Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (16 page)

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Brief, intense relationships such as the ones I had with both Deane and Leo are very common in the restaurant business. The transient nature of the job itself is often to blame. Waiters and waitresses are always moving on, leaving their coworkers behind. Everything about the movement of a dining room is temporary. The landscape of a particular restaurant during a par
ticular season is one that constantly shifts. And each night becomes a part of several different personal histories the moment it is over.

I’ve never meant to leave behind any of the close friends I’ve made over the years, but the ones who remain today are the ones I am still working with. As for the rest, I have formed them into permanent parts of myself. Their stories, at least the ones they made with me, are now my stories.

This, in the end, is what I do.

[ ]

five

the art of waitin
g

Tonight, everybody wants to sit
outside on the patio. My station is inside, on the banquette, all the tables squashed close together. I’m in the middle of calculating how much money I’m not going to make when a party of five is seated at one of my tables. They’re well dressed, well seasoned, and look as if they’re in the mood to spend some money. I breathe a sigh of relief until another waitress comes up to me and says, “Don’t knock your
self out over those people.”

“Why not?” I want to know.

“Because they stiffed me last week,” she says. “They’re Swiss or French or something. They don’t tip.”

“This isn’t something I needed to hear right now,” I tell her.

“Just trying to help you,” she sniffs.

The party is neither French nor Swiss, but they are most def
initely high maintenance. In no time they have me running to all corners of the restaurant with a thousand little demands. They’ve brought promotional coupons with them and want all their appe
tizers for free. The manager knows them and tells me to make sure they get free desserts. He is obviously unaware of the pro
motional coupons. They want a bottle of white and a bottle of red.

No, two bottles of red and a glass of white. No, just one red and two glasses of white. No, actually they’ll just have the bottle of red and a glass of Fernet Branca.

“For me,” says the one woman who is not part of a couple. “I need it for my digestion.”

When the entrees arrive, the single woman makes a sour face over her lasagna and says, “It really should be hotter.”

“Have them nuke it in the microwave,” says another.

“We don’t have a microwave,” I say. “But I’ll be happy to have them heat it up for you in the kitchen.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” she says.

“You don’t want it heated?”

“No, I want it hotter, but I don’t want to wait a half hour until they make me a new one.”

“We don’t have to make a new one, we can actually heat this one. It won’t take half an hour.”

“I don’t want to sit here without a dinner while the rest of my friends are eating.”

“If you’re going to complain about something,” says another, “at least let the girl fix it.”

“It’s not a matter of having it fixed. It should have been hot
ter in the first place. Now by the time I get to to the end of it, it won’t be hot enough.”

“Why don’t you let me take it? It’ll only take a minute.”

“That’s not the point. It shouldn’t have come out this way.”

I gaze at the woman helplessly. This is the type of situation I’ve encountered many times before at the table, but I am still unable to come up with a suitable remedy. The woman doesn’t want me to take her dish away and heat it up and she doesn’t want to let me leave it at the table. Perhaps if I offered to turn back time for her so that the lasagna could be prepared to her exact specifications (or maybe a self-heating dish would work for her), I might be able to please her. But this is obviously not

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going to happen. Therefore, I am left with an impossible conun
drum. Everybody else at the table is now watching me, waiting to see how I am going to handle it. I make a last attempt.

“Let me run it back to the kitchen,” I say. “I’ll have them heat it quickly for you and you’ll have it back right away.”

“No,” she says, “I’ll keep it. I’m hungry. You see, it’s the right temperature for me to eat right now, but I like to talk while I eat. It’s going to cool down too fast and then the last bit will be too cold.”

“What would you like
me
to do for you, then?” I ask her.

“Stay close by,” she says. “Maybe when I get to the end of it, I’ll have you heat up what’s left.”

I have to smile and nod assent. This, I think, is what it’s all about: complicated psychological interchanges with complete strangers taking place over contracted periods of time. I sign up for this kind of dialogue every time I approach a table. I am the waitress. My job is to serve. Of course, just what makes up the definition of the word
serve
is not nearly as clear.

My attitude toward service and servers changed completely with my job at Molto’s, the little Italian restaurant where Belinda worked. During my brief tenure in the Dining Room, I’d met many servers who had made their life’s work out of waiting tables. Had I been paying more attention, I probably would have noticed that most of them were quite skilled. At the time, however, I was more concerned with finding my own way through the require
ments and duties of my job. I paid little heed to the art of the work itself. I found my coworkers an interesting group, and with Deane and Belinda, I’d formed strong friendships. But by the time I became involved with Leo, I’d stopped analyzing the job at all. If anything, my experience in the Dining Room had come perilously close to souring me on the concept of table service in general.

On my very first day at Molto’s, however, I became aware of the sharp contrast in the landscapes of these two restaurants. For one thing, the staff at Molto’s was much younger, hipper, and better looking. The bartender, Anne, was a tiny blond woman with beautiful green eyes, about my own age, who had a penchant for dating wannabe rock stars. She was so small, she had to use a stool to reach some of the liquor bottles. Naturally, bar patrons usually got a prime view of her sculpted backside every time she did so. Anne made very good money. Then there was Belinda, who’d really come into her own as far as tailoring her work outfits to be as appealing as possible. No more earring or hair codes for Belinda. Charlotte, in her early thirties, was the grande dame of Molto’s. Charlotte, who taught an aerobics class during the day, had the lithe body of a dancer and a caring, almost motherly manner. When I arrived at Molto’s, she’d already been working there for five years. Then there was Grace, a flame-haired single mother in her twenties, who was very vocal about the physical attributes of the many Molto’s waiters she’d dated.

The waiters at Molto’s exuded the same sort of sensuality as the waitresses. I was assigned to follow Chris, who looked like a Chippendale dancer and had the voice of Barry White, on my first day of training. Chris ordered a spinach salad and sent it back to the kitchen when it came out looking a little limp. The redone salad was a shiny green marvel. “Now look at this,” Chris said. “
This
is a sexy salad. Mmm-mm.” It was enough to make one swoon.

The cooks at Molto’s, Sonny and Wes, were a whole story in themselves. In any restaurant, heat is a factor determining the mood of the staff. It’s always hot in the kitchen, and in the din
ing room, a server is in a constant state of motion. During a busy shift, everyone gets a little sweaty. But at Molto’s, the heat was more than just a factor, it was a salient entity. Molto’s

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kitchen was tiny, encompassing barely enough room to swing the proverbial cat. On busy nights, five or six servers had to move in and out of this minute space, as well as the two cooks and single dishwasher. We were literally on top of each other, bumping hips and shoulders. It was impossible to avoid physical contact. The restaurant seated less than seventy-five people at capacity, and on some nights the kitchen would put out two hundred dinners in sweltering heat.

In the summertime, Sonny and Wes stripped down to jeans, aprons, and muscle shirts. We’d slam into the kitchen and see their arms outstretched, holding pans, flipping pastas, turning steaks, and stirring sauces. They were both gifted quipsters and they rarely turned around, knowing which waiter or waitress entered by scent. They were a vision at the busiest times, beauti
fully built, funny, creating fantastic food. We’d come in, order, and sigh. To maintain their sanity, the cooks kept a radio set to whatever the hippest FM station was at the time. So there would be music, too, and sometimes we’d dance around each other in the kitchen, making Sonny and Wes, who were separated from us only by a few inches of countertop, laugh out loud.

Charlotte and I often stood at the line together, watching Sonny and Wes as their muscles flexed and rippled in tandem.

“It’s not really fair, is it?” she’d ask.

“Definitely not,” I’d answer.

“Guys, you’ve got to put your shirts on,” she’d tell them. “You’re killing us out here.” Sonny and Wes lived for comments like that. Really, there wasn’t a waitress working who didn’t lust after those two during the course of a shift. Sonny and Wes responded in kind.

Whether it was the heat, the proximity, or the relative youth of the employees, everyone at Molto’s shared a peculiar kind of intimacy, which extended into the off hours. We shared rides to and from work, helped each other move, and often went out for
drinks after work. Of course, this wasn’t paradise. Too much famil
iarity breeds contempt in any situation and this one was no differ
ent. There were flare-ups, romances that crashed and burned, and occasional job dissatisfaction. As a general rule, though, there was little competition among the staff at Molto’s and we were very close.

What made Molto’s even more appealing was that it simply ran well. For most of the time I worked there, all the waiters and waitresses worked as a team despite the fact that they all had very diverse interests and backgrounds. While not all of them intended to remain in the business, for the time they were there, the servers at Molto’s actually enjoyed what they did and the money they made doing it. There were several reasons for this phenomenon. For one, we all loved the food we served. Molto’s was a bit ahead of its time, offering a menu of authentic Italian dishes that were very unusual then, although they can now be found in many trendy Italian restaurants all over the country. The wine list, too, was eclectic but expertly designed. The owner of Molto’s held regular wine tastings for the staff so that we’d be knowledgeable about what we were selling. Another factor was our manager, Barry, who, although a perfectionist, was com
pletely fair-minded and had a rare ability to cultivate loyalty. Finally, the waiters and waitresses I worked with at Molto’s truly cared about how they performed on the job. It was a matter of personal pride.

As a result, Molto’s (which had already been in business for ten years) did well enough for its owner to open a second restau
rant. For me, Molto’s formed a standard against which to mea
sure not only my skills as a waitress but my ability to function as a successful adult in the outside world. My time at Molto’s would bring a turning point in my life. Although I had no way of knowing it, my reasons for waiting tables and my understanding of my future direction would undergo some radical changes only

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one year after my first shift. In a fundamental way, the restaurant itself was responsible for these changes.

But I’m jumping ahead of myself now. What I mean to say here is very simple: there is an art to waiting and to serving.

Allow me to illustrate.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are almost two million people currently employed as waiters and waitresses in the United States. This figure accounts for a little less than half of all the jobs in the food and beverage service industry. A projection for the year 2006 estimates a net increase of about two hundred thousand. Of course, this statistic refers only to current figures and says nothing about those who, at some point or other, supported themselves waiting tables before moving on to other careers. One can only imagine how large that number would be.