Waiter to the Rich and Shameless: Confessions of a Five-Star Beverly Hills Server (22 page)

“Yeah,
I know, Mr. P.  Sorry to put you in that situation.  Are we cool?” 

“Yeah,
we’re fine.  Jous be careful, okay? Watch jew mouth.” 

“I
will, thanks. Goodnight, Mr. P.”  

“Goodnight,
Polli, good yob tonight, eh!”

As
usual, I rode my scooter home in the pitch, past-midnight dark, down Sunset Boulevard
toward the Palisades. At that hour, I was alone on the road, slicing through
the night past quiet estates and mansions. The air was refreshingly cold and wet
as the night breeze blew in from the Pacific in foggy patches.  You could smell
the trees, the grass, and there seemed to be a faint, sweet scent of jasmine or
plumeria in the air.  I wondered if it was the wrong season for that. 
Who
cares, it smells wonderful and I’m feeling content and happy.
 Those
moments alone after a long fruitful night put my mind at ease, and set my
thoughts adrift.  I had served some of my heroes and earned my biggest tip so
far. It’s funny, these stars I serve.  It’s so obvious when you get up close,
they’re just regular people just like you and I, some with tremendous
insecurities and some very confident and comfortable with themselves. Some are
assholes just like some of us regular people but the really big celebrities are
usually not assholes.  I’ll go out on a limb here and say that in general most
are sweet, respectful people who know how lucky they are. When they come to the
Cricket Room, they are not on stage.  They just want to relax and be
themselves, and have a nice meal with family or friends. 

As
I laid in bed that night, my final thoughts revolved around how my latest song
was coming together; another one was playing on a couple of television shows,
and I’d started writing a love song for my sweetheart, a draft pick yet to be
named.  And despite tonight’s thrills and adventures, for the first time in a
long time, I felt lonely.

The
holidays are spectacular at the Cricket Room and it all begins around
Thanksgiving. The reservations numbered in the six hundred range for lunch and dinner.
Preparations required several days because we needed to set up extra tables
throughout the restaurant and garden area. No more well-spaced tables for
privacy; fuck privacy – we packed them in. Extra cloth napkins, tablecloths,
and table skirts had to be brought up from our banquet supply storeroom along
with all of our banquet silverware, logo plates, and fine glassware.  For the
three days ahead of an event like this one, the waiters spent countless hours
polishing glasses and silver, and folding hundreds upon hundreds of logo
napkins in our signature style. 

The
menus are always multiple courses for a set price and multiple choices for each
course. I hate to admit it but these menus were normally far from spectacular
and aimed at pure profit by numbers. Seventy percent of the orders are for turkey
and stuffing on Thanksgiving and ham or turkey on Christmas. Could the pilgrims
have designed a better for-profit meal than cheap turkey, bread stuffing,
pumpkin pie, and all the traditional fixins’? It’s what people want, even in
Hollywood, and it’s all comprised of very low food-cost items. They just don’t
want to prepare such peasant food at home, so they come to the most expensive
restaurant in town for cheap food, say grace over it, leave a big tip, and feel
good about themselves. Win-win.

For
Christmas Day and Eve we spent more time transforming the room than the kitchen
did on preparing the meal.  First, four well-lit colorful Christmas trees flanked
both sides of the red carpet as guests approached the lobby from the outside. Once
inside the lobby, our guests were greeted by a glowing fireplace and holiday-themed
décor in hues of traditional red, gold, and green. Four more Christmas trees
with ornaments and colorful lights stood in each corner, with luxuriously
wrapped faux presents set underneath.  The Christmas trees were always decorated
in different themes each year.  Some years they were sprayed snow-white and in
other years left traditionally natural with colored lights and ornaments and
many variations thereof.  This cozy decor completed the Hollywood tableau
guests have come to expect and love throughout the decades.  Santa Claus dropped
in several times over the holidays for lunch and dinner to give candy and
presents to our younger patrons.  Santa came straight from central casting; the
real deal - no fake beard or coloring in his hair.  If I had been a kid I would
have bought it hook, line, and candy cane.  

All
the planters around the booths and walls were densely filled with lush red
poinsettias, and in the garden area the planted flowers were replaced with a
thick carpet of poinsettias.  Since the garden was so cozily lit on a regular
basis, no real change was needed with the lighting. 

Guests
passed underneath a bouquet of mistletoe to enter the now-open private dining
room, and immediately on the left in front of a huge mirror, were two very
large gingerbread houses, complete with miniature cars, blinking lights in
every window, and an “icing” of snow. It seemed to me that LA people love the
surf and turf lifestyle, but when the holidays rolled around, they hungered for
conventional, middle-America traditions like everyone else. And they were
willing to pay to get them.

Christmas
Day lunch and dinner went off without a hitch.  We served over seven hundred
guests and the room grossed well over $100K to set a new record for our
highest-grossing day ever. So, approximately $20K in tips was distributed
amongst twenty waiters that day. A more normal menu would not have produced
nearly the profit that serving the cheaper holiday fare did. The corporate monkeys
should have been ecstatic but I felt sure they were gleefully chortling and
trying to figure out if they could serve some fancy version of turkey every
day. ToFurkey and caviar, anyone?

At
this particular time in my life, things had changed for the better. I had
finally met a nice girl, someone I could take home to Mama and feel proud. This
beautiful and amazing woman, Juliana, a writer, professional businesswoman,
very intelligent, warm, funny, sweet, and caring, not a typical LA girl at all
– would have her hands full taming this wild bartender/waiter/rock musician.  She
claimed she was up for it.  She’s a very classy woman and doesn’t care much for
the glamour and glitz, latest fashions, or gossip. I felt so good with her, we moved
in together after just a few months of dating.  It felt right from the very
start.  I knew it was time for me to change and rise to the challenge of a
mature relationship.  I also knew I would need to change many things about
myself if I wanted to keep this fine girl of mine. 

Unfortunately
for Jens, he’d had to find a new bosom buddy ‘cause this woman wasn’t gonna
stand for the kind of trouble I always got myself into with him and although it
had been fun, deep down I knew I had just been passing time and blowing off
steam.  It was time to focus on love and music, which suited me just perfectly.

Holidays
are supposed to be a time for families to be together and rejoice, but year
after year I kept getting gypped out of that precious benefit, always working
on important holidays.  Even though I’d gotten used to the restaurant
lifestyle, deep down I was longing for a more normal life. At first, all I had
ever thought about were the great tips I’d make on New Year’s Eve or Christmas
Day. But as the years passed, I became disheartened watching families gathering
at beautifully adorned tables, holding hands, saying grace, smiling, exchanging
small gifts. I thought about how nice it would be to switch places with them;
screw the tips. Then a bill would arrive in the mail and slap me back to
reality. I was making some money on my music, but still not enough to quit my
high-paying night job.

I’d
noticed a substantial change in myself over the past two years though.  Instead
of getting excited about all the money I made, I felt depressed.  In this
restaurant setting I could see how the wealthy lived and it became obvious that
we were merely fancy vending machines in their self-centered lives. On the
holidays, I imagined these rich fucks had given their own live-in help the day
off and probably didn’t know how to cook and clean themselves. The pride in
what I did began to taste bitter.  

The
residents from the nearby estates of Brentwood, Bel Air, Pacific Palisades,
Beverly Hills, and even more humble Pasadena arrived with their little darlings
decked out in beautiful dresses and/or cute little suits and ties, and even
grandma and grandpa usually attended.  I often felt like I was looking in on a
Norman Rockwell painting:  happy families with adorable pink-cheeked kids
enjoying their best moments.  I could appreciate the fact that their family was
together for a nice dinner and they all looked so sweet together.  I almost got
excited for them until I remembered my girlfriend sitting at home alone waiting
for me.  Then I started wishing it were us sitting together in a cozy
restaurant somewhere. It’s such a humbling experience.  It reminded me of my
place in this tableau – nothing more than a servant.  Waiter to the rich and
shameless was turning into an uglier Scrooge version of a Dickens tale:  jaded servant
to the spoiled and shameful. I felt about as appreciated as a cold sore on a
hot first date. 

I
had not spent a single holiday at home or with family since leaving my
bartending position many years past.  Back then, somehow I had managed to get
Thanksgiving off a couple of years in a row.  But as a waiter, I was required
to work every major holiday, no exceptions.  Everyone wanted the holidays off,
so no one got them. Juliana was already starting to get a bit frustrated. 
Naturally, she wanted to spend our first holidays together and both of us also
had birthdays in December that had gone uncelebrated because of my schedule. 
We barely had enough time to celebrate a late Christmas and both of our
birthdays before I had to get back to work for New Year’s.

New
Year’s Eve was just like any other holiday at the Cricket Room:  we were open
for business and packed with reservations.  Every year we started preparations
for the festivities the night before.  It was traditionally very slow on the
night of December 30th so we actually had time to perform the prep work necessary
for our big night ahead.  First we opened up our private party room to
accommodate additional regular seating.  We managed to squeeze in an extra twenty
tables, some of them quite large, so all in all we gained seventy settings. A
small parquet dance floor was brought in to cover the middle of the now-opened
private room, and a three-piece band would be squeezed into the room’s back foyer,
with that entrance closed off.  The band was necessary but not
revenue-producing, so they got no extra space. If management could have figured
out a way to stack them on top of each other, they’d have done it.  Next year
it’ll probably be Grumpy, Dopey and Sneezy stuck in that corner.

Then,
early on the 31st, we decorated all the tables with beautiful New Year’s floral
arrangements in a very chic but classy design using white roses, green leaves
and silver-sprayed baby’s breath in heavy square glass vases; wide silver bows
tied around the vases were the finishing flourishes.  This arrangement included
a sterling silver candleholder with a silver shade as well. We inflated hundreds
of black, white, and silver balloons with helium, then tied them with curly,
festive, black and white ribbons. These balloon bouquets were then positioned
decoratively throughout the restaurant, and a couple hundred more were stowed
in a net over the dance floor to be dropped at the stroke of midnight. 

There
was only one seating on New Year’s Eve, with 250 people arriving between eight
and ten o’clock and staying until well past midnight.  All guests would enter
through the main door so a strict count could be kept, and those who were to be
seated in the private room were walked through to the back of the restaurant. 
At the edge of the main dining room, our regular piano player performed with a
stand-up bassist. Again, if they could have forced the bassist to stand on top
of the piano, they would have.

I
decided to drive and not ride my scooter to work just in case some drunken holiday
reveler couldn’t see me in the dark of the night on Sunset Boulevard.  Celebrities
get extra points for killing waiters and other lowly servants on holidays. It’s
a little-known Hollywood tradition.

I
arrived at work at 5:30 pm with the sunroof open.  It was a decent day -- a
little cloudy but still about 65 balmy SoCal degrees, one reason real estate is
so expensive. Who wouldn’t love that? 

After
the usual rituals of getting into my uniform, saying hello to everybody and
wishing the day staff a happy New Year, all the waiters gathered in the kitchen
for the pre-shift meeting and the Chef’s tasting with course descriptions. The
restaurant was dead, like Sleeping Beauty waiting for her Prince to arrive.  No
guests were allowed in without a reservation and no one would be arriving for
their reservation until nine o’clock. So for once – and this is the only day of
the year when this happens – we all had enough time to do last-minute side
work, take our dinner breaks, attend the entire pre-shift meeting and actually
hear the Chef’s full course descriptions.  It was important to make things
sound as wonderful as possible, in order to justify the ridiculous prices being
charged. “Here’s your check, sir. Would you like to provide the title to your
car or a credit card?”

Our
new executive chef – the latest in a string of overpaid prima donnas – and the
ever-lovely Lola stood before us but they weren’t quite ready to present the
scrumptious dishes of the evening just yet.  Mr. P stepped in and began
assigning our stations.  No one was given more than four tables because, for
once, they recognized we would all get swamped at the same time. They showed
some compassion and actually staffed up enough to do the job right, which they
could well afford.  The only upside of everyone working every major holiday.

Mr.
P explained how he wanted us to ring up and fire all the different courses and
then pointed out that, “Ees a seeks kors deener, wit multipel choice korses.” Some
of the newer staff had a quizzical look on their faces but we would translate
later.  He went on to say, in a nutshell: “It’s $250 per person, no exceptions,
only one glass of French champagne (which is technically the only kind of
champagne there is) included and it will be served around eleven-thirty along
with party hats and favors.  I don’t want any screw-ups tonight!  No
freelancing, no customizing, no substitutions or special requests. Everybody
focus and double check your orders before you send them to the kitchen.”

At
that point, I glanced up at the usual fuck-ups who for sure would have some
kind of problem.  Their eyes were fixated on Mr. P as if they were actually
listening.  As for me, this was my tenth year with the company and fifth year
doing the waiter thing. I’d never had much trouble with the mechanics of
serving our distinguished guests, as I knew this job like the inside of my
head.  I took great pleasure in the opportunity to – for once – stay with my
tables and guests for the whole night and actually get a chance to serve them
without having to rush around covering other servers’ tables while they were on
break.  As I explained, we only had four tables each and even the weak straight-from-Denny’s
waiters should be able to handle that.  I made up my mind early on not to move
out of my station to help any clown who couldn’t handle that much – they could
fucking choke for all I care. 
Damn!  There’s that grumpy burnt-out waiter
voice again.  Shit, maybe it’s time to move on, but what will I do?  Music? 
Become a day-trader?  Do porn movies? I’m sure my girlfriend will love that. Anyway
I’ll have to figure that out later ‘cause here comes the new executive chef,
Alex, an Asian man in his thirties, with his team and all the dishes, and boy
does it all look great for once.
 He and Lola outlined the menu for us: