Condiments
packets suck, plain and simple
Your burger sits steaming and waiting for you to take a bite. If you’re like me, you order it—or a chicken sandwich—with nothing on it but lettuce, tomato, and cheese. Perhaps a red onion coil. No sauce. I’ll add that on my own please. No thousand island dressing or donkey sauce or mayo or BBQ sauce or any of that other shit that restaurants like to put on their “special” wich. No thanks. Just the meat and the veggies and the cheese thank you. I’d like to adorn it with my own condiments.
They always—and I mean always—bring a bullet of ketchup. Or there’s the ubiquitous giant red bottle of it—either red squeeze plastic—or a bottle of a brand name like Heinz or Hunts or French’s or some grocery brand already sitting on the table. All day. Likely married with other bottles at the end of the shift for efficiency. Loaded with sugar. Tasty and addictive as hell. Almost never in my experience is there a bottle of yellow mustard on the table. I almost always have to ask for yellow mustard.
No I don’t want grey poupon or mustard mixed with horseradish sauce or some other fancy brown mustard. I want the yellow kind. Mustard seeds, vinegar and salt. So what do they often bring? Packets. Little fucking plastic packets of mustard. For sure that’s what they’ll give you if you’re at the turn sitting in your golf cart. Most definitely that’s what you get at an airport cafe. I think that’s the case with all fast-food joints too, but it’s been a while for me, so I’m sure.
No bottles for you. Here’s your impossible to open little fucking plastic packets.
Ever try to open one of these little fuckers? Ever do it without wearing mustard on your fingers, your golf glove, your carryon luggage, your phone, your heretofore clean shirt and pants? I would submit that NO you haven’t. Not once.
I’ve written about packaging before here.
Packaging of our food products is a nightmare of plastic. “I have one word for you…plastics.”
The nightmare of plastic packaging is something we all content with. Apparently, it’s the only way to keep our fresh food fresh.
Mustard packets for a mustard aficionado takes the cake as the worst of the worst. My bride Ann is also a mustard-lover. She’s all in with scrambled eggs, chicken, even using mustard as a salad dressing on occasion.
We have a small-town cafe in our small town. You know the type. Booths and tables and familiar faces and coffee cups with your names on them hanging on the wall for your frequent visits. We happen to think ours is pretty special. We know the owners. We know the server’s names. We keep a regular Sunday breakfast schedule among other visits. When we first started this Sunday morning tradition many years ago, we encountered mustard packets. They were all cutely arranged in a little bucket, much like the butter packets for your toast and pancakes. Don’t even get me started about foil butter packets that come out of the walk-in refrigerator first thing in the morning and are hard as a rock when we arrive at 7-8 AM for our Sunday visits. Ever try to spread this little frozen cube of dairy around on a perfectly toasted hunk of Rye?
Back to the mustard. We immediately asked for a bottle. Which they did not have. How? we asked. Why not? we implored? There’s a giant plastic bottle of generic catsup sitting right here on the table waiting for our use, but no bottle of mustard. I promptly went into the history of the creation of mustard packets in the 1940s for specific uses like sporting events, airport restaurants, fast food places. The reason being portability and ease of storage. When you’re taking your food away from the place you ordered it, packets are ubiquitous. But for a sit-down dining experience, bottles are preferred.
Our patient yet exasperated server kindly retorted, We don’t have bottles of mustard, but by the next time you come in, we will. Just for you.
Ann went about the task of attempting to neatly apply mustard to her scrambled eggs. I even helped. Between the two of us, we got mustard on the plate, on the table, on our fingers—nearly all of them, on my teeth which I used to tear open the little fuckers, and on the many napkins we used to clean up our mess. Everywhere but the scrambled eggs. And despite the many napkins, mustard does not come easily off of fingertips. So you’re left with these little yellow stains on your tips and under your nails.
Every. Single. Time.
Try it yourself if you don’t trust my experience. I dare you. I’ve tried it at home with scissors just to prove that it can be done cleanly. It cannot.
The following Sunday we arrived and the first thing Ashley our server did when she greeted us was plop down a large bottle of Heinz mustard. See photo below. It says right on the bottle Common Condiment. If it’s so damn common, then why is it so uncommon to find it on the table instead of the packets Ketchup certainly doesn’t face the same identity crisis.
We were pleased. Ashley and the other servers now lead with mustard bottles each Sunday morning when they see us trundle to our table. Now if we can just train the rest of the hundreds of restaurants we’ve encountered this issue with.
Call me sour rather than sweet if you like. I prefer mustard over ketchup. Always and evermore.
Thank you for listening.
"Ever do it without wearing mustard on your fingers, your golf glove, your carryon luggage, your phone, your heretofore clean shirt and pants? I would submit that NO you haven’t. Not once."
Fingernails, Dee. Tear off the corner, then squeeze. So Yes.
Good job, Ashley. I agree. Mustard is way better than ketchup anyway. Ketchup is way too sweet these days and I use it occasionally on fries but mustard? I use it on burgers and fries and corndogs and hot dogs and possibly even a biscuit. Yes, give mustard its own botte. And now. Great post, Dee.