Good Eye, Klo, Good Eye

I manage a restaurant. And there was this line cook, who worked briefly with us, who said very solemnly to me once, "Good eye, Klo, good eye."

We had, by this point, figured out that he was a compulsive liar, knew very little about cooking (he'd asked one of the day cooks for a scallion cutting seminar), and made for staff meal, awful and sometimes inedible salads (think tablespoons of ground cinnamon dumped into delicate, fresh lettuce leaves). On this particular day, he was mangling molten chocolate cakes as he was cutting them out of the ramekins and while some were passable, some were not. The one I was looking at appeared as though it had not only been massacred with buckshot but a small land mine had also gone off to maim its face, leaving it sad, bleeding and asking for change in front of the O'Farrell Street Garage.

"I can't serve this cake," I said.
"Oh, what's wrong with it?"
"Look at it."

He looks at it, and he looks at me. And I'm starring at him, hoping that I won't have to actually explain that when people pay $8.00 for a dessert, they actually want it to not only taste good, but also look nice. There's an uncomfortable pause. Then, for a moment, I think he may actually be embarrassed that he put it in the window in the first place. I'm looking at him beseechingly, hoping that a glimmer of understanding will pass between us. Instead, he looks at me like I'm a genius and says, "Good Eye, Klo, Good Eye," and took it away to be replated.

Of course, this has been a continuing joke in the restaurant since he left (and really even while he was around). I've been told by a surprising number of people that I have a "good eye" both in jest and in earnest and I never know how to take it. Because it can mean a couple of different things. It can mean "You are very observant, pay attention to detail and diligent at your job." Or it can mean "You are a micro-managing, obsessive-compulsive psycho who should think about something other than what angle this fork is facing." I suppose both are true sometimes and I'm learning to live with that.

On some level, I actually do think that I have a good eye; not for things like interior design, which I am hopelessly bad at, or arranging flowers, which I really feel that I should be good at, but am not (I actually make the supermarket flowers look even worse than when they lived in plastic wrapping). What I realize is that my ridiculously long stint in higher education and my prim, proper and overly organized Chinese mother has given me tools to look around me and notice things. Now whether or not these things are interesting to anyone other than me is definitely questionable. I guess we'll see.