When we run out of something......

I used to work at a restaurant whose house specialty was roast beef. It would take about 12 hours to slow cook these giant 50 to 70 pound rounds of beef. You can get a LOT of meals out of a roast that large. On any given day, no one can predict how many people will order roast beef. The only thing you can do to prepare for this, is work on averages. Occasionally we would have a day where more people than average would order roast beef, and we would run out. This didn’t happen very often, but it did happen. People would be aghast…”How can a roast beef house, run out of roast beef?!?!?”

My answer to them was always, “Better we run out, then to serve you something that’s been sitting around for a few days.” That usually puts a new spin on it. If it was burgers we ran out of, someone could run to the store, and then we could continue making burgers. But this roast beef takes 12 hours to cook!

Think back to when you were a kid…..you’re really hoping to have chicken for dinner…you get home to find out it’s meatloaf. Disappointing? Sure. But we learn to live with these disappointments. So we had two choices, eat the meatloaf, (which was the only thing on the menu for the evening) or go hungry. It’s a fact of life, you can’t always get what you want….and if you chose the drama queen route, and declared that you weren’t going to eat…go ahead, cut off your nose to spite your face (fool). And if your parents allowed this type of behavior, then shame on them.

So, unlike the home menu, which featured ONE item, when a restaurant runs out of something, there are probably 30 or 40 other items to choose from. If we’ve run out of your first choice, and this is your biggest disappointment in life, well that’s just sad. Learn to appreciate the fact that a) you don’t have to cook, you’re dining out, b) you don’t have to do any clean up, and c) someone else is serving it to you.

If you decide to continue with your little hissy fit, don’t care if you are making anyone else at your table uncomfortable, (and if you have children with you, great way to set an example) as far as I’m concerned, you can march your self-centered ass out the door and go eat dirt.