salmon fish and chips

From Schmidt & Weston blog

"L'enfer, c'est les autres" (Hell is other people) - Jean-Paul Sartre

To begin with, I should point out that the above fish and chips tasted delicious. With all the excitement surrounding the return of all the sockeye salmon, I felt it was appropriate to order the salmon fish and chips. I wondered briefly if battering salmon and deep frying it was some sort of culinary sin, and then ignored the thought because I was hungry. Hunger trumps snobbery every time.

Also, I have a weakness for fries.

Go Fish is a popular little shack that sells fish and chips and fish tacos next to False Creek. The food is good, the service is horrible.

I have mixed feelings about the bad service. The 30 minute line up we were in did consist of remarkably stupid people unable to grasp the concept of passing a menu around so that their order can be that much more efficient. It must be hell to work a full shift at the Go Fish shack.

However, seems to me that if you're in the food service business, you gotta learn to treat people nice, even the super stupid. Screeching out names angrily as the orders come up doesn't really make anyone feel good about themselves. If I can manage to remain civil and kind while dealing with unreasonable demands and stupidity in the extreme, surely anyone else can. Just a skill most of us seem to have in modern times.

Much like the soup nazi of Seinfeld fame, the argument could be made that the caliber of the food outweighs the need to be kind. Some part of me appreciates a business with standards applied to the customers. That is the same aspect of my personality that expects cars to stop at red lights, for people to walk on the right, and for escalator users to stay to the right or keep walking up the stairs (it's not a carnival ride). Sometimes, as much as I hate to admit it, and with hell being other people as Sartre so aptly put it, we must have rules. [But those rules had better make sense, or I'm not gonna follow them, and neither should you.]

But the efficiency created by the soup nazi's rules wasn't at all in effect at Go Fish... so I'm probably going to find somewhere else to eat my deliciously unhealthy fish and chips... probably somewhere that I can have a beer while waiting instead of standing, gradually building a slow resentment for humanity.