Occasionally, however, it’s not just the attitude of the burned-out waiter that sours. Some servers begin exacting revenge in small but meaningful ways. The waiter who couldn’t stand watching people chew, for example, actually began torturing his customers. He refused to bring water to the table, even after the customers requested it several times. He would avoid the table, watching from a distance as the customers stared despairingly into their empty glasses and craned their necks looking for him. He took a perverse delight in waiting for his customers to become so parched they were almost screaming with thirst. “Why shouldn’t they suffer?” he said.
Of course, this waiter was pretty far gone by the time he began pulling these stunts. Others feel compelled to try to protect their income while pursuing their vendettas against humanity. In these cases, tampering with leftovers before they are packaged to go is a particular favorite. Many times, I’ve seen these plates of food picked at, poked at, and dropped “accidentally” before making it into a takeout container.
Similarly, there is the practice of splitting dishes. It was policy at Baciare that no plates were to be split by the cooks. Mixing dishes up, the theory went, destroyed the integrity of the food and its presentation. Should the guest desire to split his food with others, the policy stated, the waiter should perform the split at the table. In theory, this was a good policy. It allowed the waiter to show off a little and “bond” with his customers while he made their meal more leisurely and enjoyable. However, the split policy was incompatible with another, more pressing policy, which was to pack as many tables into the restaurant as possible and turn those tables over at the speed of light. Basically, the restaurant sought to impose fine dining standards on a fast-food schedule. This put stress on the servers, which filtered, inevitably, to the customers. Many customers also rebelled outright at the notion that splits could not be done by the chef and insisted that the food not come out to the table before it had been divided. This was always a perfect opportunity for the burned-out server to release a little frustration. Thus, salads, fish, even pasta got split in the kitchen by hand. I’m speaking quite literally here—as the waiter would reach into the plate with his fingers and throw equal parts of the food onto two or more plates. Sometimes, if he felt there was enough to go around, the waiter would help himself to a small portion of the meal.
“So what?” the rationale went. “They’re not going to care what I do for them. They’ll probably just stiff me anyway.”
There are still other passive-aggressive ways for a waitress to get back at the customers she feels are persecuting her. Revenge, they say, is a dish best served cold. Or, perhaps, scaldingly hot— which is how soup is served when a customer rudely demands a reheat. This customer will invariably receive a fresh bowl of soup that has been heated to a temperature of several hundred degrees with the express purpose of burning the skin right off his tongue.
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“Is the soup warm enough for you, sir?” the waitress will say sweetly. “Because if it isn’t, I can have the kitchen heat it a little more.”
And then there’s the coffee. There is a general rule of thumb for every restaurant I’ve worked in: the more a customer protests the need for decaf, the likelier the possibility that he will receive regular. This is the line that really seals it: “Is that decaf ? Because I’m going to take your phone number and if it’s not decaf I’m going to call you in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.” (If only I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard this original line, I would be a wealthy woman indeed.)
The honest answer? No, it’s probably not decaf. At Baciare, the busboys were responsible for brewing the coffee and keeping equal supplies of both regular and decaf available. It never worked out this way. Often, when I grabbed a pot off the burner and asked the busboy, “Is this regular or decaf ?” he’d respond, “Yes.” This was an area that really separated the burnouts from those with a considerably fresher attitude. The burned-out waitress assured her customer that the coffee was 100 percent decaf, or regular, or a mixture of both if need be. The fresher waitress told her customers that if ingesting caffeine was truly hazardous to their health, ordering coffee entailed a certain amount of risk.
I’ve included these examples in the interest of fair reporting. While not regular occurrences, these things do happen. Chances are that anyone who dines out regularly has encountered a burned-out waiter or waitress at some point and has suffered the consequences, knowingly or unknowingly. Chances are even greater, though, that the server has encountered some very challenging customers and has simply lost the ability to cope. I will say this: I have never seen waiters or waitresses punish a customer who treated them decently or respectfully or who acknowledged, even in the smallest of ways, the service they were receiving. It really does pay to be nice to your server.
Truthfully, I never sabotaged any of my customers even at the most charred point of my own burnout. What happened to me was that I stopped taking an interest in my customers, started complaining about my lot in life, and developed a generally negative aura. I stopped smiling at the table and really resented it when anybody pointed out my lack of warmth. If I felt my customers were treating me like an idiot (“Can you remember my order without writing it down? You’re not going to forget that I want no dressing/extra dressing/light sauce/easy garlic/no oil, are you?”), I started using big words at the table, like abstemious and misnomer. This never went over very well, I must say. “What was that word you used before?” a customer once asked me as he scrawled in a 10 percent tip on his credit card receipt. “You’d better tell me again so I can write it down, ’cause I’m definitely lookin’ to get an education from my waitress when I go out to dinner.”
Inevitably, some sarcasm came sneaking through in my dialogue at the table. I knew it would come to no good. I slipped badly just once.
“How’s the duck tonight?” my customer asked.
“Dead,” I told him.
I don’t know which one of us was more shocked at my response.
It would have been possible to limp along this way for years more, watching the gradual erosion of my attitude and sense of self-worth, had it not been for the passing of those inexorable reminders of time gone by—the holidays.
Spending the holidays at the table is a bittersweet fact of every server’s working life. Bitter because the holidays are often referred to as “amateur hours,” times when people who don’t dine out any other time of year come to the table with impossible demands and expectations for a special experience. And sweet because the very fact that so many people are dining out almost guarantees a big payday for the server. Each holiday has its own
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unique flavor in a restaurant, and there is much to be learned about human nature in general just by watching the way people act on each one of these days.
Allow me to elaborate.
I’ll begin with Valentine’s Day. There is so little love in evidence on this day of lovers it’s enough to inspire cynicism in the most romantic of hearts. Rather, couples trudge out to lunch and dinner with a sense of duty to some false ideal of what they think they should be feeling for each other. If this sounds too jaded, consider the following scenarios. Several times, I’ve seen married men bring their mistresses to lunch on Valentine’s Day. (How do I know that the woman is a mistress and not a wife or girlfriend? Please, rest assured that your waitress knows these things.) These lunches involve champagne, sumptuous desserts, and gifts of lingerie. (The mistress always gets lingerie for Valentine’s Day. The wife, on the other hand, usually gets jewelry.) I’ve seen the very same men bring their wives in for dinner on the same day in the same restaurant.
If this isn’t enough to harden the heart, there are always the couples who choose Valentine’s Day to argue viciously over dinner. On any given Valentine’s Day (and by my calculations, I’ve worked at least a dozen), I would find at least half the couples in my section fighting with each other. Naturally this makes takin
g an order very difficult, but what’s worse is that there is no way these couples are going to enjoy themselves. And no matter what the nature of the argument, it always ends up being the waitress’s fault.
The couples in deep-freeze mode are the most challenging. These couples exchange not a word with each other throughout their meal yet manage to direct vitriolic darts at their waitress every time she comes to the table.
Then there are the couples who select Valentine’s Day to propose. This is a powder keg of a situation. What if she says no? (I’d love to include a tale or two of a woman proposing here, but I’ve never seen one.) I’ve served engagement rings in champagne glasses and on top of desserts and had to stand by to make sure that the unsuspecting recipient didn’t end up swallowing two months of her date’s salary. I have to say that this little scene never plays the way it does in the movies. Unfortunately, the rest of the scenery doesn’t fade into a soft-focus glow leaving the happy couple in a spotlight of love. Rather, there is noise, embarrassment, and, sometimes, disappointment. I’ll never forget the deer-in-headlights look of the woman who received her diamond ring in a glass of Dom Pérignon. She became pale, nervous, and a little desperate. When her would-be fiancé went to the rest room, she pulled me aside and whispered frantically, “He wants me to marry him. What am I going to do?”
Servers, as I mentioned before, are under tremendous pressure to facilitate the perfect experience on Valentine’s Day. If the evening doesn’t go as planned for the customer, the server is often held responsible. And because the rest of humanity also has a reservation for dinner on this night, servers are also under pressure to turn over their tables as quickly as possible. This is sometimes a monumental task, considering that most couples want to linger over their heart-shaped dishes for as long as possible. Most of the servers I’ve worked with don’t mind working Valentine’s Day. Usually they’ve seen enough to adopt the same cynical attitude I’ve outlined here. And in the absence of true love as defined by this holiday, nothing provides comfort like a large amount of cold cash.
The same comfort does not extend to Mother’s Day, the mother of all restaurant holidays, a day feared, reviled, and hated by servers everywhere. Waiters and waitresses prepare for Mother’s Day like soldiers preparing for war. For weeks before this particular Sunday in May, servers attempt to find ruses to avoid working it. Their cars break down, they are deathly ill, they have to fly home and have already bought plane tickets, they are so sorry, but they just can’t work it. Before I had Blaze, I found working Mother’s Day difficult. After I became a mother, however, I found
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it absolutely loathsome. “Why do I have to work?” I’d ask my managers, “I’m the only mother in this restaurant. Don’t I deserve a break?” The answer was a resounding no in every instance. At Baciare, in fact, management posted a note in the kitchen in early April stating, “Everybody works Mother’s Day whether it’s your shift or not. No excuses will be tolerated.” Every restaurant I’ve worked in has counted Mother’s Day as its single busiest day of the year, with a guaranteed nonstop flow of business from opening to closing. So why do servers dislike working it so much?
Let me count the reasons.
M is for the menu, difficult to make, impossible to serve. There is just no way any kitchen can simultaneously prepare one hundred orders of eggs at a time. Brunch items are the most delicate of restaurant dishes and the easiest ones to ruin. Anyone who has received stodgy oatmeal, cold omelettes, or burned toast will attest to this. On Mother’s Day, every restaurant must suddenly transform itself into a breakfast joint whether it excels in this area or not. And over the last few years, breakfast has become a complicated affair indeed. Eggs have to be cholesterol free, pancakes made with whole grains, orange juice squeezed fresh to order. But it’s Mother’s Day, and the customer is the only man of woman born—nobody else in the restaurant has a mother—and he wants his cholesterol-free omelette with a side of extra-crispy bacon, hot and fresh, and he wants it now. At Baciare, more cooks quit on Mother’s Day than at any other time of the year.
O is for the obnoxious attitude of the dining sons and daughters. Many diners seem to revert to childhood patterns of behavior on Mother’s Day. This is to say that they are demanding, petulant, and whiny. Since they can’t direct these behaviors at their mothers, although they’d clearly like to, the server is once again the target.
T is for the terrible tips. Undoubtedly the agony of Mother’s Day would be considerably lessened were it to result in some extra money. But inevitably, one works much harder than usual and makes much less. Very few people actually want to be there at all on Mother’s Day and they certainly don’t want to tip. It’s purgatory, no doubt about it.
H is for the hatred families feel for each other and the hatred that develops in all the staff members witnessing it. Tolstoy might have revised his opinion about all unhappy families being unique had he ever worked Mother’s Day in a restaurant. I’ve heard the same arguments many times over, witnessed the same recriminations, and felt the same tension from families that were quite obviously miserable about being together. I’ve even heard a few mothers say that they hated this day since it only served to remind them of the mistake they’d made in giving birth!
E is for the energy it takes to get through a Mother’s Day shift, which is more than the human body is capable of sustaining. One Mother’s Day, I worked a five-table section that had four complete turns. That adds up to twenty tables, all of which were seated with four or five people—close to a hundred diners and their mothers, all looking to me to provide them with the perfect day. It doesn’t matter how fresh you are when you begin the shift, by the end of it you’re feeling beaten emotionally and physically.
E is also for the effort management puts into making the server’s life as miserable as possible during said shift. That familiar battle cry “I want to see the manager!” rings louder than ever on this day, forcing all managers to start Mother’s Day in crisis mode. Of course, there is often good reason. Over the course of years, I’ve seen a few disasters. One mother was hit squarely in the head with a chair that a waitress was hurriedly moving in order to accommodate a large party. Another mother
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wiped out on an olive oil slick near her table and landed on her tailbone. Yet another woman received an added bonus in her organic salad: a scorpion. While the manager juggles these potential lawsuits in his head, one thought occurs to him over and over again: fire all the servers as soon as the shift is over.
R is for ruing the day you began working as a server, because if there is ever a day that will make you do this (and also contribute to your general feelings of misanthropy and hopelessness), Mother’s Day is it. However, since this is Mother’s Day we’re talking about, let me not end on a totally negative note. There have been saving graces along the way. I have waited on some happy families and I have received some good tips. One year, I waited on two women and their daughters who wrote me a lengthy note on their check stating that I was the kindest, most attentive waitress they’d ever had the pleasure of meeting and that I had absolutely made their Mother’s Day. They would always remember what a wonderful morning they’d had. They even went so far as to include me in their family photos of the day.
The holidays between May and October aren’t nearly as strenuous as Mother’s Day but do have their moments. Father’s Day and graduations come close together in June, spurring at least one crazy weekend, which servers like to call “Dads and Grads.” The same sorts of uncomfortable family get-togethers are in evidence here but with only a fraction of the stress caused by Mother’s Day. Then there is Independence Day on July 4. This is usually a slow day in a restaurant, as it is one of the very few holidays that dictates people stay home and barbecue instead of dining out. Of course, I worked in a town that hosted tourists from all over the world, many of whom were as clueless about American independence as they were about how much to tip. These tourists often showed
up on July 4 and wondered what the fuss was all about. Baciare, being staunchly Italian in its approach to everything, consistently refused to acknowledge any distinctly American holidays (although one Italian waiter did express a desire to see “the fireplace.” Of course, this was the same waiter who believed that Superman lived in Minneapolis). This served to make July 4 a rather depressing day to work all around. Often, a group of waiters could be found standing outside, straining to see evidence of any fireworks, complaining about their own personal lack of independence.
Halloween, while not technically a holiday, is certainly worth mentioning because of the bizarre behaviors it inspires. It’s long been a theory of mine that adults use Halloween as a convenient excuse to dress up in ways that reflect how they really feel about themselves on a less-than-conscious level. Thus, it was always amusing for me to see which waiters chose to don costumes on Halloween and which chose to remain in uniform. At Baciare, the Italians never wore costumes (there is no Halloween in Italy) but loved to see their coworkers in full regalia. As for the customers, it’s been my experience that they generally don’t share the strangely festive atmosphere. After working in costume just once and receiving exasperated sighs from my tables, I decided it simply wasn’t for me. Some customers get extremely offended. A waiter I worked with dressed himself up as a Hassidic Jew one year (for reasons only he was privy to). A couple who ate at the restaurant regularly complained bitterly to the manager about his costume, claiming all kinds of indignities and stating that they would never patronize the restaurant again. The waiter was forced to resume working in his backup costume, which was that of a waiter. Another year, a fellow waiter dressed himself as a woman, complete with high heels, miniskirt, and bustier. Although he flounced around the restaurant in delight for the first hour or two of his shift, his mood turned ugly indeed when he started getting goosed, stroked, and whistled at every time he entered the kitchen. When the waiter complained that he was
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