Bruce Buschel Ponders Restaurant Kleptomania

Bruce Buschel has already inflamed the ire of waiters and potential employees everywhere; today the blogging would-be Hamptons restaurateur returned to the Times' website to further endear himself to a certain portion of the restaurant industry.

Today's lesson: people steal.

"Lawlessness rules the restaurant demiworld," Buschel intones. "Wines have to be imprisoned. The walk-in refrigerator sports a padlock. The 25-year-old single malt scotches need their own armed guards."

Seventy-five percent of restaurant inventory shortages, Buschel has learned from the National Restaurant Association, are attributable to sticky-fingered employees. Various industry types have advised him to install security cameras everywhere and then watch the footage on his day off to see who's stealing what.

Buschel, however, doesn't want to sacrifice his Sundays -- which is just one of serveral nagging indications he may not be cut out for the restaurant business -- and instead vows to inject his restaurant with an element of consciousness-raising earnestness: "we will talk about the temptations, we will try to build an esprit de corps that aerates the thievery impulse, we will hire the best people we can and make the restaurant exciting enough that everyone can earn decent money."

And if that doesn't work? Forty-fives for the single malts.

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