In any business “shit happens” but I always felt that the restaurant industry got more than its fair share! Owning any business on Bequia was a challenge in the early ‘80s, but I was convinced that the Pizzeria had them all beat when it came to trouble. At times the problems that cropped up made me cry, at times they made me laugh, but one thing was a given ….the problems were constant!
A restaurant owner has to be vigilant when it comes to the handling of food, and on a tiny Island like Bequia where everything arrives by boat this was hard. I never knew if the butter from Ireland would be rancid or how many times chicken from the United States had been thawed and re-frozen. Insects could find their way into prepared food, and after finding a cockroach in another restaurant’s roti I was paranoid about one being found on a pizza.
One day I was chatting with my friend Nancy as I made chocolate chip cookies. She sat in the kitchen as I made the dough, then helped me drop the batter onto greased cookie sheets. My chocolate chip cookies were popular, I used real chocolate chips instead of chocolate flavored ones, and real butter as opposed to margarine. They were light, thin, crisp and delicious.
My friend Gilbert arrived that afternoon wanting to buy some cookies, and waited with us while they baked. They were too hot to put in bags when they came out of the oven so we drank cold beers while they cooled on the racks. We each tested a warm cookie for quality and they were perfect, the chocolate warm and gooey and the cookies nice and crispy. Gilbert paid for his cookies and went back to his yacht.
Nancy and I were amazed when Gilbert returned to the Pizzeria with his cookies and showed us what he had found. Inside one of the cookies was a beer cap, and how it got into the dough was a total mystery. We could tell that he wasn’t joking, cookie dough was baked into that cap. The beer cooler was no-where near the counter where the cookies had been made, we hadn’t even OPENED a beer until the cookies were cooling on racks! The cookies were thinner than the beer cap, how on earth could we fail to see it when the hot cookies were removed from the sheets with a lifter?
Gilbert had a fine sense of humor and thought it was funny, but he wouldn’t have been laughing if he had broken a tooth on the metal beer cap. Nancy and I still talk about that cap and wonder how in HELL it got inside that cookie. That one will forever remain a mystery to me.