Tag: baking

Amy’s Bug Company

I originally titled this post “Amy’s Buggery Company” which I thought was a hilarious joke on the subject matter, but after about two seconds of thought, I realized I was making a very different joke from the one I intended. So there you go; enjoy the watered down version.

Speaking of watered down versions, have you heard the latest from the insanity cesspool that is Amy’s Baking Company?  Man, did you see that smooth rhetorical transition I just did there? This is why I get paid fat sacks of cash money absolutely nothing to write on the Internet.

The latest from Amy’s is that when you order a vodka martini, you’ll get dead flies added to your drink at no added cost. This is an incredible value. You have no idea how hard it is to find a restaurant willing to add insects to your drinks. Usually, they’re all “oh god, how did that get there, I’m so sorry, let me fix that for you.” Or worse, they don’t even serve insects with their drinks to begin with! How is that fair? I argue that it is not.

The best part is you also get an example of what really, really great customer service looks like:

When our meal at Pita Jungle was finished, we jokingly asked our waitress if she could go to Amy’s and buy us a slice of the chocolate mousse cake we had heard was so good, (and possibly not baked by Amy, according to several reports). To our surprise and delight, she agreed to walk over there and buy it for us. We gave her the money to do so. The slice of cake was $10.90.

How can you not love that? I hope the servers at Pita Jungle wear identifiable uniforms; it would really add to the punchline of this whole thing.

I Knew This Would Happen

Just a quick update tonight before we head off to the movies to seek the new Star Trek. In fact, that’s part of the reason for my update: it turns out that the Harkins Theater in Marana, which has long been my favorite movie theater in Tucson, has closed down. This is sad news for me, although I did read that it looks like a Phoenix-based Harkins will buy the location and reopen. I certainly hope that’s the case.

The reason why I liked the Harkins in Marana is probably the reason why it’s closed: nobody went there. I’m sort of an introvert, as you may have noticed, and I really don’t like big crowds of people. I wouldn’t call it a phobia, exactly; I reserve my phobias for tight spaces and spiders, but I will go out of my way to avoid large crowds of people whenever possible.

I loved going to the Marana Harkins because whether you were there on a weekend opening or a Monday night, it seemed like there were always great seats. Twice, we went and had the entire theater to ourselves (the movies were the sixth Harry Potter and the 2009 Star Trek, interestingly). I knew it’s never a good sign to see an empty theater on what should be a busy night, but damn if that didn’t make me love them that much more. In fact, I go out of my way for that feature, since there are a few other theaters that are much closer to my apartment. I guess having a customer base purely of misanthropes like myself isn’t a sustainable business model, though.

Ah well. The Harkins is dead.  I’m very sad; I saw most of my movies over the past five years there. Alas.

Now we go from the sad to the hilarious. The zombie that is Amy’s Baking Company continues to stumble and lurch across the public opinion arena and shows neither signs of life nor intelligence. It’s still funny, although now it’s in more of a melancholy sort of way. I wonder how long it will last.

I Can’t Stop Watching This Trainwreck

My parents owned a restaurant when I was a kid, so I got to hang out there a lot and saw how it all worked. I’ve also heard plenty of “restaurant stories” throughout the years about what that kind of business was like, how things are supposed to be done, etc. The most interesting thing to me was my family’s perspective on the service of other restaurants; it’s amazing how many things I, as a member of the uninitiated, was ignorant towards. There’s this whole metric for how things should run, like how quickly your water should be depending on the size of the restaurant, the number of servers and the number of tables. It’s not just a single hard-and-fast rule. It’s actually really interesting to see how much tactical consideration goes into all the stuff I took for granted in food service, especially since I’m the black sheep of my family who hasn’t had a restaurant job.

Well, there were those two food delivery jobs I had, but that hardly counts.

With that said, I’d like to direct your attention to this little restaurant meltdown that’s making the rounds on the Internet. It’s funny, because I don’t like reality TV shows and I don’t really care about restaurants except for the aforementioned familial connection. And yet, I can’t stop watching this particular train wreck of a restaurant. The icing on this particular schadenfreude cake, if you’ll pardon my expression, is that they’re from Arizona. Of course they’re from Arizona.

Watch the clip. Even after that, it still flips my wig to see the clip where the owners threaten an angry customer and prevent others from trying to leave (link here, it’s the first video about halfway down the page). I think you’ll be impressed. Just don’t watch any it with the sound turned up too high. You’ll thank me in a few minutes.

For me, the best part is the vindication of the server who got fired during the filming of the first clip. True, she did get verbally assaulted to the point of tears which really sucks, but she got the best possible retribution: her asshole bosses made complete and utter fools of themselves for the entire world to see and she didn’t have to do a single thing to help them along. I tried to make a lame pun about revenge being a dish that was better when it’s self-served, but I couldn’t do it.