As we venture out of our houses, or whatever you’ve resided in over the past few months (apartments, campers, RVs, cardboard boxes, holes in the ground, you’re feelings??), I think I can say we are all stoked to be eating out at understaffed restaurants, because we want a menu that’s unlike our kitchen, one that atleast changes everyday; you know, like a restaurant...

A lot has changed out there, unlike the menu at our home kitchens, which can’t seem to get away from that chicken, fish, steak rotation. We now have the luxury, once again, to sit down, without masks, at a restaurant that requires masks everywhere but the tables, and eat in peace, knowing that COVID’s only weakness is the same as mine: a brunch table for 6. And with our grubby little dirty hands all over the napkins, the silverware, the chairs, we can touch everything... everything but the menus.

Paper menus are gone. They died in the pandemic. 600k+ people died in The “United” States and 600k+ printed menus went with them. At one point in April 2020, I’m fairly certain we were wrapping dead bodies in paper menus, but they had to be long enough to wrap around a person fully. We appreciate your service, Cheesecake Factory. We were definitely storing people in restaurant freezer trucks. “Waiter, there’s a hair in my soup, and yes, the rest of the head also. I’d like to speak to the manager. What do you mean I’m looking at him?”

Printed paper laminated into a menu has become undesirable, like working in an office or talking to your Q aunt on Facebook. Did Fucker Carlson get the menus too? He wants to you think Biden and his cronies sent them swimming with the fishies. But alas, there are no fishies left in this world, due to global warming and the fact that people aren’t satisfied with anything. Especially not posthistoric dinosaurs, or as we know em, fish. And birds. And people?? Enough evolution talk already; back to menus.

You’ve got the situation now where, if you’re even brave enough to eat indoors, in an enclosed space, and bring your monster of a child, screaming, wailing like the little unvaccinated banshee they are, there’s nothing for them to color in. Or draw on. Or search for words in. Or play tic tac toe on. Or even to draw a terrible scribble on that they’ll swear is a ladybug. The menu is on your phone, because menus have been too big for too long. Who needed the big, cumbersome, yet entirely readable menus when hey, my three inch screen will do. I’ll be the first one to scream “size doesn’t matter,” but looks like we’ve found the only exception to that rule. There ain’t no motion of the ocean to save you now. Ocean’s all dried up. That’s why the fishies are dead.

And if you don’t have a phone or, heaven forbid, you didn’t bring yours inside because you’re trying this new, crazy thing where you’re off your phone for meals in an effort to connect with the people around you that you just lost and entire year plus with due to a once-in-a-couple-lifetimes global pandemic of epic proportions, fucking starve to death you son of a bitch. That’s your reward for making it; eating it. Not eating food, you can’t have that, you don’t have a menu. I mean eating it like death. Seems like an easier option than asking for one from the back, where you know they have a full stack of them, but apparently no one left to wipe them off after every use.

People will do anything you want them to do as long as you pay them. If we’re at the point now where no one wants to take a restaurant job because they know the horrors, they know the resentment, they know the 4 top who eats for 3 hours and leaves without tipping, then you have to make it worth their while. And I don’t just mean a couple handies here and there, although, don’t get me wrong, I’ll take the handies. What I mean is equal and fair pay. Minimum wage (+ free food for the duration of working there and 10%, to keep morale up) is my suggestion. You’ll tell me it’s not doable everywhere. You’re right, but where it is doable, do it. It’s an investment and you’ll see the return in customers and business if you do something like that. Anything better than what you had before will do really. I just wanted to set a bar to start to negotiate from. I read this really good negotiating book called The Art of the Deal, and in it, Don — [redacted by editor] — And that’s why, given the myriad reasons above, he was a good guy.

Getting back to menus, I get that they pose a public health warning by being shared from person to person. I get that sharing menus hand to hand is the most effective way that this airborne virus spreads. No one understands the masks when walking, but not when seated in the same room, more than me. The 6 foot maximum travel distance of this virus in our light-as-air breath molecules comes across loud and clear to me. But we used to handle menus with ease and relaxation, not a care in the world. I think we can get something close to that now, if you wipe a menu down with a [insert brand of alcohol wipe here] wipe. Looking for sponsors? *cough* *cough* Lysol. I’m not sick, I just think winking is too creepy and subtle.

It’s not in a waiter’s job description to wipe down a menu. Fair, 100% agree... So add it. How is this hard? It’s not rocket science, it’s virology. I get that job descriptions from 2019 didn’t have this rule, but the 2021 job description does. In 2019, half the fucking restaurant wasn’t in the middle of the road and parking lot, but now it is; things change. Pay me $20/hour. I’ll wipe down the menus. Looking at you, diners, with your pages and pages of menus. I just want someone be able to point to the meat loaf, with their significant other pointing right underneath that, to the shrimp scampi, and say “waiter, we’ll have these two items from the general dinner section.” That’s the dream. Let’s tackle this new world head on, vaccinated, and masked up, but with paper menus. Please! It was the one thing I needed to see in the dark, dark new world to let me know that I was somewhere familiar. I know this is a weird hill to die on, but there’s nothing more American than dying on your own weird hill. Viva la menu!