Silver Maple
Postdoc
Posts: 3770
Loc: Westfield, New Jersey
Reg: 11-23-04
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12-19-17 05:30 PM - Post#240567
Scene: Smokey Joe’s, shortly before the Ivy Basketball Tournament.
Palestra 38: You going to eat your burger?
Mike James: I don’t need to eat my burger. I already know it’s mediocre.
38: How could you possibly know that?
MJ: I’ve had a lot of burgers here over the years. Some have been good, some have been terrible. On average, they’ve been mediocre. So I know this one’s mediocre as well. Furthermore, I’ve developed an advanced efficiency index for restaurant kitchens. My metric accounts for food costs, inventory shrinkage, sanitary inspection grades, Yelp and Trip Advisor ratings, and rat feces parts per million in the ground beef. The average RKEI is 100, of course, and Smokes’ gets a 100.062. So that’s further evidence that this is burger is meh.
38: You’re insane, you know that?
MJ: (Slaps his head) You just don’t understand. Look at it sitting there on the plate, In all its stochastic mediocrity. If you’ll just stop talking for a minute and listen closely, you can actually hear it regressing to the mean. Anyway, how’s your burger?
38: Haven’t tasted it yet, but I just know it’s gonna be awesome.
MJ: Really? Have you ever had an ‘awesome’ burger at Smokes?
38: No, but I was watching the cook before, and his spatula technique was seriously impressive. It’s like that thing just floats over the griddle. He’s a kid they just recruited from the kitchen at the Simon Gratz High School cafeteria, and he’s a true Philly lunchroom legend.
MJ: You do understand that there’s no reason to believe that performance in a high school cafeteria kitchen is at all predictive of performance in a big time restaurant kitchen, right? At best, that burger will be average.
38: Mark my words—this burger is going to be great. (Takes a bite) Omigod—this is horrible.
MJ: No it’s not, it’s average.
38: What the hell is in this thing? Waiter—what’s this burger made out of? It’s disgusting.
Waiter: We make our burgers out of scrapple, sir.
38: Scrapple? Why the hell would anybody want a burger made of scrapple?
Waiter: Why wouldn’t you? Scrapple costs the same per pound as ground beef, so it’s just as good.
MJ: He’s right, of course. You just think you taste a difference, but you really don’t.
38: (Looks closely at the waiter) You look different from the guy who took our order. Who are you? (Rips off the waiter’s fake beard) Jeff! What are you doing here? And what have you done with our waiter?
Jeff: He’s out cold in the walk-in. He’ll wake up in a few hours with a nasty headache, if he doesn’t freeze to death first. Of course, if he does freeze to death, it’ll be ok—he’s about to be replaced by a robot anyway. But you don’t care about that, do you? You just care about your precious spatula-meister from Simon Gratz, who’s never even made burgers before—he only made meat loaf at the high school level!
MJ: And meat loaf is totally different from a burger.
38: How can you say that? It’s made out of ground beef, just like a burger!
Jeff: You really don’t understand advanced animal protein analysis, Colin!
CVonvorys: (From the next table) Hey! I’m Colin! Leave me out of this!
(Argument continues for several more hours.)
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