Gratuitous

If you stopped paying the bankers they wouldn't watch your money. If you stopped paying the flight attendants there'd be nobody to bring you warm nuts or flirt with you in airports. If you stopped paying the surgeons they wouldn't cut. But if one day you stopped paying the servers, well chances are they'd probably just stick their finger in your food, or add a 20% service charge.

Being a hotel restaurant we open the door to all kinds. We inherit the hotel's mantra of "Say yes to everything." Saying no is just not an option in the hospitality industry. Give us your tired, your (hopefully not too) poor, your huddled (hungry) masses yearning for a bacon burger. We shelter the weirdoes, the freaks, the hillbillies, the Euro-trash, the elderly. We keep the doors open to all types, and get so many of these bizarre hotel guests in the restaurant. We get the people that seemingly have never eaten in a restaurant before. They don't understand how to be seated. They don't understand how to order. Sometimes, they don't even understand how to eat. And if they don't understand any of that, it's a safe assumption that they don't know how to tip.

They walk in the front door of the restaurant and ask where the restaurant is. I look behind me at the bar, the tables, the servers walking by with trays of drinks, people eating pancakes. Where is the restaurant?

"Okay, you're going to walk out this door toward State street, make a left at the Renaissance Hotel, walk three blocks to Madison and take the 20 bus eight blocks west, walk twenty paces north from the bus stop, turn into the alley, knock three times at the blue door, the password is Magic Johnson. There you will find a hostess that can escort you to the next checkpoint."

"What?"

"You're here."

"This is the restaurant?"

It's at this point that I would like to ask exactly what they were expecting the restaurant to look like. But I put on my best hospitality face and ask,

"Would you like a table?"

"No, I'm just looking."

Or, you get the people that think that because they are staying in the hotel every employee of the hotel knows them by the first name. They tell you the Sharon would like a Mai Tai. Great, who the hell is Sharon? Sharon Osborne? Sharon Stone? Sharon Needles? 

Or, horror of horrors, they want to order a pina colada. I'd like to interrupt this programming to inform you that you should not be ordering a pina colada in a restaurant that doesn't have it on the menu, or any restaurant in Chicago, or just ever. The same goes for: skinny girl margaritas, frozen drinks, mint juleps, that frothy milky chocolaty drink with whipped cream and Oreos you ordered that one time, key lime martinis, bizarre flavors of vodka that nobody has like kumquat, wine spritzers, or white zinfandel. When you order anything like that, this is what your server hears: Hi, I'm some hick from the middle of nowhere that has no idea what I'm doing and instead of availing myself of the drink menu you've provided me I'm going to order some drink I got one time at club med called a frappe-mochachino martini and when you ask what is in that drink I'm going to sigh like you're and idiot for not knowing.

These types order a Tuna Nicoise and wonder why is doesn't look like the tuna salad their grandma used to make with canned tuna and miracle whip. Then five people want to split the check eight ways when the total bill is about thirty bucks. And they will complain about how expensive an iced tea is ($4.00) after they saw the price on the menu, ordered it and got six refills of it, and made you run back to the kitchen three times to get more Splenda for it.

Some, usually millennials, will send a plate of food back after they ate almost the entire thing and expect to be compensated for it. They can't believe that you can't order a burger at 8 in the morning, or they roll their eyes at you because you can't accommodate their vegan gluten-free diet.

The strangest creatures are the ones who usually go out to dinner late on sunday night or very very early in the morning. They start pressing at the doors at 6:15am.

Then, when it comes time to settle the tab we decide whether or not to add a gratuity to the bill. For those who don't know what this means: generally if you eat in a restaurant with a group of six or more people the server will add a service charge, or gratuity. In Chicago it's probably going to be 18-20%. However, in a restaurant where the management is often scarce and servers are usually left to our own devices and the clientele is often at least 50% foreign, the 20% comes out more than you'd think. Each server has their own justification for it, and we've all done it. Every server in the restaurant has added a 20% gratuity to a rude french person. Some add it to to-go orders (especially if they're ordering for their whole office, that's 'six or more' right?), some add it to stupid miniscule charges like a banana just to stick it to them, and some will add it to a really annoying party of five.

I think it's interesting the word gratuity from the route gratuitas, or gift, something freely given, or similarly, gratis, which means free or without charge--which is exactly how we feel sometimes. I don't come to work at a charity. It may be hospitality, but lets face it we give good service, we give great service, to get paid. And when we don't get the paper it can be hard sometimes continue on doing the job, which is why--in the spirit of raising spirits and helping you to forget your lowly status in society-- the hotel throws it's annual employee party. This party, intended to boost morale and at the very least provide enough free alcohol to fake it, comes at the tail end of summer, also known as our busiest season. 

So, from gratuitous tipping on a gold card to gratuitous spending in the gold coast, outfits must be purchased for this event. But more important than an outfit (yes, there are things more important than clothes) was finding a date. I wasn't just shopping for a bow tie, I was shopping for a man. I was in the shirts department at Brooks Brothers scoping out the prospects. Seventy percent straight, and one hundred percent preppy. Here we have mister on-trend, navy blazer and neon pink pants with a yellow pocket square, too showy and 'of the moment' for me. I like a guy either a little ahead or a little behind but never right on the target. Then we have mister mister, the guy wearing a suit that looks like it was from the early 80s, who was a little too far off target. All of the bow ties we classic, easy to wear, and looked exactly like every other tie I had. The same could be said about the men. Moving on.

Six blocks and hundreds of eligible bachelors later I found these:

It was then I realized that there is something more important than having a date to a work party: looking goddamn fierce.