The Mother Plucker’s Ramblings

It’s official, the 10th Pluckers will be in Arlington, Texas opening in September.  Our location is in the Arlington Highlands shopping center in a little restaurant row that includes Chuy’s, Bonedaddy’s, Boudreaux’s and Blackfin.  This will be our second DFW Metroplex location and we are excited to be part of all that is happening out in Arlington including the opening of the new Cowboy’s stadium this Fall. 

The new Pluckers will feature over 50 plasmas (as usual), a circular bar and a huge indoor/outdoor patio to chill and watch games on.  If you are interested in applying for a job please visit the employment section of our website and complete an application.  If you are a Pluckers Club member, keep your schedule open so you can cash in on your free meal and first look at the new store some time in late-August/early September.  If you are a PC member that lives in Austin, Killeen or San Marcos, we are considering creating a bus trip that leaves from Austin and gets you up to Dallas before the restaurant opens for a small fee.  If you would be interested in joining us, please email kwollman@pluckers.net.

For some reason, every person who likes food or has ever been told they are a good cook at some point in his life thinks to himself, “maybe I should open a restaurant”.  It amazes me how many people with little to no experience open their own restaurant.  If you’ve ever watched Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, you have a good understanding at what I am talking about. 

I know from personal experience working at other restaurants just how low the morale and standards can get under poor leadership.  I thought it would be a good idea to let you know how to look for the signs of a bad restaurant before you make the mistake of eating there.  On the flip side, there are signs to look for that will tell you a restaurant experience is going to be great.  Some of my rules for choosing a good restaurant may surprise many of you as well. 

Signs to Avoid a Restaurant

The  Building Signage is Out

You know how you drive down the highway at night and see that restaurant sign where half the lights are out?  If it’s a restaurant in your neighborhood and you know the signage recently went out, then it’s no big deal because that will happen from time to time.  However, if you drive by that sign and they never fix it, stay away from this restaurant.  A restaurant that knows they are throwing off that vibe to the public on the exterior, definitely isn’t going to take pride on the interior.

It kind of reminds me of that scene from Revenge of the Nerds 2: Nerds in Paradise with the Hotel Coral Essex where half the lights on the sign are out.  Actually that has nothing to do with my point, but any time I can reference any of the Nerds Trilogy, I’ll jump on the opportunity.  And if you are saying, well Dave, there were actually four Revenge of the Nerds movies, please know that I do not consider the vastly inferior made for TV Nerds IV:  Nerds in Love to be a legitimate part of the series.  It’s kind of like Rocky 5, where everyone wants to pretend that it never really happened. 

The Restaurant Has Pictures of the Food on the Menu

On the Pluckers menu, we have random pictures of our food and that is totally cool.  However, if a restaurant has to take a picture of all 36 entrees and place it next to each item on the menu so you know what it will look like, you are guaranteed a terrible meal.  I mean, do I really need to see what the Western Omelet looks like?   In this case be assured that 1) the food will never look like the picture and 2) it will taste even worse.  A notable exception goes to the Waffle House where the pictures can’t even do justice to how incredible an order of hashbrowns “Scattered, Smothered and Covered” truly is at 3am.  

There are more than 5 “Specials” are Offered on the Menu

You may ask, what’s wrong with specials?  Well, anyone who has worked in a restaurant knows that the following scientific formula generally applies:Just like E=MC², in a restaurant:Specials = What’s left in the cooler and about to spoilRemember, restaurants are a business and like any business, they don’t want to throw out inventory.  Unfortunately in our business, we have to try and predict how much of each food item our guests will order before that item goes bad.  What’s the best way to get rid of aging product?  You guessed it, the answer is specials.  Don’t think that fine dining restaurants are immune to this either because they are more expensive.  In fact, these restaurants will be more likely than casual dining restaurants to get rid of inventory through specials because their inventory costs more.  If a restaurant has a couple of specials on the menu, it may be because the chef wants to try out a few new menu items.  However, if the menu  has 5 things on special, they are trying to ditch that last piece of salmon that’s been in the walk-in cooler for 6 days. 

Your Group is the Only People in the Restaurant

Let’s face it, you aren’t Anthony Bourdain about to find that great little hole in the wall everyone else missed.  What you are about to be is the dummy who doesn’t realize that you are the only people in the restaurant because no one else wants to eat there!  By eating at these restaurants, you aren’t supporting the local economy or  being kind by helping out a struggling small business.  You might as well just go up to the proprietor and ask for an order of the runs with a side of salmonella.   

Dave’s Aside – Do as I say, Not as I Do

OK, so I just gave you four foolproof signs of why not to visit a restaurant.  Unfortunately, somehow, I always forget to follow my own advice.  In March, I was in a tiny town in Laos called Luang Prabang.  Because I AM the idiot who thinks he is Anthony Bourdain, I convinced my friend that we should eat at a sleepy (read: no other customers) restaurant by the Mekong Delta.  The place was run by two affable Laotian men under the age of 19 who looked like they had zero restaurant experience.  So what do I do?  After looking at their menu that was full of pictures I tell them to give us all of the “off-menu” specials.  All I can tell you is that having food poisoning for 4 days in Southeast Asia is not my idea of a fun vacation. 

Signs that you Should Eat at a Restaurant

The Building Signage is Out

Now wait a minute, didn’t you just tell me that is a sign NOT to eat at a restaurant?  Well there are rules and there are exceptions.  If the restaurant looks like it has been there for more than 30 years and the signage is flickering, this can be the holy grail of restaurants.  It isn’t laziness in this case, it is character.  Come to think of it, any restaurant that has been around long enough to have the lights on the sign legitimately flickering has to be good. 

The Griddle Looks Like it Hasn’t Been Cleaned in 20 Years

I love a good greasy spoon.  It amazes me how people avoid dirty restaurants.    For instance, most of the best hamburger joints look like they could very well be infested with cockroaches.  I say that means the burgers are guaranteed to be tasty.  Come on, live a little.  In case you didn’t know it, everyday foods regulated by the FDA like chocolate or ketchup are chocked full of insects.  Hell, in Australia they allow up to 8% of chocolate bars to be insects.  A little extra protein never hurt anyone. The next time you are at a greasy spoon, take a look at the griddle.  If it looks brand new, you are missing out on years of fat and grease that has seeped into the pores of the flat-top and being transferred lovingly onto your plate.  An exception would be a greasy spoon that has no customers.  Then you have to refer to the rule above.  However, the next time you are in a city where you don’t know where to eat, look for the dirtiest looking, crowded restaurant and you are guaranteed a great meal. 

Ethnic Food Restaurants That Butcher the English Language

As a general rule, my favorite Thai, Chinese, Mexican and Vietnamese restaurants do not correctly use the English language.  For instance, if you want Kung Pao Chicken, you don’t want it described to you in a way that is easy to understand.  It’s better when it says something like “slice of chicken cooks with green pepper and peanut”.  I think we need to grant these restaurants poetic license the way we would a Wordsworth or Thoreau. A great example is my favorite chicken restaurant in the world called El Regio in San Marcos, Texas.  First off, it is in a gas station which means you know it will be good.  But more importantly, there is a giant hand-painted sign on the gas station that proudly proclaims “El Regio – The Best Chicken Taste in Texas”.  Before it hit my lips I knew it was going to be good.

Street Food

It constantly amazes me how many people don’t consider street food among the best around.  I have been fortunate enough to visit countries all over the world and usually the tastiest food you will find in places like Thailand, Vietnam and Mexico come from vendors on the street.  Not only is it cheap, the food is usually incredible.  Here’s why.  Imagine if all you did to earn a living was cook one or two dishes every day and those dishes needed to be good enough that people came back.  Well, you better be damn good at making those dishes and that is generally what happens.  Even here in

Austin some of the best food can be found on the street or trailers from places like Torchy’s Tacos, Lulu B’s and The Best Wurst. 

Now that I am older and wiser (well some would say that), I have a very clear understanding of just how demented the restaurant business truly is. There is no other respectable business that attracts a greater collection of misfits, con-artists, convicts, sadists, burnouts and debaucherists than restaurants. For anyone who has ever managed in the service industry and more specifically the restaurant business, I am sure you will be able to sympathize with some of the people I am about to describe that worked on our original staff and nothing here will shock you. For the rest of you, here is a little peek into the life of a 22-year old restaurateur and what went through on a daily basis all in the name of opening Pluckers. Names will be changed to protect the not so innocent, no matter how much I would like to provide their dates of birth and Social Security numbers.

Now I do want to preface this story with the fact that none of these types of characters would ever be found working at a Pluckers anymore. Today, we have superior hiring techniques, a better understanding of the restaurant business and have incredible people working for us. Or maybe…we are just the bosses and no one tells us the great stories anymore!

Our original staff at the old Rio Grande store back in 1995 consisted of three types of people. Those on drugs, those who couldn’t hold any other job and University of Texas sorority girls. I don’t know what was more difficult to deal with, the fact our entire kitchen staff were burnouts or trying to convince a Tri Delt that she had to miss a Crush party and work a Friday night. Mark and I, being 22 years old, fresh out of college and basically naive to managing people just couldn’t understand why our employees that we paid $4.50 an hour didn’t care about Pluckers as much as we did.

To give you a taste of what life was like running our first restaurant, here are some fun bios on our original staff.

• The Jewish Cheech and Chong – these were two fraternity brothers of ours that were best friends. I also had the pleasure of living with these guys the summer we opened the restaurant and I figured if you can’t trust your fraternity brothers, who could you trust? I later found out that they had developed a complex scam where if you ordered extra jalapenos with your chicken wings that meant you wanted a “special delivery” with more than just Pluckers food. These two also thought it was a good idea to get my 8-week old puppy stoned every night while I was working until 5 in the morning. But hey, the puppy is now 14 years old so maybe the medicinal qualities of marijuana really do work!

• Jacob – In the first week of his employment, we recognized Jacob’s raw talent as a cook and gave him what was then a monster raise from $6.00 an hour all the way to the lofty heights of $6.50 an hour just to ensure his loyalty. We were constantly amazed that no matter how many orders were on the line, Jacob never seemed to let the stress get to him. He provided a calming effect on everyone around him. Unfortunately, we later discovered the secret to Jacob’s demure demeanor. It turns out Jacob was so whacked out of his skull that once when a chicken wing fell into the fryer, he thought it would be a good idea to stick his hand in the 350-degree oil to fish it out! Needless to say that once Jacob’s hand was out of the oil it looked like a piece of raw hamburger meat. Fortunately for us, Jacob didn’t realize there was such a thing as Workers Compensation because we hadn’t even thought to buy any. He ended his glorious Pluckers career when we heard rumors that Jacob was stealing giant 160-slice blocks of American Cheese out of the coolers. When we asked Jacob to open his bookbag which to find out if this was true, his only response was “Hey man, I really like Grilled Cheese sandwiches and I thought you owed this to me for my hand”.

• Nate – another incredible find as a cook. He worked for Pluckers for over a year which made him the Lou Gehrig of Pluckers employees at the time. Nate had abused his body so much over the years that he didn’t need tongs to turn the chicken and burgers on the 400-degree grill. He would just use his hands to turn the meat because he had no feeling from his shoulder down in either arm. Being restaurant neophytes this of course this impressed us and we promptly made Nate the daytime manager.

• Nate’s Uncle – This guy was the ultimate wild-card. His typical outfit to work was a wife beater, jean shorts and no underwear. When we asked him why he didn’t wear underwear, he told us because it was easier to bathe this way. Huh? We later found out that his daily bath took place during his shifts at Pluckers when he would either go swimming au natural in the pool of the apartments next to the restaurant or he would use our mop sink as a makeshift bathtub before anyone arrived to work. After hearing of this, the mop refused to return to work for 2 weeks.

• Eugenius – to this day, the best guy/worst employee ever at Pluckers. I mean this was the sweetest, nicest kid you could meet. Sure we knew he had the common sense of a toad, but you just had to root for this guy in life. Unfortunately, there literally wasn’t one menu item he could remember how to make. Being a cook on our staff, that was kind of important. Please keep in mind that no Pluckers item at the time required more than 3 steps to completion. His piece de resistance was when a guest called the restaurant complaining about a Chicken Parmesan Sandwich he had ordered for delivery. This was a fairly simple sandwich with fried chicken, mozzarella cheese and marinara served on a bun. Eugenius it turns out had sent the poor guy 4 mozzarella sticks covered in lettuce without a bun. When we asked him why, his only response was “I don’t know, that sounded Italian to me!”

• Our first manager – After working 18 hour days for a year and a half, Mark and I decided to hire our first official manager. We had found this great cook who was a ski-bum from Colorado and he quickly earned our trust. In fact, we liked him so much that he ended up living with both Mark and I at separate times during his employment. This guy was a rock…his integrity couldn’t be questioned….we 100% trusted him with our restaurant! Well, we later found out that during his employment he:

o Had relations with a female customer in the Pluckers bathroom after a shift. Not that unusual in our business, however her request included something to do with Saran-wrap and a spatula.
o Made our walk-in cooler his personal brothel with half of our cashiers.
o Eventually we learned our lesson about becoming friends with our employees. This was because our first manager stole our company checkbook and wrote over $6000 in checks to “Cash”. However, since a crook isn’t always the smartest person in the world, instead of trying to forge one of our signatures and get away with it, this mental moron just signed the checks with his own name leading to prosecution and jail time. Eventually he decided the prudent thing to do was to flee the state of Texas forever because he had previous warrants and we haven’t seen him since.

Everyone thinks owning a restaurant is a sexy business. What they sometimes fail to see is that if you don’t really know what you are doing, you can end up with people that make the cast of “One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest” look sane. However, this is the lot in life we have chosen and we wouldn’t change any of it for the world!

Looking back in it, maybe opening a restaurant with no management experience the week after we graduated college wasn’t such a good idea. We thought we had all of our bases covered… we had our menu developed, we had hired some employees, we had a big wall menu, some door to door advertising pieces and since we were college kids who knew everything about everything, we were ready to open shop. Well, reality set in about 5 minutes after we were open. There are several lessons of business we learned very quickly that first week. If you are a budding restaurateur, read this very carefully before opening your first restaurant. No need for you to make the same mistakes we did. If you aren’t interested in ever opening a restaurant, congratulations, you are officially smarter than me and just have fun reading.

Mark and I had this brilliant idea of how we would run the store. We thought that we would hire some cooks, drivers and cashiers and we would be able to handle any problems and talk to guests at the front. So we went out and hired a bunch of our friends who were willing to help us out (for $4 an hour I might add) and hired some random people off the street through an extensive 5 minute interview that we conducted. Then we scheduled our first official employee meeting where we were going to train the staff how to cook the food, answer phones and take orders. This lasted all of 2 hours as we ran through our menu and fully expected everyone to understand what we wanted. We had no manuals, no tests and no previous experience training employees so what could possibly go wrong? Mark felt pretty good about everything because he had watched enough episodes of Beverly Hills 90210 and had seen Brandon Walsh move from a server to assistant managers to owners of the Peach Pit to learn what worked and didn’t work with employees.

Now I want you to consider that today each employee we hire goes through a minimum of three interviews, our employee manuals are 150 pages and to become a server at Pluckers, you have a minimum of 60 hours of training and have to pass at least 5 different tests. So you can see that we actually have learned a few things since the days when Ian Ziering was king of West Beverly High besides the fact that Ian was 30 years old playing a 17-year old kid. But this story is about back then and not now.

So we officially opened on July 23rd, 1995 and everything was going smooth until Vinny Palegie walked through the door. Now you may ask, who is Vinny Palegie? Well, Vinny had the honor of being the first official paying Pluckers customer. And by honor, I mean Vinny was the first person to realize that we absolutely had no f-ing idea what we were doing. I think his order was for 10 Wings Medium and fries and it probably took about an episode of The Simpsons to get his food out of the kitchen. After Vinny, the orders started rolling in. Pretty much every person we knew from college who still lived in Austin and all of their friends started showing up at the opening day of Pluckers.

I pinpoint the time that I realized we were in way over our heads at about 12:10pm CST. That was when Mark and I went back in the kitchen and realized that no one could read our handwriting on the kitchen tickets and even if they could, they had no idea what they were supposed to be cooking. So our official tenure as front of house managers lasted all of 70 minutes. For the next year and a half, I think that Mark and I personally cooked all of or most of every meal that came through Pluckers from 11am to 3am, 7 days a week.

With this change of plans also meant that we had to find reliable people to operate our cash drawer. As soon as the first day ended, we called in favors from every friends that we had in Austin and even hit up Mark’s brother Sean (our future partner) for his friends to come to Pluckers to help. Little did we know how true the old adage of “never work with your friends is”. Sure these were good people and they wanted to see us succeed, but that didn’t mean they planned on giving up partying in college. I can’t tell you how many “friends” I had to wake up at 10am in their apartments and drag them to work with a hangover to earn 4 bucks an hour…Josh Healy, I am still sorry to this day for slapping you awake.

Now it wasn’t all bad. Our first day we actually sold out of all of the chicken in the restaurant! We were so excited to be able to say that. Little did we know that it was probably as much due to our poor skills in ordering food as it was in the success of the restaurant. However, we did manage to bring in about $1300 in sales that first day. I can’t explain what the feeling of being 22 years old and counting that much money at 5am in the morning feels like, but I can tell you it was very satisfying. These days, we routinely sell more than $1300 in food an hour, but that first $1300 will always be the most special to us.

One of my favorite memories of that first week involves Mark’s mother. If you have ever had the pleasure to know Barbara, you know two things about her: First, she isn’t afraid to tell you her opinion and second, like most mothers, she isn’t afraid to tell you her opinion very loudly! I remember finally getting a brief respite from the kitchen to have a moment to talk to some friends who were at the restaurant and leave the cooking to Mark. Within 3 steps of leaving the kitchen, I hear this voice in my ear, “David, the fries are cold! David, the fries are cold!” Now this wasn’t an “inside voice”, but instead one that resonated until every guest in the place was getting a chuckle or two watching how the chicken wing genius was going to handle the situation. It seemed that Barbara had been visiting each table at the restaurant and finding out how the meals were. Unfortunately, the results weren’t that good. Even more unfortunately, everyone in the restaurant was able to find out that everyone else’s meals had also sucked.

Now mind you that I had probably slept about 10 hours in the previous 5 days and I could have handled the situation a little better, but I think I did what every self-respecting business partner would do, I sent Barbara into the kitchen to tell Mark. I was about to get my first lesson that Mark didn’t really like having his mother tell him what to do. Why that was, I couldn’t figure out because every 22-year old male loves having their moms get involved in their business. All I know is that we made damn sure not a single fry left the kitchen cold for the rest of the Greenberg’s visits. However, cold fries have always been a Pluckers specialty and are maybe the one food quality problem we have never been able to solve. So Barbara, maybe it was the fry and not the people frying them!

So who came up with the name Pluckers, a Warner Brother Character and other musings.

My guess is that there are many versions of this story, but the one that I remember goes something like this. Mark and I were working on a name sometime before the Chili Cookoff for our senior year. We had already been a big hit at the Chili Cookoff during our junior year and we wanted everyone in the Greek system at UT to know the name of our soon to be open restaurant. The only problem was…we couldn’t think of a good name or a good slogan. We asked our friends, parents, teachers, classmates, etc. for their suggestions. I remember that I was pushing hard for Bubba’s Wings to be the name of our new venture. You see, I am from Georgia and I love a good bubba (definition: a good ole boy, usually from the southern United States who at the time loved anything to do with Billy Ray Cyrus, NASCAR, girls with big hair and would scream for “Freebird” at concerts even if Lynyrd Skynyrd wasn’t playing.) I had grown up with Bubba’s most of my life and it just sounded like a good name to me. How can you not like a guy named Bubba?

Well, I guess the answer to my question came from my mother who informed me that being a Bubba usually meant that you were a racist redneck as well. I guess that was a slight oversight on my part, but I am not one for political correctness so I kept pushing for it. I can’t remember many other good names we had for our new restaurant until a girl I was dating came up with “Cluckers”. Hmmm….that made sense, we were a chicken restaurant and chickens liked to cluck. Also, it sounded kind of catchy. The next step was running a check against all other trademarked names in the world. Unfortunately, it came back that there is a chicken chain out of New York called “Cluck U” and our attorneys said that it was going to be “deceptively similar” to Cluck U (that’s lawyer speak for don’t even think about using that name because you will get sued). By the way, Cluck U is still around and although I have never tried it, I hear they make some pretty good wings.

So we had ourselves a problem. We didn’t have any other solid alternative names for the restaurant. Mark and I, being brilliant UT advertising majors decided that there was only one thing that could be done to name our restaurant. We needed to drink! We surmised that in our drunken stupor, the name of our restaurant would magically come to us. Have you ever noticed that you can remember answers to trivia questions or people’s names you haven’t thought of in years when you are inebriated? Well, maybe that’s just me, but back to the story. So we put together our creative genius over either some Bud Ice or Icehouse, which one it was I can’t remember, but I do remember that the rage of “Ice” beers caused killer hangovers. If you don’t believe me, ask any kid who went to college in the early 90’s.

I think after a while of getting nowhere, one of us suggested just changing “Cluckers” to “Pluckers”. Aha….the light came on in our heads (or maybe it was the buzz from 6% alcohol beer) and we both agreed that was the answer. If you knew Mark and I in college, you would know that we usually took the easy way out when it came to things like this. We ran it by our attorneys and they told us that no one else had that trademark, so there it was….we had our name.

Now that we had a name, we needed a fun slogan and logo for our new wing joint. I was telling my dad about our new name and he suggested that we use his graphic designer to create our logo. Since we didn’t know any graphic designers and because at the time I thought my dad knew what the hell he was talking about, we paid some douchebag about $500 to come up with three different ideas for our logo. Essentially what this graphic designer (and I use that term very loosely) came up with was Foghorn Leghorn from the Bugs Bunny cartoon and superimposed him in a circle, a diamond and a square. Those were our three logo choices….get it….Foghorn in a circle, a diamond and a square. Brilliant! Are you freakin’ kidding me?

So we called up my dad and asked him how we were going to be able to use Foghorn Leghorn in our logo since our attorneys warned us about getting sued for using the name “Cluckers”. He explained to me that as long as there was a 10% difference between our logo and Porky Pig’s buddy that we would be all right. We must have spent a week studying our logo against Foghorn. Eventually, we concluded that his beak and neck could certainly be argued that they were 10% different than Foghorn. We also figured that if Warner Brothers wanted to sue us, they weren’t going to win any money, so we threw caution to the wind. We put him in a diamond in case you were wondering.

So we had our name, Foghorn as our logo and it was time for us to come up with a slogan. I remember that I was pushing for “Chicken is Chicken, but the Wing is the Thing”. Mark thought that was only average, but neither of us could think of anything better. So we went to our mothers for help. In case you haven’t ever met either of our mothers, you need to know three things about them. First, they are Jewish mothers. Second, they think that their creative genius is a very close second to the likes of Martin Scorsese, Quentin Tarantino and Richard Pryor. And finally, even if they have little to no knowledge at all on a particular subject, they think they are always right.

However, this time I think going to my mom for help actually paid off. For twelve years my mom contradicts this story, but I swear it to be the truth. I was on the phone with her throwing around slogan ideas and told her we wanted people to remember our restaurant in the future. There was a restaurant in Destin, Florida called Fudpuckers that had a great slogan “You ain’t been Pucked, til’ you been Fudpucked”. I wanted something like that, catchy and irreverent. So we started playing on words that rhymed with Pluckers (you can come up with a few of them yourself) and finally I think she said “If you don’t like our chicken, we’ll shoot you a bird!” I liked that and after a few minutes I tried morphing it into “If you don’t like our wings, we’ll give you the bird!”

Now she claims that she came up with the slogan we have been using for 12 years, but that is not the way I remember it. I could be wrong, but if you reference the above three rules related to our mothers, you will see that I have a legitimate argument.

I ran the idea by Mark and some friends and everyone loved it. The first unveiling of the new name, slogan and logo officially went out at Chili Cookoff our senior year. I can’t even remember who designed the shirts, but to this day, they are the best shirts we have ever made. I think there are only about 3 of those shirts left in the world, so if you have one, keep it as it may be worth something one day. It was simple….Foghorn Leghorn shooting a bird and saying “If you don’t like our wings, we’ll give you the Bird!” I think we printed about 100 of these shirts and handed them out to every hottie we knew on campus and some of our friends as well. Within minutes of the Chili Cookoff starting, the delicious smell of our wings and the harem of beautiful UT coeds had our booth hopping. Everyone wanted to know when the restaurant was opening. The only thing was, first we had to graduate…

To be continued….