Chats – "Smoko" (2017)

I’m on smoko

So leave me alone!

Tom Sietsema is the restaurant critic for the Washington Post.  Every Wednesday, he hosts an online Q&A session for his readers.  A selected few of the online questions and answers appears in the print edition of the newspaper on Fridays.  

Most of his questions are from people who want a restaurant recommendation for a birthday or anniversary celebration, a special meal with out-of-town visitors, or some other occasion.  They state the time and day of the week they want to dine, note the type of cuisine they prefer, and almost always specify that they are looking for an eatery with outdoor seating.  (Sietsema’s readers must be the most covid-fearful people in the country.)

Here’s one of the questions that Sietsema and his editors chose to include in his print-edition column last week:

My sons are coming to DC for Easter weekend  and we are hoping to share brunch on Sunday morning in honor of my milestone birthday.  They will be staying at the Watergate [Hotel] and would like to eat there.  Do you know if their restaurants are open and, if so, are they offering a Sunday brunch?

Here is Sietsema’s answer:

It's been years since I visited Kingbird , the restaurant within the Watergate, but I see it’s open on Sunday afternoons. (Good luck finding a menu online, though!) Wish I could be of more help.

Here’s what Sietsema’s response should have been:

Lady, why the hell are you bothering me?  Just call the f*cking restaurant and ask them!

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I visited the Kingbird’s website to make sure it had the restaurant’s phone number.  (It did.)

Like Sietsema, I was unable to find the restaurant’s menu online.  (There’s a link to the menu, but it’s not functioning properly.)

But I did find this information about the restaurant’s hours:

Kingbird is open for breakfast weekdays from 6:30 am – 10:30 am and weekends 6:30 am – 11:00 am.  Or join us for High Tea on Saturday and Sunday 2:00 pm – 4:00 pm.

In other words, the restaurant will be open for breakfast until 11:00 am on Easter Sunday.  I don’t know if that’s late enough to qualify as “brunch” or not – maybe the woman who wrote Sietsema was hoping to eat at noon or even little later.

Sietsema didn’t bother telling her that Kingbird was open for breakfast until 11:00 pm on Sundays.  Instead, he told his reader, “I see [that Kingbird is] open on Sunday afternoons.”

The woman explicitly stated that she and her sons were hoping to have brunch on Easter morning – not Easter afternoon.  So I’m not sure why in the world Sietsema told her the restaurant was open for afternoon tea – after all, she wanted to have brunch, not tea – but didn’t tell her about the breakfast hours.

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Let’s review the bidding.

In this corner, we have a Washington Post reader who wants to know if a particular restaurant will be open for brunch on Easter Sunday.  Instead of simply calling up the restaurant and asking, she e-mails a restaurant critic.

And in this corner, we have a restaurant reviewer who not only is too lazy to call a restaurant to ask if they will be open for brunch on Easter Sunday but also can’t be bothered to read his reader’s inquiry carefully – she asks him if the restaurant will be open on Easter morning, and he responds by telling her that the restaurant’s website says it will be open (for afternoon tea only) on Easter afternoon.

The final line of his response – “Wish I could be more help” – couldn’t be more insincere.  If Sietsema really meant that, he should have called the stupid restaurant himself.

*     *     *     *     *

Sietsema gets a lot of questions during his weekly online Q&A sessions.  Why choose this one for the Washington Post print edition?   

For one thing, it’s likely of very narrow interest.  The reader is asking whether a particular restaurant offers brunch on one particular day of the year.  (She’s not asking whether the restaurant is open for brunch on Sundays generally, but whether it’s open for brunch on Easter Sunday.)  How many other readers are likely to be interested in the reply?

But if you do choose to run this question in the paper, why not take two minutes to call the frigging restaurant yourself so you can answer it?  It’s like an advice columnist who prints a question from a woman who caught her husband wearing her underwear and wants to know what she should do, and then answers “Beats me!”   

It reminds me of my eighth-grade civics teacher’s favorite pronouncement when he was asked why the government had done something:  “When the blind lead the blind, we all go in the ditch together.” 

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When I was a student, I had a number of blue-collar summer jobs – like unloading trucks and rail cars at a grocery warehouse  – where workers got a scheduled “coffee break” in the morning and another one in the afternoon.  

These breaks lasted ten or fifteen minutes, and were paid – you didn’t have to clock out during coffee breaks.  (They were written into union contracts.) 

You didn’t have to drink coffee, of course – I usually ate half a sandwich and had a carton of milk or a can of Dr. Pepper on my coffee breaks.

I remember one job where a bunch of the guys on my shift would spend their coffee breaks playing liar’s poker – that’s a variant of regular poker that utilized the serial numbers of dollar bills instead of  playing cards.  The winner of each hand got a dollar bill from each player, and the liar’s-poker players I worked with didn’t waste any time – they managed to play several dozen hands before the whistle blew and we had to go back to work.

In addition to these scheduled coffee breaks, the guys I worked with who smoked felt entitled to take quick cigarette breaks every so often.  (They smoked during coffee breaks as well, of course.) 

“Smoko” is the Australian slang term for a cigarette break.  It can also refer to a short coffee (or tea) break that doesn’t involve smoking.

I’ve never been to Australia, but I understand that hourly workers “Down Under” feel very entitled to their smokos.  Heaven help you if you try to get a worker who’s on smoko to respond to your request for help.

“I’m on smoko,” he’ll probably tell you. “So leave me alone!” 

Click here to watch the official music video for “Smoko,” which went viral after it was released in 2017 by the Chats, an Australian punk-rock band.

Click on the link below to buy that record from Amazon: