I began to feel that I was in over my head very soon after I was hired. This was fine dining, after all. The salad fork had to be placed exactly thirteen inches from the teaspoon on the place setting. Carol walked around doing random inspections with a tape measure to make sure this rule was followed. The napkins had to be folded with exactly the right number of creases. We were required to serve from the right and remove plates from the left. We used tray service in the Dining Room and so each server was required to lift and balance large trays holding a maximum of six full-sized dinner plates with covers. I had never lifted a tray that size in my life and I wasn’t sure I could do it.
The menu in the Dining Room came from the same Jurassic time period as the members who ate there. Cholesterol was an unknown enemy, and more was always better. Breakfast items featured tapioca (actually, tapioca was a staple with all three meals), sausages, bacon, pancakes, and eggs tortured in every imaginable way. These meals were a kind of upscale version of breakfast specials in truck stop diners across the country. Shrimp was a very big item for lunch. There were shrimp cocktails, shrimp salads, and grilled shrimp platters. There were also a variety of salads (the Cobb presented nightmarish flashbacks to Yellowstone) and sandwiches, including the ultimate in fatty excess, the Reuben. Most of the members couldn’t finish half of what they ordered and most of them demanded that the unfinished portions be wrapped. Those who didn’t usually put their cigarettes out in their half-eaten sandwiches, signaling a rather unpleasant end to their meal.
The dinner menu was a grateful nod to the traditions of old-style steak houses. There was filet mignon, prime rib, rack of veal, rack of lamb, and ad infinitum. A regular offering, “Surf and Turf,” was extremely popular. Having never seen it before, I was baffled and asked Deane what it meant.
“Oh, you must know,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Surf, where the fish swim . . . ”—he made swimming motions with his arms. “Turf, where the cows graze . . .”—he made hoof-stomping motions with his foot. “Oh, Lord, what’s the matter with you, girl?” he said, exasperated. “Steak and seafood. I can’t believe you’ve never heard of this.”
“Perhaps,” I told him, “it’s a bit before my time.”
The pièce de résistance, however, was the flaming Steak Diane, prepared tableside by Tracy, the inappropriately named linebacker who was our maitre d’. Poor Tracy was a tortured soul (also a writer, he confessed to me) who felt he was destined for much grander things than service in the Dining Room. He’d recently dragged himself through college with no help from his alcoholic, abusive parents and had promptly married Lisa, a pretty young waitress who worked beside him in the Dining Room. Lisa wanted to start a family right away and Tracy wanted to wait as long as possible. This was already the source of frequent quarrels between the two. The stress was often evident on Tracy’s face as he wheeled the stainless steel cart over to a table and set a steak on fire.
Dinner shifts were added to my schedule soon after I was hired. I suspect that this honor had less to do with the fact that I was a good waitress and more to do with the fact that I was young and willing to work up to five split shifts a week.
The split shift in a restaurant is a grueling one, fitting in eight hours of floor time over a ten-hour period. Add the time it takes to get dressed and commute to and from work, and the amount of hours involved in one day’s work can easily add up to twelve. Besides this, split shifts can sometimes be less profitable than single shifts since, to avoid paying overtime wages, managers phase out waiters working splits first, truncating tips. Other restaurants I worked in allowed waiters to work splits off the clock and stay as long as they wanted, but the Dining Room was fastidious about obeying certain labor laws.
I felt entirely unequipped to handle dinner shifts in the Dining Room. There were many more details to attend to, for one thing. Table settings were expanded to include soup spoons, glasses for white wine, and goblets for red. The napkins for dinner had to be folded into a standing fan as opposed to the flat fold for lunch. Dinners went at a much more leisurely pace as well, so that there was more time, in Carol’s words, for “a higher quality of service.” None of this bothered me. What did frighten me was the fact that sooner or later I’d have to open a bottle of wine, and I was absolutely clueless as to how to go about it. I was also going to have to haul a giant tray on my own, a feat I’d managed to avoid up to that point. But by far the most terrifying prospect for me was the thought of deboning a whole fish at the table. I resolved that I would find a way to weasel out of that one forever. For my first few dinner shifts, I struggled with the tray. It was sheer adrenaline and terror that allowed me to get my dishes to the table without dropping any of them. Still, I received some rather puzzled stares from my customers as I awkwardly set the tray down on a kickstand, which the busboy had grudgingly found for me. Wine was another story. I enlisted Tracy’s help at the table, claiming that I was too busy or that he knew more about the type of wine the customer was ordering. Tracy was willing to help when he could, but I started running out of ruses. Finally, my moment of truth arrived in the form of an order for a bottle of pinot noir. Tracy was busy incinerating a steak at another table, and despite his friendliness I couldn’t ask Deane for help. I was, after all, supposed to know how to do this.
As I stood trembling with the bottle in my hand, I received help from an unexpected quarter. Belinda, who was about my age and had been hired a week before me, saw my trepidation and took the bottle from me.
“Want me to do that for you?” she asked.
“Would you mind?” I asked. Belinda didn’t need further prompting, flounced over to my table with the wine, and opened it expertly without ever putting the bottle down. When she returned, she said, “You don’t know how to open wine, do you?” I admitted that I didn’t but told her to keep mum since it would surely be my job if anyone found out. Belinda, who had been waiting tables solidly since her teens, took it upon herself at that moment to teach me everything I needed to know. We began a friendship that day that would last through three years and as many restaurants.
Belinda came over to my apartment with a bottle of wine the following night and had me practice opening it over and over while we drank its contents. I would use what she showed me that night to great effect and profit in every subsequent restaurant.
A brief note about wine: I found that, like many things, successfully recommending and serving wine is as much about acting as if you know what you’re talking about as actually having any real knowledge. The reason for this is that most of my customers over the years have known much less about wine than they’d ever admit. Most people know that they prefer either red or white and then select wines based on what they’ve heard about chardonnay, cabernet, Chianti, merlot, or Riesling. There is certainly a difference between good wines and bad wines, which even the most uneducated palate can discern. Beyond this, however, much of what appeals in a wine is entirely subjective for the average diner. People have been trained to ask for white wine with fish and red wine with meat, and some of my customers have actually become visibly disturbed when I recommended switching colors with these dishes. The only way to know what you really like is to experiment with different wines and then order accordingly. It’s pointless to order a wine based on price or what somebody else thinks you should be drinking.
I saw a perfect example of this type of wine blindness a few years later in an Italian restaurant with a fairly diverse wine list. A fellow waiter who claimed to be something of an expert had recommended and served an expensive bottle of Tignanello, which is an Italian blend of several different grapes made in very limited quantities. He had been so enthusiastic about the wine that his table had left him a quarter of the bottle for his own consumption. The waiter foolishly left the bottle in the kitchen, where it was promptly drained by a couple of his coworkers. Upon discovering the absence of the bottle, the waiter ranted, raved, and accused everybody of being thieving scum. Another waiter, sick of hearing the complaints,
rescued the empty bottle from the trash and replaced the Tignanello with the same amount of house red, a hideous blend not even worthy of being called jug wine. The injured waiter retracted his earlier slanderous comments and invited the second waiter to join him in a glass. The two then sat at the counter at the end of the shift and drank.
“Ah,” said the injured waiter, savoring his glass, “this is really the stuff, isn’t it?”
“Mmm,” struggled the second waiter, who was choking on uncontrollable laughter. Although he tried to contain himself, the second waiter came perilously close to giving himself and the ruse away by literally falling off his bar stool with convulsive hysteria.
Chances are, then, that unless you have an expert or sommelier at your table, your waiter or waitress is recommending only what he or she likes personally or what the restaurant has instructed him or her to push. I can always tell if my customers know what they’re talking about when it comes to wine or if they’re merely trying to impress someone else at the table by ordering something expensive or sending back a bottle that is clearly fine. Mispronunciation is also a clue. Those who add the t on the end of cabernet, for example, are usually in the same league as those who ask for “a cup of chino” when they want that ubiquitous coffee drink commonly known as a cappuccino.
As for the cork, you can tell if the wine is spoiled only by looking at it. If the cork is crumbling or moldy, chances are that the wine has been improperly stored and is turning. But one can tell absolutely nothing by smelling the thing. A cork will always smell like a cork. In fact, proper protocol says that the waitress should remove the cork from the table altogether once the customer has had a chance to inspect it.
Champagne, or sparkling wine, is a bit of a different story. No matter how many bottles of champagne I open, I’m still terrified of being hit by a cork. It takes only one shot to the head or any other part of the body with one of these projectiles to know that it’s an experience not worth repeating. I open champagne now taking great care to hold the bottle at a forty-five-degree angle, cover the cork with a napkin, and twist the bottle slowly to remove the cork. Opened this way, the cork gives a more muted pop than when forced out with two thumbs, but you also lose much less wine in the ensuing spray. I once opened a particularly bubbly bottle of Cristal and watched it foam over the top of the bottle into the wine bucket.
“Hey, hey,” the customer said, “you just spilled about fifteen bucks worth there!”
Belinda didn’t stop her instruction with opening wine. She also showed me how to position a tray with my shoulder, distribute the weight evenly, and set it down without pulling every muscle in my back. She even demonstrated how to flip open a kickstand with one hand while the other balanced the tray. After two glasses of wine, I was convinced that Belinda was some kind of crazy acrobat waitress who could defy the laws of gravity. There seemed to be no aspect of table service that she hadn’t seen or done herself. She even had beauty tips designed specifically for waitressing.
“Do you know why my eyes look so bright?” she asked me. I shook my head, noticing for the first time just how bright her eyes seemed.
“Clown White,” she said triumphantly and pulled a tube of actual clown makeup out of her purse. “A little bit under the eyes,” she said, spreading some on my face, “really makes them bright. That really helps, especially when you’re working in a dark dining room.”
Belinda was also the only waitress I’ve ever met who was content to make a career out of waiting tables. In her teens, she’d won a few local beauty pageants and had thought her calling was on the runway, but that promise had never materialized and she’d taken a job at Denny’s during high school to save some money. Her tips at Denny’s had afforded her the ability to move away from an oppressive rural family life and she’d never looked back, upgrading restaurants every few months, always looking for the biggest payoff. Belinda’s long-term plan was to find and marry a rich man. In the meantime, she was having as much fun and making as much cash as possible.
Physically, Belinda was everything I was not. She was tall and had short, curly black hair, dark eyes, and pale skin. As we became friendlier and started giggling over the small absurdities of the Dining Room, Deane took to calling us Betty and Veronica. Though I wasn’t sure of the reason, Deane never really liked Belinda and so my friendship with him developed on a separate path. Belinda, being much more of a professional (and also much pushier) than I, got moved to dinners immediately. She was even given the coveted “Fish Fantasy” shift mere weeks after being hired.
The Fish Fantasy (nicknamed “Neptune’s Nightmare” by Deane) was the Dining Room’s biggest event. On the first Friday night of every month, the club pulled out all the stops and put on a culinary show that would terrify the most stalwart of ocean dwellers. Every manner of Pacific crustacean, fish, and mammal was featured boiled, steamed, filleted, and surrounded by exotic garnishes and steaming lemon-scented towels. But the fun didn’t stop there; also included in the price were elaborately carved ice sculptures of mermaids, dolphins, and Poseidon, sparkling fishing nets, and a variety of banners suggesting the deep sea. Attendance was very high on Fantasy nights and the waiters made good money.
As I had only recently learned to open a bottle of wine and still felt unsteady on my feet, I reckoned it would be quite a while before I was scheduled for a Fantasy. In the meantime, I spent my afternoons with Deane (we often worked split shifts together and so had two useless hours to kill in the middle of the day), running around downtown Portland, drinking espresso, and searching for the Edith Piaf records he collected. Sometimes he came over to my apartment and we sat around chain-smoking and sharing stories. Deane’s tales were much more exciting than mine. Very matter-of-factly, he told me of his past promiscuity and of the fate of most of his exes. Almost everyone in Deane’s circle of friends had either full-blown AIDS or ARC. He was just beginning to attend the funerals of friends and lovers. After getting to know him a little, I could tell that while he was cavalier about his past, Deane had real fear about his own future. I came upon him in the bus station one morning, scrutinizing a blemish on his face with a hand mirror. “Can you look at this for me?” he asked. “Do you think it’s Kaposi’s?”
Deane had been living with his current lover, Bill, for a couple of years and told me that they were very much in love. He had met Bill at an AA meeting and they shared a passion for collectibles of all kinds. He told me that his goal was to be able to save enough money to open his own shop with Bill.
Like Belinda, Deane also felt the need to educate me. When I asked him one afternoon why he had never felt the urge to at least try having sex with a woman, he laughed at me and blew coy smoke rings in my direction. “Are you volunteering?” he asked, and when he saw my expression, he added, “Oh, honey, there’s something you’ve really got to see.” The next day he took me on a tour of Portland’s gay bars, complete with annotated descriptions of what went on in them. There was absolutely no tale that was too extreme for Deane, no conversational boundary that couldn’t be crossed. Deane was possessed of an extraordinarily generous spirit and a cunning insight into the motivations of most of the people he met. Both of these qualities overrode his slightly neurotic and often bitchy behaviors. In all of these ways, he was an ideal friend. We developed a genuine affection for each other.
When we were “on the floor,” however, Deane kept to himself. Helping out wasn’t his strong suit. So I was on my own the night Hans came in for dinner and sat down at my table with a couple of executives from the upstairs offices. I was petrified to be waiting on him and sure I would make some sort of fatal mistake in my service. Naturally, I did. I served from the left instead of the right and removed the plates in the reverse order. And of course, Hans pointed it out at the end of the meal. As he went to sign off on his check, Hans said, “Your service was good, but I noticed that you served me from the left. Are you aware of that?”
I looked at Hans, sensing the end of my career in the Dining
Room, and saw that he was staring back me, pen held poised in his left hand.
“Well, yes, sir,” I answered him, “but I’d heard that you were left-handed and so I thought you’d be more comfortable if I served you from that direction.” And then I smiled as broadly as I could. “I’m left-handed myself,” I added, “so I can understand the difficulty of living in a world where everything is designed for right-handed people.”
“Oh,” was all Hans said, but there was an equally broad smile on his face and the acknowledgment that I had scored quite a few points.
Unfortunately, I was unable to score the same kinds of points with Carol, who attempted to make my schedule as unappealing as possible. Occasionally, she’d even schedule me in the Card Room. I needed only one lunch shift with this group of cantankerous, feebly lustful old men to know that I’d have to quit if Carol continued her quest. I was saved only by the fact that there were a few waitresses who preferred working this particular room and who were annoyed when I took their shifts. I never quite figured out why Carol had such a needle to me. Perhaps it was because I didn’t seem servile enough. Perhaps it was because, even at that early stage of my waitressing career, I saw restaurant managers as mostly out of touch with what was really going on at the table and I didn’t disguise those feelings well enough. Perhaps she just didn’t like me. Whatever the reason, I felt I was always swimming against the tide with Carol and that whatever success I had on the job would be in spite of her and not because she helped me in any way.
I was not very popular with the contingent of veteran waitresses, either. I suspect that they felt somewhat threatened by my (and Belinda’s) presence in the Dining Room. They’d received very little in the way of rewards for their service over the years, and some of them were understandably bitter. Most of them had children my age. Nevertheless, I made a few attempts to develop some sort of camaraderie between us. I’d spend time in the break room, for example, joining Agnes, Thelma, and Ethel as they drained countless cups of coffee and smoked several packs of cigarettes, and try to insinuate myself into the conversation. If they were talking about their children, I’d try to come in with some sort of story about my own family. If they were discussing the rules of the Dining Room, I’d add my own two cents about how I felt things were running. It was fairly hopeless. I had absolutely no experiences in common with these women and they knew it. Most times they simply ignored me until I went away. Strangely, they all seemed to love Deane although he never seemed to make any attempts to ingratiate himself with them. I began avoiding the break room unless I had Deane in tow. In a way, he became something of a protector. Belinda never spent time in the break room. She always showed up for her shifts already dressed in her work clothes (against the rules) and cut through the front entrance (really against the rules) to the Dining Room.
Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress Page 9