Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (38 page)

Occasionally, however, it’s not just the attitude of the burned-out waiter that sours. Some servers begin exacting revenge in small but meaningful ways. The waiter who couldn’t stand watching people chew, for example, actually began torturing his customers. He refused to bring water to the table, even after the customers requested it several times. He would avoid the table, watching from a distance as the customers stared despairingly into their empty glasses and craned their necks looking for him. He took a perverse delight in waiting for his customers to become so parched they were almost screaming with thirst. “Why shouldn’t they suffer?” he said.

Of course, this waiter was pretty far gone by the time he began pulling these stunts. Others feel compelled to try to protect their income while pursuing their vendettas against humanity. In these cases, tampering with leftovers before they are packaged to go is a particular favorite. Many times, I’ve seen these plates of food picked at, poked at, and dropped “accidentally” before mak
ing it into a takeout container.

Similarly, there is the practice of splitting dishes. It was pol
icy at Baciare that no plates were to be split by the cooks. Mixing dishes up, the theory went, destroyed the integrity of the food and its presentation. Should the guest desire to split his food with others, the policy stated, the waiter should perform the split at the table. In theory, this was a good policy. It allowed the waiter to show off a little and “bond” with his customers while he made their meal more leisurely and enjoyable. However, the split policy was incompatible with another, more pressing policy, which was to pack as many tables into the restaurant as possible and turn those tables over at the speed of light. Basically, the restaurant sought to impose fine dining standards on a fast-food schedule. This put stress on the servers, which filtered, inevitably, to the customers. Many customers also rebelled out
right at the notion that splits could not be done by the chef and insisted that the food not come out to the table before it had been divided. This was always a perfect opportunity for the burned-out server to release a little frustration. Thus, salads, fish, even pasta got split in the kitchen by hand. I’m speaking quite lit
erally here—as the waiter would reach into the plate with his fin
gers and throw equal parts of the food onto two or more plates. Sometimes, if he felt there was enough to go around, the waiter would help himself to a small portion of the meal.

“So what?” the rationale went. “They’re not going to care what I do for them. They’ll probably just stiff me anyway.”

There are still other passive-aggressive ways for a waitress to get back at the customers she feels are persecuting her. Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. Or, perhaps, scaldingly hot— which is how soup is served when a customer rudely demands a reheat. This customer will invariably receive a fresh bowl of soup that has been heated to a temperature of several hundred degrees with the express purpose of burning the skin right off his tongue.

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“Is the soup warm enough for you, sir?” the waitress will say sweetly. “Because if it isn’t, I can have the kitchen heat it a little more.”

And then there’s the coffee. There is a general rule of thumb for every restaurant I’ve worked in: the more a customer protests the need for decaf, the likelier the possibility that he will receive regular. This is the line that really seals it: “Is that decaf ? Because I’m going to take your phone number and if it’s not decaf I’m going to call you in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.” (If only I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this original line, I would be a wealthy woman indeed.)

The honest answer? No, it’s probably not decaf. At Baciare, the busboys were responsible for brewing the coffee and keeping equal supplies of both regular and decaf available. It never worked out this way. Often, when I grabbed a pot off the burner and asked the busboy, “Is this regular or decaf ?” he’d respond, “Yes.” This was an area that really separated the burnouts from those with a considerably fresher attitude. The burned-out wait
ress assured her customer that the coffee was 100 percent decaf, or regular, or a mixture of both if need be. The fresher waitress told her customers that if ingesting caffeine was truly hazardous to their health, ordering coffee entailed a certain amount of risk.

I’ve included these examples in the interest of fair reporting. While not regular occurrences, these things do happen. Chances are that anyone who dines out regularly has encountered a burned-out waiter or waitress at some point and has suffered the conse
quences, knowingly or unknowingly. Chances are even greater, though, that the server has encountered some very challenging customers and has simply lost the ability to cope. I will say this: I have never seen waiters or waitresses punish a customer who treated them decently or respectfully or who acknowledged, even in the smallest of ways, the service they were receiving. It really does pay to be nice to your server.

Truthfully, I never sabotaged any of my customers even at the most charred point of my own burnout. What happened to me was that I stopped taking an interest in my customers, started com
plaining about my lot in life, and developed a generally negative aura. I stopped smiling at the table and really resented it when anybody pointed out my lack of warmth. If I felt my customers were treating me like an idiot (“Can you remember my order with
out writing it down? You’re not going to forget that I want no dressing/extra dressing/light sauce/easy garlic/no oil, are you?”), I started using big words at the table, like
abstemious
and
misnomer.
This never went over very well, I must say. “What was that word you used before?” a customer once asked me as he scrawled in a 10 percent tip on his credit card receipt. “You’d better tell me again so I can write it down, ’cause I’m definitely lookin’ to get an education from my waitress when I go out to dinner.”

Inevitably, some sarcasm came sneaking through in my dia
logue at the table. I knew it would come to no good. I slipped badly just once.

“How’s the duck tonight?” my customer asked.

“Dead,” I told him.

I don’t know which one of us was more shocked at my response.

It would have been possible to limp along this way for years more, watching the gradual erosion of my attitude and sense of self-worth, had it not been for the passing of those inexorable reminders of time gone by—the holidays.

Spending the holidays at the table is a bittersweet fact of every server’s working life. Bitter because the holidays are often referred to as “amateur hours,” times when people who don’t dine out any other time of year come to the table with impossible demands and expectations for a special experience. And sweet because the very fact that so many people are dining out almost guarantees a big payday for the server. Each holiday has its own

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unique flavor in a restaurant, and there is much to be learned about human nature in general just by watching the way people act on each one of these days.

Allow me to elaborate.

I’ll begin with Valentine’s Day. There is so little love in evi
dence on this day of lovers it’s enough to inspire cynicism in the most romantic of hearts. Rather, couples trudge out to lunch and dinner with a sense of duty to some false ideal of what they think they should be feeling for each other. If this sounds too jaded, con
sider the following scenarios. Several times, I’ve seen married men bring their mistresses to lunch on Valentine’s Day. (How do I know that the woman is a mistress and not a wife or girlfriend? Please, rest assured that your waitress knows these things.) These lunches involve champagne, sumptuous desserts, and gifts of lingerie. (The mistress always gets lingerie for Valentine’s Day. The wife, on the other hand, usually gets jewelry.) I’ve seen the very same men bring their wives in for dinner on the same day in the same restaurant.

If this isn’t enough to harden the heart, there are always the couples who choose Valentine’s Day to argue viciously over dinner. On any given Valentine’s Day (and by my calculations, I’ve worked at least a dozen), I would find at least half the couples in my sec
tion fighting with each other. Naturally this makes taking an order very difficult, but what’s worse is that there is no way these cou
ples are going to enjoy themselves. And no matter what the nature of the argument, it always ends up being the waitress’s fault.

The couples in deep-freeze mode are the most challenging. These couples exchange not a word with each other throughout their meal yet manage to direct vitriolic darts at their waitress every time she comes to the table.

Then there are the couples who select Valentine’s Day to pro
pose. This is a powder keg of a situation. What if she says no? (I’d love to include a tale or two of a woman proposing here, but I’ve never seen one.) I’ve served engagement rings in champagne
glasses and on top of desserts and had to stand by to make sure that the unsuspecting recipient didn’t end up swallowing two months of her date’s salary. I have to say that this little scene never plays the way it does in the movies. Unfortunately, the rest of the scenery doesn’t fade into a soft-focus glow leaving the happy couple in a spotlight of love. Rather, there is noise, embar
rassment, and, sometimes, disappointment. I’ll never forget the deer-in-headlights look of the woman who received her diamond ring in a glass of Dom Pérignon. She became pale, nervous, and a little desperate. When her would-be fiancé went to the rest room, she pulled me aside and whispered frantically, “He wants me to
marry
him. What am I going to do?”

Servers, as I mentioned before, are under tremendous pres
sure to facilitate the perfect experience on Valentine’s Day. If the evening doesn’t go as planned for the customer, the server is often held responsible. And because the rest of humanity also has a reservation for dinner on this night, servers are also under pressure to turn over their tables as quickly as possible. This is sometimes a monumental task, considering that most couples want to linger over their heart-shaped dishes for as long as possible. Most of the servers I’ve worked with don’t mind working Valentine’s Day. Usu
ally they’ve seen enough to adopt the same cynical attitude I’ve outlined here. And in the absence of true love as defined by this holiday, nothing provides comfort like a large amount of cold cash.

The same comfort does not extend to Mother’s Day, the mother of all restaurant holidays, a day feared, reviled, and hated by servers everywhere. Waiters and waitresses prepare for Mother’s Day like soldiers preparing for war. For weeks before this particu
lar Sunday in May, servers attempt to find ruses to avoid work
ing it. Their cars break down, they are deathly ill, they have to fly home and have already bought plane tickets, they are so sorry, but they just can’t work it. Before I had Blaze, I found working Mother’s Day difficult. After I became a mother, however, I found

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it absolutely loathsome. “Why do I have to work?” I’d ask my managers, “I’m the only mother in this restaurant. Don’t I deserve a break?” The answer was a resounding no in every instance. At Baciare, in fact, management posted a note in the kitchen in early April stating, “Everybody works Mother’s Day whether it’s your shift or not. No excuses will be tolerated.” Every restaurant I’ve worked in has counted Mother’s Day as its single busiest day of the year, with a guaranteed nonstop flow of business from open
ing to closing. So why do servers dislike working it so much?

Let me count the reasons.

M
is for the menu, difficult to make, impossible to serve. There is just no way any kitchen can simultaneously prepare one hun
dred orders of eggs at a time. Brunch items are the most delicate of restaurant dishes and the easiest ones to ruin. Anyone who has received stodgy oatmeal, cold omelettes, or burned toast will attest to this. On Mother’s Day, every restaurant must suddenly transform itself into a breakfast joint whether it excels in this area or not. And over the last few years, breakfast has become a complicated affair indeed. Eggs have to be cholesterol free, pan
cakes made with whole grains, orange juice squeezed fresh to order. But it’s Mother’s Day, and the customer is the only man of woman born—nobody else in the restaurant has a mother—and he wants his cholesterol-free omelette with a side of extra-crispy bacon, hot and fresh, and he wants it
now
. At Baciare, more cooks quit on Mother’s Day than at any other time of the year.