I am sitting here as a customer of the Restaurant Blue and let me just say that for all of the yelling going on, very little is being done. The first course which was supposed to be a salad, was just a raw onion. Some people liked raw onion and so wanted to have that again but after about 30 minutes, the yelling from the patrons that we didn't want raw onion anymore was too much for the kitchen to bear and after much complaint, they brought out a steak.
It was just steak. We couldn't have any side dishes, we couldn't even have A1 steak sauce brought to the plate, but having said that it was still a pretty nice steak.
The problem with having steak is that the best steak is lightly seasoned and seared on both sides, so that it has some evidence of the process that brought it into the kitchen; and is only lightly cooked by process. The best steaks are rare and it is rare to find such steaks that have been cooked with such poise and respect for the kitchen.
When the kitchen at the Restaurant Blue ran out of steak, there was a commotion and the repeated yelling of "spill" from behind closed doors; and in their panic to try and serve us something, they brought us out a sausage.
Nobody really knows what is inside a sausage until you open it up and even then it still might not be obvious. Even if you take a bite and discover that it is as bland as all get out, you still might not actually know what's inside. We do know that this sausage looks incredibly white inside.
You could look at the list of ingredients but that's not going to tell you very much other than the usual statements that it will contain some amount of pork, some kind of filler and maybe the odd amount of spice. One thing that we do know about what's inside the sausage is that they have never ever lied to us about what's inside. Admittedly, they've never told us either but one does not ask how the sausage is made.
When you cook a sausage in the frying pan, it has a tendency to squeal and pop and perhaps splatter fat all over the cooktop. If that lands in another pan in which Coq au Vin, or Szechuan style beef is being cooked, then you might get the occasional firey incident and maybe some yelling about unsafe kitchen practices but you really needn't bother. Truth be told, sausages are best cooked next to hamburders which although are equally as suspicious when it comes to what kind of meat is inside, because hamburders are cooked on a contact grill, they can take up far more space than is sensible. If your hamburders start to burn and spit flames because you have been spraying the flames with spray cook, then you are allowed to get a new hamburder patty and wait a bit before you flip it.
You will probably find that your sausage after it has been sitting next to a hamburder for a long time, will start to pick up some really nasty flavours and depending on the opinions of your diners, those flavours although pleasant to some, will be utterly abhorrent and unpalatable to others. If this is the case, you may have to reconsider serving sausages and start to consider something else.
Given the fact that you do not have that much time to cook anything else before it is time to plate up, you only have a few limited options. You could continue to serve sausages but risk your customers getting up and leaving.
It might be advisable to mix up a batch of pancakes in your frying pan. You do not have time to properly clean the frying pan and so there will continue to be the residual taste of sausages. Admittedly if you drown your pancakes in sweetener then people might not mind the taste as much but it won't fundamentally be a particularly good meal. People might think that you are joshing if you try serve pancakes from your frying pan and there is a great fear that they might throw the pancakes out of the window.
Soaking meals in sweet syrup is a tactic used in days' past. Once a upon a time in Café Red on the other side of the street, after everyone had had their fill of beer batter hawk, they switched to serving lamb in syrup. It didn't work and everyone went to Restaurant Blue for a while and got nothing but boiled chicken in salty broth for a long time.
Still there is another option.
In theory people like potatoes. Potatoes can be quite yummy if they are fried and people actually enjoy them as a crunchy and sometimes salty treat. Be careful though. Potatoes that have been left in the bag for too long, start to develop eyes which do not see, and they get soft and begin to leak and stink.
Potatoes, like other nightshades, contain a toxin called solanine. Solanine is safe in small amounts, but the fumes created from high levels of this substance can be poisonous if they are inhaled. Rotten potato smells really awful and leaves you with that unpleasant, lingering odour.
I suspect that if the kitchen really manages to muck up everyone's dinner, they will try serving potatoes in hot sauce and or with these new gravy boats that they've just bought; which would be filled with seawater for that authentic spud and sea taste. They don't have long though. At some point, everyone will decide where they want to go for the next bit and they'd better make up their mind before then.
Of course as a restauranteur, it is your job to ensure that your customers do not go to the restaurant on the other side of the street. That restaurant has all kinds of flavours but if you are able to convince your patrons that they are too spicy, too ethnic, too weird etc. then as long as your patrons never question you, you're fine. Maybe convince them that that other restaurant is too expensive. Your patrons will conveniently ignore the fact that you already have their credit card and are robbing them blind.
Up the road there is a food caravan but who knows what kind of green goop is being sold from it. That food caravan sells who knows what manner of leaves, pureed fruit and vegetables. They might very well be selling something which is good for your patrons but they can't be allowed to know that.
There's also a guy trying to sell crocodile meat from out the front of his house. He's got something like "20 or 30 crocodiles up there on the roof" and a few people want to buy that. They're weird.
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