Postcard from Plush Mills: Whose Table Is It Anyway?
Postcard from Plush Mills
Life inside a senior living community
The menu in the Plush Mills dining room is extensive and ever-changing. Photo: Ken Wright
When Plush Mills started 12 years ago, we had lousy food and great coffee. Every time the food service changed, we told the new guys, “You can fix the lousy food, but don’t touch the coffee!” They didn’t.
Now the food here is good. Sometimes it’s even great, especially since Frank, our executive chef, learned the new sous-vide system of cooking. With sous vide, you vacuum-seal the food in a bag, cook it in a water bath at a very low temperature for a long time, freeze it, and then, when you want to use it, just warm it to serving temperature. This way, we get hot food perfectly cooked every time.
There is an incredible variety of offerings. For dinner every night there are three special entrées. Often they are country or event themed — like an Italian Night, with three kinds of fancy pasta dishes — plus pasta e fagioli or vegetable soup, a special salad and two special vegetables on top of the eight or nine regular veggies. And every night we have “Plush Mill Favorites” — center-cut filet mignon, broiled salmon, plus seven more — not to mention the four dinner salads and desserts!
The dining room seats about 80, so it takes two seatings to get us all fed. It is a pretty room that, when set for dinner with white tablecloths and colored napkins, looks especially nice. The carpet and ceiling help keep the noise down, but if there is a festive party or lots of visitors, it can be loud. Dinner music is piped in, but honestly, you can’t really hear it.
The wait staff are mostly high school students, many from Strath Haven High School. For most of them, this is their first job. They don’t understand the nuances of working in a restaurant — not how to take an order, nor that you serve from the left and pick up from the right — but they make up for their inexperience by smiling and apologizing when they make a mistake. I think they feel like they are serving their grandparents, so they really try hard.
Sometimes, living in a place like Plush Mills is like living in a small town. Other times, it’s more like being in the junior high cafeteria. This is especially true at breakfast, when people line up 15 or 20 minutes before the doors open so they can get their favorite seat.
And as in junior high school, there can be problems.
The other day I met a new couple for breakfast and took them to the “wrong” table. A friend saw me and said, “You can’t sit there!”
“Why not?” I asked. “Management just wrote to everyone telling us that we can’t reserve tables. It’s first come, first served.”
To which she replied, “Tough. Mary, Millie and Gladys always sit there.”
Some residents eat in their rooms rather than risk making a mistake. One woman told me someone swore at her for sitting in the wrong place.
If we could just get our residents to be as kind to each other as the wait staff is to us.
What do you think? Should residents expect that a table they sit at every day is “their table”? Is there a better solution? Let me hear from you. A letter to the editor of the Swarthmorean, or a text message to me (610-653-2501), might help resolve this. OK? Thanks.
Ken Wright is a longtime resident of Swarthmore. He has lived in four different houses in the borough, and now he resides just over the town line at Plush Mills.
