In many cases, one would save the best for last. I’ve done the opposite, as the final story of the three Riverside portals is indeed saving the worst, most offensive, most God-awful for last. Portal Number One involved snakes in the bedroom – BUPKIS! Portal Number Two involved bad plumbing, raw sewage and a Meth addict manhandling a rented high-pressure Jetter in the underbelly of the hotel – Sheer Folly!
Portal Number Three involves the kitchen; it involves grease, old food and bad dishwater festering in a darkened crawl space – it involves an agglomeration of things so bad that people actually go to school to become lawyers, so that they can avoid ever having to be within anything short of tort distance from this holy trinity of gluck.
As mentioned previously, the space under the kitchen was original to the hotels 1903 construction. It had a shorter head clearance than the crawl space under the hotel lobby, by maybe a foot; you were in a serious crouch in this space, and in most cases to get done what you had to do when you were down there, you had to kneel on the lengths of 2 x 12s that ran the length of the space. The two kitchen drains ran under this section, both ultimately leading into the infamous ‘grease trap’, a 16” square box that collected…well…the sort of things that would not only turn you into a Boulder-proud vegan, you’d possibly never eat again if you saw what it contained. The exit side of the grease trap consisted of a 3” pipe that ran into the main sewer line in the crawlspace in Portal Number Two, where it joined with the 3” exit pipes from the toilets, sinks and showers.
(Side Note from Richard Paradise, Restaurant/B&B Consultant LLC: If you, the prospective first-time restaurateur and B&B Operator, just read this last paragraph, and you still want to get into the restaurant & hotel business, quickly send me another $10,000, so that I can further counsel, advise and save you $1,000,000 worth of blood, sweat, tears and actual cash money; not to mention the eventual date with your grease trap.)
It was the end of the Easter weekend, 2009, when we were shutting the hotel down, for both a vacation and a kitchen reconstruction. The plan involved a big-bang, farewell Easter brunch, two-weeks out of Hot Sulphur, then a return to gut and replace the old, inherited equipment we’d been dealing with the past year, replace the existing slippery linoleum floor with some kick-ass commercial floor tile I’d scored from an old adhesive-business contact, and be ready to fly by Memorial Day, 2009.
I can’t remember why our chef went into Portal Number Three shortly before our two-week vacation, but he did, and he reported something pretty wretched.
“The pipe from the dishwasher/disposal has a crack in it, and the crawl space is flooded with….uh….well…some pretty bad stuff. There’s, like, a foot of really bad water down there.”
This was one of those times when procrastination seemed the wiser option. There was a basement full of fetid water, that wouldn’t be added to when we were on vacation. We’d rent a pump when we got back from vacation, drain it, fix the pipe, the floor, the kitchen, etc. No point in delaying our much anticipated and much deserved vacation to deal with this seamy little issue. Unlike us, it sure as hell wasn’t going anywhere.
Two weeks later, we’re back at the Riverside, ready for one hell of a floor ripping-up, crawl-space draining good time. I didn’t even bother to look in the flooded crawl space before heading to the local equipment-rental place for a portable sump pump. Money down, pump in hand, we sucked it up and opened the crawl space, to find….no water! Closer inspection found a substance that, much unlike water, was indefinable. Several months full of restaurant flotsam and jetsam, discharging through the dishwashing system through the crack in the exhaust pipe, in small dribs and drabs over the past few months, into the dirt floor of the crawl space, to sit, stew and percolate, had turned into a gel, a goo, an all but living, breathing, writhing clot. There is really no better way to describe this substance other than it being a grayish, rubbery subterranean pudding, smelling like no pudding you could imagine. If evil sought out a smell, it would have latched onto this layer of gloosma like corruption seeks out politicians.
“Crap!” I thought, “I planned on being able to pump this problem out of my life.” No, it would require a shovel, some plastic bags, and me kneeling/crouching in the cramped quarters of the Third Portal of Hell. While my chef honorably offered to do this dirty beyond dirty job, I couldn’t reasonably ask anyone that I was paying less than $140/second to perform this horrific task.
I previously might have mentioned that it smelled really bad; it did, but when the gelatinous smelogma was actually disturbed, i.e., turned and probed by the peak of the spade, the odor that was unleashed from this custard of a thousand previous Riverside dinners was indescribable. It was very quick duty; throw a plastic trash bag in the hole, hold my breath, descend and scrape two or three shovelfuls into the bag, stick my head above the crawl space for a breath of air, hold my breath, and repeat. There were a few times I had to exhale and breathe on my way back up, and the gag reflex was major; just a momentary whiff of what I was excavating was potentially lethal. Any bad human act – you name it; robbery, terror, murder, greed, vengeance - could be averted by the threat of having to smell this hellish concoction.
It took a while, but the job was completed. I might have imagined this, but I don’t think so, as the trash dumpster, containing the bags of crawl space sploojisma, emitted a fluorescent greenish glow from beneath its lid as it sat in our side yard, waiting patiently for the 2nd Tuesday of the month pick-up.
The puddinous spoosma collected, a layer of lime was deposited upon the crawl space floor, eliminating any of the remaining odors, and slaying the resident microbial villains that had been wrought from the no-longer festering foodsmegjisma.
I now live in Mississippi, and am fortunate to have a job with a large corporation. People often ask me “Why would you move from Colorado to Mississippi? Didn’t you love the restaurant business? Aren’t you sorry that you gave up your dream?”
Those are fair questions. If you want the real answer, please contact me at:
rwparadise.restaurantconsultant.com/hellportal
Be prepared to spend a Grand. I’ll save you a fortune.
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