On Ketchup

  People ask for strange things with their food. This is just one of those facts of life. Let’s face it, everyone likes their food or drink prepared a certain way; but some people are a little more particular than others. Olives for your water? Of course! You need mayonnaise, mustard and Tabasco so you can make your own sauce for your crabs? No problem! You would like ice for your Cabernet Sauvignon? Ew, but ok!

  These odd requests can throw you off a bit when you are a fledgling server, but as you become a more experienced server, they roll right off of you. Then you start to work at a high-end steak house. And that’s when you get really snotty. Because when you work at a shi-shi,  expensive steak house, you need to know everything about everything before you can even wait on your first table. You can’t recommend a great steak if you know nothing about it.

  So you learn that there is a difference between dry-aging and wet-aging, filets are the most tender cuts, there is such a thing as marbling that greatly affects the flavour of the steak, and that a porterhouse and a T-bone are NOT the same thing! Just to start with.

  Now that you’ve made it through training and are armed with your new found steak knowledge, a whole new set of odd requests awaits you, ready to irritate and induce eye-rolling.

Them: “I would like my filet mignon well-done, no pink.”

Me, ( out loud ): “ Of course.”

Me: ( in my head ) “ Sure steak ruiner, we’ll do your filet that loses all flavour when cooked past pink well-done you heathen”.

  Now, it is completely understandable when people like things prepared a certain way. It might not be right, but it is what they want. I can handle that. Some people like certain things with their steaks, like steak sauce. I can handle that as well, even though a good steak does not need steak sauce. If you want to douse your $50 ribeye in A-1 you go right ahead my friend.

  But there is one thing that someone will ask for every so often to accompany their perfectly lovely, mouth-watering, delectable, expensive steak. I absolutely cannot stand when people ask for ………

 Ketchup.

  Are you mad????? What planet are you from??? Were you raised by wolves??? Oh wait, you obviously weren’t raised by wolves, because wolves don’t eat ketchup. Everything was going so well “sir”, until you had the audacity to ask for….ketchup. You asked for your steak to be prepared at the proper temperature, you really seemed to know what you were doing. But no, you had everyone around you fooled!

  I’ll put it this way; if someone dared me to eat an entire steak with ketchup, or spend the night in an extremely haunted house; I would spend the night in the haunted house. Ketchup is silly, it belongs nowhere. I have here a proper list of things that ketchup is suitable for.

1. French Fries.

 That is it. You don’t put it on hot dogs, you don’t put it on eggs, ( I’m talking to you New Jersey ), you don’t use it to “make” barbeque sauce, ( unless you are a culinary cheater ), and you most certainly, without a doubt, do not put it on a $44 steak!!!! NO!!! I would rather see you order plain spaghetti and put ketchup on that!

  Maybe you figured that, since you put ketchup on a hamburger, which is meat, that it would go well on a filet, which is also meat. I’m onto your thinking, and it doesn’t work that way, hun. That hamburger was slapped together in 5 minutes by some guy,; your $44 filet was dry-aged for 28 days. So yeeeaaah.

  If you truly feel the need to put ketchup on your steak, just refrain from ordering the steak in public. Keep it underground. If you need to put ketchup on your hotdog, or your eggs, don’t do it in front of me. I will make fun of you. You know why? Because I’m a waitress in a shi-shi expensive steakhouse. And I know everything J