Clipped from the district reports on my way through the village. I read these so you don't have to. — Ash
July 15, 2001, 3:30 pm — Kelsey Novotny and a group of friend received poor service at the Salt & Pepper Grill located at Lincoln and Wrightwood.
“We-me and Hilly and Des — all came in Sunday afternoon for a late lunch. And right away this girl was all attitude. I asked her for an ice tea with lemon and she brought the tea….WITHOUT LEMON. When told her my silverware was dirty it took her, like, three days to bring me new utensils. I ordered the chicken Caesar salad with the lite dressing on the side. She brings the salad without the dressing on the side…I mean, how am I supposed to eat all that dry greenage? What do I look like? An ungulate? And when she finally does bring it, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t lite. I could see the fat just glistening in that little plastic cup. Plus, I’m pretty sure she was looking at Des’s breasts the whole time. It was just awful. She had a lip ring and blue streaks in her hair. I remember noticing that before I had even ordered.”
“She was just a difficult customer,” says server Halley Riordan, a performing art major at Colombia. “It was my first day and I was still getting used to everything. I made a few mistakes but I was quick and polite the whole time…even when I heard her complaining about me as I left the table. When I brought the check, she asked to see the manager and things just got completely out of hand.”
When the manager came over, Novotny demanded free meals for her and her friends.
“The manager offered to comp my meal, but said he wasn’t going to comp Hilly and Des. I was shouting at him too, giving him my best dirty look. He wouldn’t budge. I was all like, f— this, you obviously don’t know who you’re dealing with, I’m calling the cops on your ass. So I whipped out my cell phone and dialed 911.”
The police arrived on scene and attempted to mediate the
situation. Finally, a compromise was reached: Novotny and her friends agreed to pay only half of the total accumulated bill if Riordan was fired on the spot. “I thought [manager] Dan should’ve stood up for me,” says Riordan. “But he just caved in to the cops and these three classless girls. Luckily, my friend Duncan works at Cafe Descartes down the street and he says they’re hiring so I should be okay. But it’s wrong that women like this can just twist everyone to get their way. This experience, as unpleasant as it was, is perfect fodder for my art. I’m working this whole expereince into a centerpiece for my one-woman show, ‘The Dildo Diaries: Musings of a Twenty First Century Glamour-Slut’ I perform most of the third act of the show entirely nude while drinking Goya coconut milk straight from the can. It’s intended to point a satirical finger at expectations of womens’ traditional gender rolls at the beginning of the new millennium. It’s very insightful.”
When told of Riordan’s comments, Kelsey Novotny replied, “I don’t agree with her account. My boyfriend, Jon — he’s a lawyer — is looking to file a civil suit against her. She’s just digging a hole for herself.”
“The number of these incidents has been growing in the past few months,” says Detective Andy Panozzi of the Chicago Police Department. “It’s just a sad situation. The service is been getting worse and worse in Village restaurants. Technically, we can’t arrest a waitress for being bad at her job — although, I’ll tell you, I wish to God we could sometimes. Never eat somewhere that you don’t feel safe, we say. And, if they do and receive poor service, we tell the girls to just act cool, pay up but don’t leave a tip. Lesson learned for both parties. And put the word out on the street about that particular place, ‘This is a bad restaurant.’ People will go, ‘Okay,’ stop coming, the restaurant will close, and maybe someone will open up a place with good service in its place. We also suggest that the girls think about shopping at some of the supermarkets that offer prepared foods-Dominick’s, Treasure Island, that Market Place over near Broadway and
Diversey. That way they can get reliable, restaurant-quality food without the hassle of poor service. Another option is to simply skip the meal in question until you can get home and make a dish of pasta or some popcorn.”
“It’s ugly, I know, the poor service…. but this is the kind of stuff that happens in a city the size of Chicago,” says Det. Panozzi. “It’s a realdisgrace.”
