Damon’s, The Place For Ribs

Though a former employee at two different locations, I actually didn’t know until researching this piece that the restaurant chain Damon’s (a.k.a. “The Place For Ribs”) was in fact founded in Columbus in 1979. As far as I can determine, the last location remaining in town closed its doors in 2011, although a handful remain in the states and – bizarrely enough – there are a few still over in England.

Above is a picture I snapped one day, of the location where I once worked. This one was attached to the Parke University Hotel on Olentangy River Rd and that’s an exterior shot of the dining room, taken from my car. So not the most exciting photo in the world but at least you can see how it looked. The company logo at the time kind of resembled the nautical flag for “diver down,” which should have maybe been a bad omen itself – a red rectangle with a white diagonal slash. Apart from the ribs, they were probably most famous for the onion loaf, which reeked to the high heavens and had one of these diver down flags planted at its summit. My personal favorite though was the Steamboat, which was this hollowed out bread loaf filled with a mountain of BBQ pork and topped with shredded cheese. In another nifty creative touch, they also had their dessert menu loaded on one of those red plastic Viewfinder toys, planted at each table.

Even by late 90s standards, though, the exterior décor was shabby, and the interior not much better. With its white plaster walls and hot cocoa carpet both no thicker than a page of the Columbus Dispatch, its matching plywood trim an equally disgusting shade of brown, the dining room where I worked had clearly not seen a remodel since probably the day it opened its doors. The dining room does have one redeeming feature, which is a giant bay window overlooking Olentangy River Rd. Three small two top tables are situated along the curve, and whenever the weather’s exceptional, I like to sit or stand there, dearth of patrons permitting. Cars hiss down Olentangy, but the gravestones filling this massive cemetery across the way remain unmoving, as they surely always will, the perfect backdrop to stare and dream against. And that’s about it for the dining room.

The clubhouse half of the operation, with its big screen TVs broadcasting sports non-stop all day, fared a little better, although even then, owing to the technology of the era, placing speakers at every table – so patrons could choose which event to tune in to – meant running wiring up through the table stand. Which meant the tables couldn’t be moved, which meant no large parties in the clubhouse. It was an unfortunate setup, as the big tops were either forced into our dreadful dining room, or one of the hotel’s banquet halls.

Our dining room definitely attracted a more elderly crowd, too, ones who’d probably last changed homes fifty years prior and could relate to the antiquated decorating scheme. This makes sense, but little else about the establishment does. Under this broad umbrella you might include its very design. Whichever architect laid out the blueprint for this abomination either fell under the influence of some heavy chemicals, or paid for his degree on the black market. At the very least, he should have been sent packing before the first pickaxe was lifted.

Attached as it is to the Parke University Hotel, our restaurant has a long central hallway running right down the middle, connecting the lobbies of both. The clubhouse and its kitchen are on one side of the hallway, the dining room and its kitchen on the other. In between, eighty year old grandmas clomp down the carpeted hall with walkers, kids bounce soccer balls, moms and dads stagger back to their rooms drunk. The clubhouse does three times as much business as the dining room, if not more, and yet its kitchen is about as big as the janitor’s broom closet. By logical extension, then, it stands to reason that our inanimate dining room kitchen has enough space to double as a practice field for the Buckeyes football squad. A pair of doors theoretically connect the two, but between these lies the obstacle of that goddamn hallway.

So as all prep work is done in the dining room kitchen – flouring onion loaves, baking bread, and countless other chores – our poor preps carry steaming hot, four by two metal pans from their work stations, creak the one swinging open door very carefully so as not to drill any passing hotel guests, look both ways, cross the hall, mount two steps, open the clubhouse door – it only swings out, not in, another brilliant conception – and then fight their way into the cramped cubicle where, on a good day, as many as half a dozen cooks are jostling about, yelling, cursing, in general paying little mind to some quiet, underpaid foreigner bringing in their next batch of barbecue sauce.

The faded red tee shirts our cooks had to wear were kind of cool in their own way, though. Certainly better than the ghastly uniforms we servers were always forced to break out. We went from hot pink polo monstrosities, to referee type vertical striped company shirts, and then finally to these white, long sleeved dress shirts, purchased at our own expense. March Madness did bring with it a brief series of black and white tee shirts, trumpeting that year’s (1998) event. At least the black dress slacks and non-skid shoes remained the same, and were not too horrific.

George Steinbrenner, he of New York Yankees fame, is in the ownership mix of both hotel and restaurant, although I’m not sure to what extent. I spot him at our breakfast buffet just once, having been alerted to his presence by a number of other coworkers, as we peeked around from the service station corner to gawk at him. At any rate, when the baseball season is in full swing, the Clippers often lodge at the Parke hotel during homestands, particularly the big ticket stars who might only be slumming it on a rehab stint.

Akash normally waits tables with me, in the moribund dining room, but one afternoon in the summer of ’97, he’s scheduled in the clubhouse instead. On this particular shift he has the 120s section, which, on the tri-level, rainbow shaped floor, means the middle cluster, far right, if facing from the front entrance. Word circulates he’s waiting at this moment on what passes as our greatest recurring celebrity, a spectacle I’ve thus far missed. In previous seasons, they tell me, both Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden were constant clubhouse presences, during rehab stints with the Clippers; just my luck that this year we’re accorded instead a Japanese import, pitcher Hideki Irabu. Brought here after the hype machine and an intense bidding war dropped him into Steinbrenner’s back pocket, the history shattering king’s ransom his signing bonus. Irabu polishes his act here before an eventual call to the big show, a possible metaphor for what folks think about this city in general.

I happen across the clubhouse just as Hideki’s finishing lunch. A veritable mountain of dishes cover every square inch of his two top table, as he reclines and lights a cigarette, with his fantastic Buddha mound of a belly nearly reaching the eating surface. I confer with Akash in the clubhouse server station, who beams and whispers, counting off the dishes on his fingers, everything the star twirler has knocked off – and only in baseball, I’m thinking, could a prized athlete get away with this. In the papers George will refer to his golden boy as a “fat, pussy toad,” and yes, to the naked eye, the Asian sensation is disastrously out of shape, but so long as that arm is lively he will justify the millions spent, you can chisel his enshrinement plaque as god.

As a true fanatic of the national pastime, though, I get a kick out of rubbing elbows with any of the players – and Damon’s also has an outpost right inside Cooper Stadium, it’s worth noting, to which a number of our employees are frequently loaned. Although this thrill is mitigated somewhat once I discover to what extent these minor leaguers, ahem, poach the talent from our farm club, i.e. establish hookups for when they are in town. Whenever they’re around, we sad dudes wearing the clowntastic Damon’s uniform become invisible, and we stand little chance of dating most of these girls. This is a cycle that will repeat every summer.

As the name would imply, ribs are a drawing card, too, although it does continue to amaze me that people willfully choose to eat here when so many other options abound. Attached to this dilapidated hotel of equal shabbiness, our rib joint could be a crown jewel among campus establishments but is in such a sad state of neglect it’s difficult to imagine what kind of lunatic might actually eat here. The food’s great, sure, but there’s a roach motel clipped underneath each table. Our clubhouse has a handful of big screen televisions to entice the gluttonous, beer swilling sports fan, but each time our bartenders are forced to make a mixed drink their archaic blender’s loud enough to drown out all sound. They may as well rev a motorcycle back there. And the stench arising from the busser station along one wall of the clubhouse is enough to turn even the staunchest stomachs, an aroma duplicated by the backed up floor drains across the way in my dining room server station. The cheapskates who own this place give our general manager Mark Stokes twenty dollars a week for incidental repairs or improvements, but he’d get more bang for his buck buying lottery tickets with the money than to try to fix anything on such a shoestring budget.

II.

For roughly the first 8 months of my employment here, I’m just a part-timer, working days. Then I quit my other job to go all-in on this outrageous establishment, and it’s immediately apparent I made the right move. Though enduring considerable condescension from the clubhouse veterans, us dining room servers are pulling pretty much the same amount of money with a lot less managerial interference, not to mention the requisite bitchiness from many of those same clubhouse employees. On weekends, Saturdays especially, some of us are putting in fifteen hour days, from 9am to midnight, although it’s worth it as the pace is nonstop, my coworkers are a riot, and you have the hands-on gratification of watching if not stopping to count the growing bulge of tip money in your pocket. That first great eye opener occurs on such a Saturday where the Buckeyes football game is immediately followed by the Cleveland Indians in game one of the World Series, and I walk home (or should I say, over to Woody’s) with more in this one shift than I was making all week at Kroger.

Everything will permanently change for me, after this first OSU game. Dozens of patrons without tables are standing around, drinking, lending even our relatively sedate dining room somewhat of a keg party atmosphere. So this is what it’s like to have arrived in the big leagues. They schedule five of us to carve up the dining room, and Marlene mans the seldom used bar. It’s wall to wall madness, and this would include prep work leading up to the shift itself. I help manager Jeremy carry up umpteen kegs from the strangely mazelike basement I’ve heard rumors about yet never visited. And the night before, they pay me extra to stay over and pop onions with one of the full time evening bussers, this goofy Bosnian kid named Randy who’s apparently worked here for eons.

I might know nothing about the basement, but Randy’s allegedly an expert. Multiple sources indicate that he’s been busted on more than one occasion hiding out down there to avoid work. Other than that I have no other information on him, except that he has that prototypical pale and skinny European look down, that he also speaks very little English and smiles all the time – a smile surprisingly intact and unmarred considering he seems to drink Pepsi nonstop all night, every night. Actually Randy is not even his real name, it’s something long that starts with an A. But apparently when he first started, Mark Stokes, a poker faced man of few words if ever there was one, asks this new busboy his name, purses his lips and nods his head, prints out a sticker for his badge. Randy it is, then, we are calling you Randy.

As far as this popping onions business is concerned, he and I are assigned to a prep table in the spacious dining room kitchen, where dozens of white plastic tubs await. Much like the basement, I’ve absorbed occasional mentions about popping onions but never partaken, or paid any attention to anyone tasked with such. Someone has sliced who knows how many hundreds of white onions into these tubs. Now all we have to do is manually pop them out, i.e. punch the middles with our thumbs so that they fall apart.

I already considered our wildly popular yet noxiously fumed onion loaf to be the most revolting item on the menu, and seeing what goes into their creation takes this repugnance to a whole new level. The precise alchemy eludes me, but somehow these are dumped into a deep fryer, pressed into loaf shape and seasoned, possibly with the addition of flour or something somewhere along the line. After about fifteen minutes of this popping motion, blowing one’s brains out begins to sound like a viable option.

Randy and I manage to work our way through this entire mountain of tubs, although some understandable shenanigans creep into the proceedings. We might suffer a language barrier, but fortunately certain gestures and facial expressions transcend speech. At one point, spying a tomato nearby, I seize and pantomime dropping it into the popped out tub we’re working on. Randy giggles and nods eagerly – yes, yes, do it. Into the next tub, he buries a pair of metal tongs. One of those mini bread loaves used in making Steamboats finds its way into still another. And when this stunt grows a little dull, we’re winging onions at our comatose dishtanker, though he never responds in the slightest.

Fortunately, this is an isolated assignment I can’t fathom ever agreeing to again. My first ever night shift, and then, yes, the initial OSU game, these represent complete paradigm shifts from anything I’ve known before, and from here there’s no going back. It isn’t that these nights are busier than the days ever were, or that Saturdays during football season blow the rest of the year’s out of the water. It’s that everything is different, somehow. The way it feels is as though the entire restaurant were flipped upside down and we now find ourselves in the Southern Hemisphere, or something, the seasons and the weather and everything else flip-flopped, a change this drastic. People who’ve worked here the entire time whom I’ve never met, among them some really sharp females. Entirely different clientele, including the regulars, with bigger tickets on average and therefore larger tips. Dimmer lighting, even, and a Muzak that automatically changes at 4pm from whatever randomness happens to be playing to this disco dance party mix, every night, without exception. To this day any time I hear Rock The Boat by Hues Corporation, it instantly takes me back here, showing up to work an evening shift.

People get so fired up about these Buckeyes that their mania borders on fits of panic. Working this first game, one party is in such a hurry they leave me an $18 tip on a $21 check because they’re too impatient to wait on change. We do have a couple of TV screens behind the bar, though the room layout impinges much standing around. The hardcore nuts are therefore predominantly over in the clubhouse still, for the most part, meaning the spillover we pick up are mostly the unfortunate, or the few disinterested, the ones going to or coming from the game and okay with just soaking up the atmosphere. Maybe catching some action from their fitful glimpses of the bar screens, or speculating and recapping with all these other goobers in scarlet and grey.

III.

One afternoon in early January, our audio-visual guy Kelly and I are hanging out in the clubhouse server station, bored, and are idly wondering if anyone ever cleans the upper reaches of these walls, or the drop tile ceiling, for they are looking quite grimy. It’s the kind of thing you joke about but don’t exactly mention to management, as they might consider this volunteering. 

This leads to speculation about an experiment, however. Over a series of back and forth half jesting suggestions, he and I decide to open a pack of saltines, and smear butter – or whatever it actually is – across one side of the cracker. Then draw a smile and two eyes with ketchup on the other side. He’s tall enough to reach the low ceiling, and is able to affix this humanized food bite, dubbed Mr. Smiley, to the drop tile with no other adhesive except for that butter, right in the middle of the room. Now we debate how long Mr. Smiley will beam upon us all before someone spots him. I’m a little more optimistic, proposing it will surely only last a week, while he’s going long in predicting a month. As it turns out, we are both way wrong: April. This thing doesn’t disappear until April.

So this is another fascinating subject, these case studies in what does or doesn’t get noticed at the restaurant. Cleaning out the Evergeen Room one night after a banquet, I find this lacy purple bra, its owner by appearances a well-endowed one, flung on the floor underneath a table. Interesting. I had no idea the guests were getting down like that in here. Stuffing it into my apron, I don’t have time and am too dead on my feet to think of how to plant it right then. But arriving to open the following morning, I sneak over to the clubhouse, and hang it from the corner of this framed Mike Tomczak jersey, in a dark, crowded section of wall. Nobody saw me, but this thing is common knowledge within half an hour, which just blows my mind. I keep my mouth shut as the remaining servers attempt to solve this crime.

“Who wears a bra that size?” 

“Is it Ewok’s?” 

“Is it Marlene’s?” 

“No, I don’t think she wears one that big.” 

No one bothers to actually take it down, of course, so late afternoon is upon us before Jeff notices the bra dangling there. He then defiantly strolls through our main kitchen toting it, as though a vice squad detective having made a huge bust, but in reality that purple undergarment billowed above a room full of paying customers for hours.

And yet the Mr. Smiley saltine persists in plain sight in the clubhouse server station, weeks after Kelly and I placed it there. Maybe we should bring in those ceiling tile specialists from the Swabby shows to work their magic on these as well. 

Kelly is also at the center of the latest intrigue, as I arrive to open the dining room yet again. “Dude, there’s a half empty keg sitting in the Evergreen Room!” he tells me first thing, his moon sized blue eyes even wider than usual, a mischievous grin on his face. 

“What?! Is it flat?” I gasp. 

He’s not sure about this detail, so we head over there in the name of scientific research. Sure enough, in our tiniest yet most trafficked banquet space, just up the hall from the managers’ office, here this metallic buoy floats on a bed of all but melted ice. Clearly, a remnant of last night’s party, which our faceless guests paid for but failed to kill. Isn’t it a sin to let perfectly fine beverages go to waste? Kelly doesn’t really drink much but is eager to pump after I go grab a clean cup. 

Though far from cold and heavily foamed, it’s beer, alright, and even the foam transforms by unknown alchemy to still more beer if you leave it sit long enough. Bruce and Akash, the next two servers to arrive, are soon clued into our little discovery, and we take turns sneaking over for refills the rest of our shift – a diversion so appealing that even Kelly can’t resist joining in the fun. Though unable to speak for the other three guys, I’m about half loopy by noon. 

IV. 

At the conclusion of the 1998 March Madness basketball tournament, the dining room is shuttered for a much needed remodel. During this time, we will operate out of the Evergreen Room if business dictates – pretty much only during weekend nights, or for large parties who have booked the space – but otherwise cram ourselves into the clubhouse, both patrons and wait staff alike. Though the remodel is accomplished in what feels like an impressive three weeks, casualties mount in short order on both sides of this equation, some of which are never seen again.

All signs point to a clear demarcation of eras, though it’s anyone’s guess what this might mean. While the final four doesn’t conclude until an insane Monday night, where L.J. is going positively berserk in the clubhouse, as his beloved Kentuck-ah Waaaahlcats claim another title, and the typical rate of his playing YMCA every fifteen minutes so people can jump up and reenact the arm motions is doubled, it’s decided that the Saturday prior is our last night of business for the current dining room.

It’s estimated with complete seriousness that I might have spent more hours in this room than anyone in the history of the restaurant. Most normal folk jumped ship after about a month in this space. As such it’s with a little bit of sadness, shutting this puppy down, its future not altogether certain.  Saturday night, after shutting the place down, we servers on that half are tasked with cleaning the dining room and stripping it down to the fixtures. Everything is hauled either into the kitchen or the basement – tables and chairs, ketchup bottles, glasses, every drop of booze behind the bar. By the end of this exercise, I’m so wiped out that I drive straight home and collapse in bed.

Things do not exactly end on good terms here. I will wind up getting canned near the end of April, 1998. But even after being terminated, I am not quite finished with my former employer, nor they with me. We will continue to toy with one another, albeit from a distance. These are all very distant, nebulous chess moves, inconclusive and perfectly defensible as accidents – the culmination of which, I have to admit, is the final W-2 they turn in for my tenure here.

Stumbling onto this document just now has totally made my night. I couldn’t find the W-2 itself at the moment, but here’s the correction they eventually filed. As you can see, they have me at $249,648.26 in tip money for those three plus months, which let’s just say differs ever so slightly from my records. By, like, $247,000. We were doing okay waiting tables here, sure, but not that okay.

This piece of paper is so hysterical that I feel like framing it. I never really determine whether they did this intentionally, either for comedic effect or the latest volley in this back and forth battle. Perhaps this was an attempt to indirectly bill me for damages. Whatever the case, I have a hard time believing it was an honest typo, committed while filling out paperwork for one of their servers. Actually I have a hard time believing anyone involved with this operation made $250K on the year.

V.

I eventually realized in going through my stats for this site that there are a couple of posts that (relatively speaking, of course) “blew up” for a minute on Reddit. Someone posted a link from a subreddit there, over to here, which I truly appreciate, especially as it sent a decent amount of traffic my way. However, one of the more frustrating and befuddling aspects about this is that what tends to happen is someone will read that subreddit…come over here and check out my post…then bounce back over to Reddit to comment on it, instead of doing so here. So you would never even know any of this was happening – as I didn’t either, for quite some time.

Anyway my half-baked idea for incorporating some of this is to at least post the Reddit feed here. I’m not crazy about linking over to there, but at the same time, it seems kind of stupid not to. So here goes, beginning with the one that kicked the subreddit off: