Bluebird Diner: My extra 2 dollars worth

I don’t usually see the value in saying what’s already been said. Sometimes, though, it’s worth it; I can think of it as building solidarity or engaging in conversation… or bitching. And I suspect that not everyone has had a chance to read the review I’m echoing from my friend’s Panoptibolg. But I, too, went to the Bluebird Diner.

I was meeting Gail, a professor / friend / advisor from out of town for lunch, and told her about this new place and Mike’s review. On the strength of his endorsement she paused before agreeing. “Any place,” I said wryly, “this mediocre, I just gotta try,” and she said she’d meet me there at noon.

The place in question was pleasantly full, and for what is essentially a large room with tables strewn across it, being pleasant and anything like full simultaneously is itself a success. Perhaps the mood was benefiting from holiday cheer. Gail and I sat close to each other so as to hear our conversation over the din and talked shop until the waitress came, nice but flustered.

I’ve sometimes talked to my friend Rich, a bar tender and cook and waiter at a local bar that caters to a tradesman lunch crowd, about the staff’s idea of being busy. Now, I don’t mean to have implied earlier that other folks don’t also not see the value in saying what’s already been said; folks look for ways in which to make the same story interesting. This generally isn’t by making it mediocre. One exaggerates… ‘Can you believe how busy we were at lunch…?’ one asks instead of, ‘did you notice that just slightly more than half the tables were full?’ Rich looks on them with scorn. ‘This isn’t busy,’ he says to me after. ‘This isn’t hard. Everybody orders the special. You put it on a plate and give it to them. It’s not really something to get worked up about.’

Of course, I appreciate that people have reasons beyond conversation for their conversation. It’s probably much more interesting for many folks a lot of the time to perform some role other than ‘average day at work.’ That is, it can be nice to consider oneself busy, or bored, or otherwise engaged in an exceptional activity. And, hey, I’m all for whatever gets people through the day. So long as they can perform that role competently. So long as it doesn’t mess with my lunch. You know who I mean, the waitpeople with good observation skills, that handle multiple tasks with easy grace, that make few mistakes and deal efficiently with the ones they do make. The ones who can look around and think, ‘Huh. It really *is* busy here today. Good thing I’m good at my job. It’s not really something to get worked up about.’

Our waitress at the Bluebird was nice but flustered. I can imagine her saying, ‘Wow. It’s really busy in here today,’ and Rich rolling his eyes. I say this by way of extended introduction to explain why, when she brought me the eleven dollar steak and eggs instead of the nine dollar chicken fried steak I ordered, I was neither especially surprised nor especially upset. Half anticipating a moment like this, I hadn’t even asked for my hash browns to be cooked crispy. ‘You ordered the chicken fried steak?’ she asked, looking at the crunchy, well done meat on the plate. Now, the question that follows ordering a steak is, ‘how would you like that done?’ and if I’ve ordered a steak, I reply ‘medium rare’ and if I’ve ordered chicken fried steak I reply, ‘huh?’ and any mistake gets sorted out before I’m eating something unordered and overcooked. No such conversation here.

So, after we told the waitress her mistake and she looked confused before claiming they were out of chicken fried steak, I took the food because I don’t like the idea of it getting thrown away any more than I like the idea of waiting another twenty minutes for something else.

Now, I’m not saying that they should have given me this lunch for free. I’m mostly just saying that they should bring me what I order. And when they don’t, well, at least they shouldn’t charge me extra for having messed up my order. Paying the nine dollars I had agreed to pay for the lunch I wanted for the lunch that I didn’t isn’t really compensation but would have been better than paying the eleven dollars I hadn’t agreed to pay for the lunch I hadn’t ordered. This is a subtlety apparently lost on the Bluebird staff. I would have liked to get the meal for free, sure. I would really have liked a manager or some such person to come out and apologize and check if the situation had been resolved to my satisfaction. That would suggest to me they are trying to say, ‘we’re human and make mistakes but we’re trying, and want to do a good job’ instead of saying, ‘we’re incompetent, and we don’t care.’

I still had hopes for the food. Both meals came with toast. Not every breakfast does, but every breakfast, regardless of time of day and even if it's French toast, should come with toast. So, a plus. Gail’s corned beef hash was strange, less hash then corned beef julianne tossed with fried potatoes. She said it was good. The steak wasn’t shoe leather. The egg – scrambled – had been sizzled dry on a large flat griddle, paper thin and chopped into strips like Gail’s corned beef, a sort of visual motif. My hash browns, if not brown weren’t exceptionally bad, but tasted strongly of artificial butter flavored shortening that I wouldn’t want to waste cholesterol intake on. The portions, like Mike said, weren’t large – enough, but just barely enough, not enough had I been really hungry. In short, the food was nothing special and pretty pricey, and that’s a disappointing combination. We didn’t stay for pie.

But, oh – despite my harping, the waitress was nice. She refilled my iced tea a couple times (that a *miserable* Earl Gray concoction with extra tannins and apparently the philosophy that lots of flavor that is bad is better than little flavor that is good) and smiled through her flustration.

The botched order is fun to write about but not that big of a deal. Food that proves to be mediocre and service that seems consistently sub-par is. I’ve had worse food, and I’ve been in worse places than the Bluebird, but given the local options I’m not sure why I’d go back.

News Flash: QT Scrooges Wonderland

“You ought to be paying me! You’re working in a freaking winter wonderland!” I was on a roof, a steep roof, in the snow, when Matt Bockensteadt, my employer at the time, yelled that to his crew. It was cold and scary and a long way down. I shivered.

Another time, in Delhi, Iowa, I woke up at my friend Frank’s parent’s house to what looked like an avalanche outside the window. Frank and Matt were high school chums growing up in Delhi way before I knew either of them.

Accompanying the snow, I heard thumping on the roof and envisioned reindeer or a snowy apocalypse.

“Where’s Frank,” I asked his mom.

“Shoveling the roof,” she replied mater-of-factly. 'Of course,' I thought, 'like one does.'

I’m reminded of these incidents on a day like today, walking to the Lindquist Center from just south of campus, past the Quick Trip on the corner of Madison and Burlington. It is a winter wonderland out there. It’s not my favorite snow today. I like the warm snow, the soggy, big flake snow that drapes itself over the grass and leafs on the ground, draping them with cold messy beauty. They melt for a while upon contact before beginning to cover it up. Those are catch on your tongue snowflakes; that is snowball snow. It’s not the best to walk to class in as it clings and moistens unduly. And, it’s just not as pretty. Today, it’s cold. The snowflakes are small and the wind is still. They float on the air as much as fall, turning the sky white with slow motion. They don’t melt, and they don’t stick. It’s too chilly to be sticky. They just pile up in and around the grass, covering it by slow degrees, four inches in eight hours. If they land on your shoulder, they brush off or fall off in the least breeze of movement. This is the snow of Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods”.

Which is to say that it ain’t that hard to shovel.

Last year, the ice build up on the two sidewalks outside of QuikTrip lasted from first freeze to final thaw. It looks like they’re gearing up for that performance again this year. This doesn’t so much surprise me – Iowa City businesses – with notable exceptions – are abysmal at scooping their walks. But this with QT is what I really don’t get.

The weather report confirms that the snow is coming down at half an inch per hour. This means if QuikTrip sent out a minimum wage employee once an hour, said employee would have to move half an inch of snow off the walk with a shovel. No shovel, you might wonder? They sell them. What about accumulations overnight? They’re open 24 / 7.

But last year, it may be noted, was an icy year. Ice storm after ice storm. That was beautiful, too, except for the broken trees that reminded me more of Frost’s “Birches,” ice sickles on the ground like the dome of heaven had shattered, or hanging from the trees like a coat of diamonds. But that stuff’s not like shoveling powdery snow. It’s freezing.

QuikTrip sells ice melt.

So, one might want to ask: why does a store, staffed with young able employees, a store that is open all night on a corner lot and has an inventory of shovels, a store that sells ice melt, why does such a store not think it has a responsibility to, oh, I don’t know, people who walk – not to mention those that get around by wheelchair or other mobility device – not think it has a responsibility to shovel the sidewalk. Or maybe they think their frozen burritos are community service enough.

Maybe they’ll figure this out at some point, but in the mean time they’re Scrooging up my Winter Wonderland.