Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (19 page)

This state of transcendence is not an easy one to reach, and most of the waiters and waitresses I have worked with have found ways to get to it by other means. When I began working at Molto’s, I was amazed at how much my coworkers drank. This was a pattern I saw repeated in every subsequent restaurant. I’ve

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never met a waiter or waitress who could work a shift such as the one above and not need some sort of release at the end of it, whether it be through alcohol, drugs, sex, or, for the luckier ones, bursts of creative energy.

Training, Other Qualifications, and Advancement

“Because maintaining a restaurant’s ‘image’ is important to its success, employers emphasize personal qualities. Food and bev
erage service workers are in close contact with the public, so these workers should be well-spoken and have a neat, clean appear
ance. They should enjoy dealing with all kinds of people, and possess a pleasant disposition. State laws often require that ser
vice workers obtain health certificates showing that they are free of communicable diseases.”

In my opinion, this description is understated to the point of hilarity.
Personal qualities,
in particular, is a term that, could it truly be defined, would illustrate perfectly what makes both the best and worst servers. (For the record, I have never placed myself in the former category. Being the best at serving people requires a level of selflessness I haven’t come close to achieving.) I saw exam
ples of both at Molto’s and have forever used them as yardsticks to measure not only the service of my coworkers but my own.

Belinda was certainly the best waitress I have ever worked with. The moment I saw her open that bottle of wine in the Din
ing Room without ever letting it touch the table, I knew she had a certain facility for her job that I would probably never achieve. Belinda’s personal qualities extended beyond her ease with a wine opener, however. At Molto’s, we were not allowed to have order pads and were required to remember orders for parties of up to six people. Belinda was able to carry the most complicated orders for six or seven tables in her head without ever forgetting an item. She also knew instinctively what her customers would
order before they did. Her predictions became something of a parlor trick for a while, in fact. Beyond such obvious attributes, however, Belinda was able to morph both her personality and her looks to suit whoever she was waiting on. For example, I’d watch her waiting on a group of young women and she’d appear reserved and fresh faced. Her conversation with them would be friendly but impersonal, never threatening. For couples, she’d become sophisticated, knowledgeable, and attractive. When waiting on men, she became girlishly flirtatious and subtly sexy. Were it not for her obvious sincerity at the table, Belinda would have merely been a good actress. But I don’t believe that Belinda herself was aware of her transformations, and that detachment was part of the reason she made more money and received more compliments on her service than any of her coworkers.

None of the qualities that made Belinda a great waitress and a good judge of character made her an easy person to deal with when she was not on the floor, however. Although she remained a good friend of mine for years, she usually ran through managers, own
ers, and coworkers in short order. A born organizer, Belinda knew what would make a restaurant run smoothly and was very vocal about what she felt needed changing. Despite the fact that she was a natural at what she did, most of her employers weren’t willing to put up with what they felt was insubordination for very long. As a result of this and her own restlessness, Belinda switched jobs quite often. I’d only been working at Molto’s for a couple of months, in fact, before Belinda moved on to greener pastures.

Unfortunately, I was responsible for the hiring of the worst waitress I have ever worked with. Tiffany, a relative of mine, was new to the city (and perhaps the planet, I later thought) and needed to find work. Tiffany assured me that she’d had plenty of experience waiting tables and pleaded with me to help her get a job at Molto’s. My manager liked me and found Tiffany amusing at her interview, so he hired her.

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The disaster that followed was almost sublime in its totality.

For starters, Tiffany was completely unable to hold a thought in her head, let alone an order. She became the only waitress at Molto’s to use an order pad, and even then she wrote down the wrong items. She took orders for entrees not listed on the menu and drove the cooks nearly insane when she demanded they pre
pare these dishes. Because she added every bill incorrectly, the bartender on duty was forced to total Tiffany’s checks to avoid costly mistakes. But even with all this help, Tiffany had absolutely no sense of timing—a fatal flaw. Every day she came to work (and she often didn’t make it in for her shifts), she acted as if she was serving a leisurely meal in her own home, to one table at a time. The word
multitasking
was not in Tiffany’s vocabulary.

Perhaps all of this could have been forgiven, or at least man
aged, if Tiffany had been possessed of some of the personal qual
ities that make a good, or even competent, waitress. But although she was an attractive young woman, Tiffany selected variations on the standard black-and-white uniform that could only be described as garish and strange. Seeking to disguise an imagi
nary heaviness, Tiffany shopped at a clothing store named Renoir’s Lady and came to work in a floor-length tent of a skirt that would have been better suited for a Wiccan festival. Her jumbo skirt caught on the edges of tables, collected spills of every kind, and tripped her quite often. In contrast, she bought white shirts that were way too small for her ample bosom and popped several buttons under the strain. As for hair and makeup, Tiffany was clueless. Suffice it to say that several strands of her dark tresses frequently wound up in the dishes she served. When I attempted to offer some advice on her attire, however, Tiffany accused me of being jealous of her sense of style. I coun
tered by telling her that our manager, Barry, had noted that her clothing was inappropriate (what he’d actually said was “Where the hell does she think she is, a cabaret?”). Tiffany really took
umbrage at this, telling me that she was quite sure Barry was “very attracted to me, if you know what I mean.”

Barry did have a certain attraction for Tiffany, but it was the sort of fascination that makes people slow down when they pass a fatal accident on the freeway. For in addition to being a train wreck in terms of ability and attire, Tiffany was also unable to get through a single shift without dropping, breaking, or spilling something. Her penultimate feat at Molto’s came during a busy lunch shift. The dining room was divided into a main floor and a balcony linked by a carpeted stairway. I was taking an order in the upstairs smoking section when I heard a tremendous crash. The wind whispered “Tiffany” in the silence that followed.

Sure enough, Tiffany had managed to wipe out on the stairs with two dishes of linguini and shrimp in cream sauce, which made the seating of any more upstairs tables a viscous impossi
bility. Tiffany was laughing. Horrified, I rushed over to the host’s podium where Barry was watching silently, his jaw muscles working overtime in an extended clench.

“Barry, I’m so sorry,” I said.

Barry, a chiseled New Yorker with a wit drier than the Sahara, looked at me and said, “I can’t stand the way she moves. I can’t stand the way she moves through my restaurant.”

Wringing my hands, I told him, “Please fire her. I don’t mind. Really.”

Barry was no fool. He was also the first and last restaurant manager I have ever respected. “Oh no,” he said, “I’m not going to fire her. You can do that. Go ahead, I dare you.”

Neither one of us fired Tiffany. Miraculously, she found another job (serving cocktails, no less) after complaining that nobody was nice to her at Molto’s. Before she left, however, she managed to create a final nightmare of epic proportions. In preparation for her new job, Tiffany got two-inch acrylic nails applied to her fingers. She then came to work at Molto’s with

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said nails and proceeded to puncture several holes in the boxes that held the restaurant’s house wines. Naturally, Tiffany never noticed the leaks. Since the wines were stored in the upstairs cooler, chablis soon began flooding out of the containers, down the stairs, and along the walls, dripping in a fruity waterfall onto the tables below.

Tiffany and Belinda represent opposite ends of the waiting spectrum as it pertains to those elusive
personal qualities,
but I’ve also seen everything in between. Unfortunately, many restaurant managers hire their waitstaff according to their own specifica
tions regarding certain qualities. Breast size, for example. One owner I worked for hired a stunning Brazilian girl to wait tables even though she spoke absolutely no English and had never lifted a plate in her life. When it proved impossible to keep her on the floor, he paid her just to stand in front of the restaurant in a short skirt, holding menus.

As for state laws requiring that servers prove they are free of communicable diseases, I’ve never encountered such a request. Perhaps this is because most restaurant managers figure that communicable diseases on both sides of the table cancel each other out. A waiter may come to work with a cold, for example, but he would never approach a table with a visible open sore (what customer would tip
him
?). However, a customer thinks nothing of sharing his maladies with his server. The woman I waited on who handed me the napkins full of vomit is but one example. I’ve also had to clean up used dental floss, emptied syringes, and bloodied linens. Other servers I have known have not been as lucky, having been licked, kissed, and thrown up on.

Job Outlook

Finally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides a telling paragraph in its description of the job outlook for waiters and waitresses:

“While employment growth will produce many new jobs, the overwhelming majority of openings will arise from the need to replace the high proportion of workers who leave this very large occupation each year. There is substantial movement into and out of the occupation because education and training requirements are minimal.”

A recent survey projects that Americans spend almost a bil
lion dollars a day on dining outside the home. Surely, this is a clear indication of the nation’s increasing appetite for personal, gratifying service. Yet, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics rightly claims, the training and education requirements for the providers of this service are minimal. It’s somewhat of a paradox that as a society we demand so much from those for whom we have such little regard.

Perhaps this is all a bit too profound. I don’t claim that wait
ers and waitresses need advanced degrees in psychology or human relations to be successful at their work. Nor do I believe that waiting should be elevated to the status of health care, teaching, or any other occupation vital to the forward movement of the human race. However, I do believe that there is more to waiting than immediately meets the eye. Even servers them
selves are often unaware of the subtle complexities of their job. My feeling is that for all the reasons above, waiting tests a server’s ability to cope with much more than remembering an order and delivering it in a timely fashion. In addition to provid
ing excellent training in personal organizational abilities, patience, and stamina, waiting also provides a test of a server’s human relations skills. There are few jobs that offer such direct contact with such a wide variety of people. Those who are able to hone these skills, I feel, will be successful in whatever field they choose, whether they stay in the restaurant business or not.

Restaurants provide one of the last customer service indus
tries to flourish. These days everything can be done via fax,

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modem, or phone. I can order my clothes from a catalog, furnish my house through home shopping channels, listen to music samples on my computer, and submit my written work via e-mail. The only thing I really can’t do without a human being present is be served dinner in a restaurant. Somehow, there really is no substitute for the person-to-person contact involved in the sim
ple act of sitting down in a restaurant and being waited on. Per
haps this is part of the reason why the interchanges between customer and server are often so highly charged and have emo
tional content far beyond what seems reasonable given the situa
tion. The expectations for an “experience,” be it pleasant or not, are great. On both sides of the table.