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This is the Civic Media Spotlight.
Hello and welcome to the second hour of the Civic Media Spotlight.
In this hour, we move to Night Light with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach.
Pete and Greg are joined by Stefan Petry and Julia Colby.
from the Milwaukee Public Museum to talk about some of the museum's biggest upcoming events.
They preview MPM's greatest hit lineup, including Creepy Crawley Day, in the celebration of the museum's beloved rainforest and butterflies.
Welcome back to Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach here on the Civic Media Radio Network.
You can always get in touch 855-752-4842, 855-755-CIVIC.
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Let us know your thoughts on our question of the night.
It's National Crouton Day.
What's your favorite salad?
topping, not just dressing, but topping.
So let us know while you're doing that, we're going to get to our first guests for the evening.
Very excited to have them here from the Milwaukee public museum.
Julia Colby is the zoology collections manager and Steven Petrie is the informal education coordinator here to talk about all the great things happening at the museum.
Good afternoon slash evening folks.
How are you all
doing?
Excellent, excellent.
Thank you so much for being here on the show this evening.
Well, there's a lot going on at the Milwaukee Public Museum, but we're here to talk about specifically the BioBlitz that's happening next month.
Why don't you let the folks know what's going on with the BioBlitz, the event itself, and what they can expect to see?
Yeah, so the BioBlitz is a super fun event.
It is the 12th and 13th of June.
There's public programming on the 13th.
It is fun.
It is...
great for people of all ages, and probably best of all, it is free.
So just come on down.
We'll have nature walks, IDs.
You can talk to the scientists and see what they've found.
They will have been there since Friday, surveying.
And at the end of that time, the scientists are out in the field.
Finding species and putting names on them will announce what we found.
And it's a really fun time for all sorts of folks.
Excellent.
That's so great.
Steven, you're the informal education coordinator, as Greg just mentioned.
Tell us a little bit about your duties and how important education is from a museum.
I mean, it's so great that we have such a great museum in Milwaukee and many others as well, but this one in particular puts kids in touch with history and all the great exhibits you guys have.
What is your connection or liaison between education and the facility itself?
Of course.
Thanks for asking the question.
So my job
Education takes a lot of forms in our everyday life and certainly at the museum.
And so we have my counterpart.
We were joking about this earlier.
We do have a formal education coordinator.
He does the like formal school programming.
So if you sign up officially for a program, we have.
programs that way, but also we just love when people come to our museum and have an opportunity to learn something from someone on the floors.
And so that's what I specifically oversee and help coordinate is if you ever come to the museum and you find an educator, a docent, someone else that is included free with a mission to just tell you something cool, to have some hands-on activity, those are the types of things that we try and bring to the fore.
And we have
a lot of it going on throughout the week, but especially try and do it big on certain days.
And the next one coming up is going to be our big theme day called Creepy Crawley Day on Saturday, June 6th from 11 to three, where we'll have, I think it's about 10 stations on the floors.
You can interact with live insects.
You can learn a little bit about our littlest neighbors around us, what makes them special, what makes them important to us, how we can take care of them.
And you can also try and eat
live bugs or not live bugs.
You can try and eat real bugs yourself as a sustainable source of protein.
I'll pass
on that.
Interesting as it sounds.
Julia, you are the zoology collections manager.
What is like, when I first saw collections, my first brain went to like, wait, what, like deadbeat zoologist, but no, what do you do in your job there at the museum as far as like being the collections manager?
So I think we're all familiar with the museum floors.
There's a lot of
specimens on those museum floors behind the scenes we have four million specimens and objects that are in storage so think of it sort of like a you know an archive or a special collections library where you don't necessarily need to get at all of those things all the time but it's important that they're there when you do need them so my role I manage about half of that collection or half of that total of two million
or four million specimens.
I've got about two million of those in my collection, so I'm in charge of making sure that they're housed correctly and cared for.
I manage use, so when scientists or researchers or artists or students want to come in and answer a research question or use the material in some way, I help coordinate that.
And then all of those specimens, they're important because they're specimens, but they're important because there's data.
with them, like where it was collected and who collected it and when they were collected.
And so I helped manage that data as well to get that data as accessible as possible to as many people as possible.
Excellent.
That's so great.
Let's jump back to Creepy Crawley Day if you can just for a minute.
It's Saturday, June 6th.
It says the finale.
Is this a series and how popular
Like when kids go there, Steven, when they come to the museum, are they excited to interact with bugs and creepy crawly day?
Or what is, tell us a little bit more about this and how interactive it is.
Sure.
So why it says it's the finale is because this is the finale of one of what we've been calling our greatest hits.
So as we all know, Milwaukee Public Museum, it's going to be closing at the end of this year.
Still plenty of time to come in and say your goodbyes or hellos.
three or four or five times before you finally say goodbye but throughout about every other month we've been highlighting one of the really special topics and exhibits that make this museum this place feels special and so this is our third one it's wrapping it up on the rainforest butterflies and of course all the creepy crawly things with us so right now we're diving deep into the bugs it's a perfect time
to do it spring.
In the past we've covered kind of the ancient world, we focused on our great dioramas, but we still also have more to come later in the summer.
We'll be focusing all on dinosaurs, all on ancient life, and then we'll be closing it off in the fall with a really deep dive into the streets of Old Milwaukee and European Village.
And so this one I'm really excited for, this one's one of my favorite.
We've actually been doing Creepy Crawley Day for a couple of years and it's just so much fun to have
extra life here, not just because there's so many people here bringing that excitement, but also because we get to bring out live bugs, which we get to see a lot, but we don't get to do every
day.
If you're just joining us, we are talking to Steven Petrie and Julia Colby of the Milwaukee Public Museum, discussing the BioBlitz events as well as the Creepy Crawley event.
As far as Julia, as far as the BioBlitz event goes, you know, what are the things that like, because it's a 24 hour celebration, what are the things that people really look forward to in that specific event?
So a lot of the surveyors who are there for the 24 hours really welcome the chance to sort of put their day jobs aside and go out and do the thing they love, which is looking at the natural world.
A lot of them really love sharing information with the public.
So on Saturday, they're at We're a Nature Center, you know, you can come up and talk to them and they'll show you what they found and how they identified it.
The public, I think, really likes a chance to look at the natural world in a new way.
because, you know, you can walk through the woods and not see anything.
And if somebody goes along with you and says, oh, that's, you know, this kind of warbler or this kind of tree, like that gives you a whole new perspective on often nature that's a park that is in your own backyard that you go to all the time.
But just to piggyback on what Greg said, Julia, what are, you know, this is a, it says celebrating Wisconsin species and, you know, biodiversity.
What do we see in Wisconsin?
Like what are some of the big draws and how do they mix together like that?
Yeah, so that's one of those things that like we think about diversity.
We think about like a tropical rainforest and it's oh it's so diverse and it's so exotic but there's so much biodiversity in your own backyard.
Like a couple years ago we have a surveyor who studies algae and there is a species of algae that only lives on snapping turtles.
which I didn't know.
And so there's all these little tiny things, like there's the big things that you're used to, like deer and turkeys and maple trees, but then there's all these other little things that you've never considered and they're all so important for the way you live your life and the things you do for fun and the water that you drink and the air that you breathe.
And understanding a little bit more about those makes you much more inclined to do something about them.
And I can just add in here too, as an educator,
fortunate enough that oftentimes we get to participate in the education day at BioBlitz, which is specifically the Saturday component of it.
And in between people coming up and asking questions and doing the activities, one of my favorite things is to just sit and have a chance to talk to the scientists in the field and learn all about these little tidbits.
I know they love talking about it, so I'm not going to
say I
don't like them, but there was a one year, a couple of years ago that I got to sit next to our butterfly wing supervisor,
ask him all the questions about the butterflies and I wash away with such a deeper appreciation of that life that you see a butterfly and you're like, oh, that's pretty, but actually understanding what it's doing here is really something that's special about getting to interact directly with
scientists.
to ask you both was the fact that you work at the Milwaukee Public Museum.
You're both experts in your field.
You have your day-to-day.
You come to work with your lunch.
You've got your work to do.
But as you just said, Julia, there are folks there who work there, but they also love being in nature.
For both of you, what is something that is just a mind-blowing fact you learn from the museum that you share in this?
As a person who works there every day still surprises you and gets you excited to be doing the work you're doing.
Julia, we can start with you.
Yeah, I mean, so part of my job is obviously a lot of hands-on care of the specimens that we have in our collections.
And every day that I get to do that, it is just a gift to see the diversity of life on Earth.
And there's always something that I'm sure I've seen it before, but I've never really thought about it.
And just seeing that diversity of the things that I really enjoy,
is to me great.
And if that's like, if I ever come in and I'm like, oh, geez, it's just another day dealing with owls.
That's the time that I need to leave, you know, I need to get a
different job.
I say that every day.
Yeah.
But
like, they're always, it's always exciting and it's always new to me.
Stephen, what about you?
I mean, that's such a difficult question to answer.
It's one of those things that it does.
Sometimes you have to just take a pause and
realize
how awesome the place you work at is because I mean Sometimes some days it's a desk job.
I know yesterday.
I had a bunch of meetings.
I didn't get to walk around the museum floors I wasn't teaching that day But then if you just get five ten minutes to walk around and be like, oh I get to work
around all of this history and just like my today today is I get to walk by and look at something that's 400 million years old and just appreciate that's what the world actually used to look like here in Wisconsin and I have to say like personally big nerd about the Solarian period have a Solarian tattoo favorite exhibit so excited also that it's going to be represented in so much bigger weight in the future museum.
I'm kind of envious that both of you work there and I think it would be a really cool gig
if I actually knew stuff.
I'm probably referring people to you guys, but it seems like such a great environment.
Let me ask you this, we have about a minute and a half or so before we have to do a break and then we'll continue our conversation with Steven Petrie and Julia Colby.
from the Milwaukee Public Museum, but what are some of the times to go there?
I love kids, I have kids, but if you're an adult and wanna just immerse yourself in the museum, when is the best time to go when it's not volume 10 and there's kids running everywhere as joyous as that is?
I would say, I mean, especially as people are appreciating it on our last year, it does get pretty busy.
If you are an adult looking for a little bit calmer time, I would stay any time after 3pm.
The school groups are going to start leaving for the day.
A lot of the kids are going home for their naps.
And so there's still probably going to be people here.
You're still rowing
the
dice.
It's
a pretty
popular place.
But especially if you want to enjoy a little bit calmer atmosphere, I'd say mid to late afternoon.
There
you go.
All right, we're going to, uh, Julie, I want to get your thoughts on this as well.
You may, you may have a time that we, we, uh, we don't know about secret time.
We don't know about, but we're going to talk more about that on the other side of the break.
We are talking with Julia Colby.
She is the zoology collections manager and Steven Petra.
He's the informal education coordinator from the Milwaukee public museum.
Don't go anywhere you are listening to and or watching nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach here on the civic media network.
Stay tuned and stay close.
You're listening to Civic Media.
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Visit civicmedia.us slash email to get started.
Welcome back to Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach here on the Civic Media Network.
As always, get in touch 855-752-4842-855-755 Civic.
The question of the night, it's it's National Cruton Day.
What is your favorite salad topping?
Let us know.
And coming up in the second hour, we'll be speaking with Adam Reiner, who's a James Beard winning award-winning food journalist, talking about his new book and
the new rules behind dining.
So stick around for that.
But right now we are continuing our conversation with our folks, our friends from the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Stephen Petrie, he is the informal education coordinator and Julia Colby is the zoology collections manager at the museum.
And as you mentioned, Stephen before, and this is open to whomever would like to answer, but it's your last year here at that current location, you will be moving and opening up in 2027.
And you have your greatest hits exhibits going on, but what else is happening in these last few months at this historic location for the Milwaukee Public Museum?
I mean, in addition to our greatest hits, we...
in between have all the same kind of great programming that our regular visitors have come to love and expect.
So we'll be celebrating things all throughout the summer.
When we get into fall, before we kick off our streets in European Village, Greatest Hit, we'll be doing a lot of programming for Hispanic Heritage Month, for LGBTQ History Month, and then of course in November, we'll be doing a whole showcase of so much programming for Native American History Month.
Wonderful.
That is so great.
I always thought it'd be cool to live on the old time Milwaukee Street, kind of like Walt Disney did at Disneyland.
He had an apartment apparently over the firehouse.
It just seems like a cool place.
Tell us a little bit about, this sounds really cool to me, an event you guys have coming up on May 28th, Adult Trivia Night, Rainforest and Butterflies Edition.
So the bad news about that event
is
if you really wanted to come and you didn't buy your tickets, it is already sold out.
It
is going to be a great night and I will put a plug in there.
While this one, if you didn't buy your tickets already,
I'm sorry, you're out of luck.
There will be a family trivia night about dinosaurs doing our dinosaur greatest hit.
And, you know, if that one sells out too, maybe look forward to another trivia.
Can't promise anything.
But those are always fun nights where we have themed trivia kind of highlighting one specific talk, but also bringing in all of the different facets of our museum.
And some are a little bit easier, but, you know, it's trivia.
We're trying to stop people and have you
having a good time, but also leaving learning something.
Will there be scalpers outside?
Can we squirt some tickets that way?
I don't know if we would allow that, but you know, if it's far enough away, it's out of sight, out of mind.
Okay, good to
know.
Julie, besides the Bioblitz events coming up next month, is there anything that you're looking forward to specifically in these last few months at that location before you move?
Oh gosh, that's a tough question.
I ask
all the tough questions.
I am such a journal manager.
He's trying to make you cry.
He wants to be Barbara
Walters, Julie.
I mean, most of my job, aside from Bioblitz, which is very public facing, is behind the scenes.
And so right now, my time is almost exclusively devoted to the move.
So that's what is often not very visible change, but that's what I'm really doing.
Honestly, she might not even realize when we close the doors because she's going to be too busy moving all of these great things.
Yeah, there's just a
lobby in here.
It's
fine.
Is it like when you move to another apartment, you have to call your friends up and be like, hey, guys, can you come on out and just get all the trivia?
People are like, hi, you got to help us move for an hour before we start trivia, but it'll be fine.
It's sort of, yeah.
I mean, we've hired a huge crew of really talented folks to help with the move.
And so it's basically, you know, all of our friends have come to help put things in boxes very, very carefully.
You're off the hook, Dom.
So we want to, I want to ask you guys, we have, you know, a couple of minutes left.
Tell us about the planetarium and any, any fun films that you guys will be showing at the theater right there in house.
That sounds fun.
So that one, I don't know all of the specifics because unfortunately for me, I love the idea of the planetarium.
I get motion sick, so I
don't
get to
love the shows myself.
I do know that whenever we get to our graze hits, especially for the dino days of summer, you can expect a lot of new, but also some returning favorites of our dinosaur movies coming up.
So if you want to see dinosaurs on the big screen, they don't make screens bigger than ours.
That's awesome.
I will also say that we have a special show that I think will be opening maybe exclusively in the new building, but it's made in-house.
by us, by our staff, called Wisconsin Wonders, Landsky and People, all about Wisconsin, because a new museum is very, you know, Wisconsin-centric, and the architecture especially was inspired by Wisconsin, so it's sort of a tour of the state.
And I've seen little snippets of it, and it looks really cool.
And that'll be opening up in the new location?
I believe so.
I think we had some footage shown for Inside Out, but I believe it will open in the new museum.
So hey, maybe if you ask about it enough, there might be more sneak peeks.
Yeah, that'll do it.
So
bug the people.
No, that's a pun.
Badger.
No, that's also a pun.
All right, just bother them a lot.
All right.
We only have a couple of minutes left here.
Really quick before we get on it.
What is so, you know, I don't know if we'll talk to you before the move, but what are the last things you want to talk about before we get on out of here about the museum, about what you have left to do for the rest of the year?
And just, you know, I want you to gush for the museum because I know how much you love it.
I mean, that is very true.
I mean, both Steven and I are huge museum fans.
Yeah, just a little bit.
I think reminding folks that we have a lot of great programming and events and we're still here and we're still open.
Obviously, I'm going to plug the Bioblitz again because that's a huge thing for me.
We're going to be at Wear Nature Center.
We're so excited to be there because our partners at Wear are fantastic.
There's going to be so much fun stuff to do on Saturday.
And I think I mentioned this earlier, but it's free and that matters.
That does matter a lot.
I would just add as one last plug it's always great to come down to the museum but also if you haven't seen it already
Take a look at all of the cool new merch that they're plugging in the gift shop.
They are really going out
of their way to get the best t-shirts I have ever seen.
So, you know, Walkie Public Museum, we got some time left, and you have some time to represent your love of this building in the community.
I certainly hope your bosses are listening to that plug for merchandise.
My goodness gracious.
I'm so there.
I can't wait.
I cannot wait to get there before you guys close out and move.
But that has been Julia Colby, Zoology Collections Manager, and Steven Petrie, the informal education coordinator from the Milwaukee Public Museum.
Guys, thank you so much for being here so much.
Have fun over the next few months.
We'll get on out there and have a great time with you.
But thank you so much for being here tonight.
Thanks for having
us.
Thanks for having
us.
Thanks.
All right.
On the other side of the break, after the news, Adam Reiner, James Beard award-winning food journalist, will be here talking about his new book.
So you don't want to miss that.
Plus, we'll be talking about the question of the night, which is, what is your favorite salad topping?
So don't go anywhere.
You are listening and or watching Night Light with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach on the Civic Media Network.
Next on Night Light with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach, they talk to James Beard award-winning food journalist, Adam Reiner, to talk about his new book, The New Rules of Dining Out.
They talk about restaurant etiquette, tipping culture, and how people eat out differently today.
Welcome back!
This is Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach.
So great to have you with us on this Wednesday night as we talk about all the things in life that make us happy and right now it's food.
And restauranting.
I just made up a verb there.
Our guest at the moment is Adam Reiner.
He is a James Beard award-winning food journalist and author of The New Rules of Dining Out.
That's right, folks.
There is an etiquette to this.
And Adam is here to steer us in the right direction.
I have to ask you, my wife sometimes will say, like, we'll be at a pretty decent restaurant.
And she'll say, why don't we just split something?
And if I were a waiter, that would drive me bananas.
Is that okay to do?
Sure, why not?
I think it depends like if it depends how you're doing it, how you're asking about it.
You know, I think most people that work in restaurants, they just want to make you happy.
They just want you to leave happy.
So I think that there's a little bit of a misconception about like restaurant staff, these like urban myths about
You know how the chef is gonna like taint your food if you if you're if you send it back like In most busy restaurants these people don't have time to to to like Play these play out these grudges against you.
Yeah,
they just want you to enjoy yourself
That's a relief, you know
And so like I think when it comes to sharing like if you're okay with the food just coming with like some share plates That's fine when I think it becomes like Overstepping is when you're like, can you
played in on two plates for me, but could you put like only the sauce on one of the plates?
You know, where it's like, you're being lazy, or you expect special treatment.
And so I don't think that anything basic like that really bothers a server, assuming that they're not having a terrible night, as long as you ask for it in a way that's respectful.
I don't mind having all my
nachos belgrande on one plate.
That's fine.
I think that in my book, like the kind of basis of a lot of what I'm talking about is really just about communication.
And, and that's something where I feel like it breaks down a little bit for some people in restaurants where they just don't know how to find the right language to say what they're looking for.
And I think that once you work a day in a restaurant in your life, it kind of changes your whole worldview about
what it takes to make that hospitality magic happen.
And so for people that have never had that experience before, it's sort of understandable why they wouldn't know how to send food back.
Like, you know, sending food back is a really hard thing because a lot of people, they always say the same thing.
They're like, I never do this before.
I've never done this before.
Or I'm not this, I'm not that type of person.
It's like, well, clearly you are that type of person.
But even so, like you don't really have to preface it with apologies if you're unhappy with the experience.
And that's why I think in the book, there's an entire chapter that's titled Managing Disappointing Experiences.
Like, you know, we need to understand as as restaurant guests that
we can have bad experiences in great restaurants and we can have great experiences in bad restaurants.
Like ultimately we are the constant variable in those situations and we ultimately decide if we leave unhappy or not.
Like even if like everything goes wrong and the plates are flying and your food hits the floor, the servers are rude or whatever, you can still enjoy your company and have a good time.
I've seen this happen like where things melt down and people just realize that
You know, it happens one out of every 50 situations in a great restaurant might go bad.
If you got that night, it stinks when it happens, but it isn't the end of the world.
You know, you can make the best out of it.
So I think that going into it with the right attitude, I think is really important too.
And that, you know, leads me to a question here about modern day in 2026.
We are, you know,
We are five years out from the world being out in the world, not including the lockdown, but there's a whole new attitude.
We have social media, people online filming their experiences, whether they're good, bad, they want clicks, they're hoping it's bad so they can make a million dollars.
But what are the conversations you were hearing, Adam, with restaurant owners, servers, and even customers in a post-COVID world when it comes to the experience?
attitude and this this notion folks have that I'm here so I deserve the best and if I don't get it well I will ruin you because I have the internet.
That always reminds me of the South Park episode when Cartman's an elite Yelper.
Have you ever seen that?
Yes You know, I'm actually reporting a big story right now That's about the restaurant economy and and I can tell you just from a lot of these conversations with people restaurant owners Operators chefs from all over the country things are really really bad right now like I don't understand why there's this kind of disconnect between when
people go to the grocery store and they see how expensive a bag of groceries is today, and yet they go to a restaurant and when it's pricey, they sometimes can't sort of like separate those two.
Like they get more upset when the restaurant is expensive than they do when basic necessities like gas and groceries are expensive.
But I think that with the technology part, I just want to add that that becomes an obstacle to connection.
in a restaurant and so like when you're a server and you walk over to table and greet them and say hello welcome to the restaurant thanks for coming blah blah blah and the person says uh could i get your wi-fi password like that immediately kills the vibe and it immediately sends the message to the server like dinner is a secondary like priority for you
which is a really negative thing.
And I understand sometimes people want to post videos and all that stuff, but restaurants are like the ultimate analog experience, you know, like they're, they're a restaurant is never going to get better by having multimedia technology going on.
It's the type of place where you need to set all that stuff aside and switch it off.
And when you're not doing that, then you're making life a lot harder for the people serving you.
But I think that with the restaurant economy struggling right now, I feel like this is the most important time for people to really double down and be better guests than they have been in the past.
These restaurants really need that support.
They need you to buy a gift card during the holidays that
maybe someone, it'll help to, you know, keep them busy in January and February.
You know, to sit down at the bar on a Monday night at five o'clock when they open and order a glass of wine and a pasta.
Like, it's, it's those, those dead times early and late that are the ones that are the hardest to, to fill.
And without a doubt, post COVID, things have changed.
Dining habits have changed.
Everybody's door dashing all the time.
People don't stay out as late.
People aren't, you've heard all the narratives, I'm sure people aren't drinking as much alcohol because they're, you know,
doing cannabis, you know, things or whatever it is, it's not helping the restaurants in terms of their sales.
And then on top of that, behind the scenes, they have issues like immigration and tariffs and food cost rising and labor cost rising.
So it's really kind of a perfect storm right now for restaurants that is not, it's not a healthy situation.
Boy, that's a great point.
Our guest is Adam Reiner.
He is a James Beard award-winning food journalist and the author of The New Rules of Dining Out.
It is a great read, folks.
One of our listeners, our regular listeners, also weighted tables, John Murray from Madison.
He wants to know if 20% is an acceptable tip in the mind of today's waiter.
And he also calls you his favorite guest of all time on the show, Adam.
So there you go.
I'm honored.
I'm honored.
Thank you.
I think 20% is great.
And, you know, I think that 18% to me is still kind of a baseline.
You know, the one thing I will say about tipping is that
It's really important for people to divorce the idea that tipping should be either a reward or a punishment.
You should never, what we in the industry call stiff your waiter.
Do not ever stiff your waiter, meaning leaving zero tip.
If you have the worst experience of your life, you still should never leave zero tip.
There's a whole team of people that are involved that may not have dropped the ball the way that the server that you want to punish did.
So leave a proper tip, let's say 15%.
Then the following day,
I recommend if you still feel like you, you know, aggrieved, call the restaurant, talk to the manager, send them an email, lay out the case for why you were disappointed and give them a chance to make it right.
But it doesn't do any good to just like.
Give somebody a bad tip ruin their day, you know hurt their income You never know what's going on in a restaurant behind the scenes Somebody might have gotten into an accident on the way to work and so they were short staffed They could have missed a delivery one of the piece of equipment in the kitchen might have broken down like again These are one this could happen one day in the 50 days that you could possibly have gone there You just happened to go that night and it's unfortunate But it doesn't mean that they can't invite you back and do some nice things for you and reclaim the situation but if you
don't express it in a healthy way.
You're never going to get
that.
I just had this conversation at a restaurant this past weekend with some friends and they, and one of the people said, you know, I leave a very low tip or I don't leave a tip as a way to tell them what I think.
And I said, yeah, that doesn't really work though, because you don't know the situation, what you just said, Adam.
And also a lot of these folks are making like
to 30 an hour.
So when you don't give them a tip, you're also taken away from their general liability.
And this is how they pay their bills.
There are other ways to approach it, but this is not the way to do it.
You're not, you are not the grand teacher by saying, well, I'm going to give you
$10 instead of $15.
You've done nothing.
You've just made them more upset and made you look bad.
So... 100%.
100%.
And just to clarify too, because I think sometimes people really just don't understand what's behind the tipping.
As you said, the base minimum wage on the federal level is $2.13 an hour.
But just to be clear, they call that the tip credit.
It doesn't mean that the restaurant owner has the right to
underpay their staff, it means that your tips make up the difference between that 213 and the minimum wage.
So if the server doesn't make it all the way to that minimum wage, then the owner should have to pay the difference.
So you're basically subsidizing their salary.
And when you don't hold up your end of the bargain,
In my opinion, you're taking advantage of a system that artificially lowers prices based predicated on the fact that they can have a team of people that's making less than minimum wage.
Now, not all states are 213 an hour.
Many of them have gone up and some of the states are trying to raise it to a point where it's almost to the the minimum wage of those states.
So in some cases, like on the West Coast, you have a lot of places where the tip minimum is 15 or $17.
So it's it's not low.
But ultimately, when you're dining out, you're participating in an economy with tipping that, again, all of the menu prices are predicated on the fact that the owner is allowed legally to pay a base-level wage to front-of-house employees that is less than minimum.
Adam, we have about a minute and a half or so left.
There's something I noticed about this book, and I don't know if this is intentional or not, but
It seems to be just this nice message about community and treating others as you want to be treated almost to make a successful restaurant visit or have a great food experience.
Was that at all intentional?
Yeah, I think so.
I mean restaurants are community You know that the end of the book the post script kind of is a little bit of a I think a word of warning and a cautionary tale for people to understand like if you want your communities filled with these like vibrant places that are Gathering spots for your families and your special occasions.
You need to respect that You know when I was a kid anyway, and there was like little league teams and things like that the local restaurants were always the places that were sponsoring the little league teams I'm sure it's still that way now.
Yeah, they're not sponsored by Chipotle
So if you want to have a community filled with noodles and co, and whatever, then keep spending your money there.
But if you want to have those places that really have character, that serve the types of regional cuisine that you might find in Wisconsin, some good bratwurst and cheese curds, you better go out there and spend your money at those places because they're not going to exist anymore.
The game is rigged against them right now.
So ultimately, we as consumers, we decide
What our dining landscape looks like and it's always a reflection of us and our purchasing habits
Wow Yeah, great stuff amazing fun and incredibly informative So thank you so much.
You guys have a candidate for governor.
That's it was a former restaurant employee, right Francesca Hong Yes, indeed if you want to clean up if you want to clean up your your government puts to put a restaurant worker in All right, that's my final answer
There you go.
That's awesome.
Check out the new rules of dining out folks.
A great read and very insightful.
Thank you so much for your time tonight, Adam Reiner.
Let's do this again sometime.
It was my pleasure.
Thanks guys.
All right.
This is Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach.
We are coming back for the nightcap on the Civic Media
Network.
You're listening to Civic Media.
Find the latest news, information, and archives of all your favorite shows on the Civic Media website, civicmedia.us.
It's time to wind it down.
Let's take a moment to look back and ask, what did we learn today?
This is Nightcap with Greg and Pete.
Welcome back to Nightlight with Pete Schwabba and Greg Bach here on the Civic Media Network.
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Tonight's question is, what is your favorite salad topic in honor of National Cruton Day?
And I would say in honor of our conversation
with
Adam Reiner, too.
He was fantastic.
If you missed any of the show, folks, go to civicmedia.us slash shows.
Look for Nightlight.
download episodes, take them wherever you'd like, and catch on up.
And as always, you can listen to us.
You can get in touch with us, be the Civic Media app.
If you don't have it, download it today.
It's app, absolutely free.
So tomorrow's show, it's going to be a banger, my friends.
We're going to be talking to Steve Glenn from Experience Milwaukee.
He'll be discussing the misunderstood points of data centers and the tech sector in Wisconsin.
And then in the second hour, Oh Mother Glory.
It's time to get into the nightlight movie club where we're where we will be talking about the classic.
I would say the godfather of spoof comedy airplane.
It's going to be
great.
It's kind of beyond the classic.
Like, you know, a classic is, I don't know, like,
to me, it's
world or something.
But this is a all time.
It's a textbook.
The
movie's a textbook really when it comes down to it, but we'll be talking more about that tomorrow in the second hour.
So please come on back.
We'll be here.
Same time as always, five to eight, five to seven.
Oh my gosh, almost made us three hour show.
But that'll be tomorrow.
So please come on by, stick around, have fun.
And let's get into the nightcap right now.
We're going to get to some more of these text messages and Facebook messages about our question of the night and about what's on people's minds.
Dom, what is on
The text line right now.
We got a few more.
We got Nick texting in on WMDX says homemade croutons are the best.
Maple Tree Supper Club has really good croutons or croutons and they seem like they're homemade because my mom had made some in the past and they kind of tasted similar.
There we
go.
Oh nice.
Alright.
He's the guy that does the homemade bacon bits too.
Nick is loving this salad question.
I love it.
We have Karen.
He's like,
finally a question just for me.
Yeah.
Karen, Texana, and WAUK says smoke salmon in peas with blue cheese crumbles.
Oh man.
Just get better than that.
Wait, say that one more time?
That was what?
Smoke
salmon in peas with blue cheese crumbles.
I don't hate that.
I'm not a big fan of peas, not for any other reason why I just feel like they're useless.
But good for you, dude.
Are they fiber?
Oh, yeah.
Okay.
My mom used to put him in tuna salad when I was a kid.
It was always tuna salad.
Yeah, absolutely.
And I just want to say thank you to John and Madison listening on WMDX for all the great texts regarding our conversation with Adam.
I think that was a great talk.
I really, really enjoyed that discussion with him.
So did he have anything else to say?
Do we miss anything
else?
He said I always overtip no matter what happens.
I like to make up for that bad customer that burned my waiter.
Okay.
I kind
of do
too, unless they're completely jerky.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm with John.
I almost always like, if 20% is like the average, I always give like 25, 30, especially breakfast servers.
I always go overboard on breakfast, sir.
Cause that's a crazy time of day.
And especially, and not only that Greg, but like especially if you, if your bill is 20 bucks or 16 bucks
or
whatever, 25, the difference between 20% and 25%, sometimes it's like 75 cents,
you know, or whatever.
It's, it's just worth it.
Absolutely.
What do we got on the faché book?
We got three more here.
Mary Piccourney, Donlan, my producer at PBS for Directors Cut and the POV and Independent Lens Opens Love, Mary.
She says French dressing and then made a puke emoji.
Oh, wow.
She's laying it out there.
She's not in Flavor
Country.
She loves it so much she gets sick.
I got it.
Got it.
She can't handle it.
She
can't
handle it.
Matt Harper in Green Bay Rock Rap Artist says hot bacon dressing from Rivers Bend's Supper Club.
Okay, thank you Matt.
Hope you're well, buddy.
We've got a couple more here at Jenny brand our civic media colleague says eggs exclamation point especially if you swap it for the chicken and a Caesar salad Okay, and then thank you Jenny and then Chris Anderson my old pal says I Gorgonzola
Yeah,
I
forgot about Gorgonzola when the cheese is right.
It's great when the cheese is right on my Facebook page We got a few more my friend Katie says feta
Pickled onions and all olives.
All right.
Well, that sounds more less like
a
salad than just, you know, those three things.
Bill says shredded cheese, Melissa K, our buddy up north and works for Subangina.
She says cottage cheese.
I always put cottage cheese on the side.
I don't put it on the salad.
I want that separate.
That's.
Excuse me.
Nikki says Caesar style.
So croutons, Parmesan cheese, Italian dressing.
By the way, it's pronounced croutons, but I like saying croutons.
If I don't count dressing and have to choose one from the other I'll go parmesan My friend Ryan says I guess it's croutons.
Is that what you want to hear croutons there?
I said it's What no Ryan's hilarious trust me he was giggling while he wrote that okay Joe says bacon with three exclamation points nice Victoria says bacon cheese hard-boiled eggs That's basically a sandwich at that point and then Jim says kukes for cucumber.
So oh, yeah, thank you so much everybody Pete what'd you
learn tonight?
I learned a lot of stuff that I learned that a going out to eat is a process and there's a there's a point in his book where he says it's like this immersive theatrical experience where you're the main character I mean at he has broken this down
and it
was really fun to talk about that stuff
I'm gonna repeat the name of the book because John up there John Murray in Madison in case you want to pick this up that is the oh geez now I just lost it
what is it called Pete I had it too and now I've
through my questions.
The new rules of dining out.
There you go.
I think, John, I think you really enjoy that book.
I hope you get it.
Let us know if you get it.
And yeah, we'll work on getting him back on the show.
That would be a great after dark discussion.
Absolutely dumb.
What did you learn, Mr. Jimmy Caesar?
Real quick, just learned that there's a thing as butter lettuce.
I thought that was really cool.
I can't go in
there.
I gotta look that up.
Butter lettuce.
What did you learn, Greg?
Well, thanks so much for asking Pete, not Dom.
My goodness.
I just learned that no matter where you're going to eat, you know, it doesn't have to be a three-star Michelin restaurant.
It can be, you know, a local diner.
It can be a chain restaurant, but you have to have a certain etiquette attitude and you need to release your own mind from expectations of what you think you deserve in that experience.
Have a good time.
Tip.
And don't be, don't be a jerk.
Interesting.
There you go.
All right, folks, we got to get on out of here, but don't you worry, there's more programming after this program right here.
Thank you so much to Dom Tucker, engineering traffic for all the work they do, making sure the microphones turned on.
Everybody who called texted got on the live stream without you.
There is absolutely no us.
So we appreciate you being a part of this adventure with us.
It's time to get on out of here, but we're going to have a fun time tomorrow.
Say good night to the people Pete.
Good night, Wisconsin.
We're up for nights again.
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