Well folks, this shoot at Goldie’s Seafood Bar & Grill on the northern-ish tip of Canton, Baltimore, was almost as good as this slog in West Virginia, fortunately including free and luckily easy parking.
The premise of the shoot was looking pretty good on paper – nice 2PM appointment time, almost-a-full-menu kind of shoot at a place where base dishes just get sprinkled in protein topics that can typically turn 1 item into 4-5 on the checklist, and location (2112 Fleet St) is just above and past all the paid parking areas in Canton, so in theory this was to be a nice and easy-peasy kinda job. If only we lived in a corporate world where we could, have nice things….
I got into a little musical chaos of what looked like a group of school kids getting early dinner sitting about the bar in the front of the house and a bartender eventually greeted me and took be towards the kitchen to greet the owner who was slaving away at the fresh set of orders. The owner seemed to know about scheduling a giant photo shoot, and considering the sheer amount of food to be captured I set up in the back room despite almost complete lack of natural light (that I can handle perfectly fine, as you will see in a bit).
Quick rush of customers is entirely why the shoots have extra time padded into them, despite every venue getting an email to have everything ready 10 minutes prior to the appointment, but I feel like the lazy corpo reps just stopped mentioning that critical part of the deal entirely since I may have had a handful of recent shoots in the past 2-3 years that actually were prepared upon my arrival.
The rush goes by, all the while owner is sliding customer orders by me, one by one, and eventually says something along the lines of that will be the expectation and completely vacates the premises as does his only bartender/server after a little bit more of my precious time….
So an hour and fifteen minutes in and they barely had 10 unique plates pass me, our of about 3 more dozen to be covered, and I was starting to get pretty irked at the whole situation….
Hour and a half mark from appointment start comes around, and I’ve still barely seen dozen and a half of dishes since 99% of orders were between their penne containers with shrimp and smaller mash potato containers with nothing but chicken and/or shrimp for every order. Consistency is a good tell of what’s good to order, but for fuck’s sake it doesn’t help me reach my quota if nothing unique is nor cooked for the shoot as it is supposed to be nor is ordered by patrons……
While this slow boil in my veins is getting up to internal 165 degrees to be safe to blow the doors and be on my way, there’s absolutely nobody manning the front of the house and their bar. Some seemingly newer customers or perhaps those used to not seeing this place be almost completely dead towards 4pm were stumped that it was so. I had to mention that I don’t technically work there, and to go ahead towards the kitchen instead of semi-respectfully not yelling across like at Sunday market. Then I myself mentioned to the kitchen to please pick up the [damn] pace as I was there for close to 2 [goddamn] hours with next to no work to show for it……
I chose to just leave after another maybe 15 minutes of this absolute circus going on. There is no point in wasting more of my time waiting for more of the literally same orders being rolled through me bread crumb by bread crumb. Owner never showed back up, by the way, neither did anyone who should have been front of the house and honestly I was surprised that this places trusted their security cameras to literally be the only things to watch over their pretty nice bar for hours on end. Overall, there weren’t all that many orders flying out the kitchen either, though I would put this more on the after-lunch dead hours than anything else. The dead hours that are typically prime time to do something like a full menu shoot with peace and quiet from the hustle and bustle, were nowhere in sight at Goldie’s Bar that afternoon.
Food looked alright if I’m being honest, but the way this show was operating the rather long time I’ve spent there that day wasn’t a great sign of confidence, at least to me.
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