Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (31 page)

The first happened on a sultry summer evening. I was wait
ing on a couple who were seated in a dim section of the open air patio. I had already delivered drinks to the table and I approached them to take their dinner order. The male half of the couple looked a little flushed as I stood before them. The woman, sitting beside him with one hand below the tablecloth and the other casually holding a glass of wine, had a sly smile on her face.

“Do you have any questions about the menu,” I asked, “or are you ready to order?”

“I have a couple of questions,” the woman said. She began moving her hand under the table in a rhythmic motion as she spoke and the man leaned in closer to the table, looking mildly uncomfortable. “Do any of your entrees come with salads, or is everything à la carte?”

“Everything is à la carte,” I said. “But we do have several sal
ads and appetizers to start.”

waiting
215

“Great,” she said and began moving her hand a little faster. Her date began breathing heavily, his face reddening into a shade of crimson. “And can I get this pasta without oil?” She pointed to an item with her free hand.

“Sure,” I said, wanting desperately to leave the table and whatever unseen acts were progressing beneath it.

“Oh, good,” she said. “Well, I’ll have that, then, and why don’t you bring me one of the house salads?”

“OK,” I said. “And what can I bring for you?” I asked her date, although I knew full well he was getting everything he needed and more.

“Aah, uhnn . . .” he replied.

“You know what?” the woman interrupted, without ever breaking the rhythm of her hand motion. “Why don’t you just bring him what I’m having? That’ll be fine.”

“Great,” I said. “Can I bring you anything else?”

“Yes,” she said, smiling broadly, “extra napkins, please.”

The second encounter, at the same restaurant, involved a woman who was a regular patron and who had definitely had too much to drink. After groping her date at the bar, which is where she’d picked him up, she disappeared with him to the back of the restaurant, where they ended up in the ladies’ room. They might have really made a night of it had a particular waitress not needed to relieve herself. The waitress came out reporting that the two were going at it full tilt in one of the stalls, complete with groan
ing, moaning, and the sound of zippers going up and down.

“So what did you do?” we asked her.

“Well, I really had to pee,” the waitress said, “so I used the other stall.”

“You mean they’re still doing it?” we asked.

“I think so,” she told us.

That information was pretty much all that was needed to turn the ladies’ room into an instant attraction. Every waiter and
waitress on the floor headed over to the bathroom and listened while a busboy held the door open. The waitress hadn’t lied. The couple were still quite involved judging by the sounds they were making and the tangling of their feet visible beneath the stall door.

Eventually, our eloquence-challenged manager was forced to go to the bathroom and break it up.

“What I am supposed to say?” he sighed.

“Why don’t you try using a stick?” one waiter offered help
fully. “Sometimes that works with dogs.”

“Sing ‘That’s Amore,’ ” offered another.

“But what they are doing really? Do I have to go there? I am a man and it is the ladies’ room.”

“Yes,” we chimed in a gleeful chorus, “you have to go.”

Shaking his head and muttering at the vagaries of fate, the manager reluctantly entered the bathroom and, quite politely, knocked on the stall door.

“Hello?” he called. “Can you come out of there, please?”

“Can you give us a minute?” the woman said, sounding somewhat annoyed.

“No, you must come out now. This is a public place.” After repeating this two or three times, the manager, who felt he had gone above and beyond the call of duty, left the bathroom and sat down heavily at a vacant table, still shaking his head and blushing furiously. The couple exited the restaurant through the back door a few minutes later.

What drives certain people to turn their table into a makeshift motel room? Aside from the fact that the above-mentioned couples were seriously lacking in any kind of paranoia, part of the appeal seems to be the built-in audience in a restaurant. The woman in the first scenario was clearly carrying on for my bene
fit as well as her date’s. As for couple number two, it’s not as if they couldn’t hear a crowd of people snickering by the bathroom

waiting
217

door. The fact that everybody knew what was going on added an irresistible naughtiness, making the encounters much more exciting.

In the face of these public displays of “affection,” the atti
tude of the waiters and waitresses I’ve worked with is generally one of amusement. Occasionally, someone will take a moral high road (“Really, can’t they wait until they get home?”), but the feeling is usually that if people want to make fools of themselves in public, so be it as long as they tip well. Besides, the staff usu
ally have much more pressing issues with which to concern themselves—their own affairs, for example.

Before coming to work at Baciare, I’d seen plenty of affairs behind the scenes in various restaurants and been part of a few myself. As far as I was concerned, a restaurant without some kind of ongoing soap opera was an anomaly. But no restaurant ever came close to approximating the kind of steamy, volatile passion I saw at Baciare, which also won points for the sheer creativity of its staff in finding places and time to fulfill their desires. Within the first few months of its operation, this restau
rant had as much of a reputation for its “scene” as for its food. Weekend nights, especially, became festivals of consumption on every level. The word
orgy
often sprang to mind. There were so many pairings that it soon became impossible to keep current with the various players. On any given night, there were trysts planned in the kitchen and consummated in the linen room, kisses stolen at the bar and on the cocktail patio, relationships starting and marriages ending. All of this heat made for an explosive atmosphere, and almost everybody got into the act, from the managers to the busboys. But perhaps the best way to describe what went on is to provide an illustration, the “dish,” if you will, from the menu of an average night.

Consider the scene: It’s a Saturday evening in early summer. The sun hangs low over the ocean, coloring the water with a million blue diamonds. The restaurant, which has a prime view of the Pacific and the lightly swaying palm trees along the beach, pre
pares for a busy dinner. In the kitchen, a prep cook chops car
rots, zucchini, and red new potatoes. Another ruthlessly hammers several pounds of steak into tenderness.

Behind a cage, the two dishwashers take their meal break. Because he can’t find a clean fork, one dishwasher is eating a caesar salad with a steak knife. Very carefully, he spears the let
tuce on the tip of the knife and slowly places it in his mouth. The other dishwasher has given up on silverware altogether and is eating chicken with his hands.

Tonight there is rabbit on the menu, so one of the line cooks is in the kitchen stuffing several rabbits with rosemary and garlic before he ties them to the rotisserie for their final ride. After the rabbits come the chickens, whole and stuffed to bursting with herbs and still more garlic.

In another corner of the kitchen, the sous chef, Mario, cuts an entire Pacific salmon into fillets. Using a swordlike knife from his own personal collection, Mario expertly slices the three-foot salmon in half and plucks the bones from its pink flesh. Diminu
tive and intense, Mario works fast and says little. He looks up from his task only when he hears the sound of the time clock punching the staffers in and out. His bright blue eyes scan the kitchen quickly to see who has come on shift and then, not find
ing the one they’re searching for, drop back down to the fish.

Stefano, the executive chef, consults with the pantry cooks on the state of the desserts. He watches as they sprinkle cocoa powder liberally over the trays of fresh tiramisu and inspects a tray of the same that has seen better days. Although he leans in toward the dessert as if he’s actually going to do something, Stefano rarely touches the food. Most nights his chef’s whites

waiting
219

remain spotless, which, considering that the kitchen averages five hundred dinners a night, is quite a feat.

In a tiny office off the kitchen, the managers have their daily conference, which basically entails sitting around, gossiping to each other in Italian, and drinking several demitasses of espresso. They insist on at least an hour alone to do this without interrup
tion from any staff members. Rome might burn to the ground and still there they would be, blithely fiddling away.

The last two members of the lunch crew prepare to leave. They look bedraggled and tired and stand in the kitchen staring into space, gnawing on discarded crusts lying around the bread station.

“When’s this torture gonna be over?” one says to the other.

“Five minutes,” responds the other, checking his watch. “And I don’t care if the openers show up late, I’m leaving. Fuck ’em.”

As he speaks, the night crew begins arriving for work. These waiters and waitresses are showered, fresh, clean, and perfumed.

I must make a brief note about style here as it pertains to waiting. Waiters and waitresses don’t get much leeway in this area when they are required to wear a uniform, so some become quite creative in finding ways to make the most of their physical attributes. In this restaurant, the uniforms were designed with old Italian waiters in mind and consisted of a jacket, pants, and tie. One waitress put darts in her work jackets so that they tai
lored her torso. Combined with her skintight black pants, this made her look like some sort of futuristic cyberbabe on assign
ment from the future. A less outrageous touch employed by vari
ous waitresses involved wearing a black bra under the white shirt so that the design of the undergarment was just visible enough for the imagination to run wild.

Waitresses also got creative with hair design and a variety of sparkly clips. Some of the waiters spent quite a bit of time on
their hair, too, making liberal use of gels and sprays. Although facial hair was highly discouraged, some waiters experimented with sculpted goatees, moustaches, and sideburns.

Makeup, as Belinda had once shown me, took on a whole new meaning as well. Every waitress carried lipstick in her jacket pocket and reapplied it throughout the night, using butter knives as makeshift mirrors.

And of course, we all wore earrings of every imaginable design. I began experimenting with earrings early in my wait
ressing career. I found that if I wore fish earrings, I would invari
ably sell more fish, earrings in the shape of grapes or bottles equaled greater sales of wine, earrings in the shape of pasta— yes, I actually own a pair—were always noticed and invariably spurred orders for pasta.

In effect, the uniform was the costume for the night. What waiters and waitresses did with that costume and the body within it became a form of subliminal advertising. And as fright
ening as it seems, this kind of advertising really works. For example, if I was tired and wanted the table to leave, I’d try this one: “Would you like dessert or coffee?” and subtly shake my head no as I said it. At least seven times out of ten, the customer would say, “No, I don’t think so. Just the check.” Nodding helps in the reverse situation as well: “Would you like to see the wine list?” nod, nod. “Why, yes,” the customer would say, “I think we will.”

But now I’ve really gotten off the topic.

The night waiters and waitresses march through the kitchen on their way to the dining room and shout greetings at the kitchen staff before they go outside to polish silverware, straighten tablecloths, and argue with management over the sta
tion they’ve gotten for the evening. The busboys straggle in, pick at the leftover staff meal, and sigh heavily before checking to see which servers they’ve been assigned to for the night.