So, there’s nothing like discovering that one is an accessory after the fact to grand larceny.
Dan left a bit out of his story of Waiters’ Revenge. After he collected a silver service for 12, he didn’t take his ill-gotten but oddly deserved gains home. Noooooooo. He wrote me a letter—this was so pre-internet—and asked if I could ask my friends in London to store some stuff for him, as he was doing some traveling around Europe before heading back to the States. My friends—actually, the poor-as-church-mice daughter and son-in-law of one of my professors, two lovely people I hadn’t met in person but whom I have become great friends with—said they’d be happy to. Over a year later, I come to London to discover that they’d had to put this duffel bag full of silver under their bed in their Dickensian two-down, two-up house in Forest Gate.
And I was the mule bringing it back to Chicago after my own Grad Student With Backpack summer travels. “Just tell customs you got it used at Camden Market,” Dan instructed me. He himself probably didn’t know it was over 10 grand in silver, and this was all pre-9/11. The extra weight required me to pay for overload for my luggage, too, now that I think of it.
But I got my own revenge years later by tossing out a lot of shit he’d left in the family basement.
And as for foodservice: I’m writing this while tending bar. Cheers. My own stories of waiting tables can wait for some future Slog thread.
Fucking brilliant!
No shit. Great tale.
Please make them fix their website:
“Our bartender’s have a large selection of music and one of the largest collections of vinyl in the city.”
Heh. When you’ve got a family member about whom it can be fairly said to “count the silver” after a visit, it must be good to know he’s sitting on a pile of it already. Christofle no less! XD
I may have to stop by for a drink. How are the taps? Anything to offer besides Bud, Bud Light, Bud Lime, Bud Light Lime, and the ever popular Belgian style raspberry -flavored Bud Framboise?
@ 5, we’re not the Hopleaf. Berghoff, Berghoff Dark, Bass, and Seirra Nevada Pale Ale on tap. Some good bottles from Bell’s, Two Brothers’ and Goose Island. I work Thursday nights.
@3 Fixed.
Something about this theft really pleases me on an “asshole bosses getting their just desserts” level.
@5, you read the part in Dan’s piece about the new restaurant owners suddenly keeping ALL of the 15% surcharge previously distributed to the waitstaff, right? And pounds to porkpies they did not report it as income to HM Revenue & Customs.
What @8 said.
Whoops, that first callout should have been @6.
What @8 said again.
I must say it always tickles me pink, Chicago Fan, when you write about the place, and I get to see my name!
Some day I will get back to Chicago and finally have a drink there. While I lived in Rogers Park, working on my MFA, I never got around to going there, since my branch of the family ( we all went to DePaul )did not speak to Steve’s branch for some reason no one would ever tell me. Since that whole generation is gone now, perhaps I can mend the breach, and finally find out what the hell it was all about. Maybe it had something to do with the Cody’s or the Fitzgerald cousins…
Hey Chicago Fan, maybe I’ll see you there. I’ll be in town next week for a conference.
Dan will have to add, self-avowed felon” to his C.V. I wonder how his friends in the GOP will spin this.
Come on, it was over 20 years ago. Dan wasn’t even old enough to drive then.
@14, sure it’s wrong. Nobody argued otherwise; everyone used words like “theft,” “larceny,” “felon.”
Now, if one WERE to try spinning it, moral-relativism sleight-of-hand (that’s the phrase you were leaping for, and falling short) would be ABSOLUTELY the best approach to use. Conservatively assuming a waitstaff of 10 and average tips apiece of £90 a night, the restaurant owners stole upwards of £300,000 per year from their employees; moreover, they likely did not declare it as taxable income and therefore deprived their countrymen of some significant chunk of government services (maybe somebody’s kidney transplant through the NHS); they probably bought foreign luxury goods with their ill-gotten gains, negatively impacting the balance of trade; and the American expats on the waitstaff couldn’t declare it on their U.S. tax returns, foiling our purchase of who knows how many bullets and bombs. The horror goes on and on.
The law, for all its verbosity and pomposity, fails to address the vast majority of injustices in this world. That Dan found a way to wreak personal revenge in this instance will not be keeping me awake; it may actually cause me to smile slightly in my sleep.
I live right by Cunneen’s, and I love that bar. Cheap bottles of Bells and one of the cheapest pool tables in the city. And to boot, you can get shots of Malort. If for some reason you wanted to.
@11 Cunneen himself rarely discusses family stuff–he’s an only child and his mother (actually his aunt, if that makes sense) died many years ago. I’ve never heard him mention Cody or Fitzgerald cousins, though he has mentioned cousins. He’s a loner of sorts.
@12 See you there. If you need directions, check the website or call.
Jeffy, your feelings do you credit. I’m sorry that anything I said implied you were a right-winger. On the contrary, I’d count you among the bleedingest of bleeding-heart liberals. It’s a good thing.
Though you won’t believe it, I actually live my own life as you describe. But I meant what I said in the last paragraph @16–the law is often a miserable failure. I’m human enough to take visceral, vicarious satisfaction in what Dan did.