Jeff Burkhart: When the bar loses power, it’s time to go
The man in front of me had just rendered his own “War and Peace” in the form of a food order that covered the front and back of the little notebook I was holding.
“Oh wait,” he said. “Never mind, I will just have a cheeseburger.”
If time is money, as they say, that guy owes me a few bucks, because there had been a lot of questions. A therapist once told me that sometimes anxious people ask a lot of questions because of their anxiety, which did two things for me at that moment: it made me anxious, and prevented me from wanting to ask further questions.
What prevented Mr. Cheeseburger from asking further questions was the flickering of lights and the total loss of power at our establishment right in the middle of a weekend night dinner rush.
The safety lights then flickered on to the dying hum of the refrigerators’ electrical resistors dispensing their charges.
Restaurants have a lot of safety devices. There are fire suppression systems, overhead evacuation fans and cooling vents. But you would expect all of that in a place crisscrossed with high-temperature gas stoves and ovens, overlaid with high-voltage refrigeration and enough sharp objects to equip a modest body of front-line troops.
Once all those safety fans stop working, temperatures increase rapidly. And what’s normally a casually cautious work environment becomes a dangerous one. There are protocols for just such an event, and we need to follow them.
Power outages usually happen in two ways: either the power goes out for a few minutes and then goes back on, or it stays off for quite a while. When those few minutes elapsed, we went into action. I opened up the front door, propping it open, and then opened two side windows.
“Could you please close that door?” asked a woman sitting in the foyer.
“Beg your pardon?” I replied, flashlight in hand.
“That’s going to make it drafty in here,” she said.
Of course it was going to make it drafty. In fact, that was the point in doing it. Emergencies in service-related industries are always interesting. There are some people who just can’t, or won’t, understand the situation. And often they start asking questions.
“Do you have a generator?” asked the man in front of me.
I didn’t answer him; I just let the logic of everything staying dark wash over him.
“When’s the power going back on?” asked his female companion, as if I somehow had a special intuition into these things.
“Is it out all over, or just here?” asked someone else of a person who was also standing in the dark just as much as they were.
And then came my all-time favorite question. One I really could not believe.
“Can you turn the TV back on so we can get more information?”
Where was that therapist when I needed him?
Just some fun facts about a power outage in a restaurant:
• You cannot stay inside a restaurant with no power. It’s dangerous.
• The restaurant is still going to ask you to pay for what you have already had. Why wouldn’t they?
• Drinks are not “on the house.” In fact, drinks are almost never “on the house.”
• No, we can’t just light some candles, because with no evacuation fans, why would we now add a dozen fire sources to the equation?
• Yes, you do have to leave. And no, we probably don’t know what else is open because we kind of have a situation of our own to deal with.
• And finally, we know it’s an inconvenience, but imagine how inconvenient it is for us. It’s not like we asked them to shut the power off.
It took the better part of two hours to completely clear out the restaurant, partly because of the crowd of people in the restaurant and partly because people kept coming into the restaurant.
People who work in restaurants are used to the people who don’t read the hours of operation signs. These folks are distantly related to the people who won’t look at a wine list or don’t read the menu. But the number of people who will enter a dark building with people streaming out of it surprised me. And I’m not easily surprised.
“A table for three,” said the man, holding up three fingers in the dark.
Leaving me with these thoughts:
• I think I need a new therapist.
• “Ask any question,” said a professor of mine once. He then added, “Just no stupid ones,” which resulted in no questions being asked.
• “Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison for oneself,” said Patrick McGoohan on the 1960s TV show “The Prisoner.”
• “Drink up, lads, she’s going down” is something a third-class steward on the Titanic reportedly said while handing out free drinks immediately before the Titanic sank.
• If the drinks are in fact on the house, then the situation is probably far worse than you realize.
Jeff Burkhart is the author of “Twenty Years Behind Bars: The Spirited Adventures of a Real Bartender, Vol. I and II,” the host of the Barfly Podcast on iTunes (as seen in the NY Times) and an award-winning bartender at a local restaurant. Follow him at jeffburkhart.net and contact him at jeffbarflyIJ@outlook.com