Royal Fork Buffet was my first “official” job when I was sixteen. Jerry Caven started the chain in 1967 in Idaho, and they had several locations in the Denver metro area. There were two in Lakewood—one on West Colfax and one on Alameda. I worked at the West Colfax location, starting as a busboy for $1.35 an hour. The store had specific standards for everything, including how a bus tub should be organized for the dishwashers. There are plenty of stories from my time there, but for now, I want to focus on my rise through the ranks, the different roles I worked, and what I learned.
There were seven different areas in the restaurant: hot cook, salad cook, dishwasher, line runner, carver, hostess/cashier, and busboy. Over the years, working in four different locations, I had the chance to learn every position. I worked at the West Colfax, East Colfax, Alameda, and Greeley stores, eventually moving up to assistant manager. I enjoyed my time with the company, and I have some interesting stories to share. The first involves my time in the salad department.
Royal Fork had an “old-school” view of job roles, and the salad department was traditionally considered a “women’s job.” It was rare for a man to work in that section. Since I wanted to learn all the departments, I requested shifts in the salad area. There was a nuance to preparing salads correctly—it was a learning experience. Unlike hot foods, which were more straightforward, salads required a delicate touch.
One of my first tasks was making salad dressing. We made all of them from scratch in large bins, and they had to last for a few days. My first assignment was to make Thousand Island dressing. I followed the recipe and used a large paddle to mix everything together. Once done, the paddle was sent to the dish room to be cleaned. However, we needed to make Blue Cheese dressing right away, and the paddle hadn’t been washed yet. The person training me had a “technique” for this situation—she plunged her bare hand into the dressing and mixed it by hand. She insisted I do the same so I could learn the right consistency. It’s been fifty years, and I haven’t touched Blue Cheese dressing since.
The following week, I was trusted with making the potato salad. This turned into a hard lesson in knife skills—and a little unintentional cannibalism. The potatoes were boiled, drained, and left to cool for a few minutes before I was tasked with dicing them. You can probably guess where this is going. I was young and inexperienced with a knife, especially when it came to controlling my fingers while holding food. I wanted to make that last cut, and in doing so, I sliced off the tip of my middle finger. It was a clean cut, and it took a few seconds before the bleeding started.
I quickly bandaged my hand, and to this day, that part of my finger never fully grew back, leaving it looking a little stubby. Now, here’s where the story gets a little creepy—or gross, depending on your perspective. With my finger freshly bandaged, I returned to my workstation, only to be asked by my boss how long the salad would take since we were running low. I searched everywhere, but I couldn’t find the missing fingertip. Maybe it flew when I pulled my hand back, but I doubt it. Then came a monumental decision: Do I scrap the entire batch of potato salad, or do I just move forward? Being a teenager who didn’t want to get yelled at, the choice was easy.
Looking back with fifty years of life experience, I might have made a different decision. At the time, I never told anyone at the restaurant, and I’ve only shared this story with a couple of people over the years. But I figured it was finally time to come clean.