on perception, (people think it's a good restaurant, so
then it is) once that perception changes there is almost no effort that can fix that. Not
good reviews, not menu changes, not managerial changes, once the magic is gone, it is
unrecoverable.
So it was with this "bulletproof" business. With each little change we would lose valuable
staff members, people whose conscience would not allow them to misrepresent or
distort. Eventually the restaurant was staffed with people who either didn't care or didn't
know, which in either case was a recipe for disaster. Add in some managerial in
fighting, marital dissolutions and slowly, ever so slowly, the whole fabric unraveled. Stiffy
would give way to other managers who, having less to work with, only accelerated the
process. Once the skid started, it never stopped. Eventually I watched the decline and
fall from the outside, told to me in Gibbonian detail by fleeing customers and employees.
That unsinkable restaraunt finally sank beneath the waves of the curret recession. Quietly
and relatively uneventfully it made it's final bow, in the words of T.S. Eliot (from The
Hollow Men) "Not with a bang but a whimper." A whimper that came, ironically, near the
anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, proving that quietly or not, arrogance always
leads to disastser. And it can all start with a single word, in this case that word
was"bulletproof".


Jeff's Bulleit "proof"* Manhattan
2 ounces Bulleit Frontier whiskey
½ ounce Dimmi Liqueur
1 tangerine wheel**

Combine first two ingredients in a cocktail glass with ice and stir until cold. Strain into
chilled cocktail glass. Garnish by floating tangerine wheel on surface. Raise a toast to
lost restaurants and lost ships. Sip knowing that nothing is ever "bulletproof" or
"unsinkable".

* Bulleit is 90 proof (45% alcohol) or ten "proof" more than Jim Beam bourbon or Jack
Daniels whiskey
** Slice tangerine crossways between "navels" into quarter inch thick circles.