Duck, Duck, Goose-Egg?
Can great food overcome substandard service?
I advise my children that generally they get to make the choices they need to in this life of their own. My only caveat: definitely think twice about whether you want a neck tattoo.
That comment is often made mostly in jest. Some of the greatest people I know have neck tattoos. The possession of corporeal ink is frankly a shorthand that you’re probably way more creative and have a bigger heart and a higher level of openness than the clean neck douche with the Audemars Piguet wrist candy and the Tom Ford O’Connor Prince of Wales suit.1
And while I try to remind myself of these ideas as much as I can, I sometimes fall prey to the stereotypes of neck tattoos making silent conversations with myself like “how many people have they stabbed?”
Although in the hospitality world if you don’t have a neck tattoo or at least one sleeve, you’re probably suspect. For sure if you’re Gen Z and you work in restaurants and you don’t have a septum piercing, WTF is wrong with you?
That being said when the server with the neck tattoo approached our table looking a little lost, I became unnerved.
I suppose I was concerned less about the person and more because in a half empty2 restaurant with lots of options, they put baby (me) in the corner next to the drafty door to the outside patio.
Then again, it means The Duck Inn had no idea who I was which in the words of K.C. and the Sunshine Band, well, that’s the way uh huh, uh huh, I like it.
I know this for certain because the service for the next two hours was a comedy of errors that no one would ever foist upon a suspected food critic.
