Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (9 page)

“Now y’all gotta be real careful usin’ this baby,” our supervi
sor said, stroking the killing steel surface. “I don’t want none a y’all losin’ no fingers while I’m here. Ain’t nothin’ uglier than a bloody fingertip in some poor guest’s food.”

“Um, excuse me,” I piped in timidly. “I don’t think I’ll be able to use the slicer. I think I’m too, uh, short to reach it.” I blushed crimson while my skyscraper of a supervisor looked me up and down.

“OK, then,” she said disdainfully, “Little Bit here don’t use the slicer.” Then she turned to me and said, “You’re gonna be on salads every day, then.”

“Sure,” I said, immeasurably relieved that I wouldn’t have to touch the deadly meat machine. It was even worth the embar
rassment of being called Little Bit by everyone in the kitchen from that moment on.

The salads, however, presented a problem all on their own. We were instructed on how to soak the lettuce in a preserva
tive to keep it fresh throughout the day. The preservative came in a cannister marked with the caution that it should not be inhaled directly. I could feel my lungs shredding as I poured these granules into a vat of water. The lettuce was terrified into crispness after immersion in this chemical bath and was then fashioned into either a garden salad (with the addition of a sad wedge of tomato), a Cobb salad (with the addition of large slabs of processed cold meats and cheese), or a shrimp cocktail (complete with deveined shrimp, which seemed to regularly leap off the salad glasses in postmortem protest). Naturally, the salads required dressings. A perennial favorite was Thou
sand Island dressing, which we made by the tub. I have never been able to understand the appeal of Thousand Island dress
ing. A hideous combination of mayonnaise, ketchup, and pickle relish, this thick sauce has an unnaturally pinkish hue and a noxious odor to match. The addition of this dressing to any salad more or less ensures total obliteration of any natural fla
vors. I developed an allergy to ketchup then that persists to this day. Vegetable or no, I can’t even smell it without my stom
ach turning.

Then there were the desserts. My favorites among the con
fections were the napoleons. Made with yard-long sheets of pas
try dough layered with chocolate and vanilla pudding, these culinary miracles required the use of a mixer that was large enough to contain my entire body. I had to stand on a chair to reach into the mixer and had a coworker hold on to my legs so that I didn’t fall in. Once all these items were prepared, they had to be stacked in individual dishes and placed on huge trays where the waiters and waitresses could grab them as they flew through the kitchen.

I was never tempted by any of the food I helped to prepare. Once I’d eliminated what would either kill me or alter my genetic structure, I was left with mashed potatoes (made from a
powder, of course) and chocolate pudding. The employee meals, exercises in fat and starch, were even worse. By the time I left Yellowstone, I’d lost ten pounds.

Learning the basic tasks of my job took very little time. Soaking lettuce and mixing vats of pudding requires only so much skill. Once these things started becoming routine, I began noticing what else was going on around me in the kitchen (the “back of the house”) and in the dining room (the “front of the house”). This kitchen had a hierarchy I would see repeated in every subsequent restaurant.

Allow me to illustrate.

Dishwashers are on the very bottom rung of the ladder, clinging, tenuously, for their lives. The dishwashing area in this particular kitchen was far removed from all other forms of life. Nobody ever saw the dishwashers, they were considered unclean, the untouchables, slaves of their own misfortune. As a result, they hardly ever spoke (at least not to anyone who wasn’t also a dishwasher) and kept themselves as anonymous as possible. The irony, of course, comes in the fact that a restaurant simply can
not function without efficient dishwashers. Years later, I worked in a restaurant in which the dishwashers occasionally revolted and left their stations to go drink themselves into oblivion. Dirty dishes, glasses, and silverware stacked up until a large portion of the kitchen had been transformed into a miniature toxic waste dump. And then everything came to a complete standstill until the chef could convince some sorry knave to start scraping and rinsing.

In the Yellowstone kitchen, pantry workers were considered only one step up from dishwashers. Since pantry wasn’t responsi
ble for any “real” cooking, it didn’t command very much respect. We didn’t sweat over a hot line and turn out fifty plates at a time. We did not keep our faces in the fire. We were not real men, we were merely girls. In the kitchens I saw later, pantry workers
were similarly denied respect, even when they were responsible for more than just preparation.

The chefs (or cooks—a not-so-subtle difference), at the top of the ladder, had their own pyramid of power. Line cooks (most often those with less experience, who got paid the least, never got to do any menu design, and were forced to prepare eggs every morning) were at the bottom, followed by sous chefs (who were just below executive chefs, got to do some menu planning, and were allowed to boss line cooks and other kitchen workers around), and then executive chefs (responsible for menu plan
ning, design, ordering, and kitchen personnel). In contrast to the rest of the kitchen employees, all the cooks had previous experi
ence preparing food. Some had been employed by the park for several years.

Chefs and cooks are an interesting breed. They work in a controlled frenzy, often producing mass quantities of food with individual specifications for each dish. They have a small space and a limited time frame in which to operate. They are responsible for producing food that is not merely edible but tantalizing and attractive. And they do all of this, literally, in the fire. I have worked with very few real chefs who didn’t consider what they did an art form and who weren’t truly dis
turbed if they turned out plates that were obviously below par. But most chefs receive very few accolades. They can’t stroll around gathering compliments from the guests who eat their art. Instead, a chef has only the server as a link between him (or, rarely, her) and his “public.” Unfortunately, servers are often too busy with their own problems (usually that their food is coming out too late) to care about the chef ’s efforts. In many cases, the chef is correct in assuming he is underappreci
ated. More often than not, I’ve seen a chef place a particularly beautiful dish on the line only to have the waitress cart it off without so much as a smile to acknowledge his efforts. Clashes
between the chef and his crew and the waitstaff are therefore routine.

So it was no surprise that while there were some internecine wars among the cooks, they were united on one point: they hated the waitstaff. Waiters and waitresses were considered money-grubbing scum who had no clue to how hard the kitchen worked for them. In my long career as a waitress, I have seen variations on this theme but have never experienced its absence, whether the chef was a talented and experienced artist or a third-rate cook. At any rate, the cook’s level of expertise matters not; if he wants to, he will make a waitress’s life hell and no amount of skill on her part will save her. On the flip side, a wait
ress who gets on the cook’s good side will invariably experience less stress and make a lot more money. I saw ample evidence of this at Yellowstone and have never forgotten it.

For as depressed as I was over my own job, I felt a deep, unmitigated pity for the waiters and waitresses, many of whom had no prior experience in a dining room. From my vantage point in the pantry, I watched them slam through the kitchen doors, frantic and sweating:

“Where’s my oatmeal?”

“No, no, I wanted over easy, not scrambled!”

“Anybody seen my toast!?”

“I can’t find the Thousand Island dressing!”

Full trays of food were dropped regularly. Many waitresses broke into tears on a daily basis.

As befitting our lowly station, we kept pretty quiet in the pantry, but the cooks were relentless, torturing the waitstaff at any opportunity. They were generally a scary lot, hardened by their service at the hotel. Singularly unfriendly and crude beyond anyone’s expectations, these men made a game out of ignoring the waiters and harassing the waitresses. One popular trick (a crowd pleaser to this day) involved putting up a thermonuclear
plate on the line and waiting for the waiter to touch it bare
handed. Invariably, after the waiter shrieked in pain, the cook would smile and say, “Careful, it’s hot.”

The cooks called the servers by number as the dishes came up, often delaying delivery of a particular order until the frenzied waitress gave up waiting for her food to come up and headed out to the dining room to apologize for the lateness of a meal. The moment her back reached the door, the cooks called her number and then berated her for not arriving at the line sooner. Server number nine, a lissome beauty from Tennessee and a particularly slow waitress, experienced this maneuver several times. In the middle of the lunch rush one day, her orders began stacking up and dying slowly in the window.

“Number Nine, pick up,” a cook called. After a few minutes, he repeated the call. “Anyone seen number nine?” As if they’d preplanned it, all the cooks (and there were several behind the line) launched into a version of the Beatles’ “Revolution Number 9,” repeating, “Number Nine, Number Nine, Number Nine. . . .”

Number Nine never picked up her food. She had left the din
ing room, the park, and the state—the first of many to flee.

Of course, the cooks were not immune to the call of nature and many of them were wolfishly on the make. More than once, I walked into the cavernous cold storage unit and found a cook rubbing pelvises with a waitress. This, too, was a scenario I would see duplicated in various forms in the years to come.

The waitress-cook combination, however, is one of the few that allows the front of the house to fraternize freely with the back of the house. The waitstaff are part of their own unique power structure, one that resembles the feudal pyramids of medieval times. At the bottom of this pyramid are the busboys. Busboys have a symbiotic relationship with their servers. In a full-service restaurant, a waitress cannot perform her job with
out her handy slave cleaning her tables, delivering bread, and
refilling water glasses. On the other hand, the busboy cannot make any kind of decent night’s wage if his waitress’s tables tip badly due to slow or inattentive service.

Hosts and hostesses are a cut above busboys. In some restaurants, the host or hostess is given a considerable amount of power by virtue of the fact that he or she controls the reser
vation book, the holy grail of the dining room. The hostess is the first person to greet the guest and the first to make an impression. A hostess can “get you in” at the table you want at the time you want. A hostess can also present a waiter with a section full of deuces or a section full of large parties. Some
times, power corrupts. Although this was not the case at Yellow
stone, I would work at a restaurant many years later that was almost controlled by a cartel of cash-hungry hostesses. These lovely ladies took tips at the door from guests wanting specific tables and actual kickbacks from waiters desiring profitable par
ties. I’d spent years listening to my father complain about kick
backs in the hotel restaurants where he worked, and I refused to knuckle under. As a result, for several months I received whatever was left over after the prime tables had been seated. No amount of complaining or accusing helped my situation, even though there were plenty of other servers in the same position. The hostesses denied everything up and down, and management backed them up (management, it turned out, was actually having affairs with the hostesses, but that’s another story).

Servers are in the middle of the dining room pyramid and take up most of it. Often, they are the only connection between the guest and his food. Therefore, they alone deal simultaneously with the front and back of the house. Servers, too, are responsi
ble for controlling the wild variables everywhere in between: disgruntled busboys, rapacious hostesses, hungry guests, surly chefs, and profit-minded managers, just to name a few.

Managers and owners make up the top of the dining room power structure. As I’ve already pointed out, salaried middle managers often make less money than the servers they police, leading to resentment and abuses of their power. It’s very easy for a manager to impose punitive measures on a server without ever being held accountable. The schedule is key. Failing to com
ply with a particular manager’s sense of subordination can guar
antee a week of lunch shifts or, worse, brunch. A week of such shifts can easily cut a server’s income in half. Regardless of whether the manager is also the owner or just one of many supervisors, however, he or she is likely to have an eye on cash flow. Customer service is always important but must lead to financial gain for the restaurant. The last thing on a manager’s mind is how well the server is doing, monetarily or otherwise.