Yep. Fried fish was nothing compared to the really good stuff. Seafood tempura, stuffed shrimp, shrimp etoufee, grilled catfish with dill sauce, Grilled Haddock with provencale sauce. Provencale sauce included wine. Speaking of cooking with wine, Burgundy Beef Ragout, and sautéed mushrooms. Other favorites included chicken livers topped with French dressing and onions, and the occasional USDA choice ribeye steak. I didn't care much for our filet. Luby's Special Chopped steak was served only by the Walzem Road location in SA. Mr. Copeland at Walzem Road was the strangest of all managers I worked for.
We bought two kinds of wine, both by the gallon. Sherry and Burgundy.
Two of my favorites to cook and eat were stuffed baked potatoes and soft beef tacos. I developed and made other varieties of stuffed baked potatoes, using leftover spinach and leftover mushrooms. I liked the spinach in the stuffed baked potatoes, but there wasn't a whole lot I didn't like to eat.
My all-time favorite dessert to eat that I never cooked was the eclair, stuffed with cream filling and topped with chocolate sauce. Was only served at store openings. "The crew" consisted of the ladies who traveled to all new stores and showed new employees how to cook. I got to work at a new store opening in SA one year and that is when I tasted that eclair.
I had to learn to cook basically everything else.
One time we had an asst mgr. meeting and were challenged to come up with a new food item, so I took a standard lemon cake recipe and asked the pastry lady to top it with cream cheese filling instead of the usual lemon drizzle. beyond delicious!
I developed a couple of kinds of entrees, my favorite being chicken-fried ribeye. I took a leftover ribeye steak, ran it through the tenderizer, battered it with the usual, flour, batter, crushed crackers, and deep fried it. Delicious does not begin to describe the taste.
Imagine you are a late 20s single man working around made from scratch food 14.5 hours per day, with no energy left at the end of a shift to exercise. Some locations, especially in San Antonio, senior mgrs. let everyone stop down for breakfast about 9:30 or so....some of the best breakfast tacos ever.
When I started in 92 I probably weighed 180 pounds and left in 2001, only weighing about 217. I can promise you, about 90% of managers who worked that length of time gained a similar amount of weight.