When it comes to channeling anxiety, I have always excelled. Until this point, I had not understood exactly what I would be doing as a backserver and found myself increasingly nervous. Let’s review a typical meal. The guests walk through the sliding glass door into the restaurant, where they are met by a host or hostess and the maître d’. Once seated, their captain greets them, takes a cocktail or wine order, and brings them menus. The captain explains the menu, takes the order, sells and serves the wine with the help of the sommelier, makes sure they liked their food, and delivers the check at the end of the meal. Everything else is done by the backserver. The backserver pours the water, serves the bread, marks the table (meaning that he or she sets the silverware for any number of courses), helps clear each course, fetches glassware, removes empty glasses, and pretty much runs the station. Without a captain, the station might get swamped; without a backserver, it would sink. Tragically, he or she is practically invisible to the guest. It is a mindless and fairly thankless job, and although I would have taken almost any job to work at Per Se, I saw pretty quickly that it would grow dull. Even the food runners had more contact with the guest. They spent half their time watching the chefs plate the food and the rest of their time in the dining room, explaining the food. The only thing the backserver explained were the kinds of bread and butter—six to eight times a night.
My first real friend, another backserver named Patrick, had me laughing seconds after I sat down next to him. With his cherubic face and funny little tuft of blond hair that seemed to spring from his forehead, he looked barely seventeen. In fact, at twenty-three, he had already managed a well-known restaurant and now aspired to work in the wine department.
“I know I shouldn’t be wearing all this aftershave,” he whispered to me with an impish grin as I sat down, “but I figured it was better than smelling like a distillery.”
As backservers, we handled table maintenance, so our training began with setting and clearing tables. The maître d’s gave detailed demonstrations, after which we practiced, using mock tables manned by managers and peers. After each one of us performed the intricate ritual of serving and clearing, our audience critiqued us. One of us moved too slowly, another too fast; one raised the plate in front of the guest’s face like a helicopter; another approached from behind and startled the guest; we forgot to serve the ladies first; we backhanded the guest, meaning we reached in front him, rather than around him.
Once we mastered the basics, the managers threw us curve balls. At one point, one of the maître d’s moved close to Laura, the general manager, and took her hand. When the backserver arrived with their settings, he tried to slide the silverware unobtrusively beneath them. They immediately withdrew their hands.
“Do you see how you just interrupted us?” the maître d’ pointed out. “Nothing is important enough to interrupt the guest.” In this instance, the backserver should have set the knife and fork on the other side of the setting and left their hands in peace. In a similar vein, while we were instructed to pour water and wine from the right with our right hands, to avoid backhanding and crossing the guest, there were exceptions. Instead of interrupting two people in conversation, we should pour from the other side so as not to break their eye contact with an elbow or a bottle. Laura stressed something called “the bubble.” Each table had an invisible bubble of personal space around it, of varying depth. It was our job to determine the boundaries of that space, so as to make the guest feel cared for but not cramped.
On my turn to practice clearing, I approached so the guests could see me coming, placed the silverware on one plate and slid it out from under the guest, careful not to bring it in front of her face, careful not to let my thumb venture over the edge of the dish, and then did the same for her dining partner. I thought I had done everything perfectly when one of the managers leaned to the floor and picked up a sauce spoon that he had intentionally dropped.
“You must know the markings so you know if something is missing,” he explained.
One of the kitchen servers stood too close when serving the soup—or, more accurately, watered-down ketchup in a shallow bowl.
“I feel cramped,” complained one of the managers. “I should not be able to smell you.” Patrick caught my eye from across the room and winked.
Another kitchen server stood too far away, so he had to bend forward to place the plate before the guest, causing his rear end to jut out behind him.
“Imagine if I were sitting at the table behind you. What would I be seeing right now?” Laura asked him.
Everyone participated in captain training so we all had at least a grasp on every aspect of service. A captain’s job mainly entailed navigating the guests through the different menus, an act we called spieling. Per Se would offer three menus when we opened: five courses of larger portions (a choice of first courses, fish, meat, cheese, and dessert), the nine-course chef’s tasting menu, and a “tasting of vegetables.” Captains needed to learn how to explain the differences between the menus and encourage guests to choose the chef’s tasting menu without feeling pressured, limited, or overwhelmed. This was the menu that the restaurant did best and, unless there were serious dietary concerns, would be the most enjoyable for the guest.
We were to avoid using terms like signature or chef’s choice because they favored certain dishes as opposed to the experience of the tasting menu. In general, words that were rote or clichéd were discouraged. “Bon appétit” and “enjoy” are fine the first time you hear them, but if the maître d’, captain, backserver, and kitchen server tells you to enjoy every course for nine courses, you might also enjoy tripping their shiny, Lincoln Town Car shoes.
No first names, no flirting, no hands on the chairs, no touching the guest. Restaurant right-of-way: guest first, then hot food, then cold food.
Because the guests should never have to ask for anything, the rules stated that we drop the check before they had a chance to ask. This required the utmost sensitivity. If we had the sense that they wanted to linger, we might delay the check and let the maître d’ know it might be a while. If they seemed to be in a hurry, we might deliver it right after the last cookies hit the table. In any case, we would leave it in the middle or toward the edge of the table without ceremony or comment. Mercifully, the rules also stated that the first guest to give a credit card would pay. Waiters despise when guests rope them into an argument over the check. Even in the two years that I had worked in the business, people had shoved cards in my pocket, pulled me back and forth, tried to corner me in the hallway, and even accused me of discrimination when it came to paying.
We discussed at length every movement made in the dining room, from the distance between our feet when we served each plate (six inches) to the level at which to carry the plates (just above the waist with elbows at right angles). While I found myself overwhelmed at first, wondering if I should ask how to walk and breathe as well, I saw a reason behind everything we learned, namely how to put the guest at ease.
But there was one arena in which I could not imagine ever being at ease: wine. “Striped bass with ginger vinaigrette. What do you serve?”
Red with meat, white with fish, I thought to myself as hands shot up across the room, mine not one of them.
“I’m thinking an Alsatian white or a Swiss Chasselas,” answered one of the captains whom I had overheard talking about his two previous jobs at four-star restaurants.
Chasse-what?
Paul Roberts, the wine director, taught most of our wine seminars, flanked by three minions: a foppish blond with horn-rimmed glasses and two black men, both of average height, both with shiny bald heads and spaces between their teeth. At the French Laundry, they had fun with the fact that people mistook them, pocketing the other’s tips, switching tables to see if anyone noticed. Their walks, I discovered, defined them. One walked a little like a penguin. The other, André, had this bowlegged glide that, when in jeans and round-toed sneakers, made him look a little like Ernie; in a pinstriped suit
, his walk had an irresistibly quirky charm.
Paul must have had all the sommeliers go up there and introduce themselves, but I only remember André. He wore a checkered shirt that reminded me of the very picnic blanket I was soon daydreaming of putting into a picnic basket with some very rare roast beef and unpronounceable cheese. He could bring the Chasselas and, while he was at it, maybe explain what it was. In my limited experience with sommeliers, I had learned to dread the tedious dictums on chalky soil and the supposed happenings on my midpalate. But this wine team, and André in particular, had an inventive way of talking about the subject. I liked that he called wine “bangin’,” described bottles as “Victoria’s Secret” (silky, lacy, and seductive), and claimed to smell lathered ponies. He had two different wine keys, labeled “Chocolate Mousse” and “Bad Mo Fo.”
By the time I refocused, he was talking about how he began his career in Texas, in such esteemed establishments as McDonald’s and Red Lobster. I began to pay better attention. So far I had met a bunch of New York career waiters who knew they knew it all, a crew of culinary school graduates who had recently been told that they knew it all, and a few like myself who were keeping quiet because we knew we knew very little. André fit into none of these categories. Here he was: from Texas, the land of meat and tequila, a black man in a world of old, white, wine-swirling men, with a résumé that could be held against him. Anticipating the question in my head, he explained briefly that he became interested in wine as a means to boost his check average as a waiter, but I suspected that there was more to the story. After a few months of intensive reading on his own, he decided to test his own knowledge and entered a wine competition. He won. And then he won again. And then he went to the nationals in Miami and won again. At this point he approached Paul Roberts, the only Master Sommelier in Texas, the highest ranking for wine service professionals, and told him he wanted a job. It just so happened that Paul was moving to California to work at the French Laundry, and eventually to open Per Se, and he needed to hire a few sommeliers for the new place. Could André be in California in a few weeks to begin training? He was.
A few days into orientation, some of the female backservers, runners, and chefs were down in the women’s locker room trying on uniforms and lamenting about buffable black lace-up shoes.
“Who’s the sexy sommelier?” I asked, although it was clear by my tone that I knew perfectly well who he was and was doing a little homework.
“That’s my boyfriend,” I heard over my shoulder and turned to see that it was Leigh, one of the women I had seen working behind the bar. “Of seven years.”
Oops. Oh well, there were a few others I had my eye on.
The only profession to which I would liken the restaurant dating scene would be the theater. The romance with the costar/coworker ends when the play ends or when the waiter moves to a different restaurant. Then it’s on to the next play or restaurant and another crew of beautiful, young, and restless actors with too much time on their hands and career aspirations easily put on hold for another beer or six. My first job, as a busser, came through that childhood sweetheart I told you about—he left me for his costar. Our first kiss, at age seventeen, had taken place while making oatmeal-raisin cookies. From then on, most of my affairs were related to food in one way or another. There was the Mexican sous chef who seduced me at Coney Island, after hot dogs and a six-pack of Corona. Next up was a relationship with a food runner based entirely on lunches at restaurants we couldn’t afford for dinner. He was very sweet and very attractive, but he was also a Republican ex-marine who watched football on television. That didn’t work for about four reasons.
After working with a bunch of artists who lived on ramen noodles, I was feeling like a very small fish at Per Se—a white sardine, maybe. Half the staff had come from the French Laundry for a few months to help us open the restaurant. To me, this meant that, though they were quite friendly, they knew everything and were, therefore, intimidating. Miraculously, and I say this having barely survived the vicious cliques of Edmunds Middle School, I became friendly with a few of the Californians. After training, we began migrating over to Kennedy’s, an Irish pub around the corner. Later, we moved to the Coliseum, which was half a block closer (and after seventy hours a week on your feet, this makes a difference) and became a sort of petri dish for anything brewing. Or, in many cases, for anything breeding.
The camaraderie was a little distracting for some of us, but it also helped us work together. When service flowed seamlessly, we called it “the dance.” In these moments, there was a grace to our movements, a sense of poise, an awareness of our bodies in relation to one another and to our guests. In the months of training for this restaurant’s opening, we not only learned glassware series and the names of the cows that produced the milk from which our butter was made, but were coached by an eighteenth-century dance specialist. One afternoon, at the Hudson Hotel, we learned to walk, to stand, and to bow like ladies and gentlemen. Ladies were taught to look demure and to curtsy. Gentlemen learned to stand with one foot ahead of the other and the opposite hand on imaginary sword hilts. It seemed absurd at the time, but in fact much of it came in handy. When holding two hot plates of Snake River Farms calotte de boeuf with crispy bone marrow and a rissole of marble potatoes, one was wise to hold them close to the center of gravity, learned in curtsy training, so as not to make the marble potatoes roll around the plate like their namesakes.
Toward the end of that session at the Hudson, our instructor split us into two long lines and took out a bouquet of multicolored feathers.
“I would normally give the feathers to the ladies,” she explained as she passed them out, “but we will have to make do.” Out of fifty or so front-of-the-house employees present, there were maybe six or seven women.
“The point of this dance is to think about giving and receiving,” she said, pressing play on her tiny boom box. A slow and stately march started playing through tinny speakers, a march to which we learned a simple dance: stepping up to our partner to give him the feather, stepping back to a bow, taking his hand, turning around, receiving the feather again, and stepping back to the line.
“Are you starting to feel each other’s sense of space?” she called out. Someone sneezed.
As the dance went on, we grew more comfortable with one another, roughhousing and fighting over the props.
“I’ve been defeathered!”
“Giveth the feather backeth or I will have to unsheathe my sword!”
WHEN WE OPENED the restaurant, we were armed with wine keys and Mont Blanc pens instead of feathers and fantasy swords, but we were going to need more than these to survive on the dining room floor. We also had the menu and the wine list to contend with.
Let’s say two guests, Mr. and Mrs. Bichalot, have just been seated on table five, which is restaurant-speak for sitting at table five, and have chosen the chef’s tasting menu. Hopefully they took our suggestion of champagne in anticipation of the first course, a rich caviar preparation called Oysters and Pearls. Expecting the dish to stand up to scotch or something equally palate-dulling is expecting a great deal from a fish egg. The Bichalots critique the flowers (quite tall, don’t you think?) and the view (it’s a pity Chef Keller didn’t choose a higher floor), the sparseness of the walls (Darling, perhaps a loan of a little artwork is in order?), until a waiter appears on their left with something they hadn’t considered for years: an ice cream cone. At that point, they relax and begin to take the whole affair a little less seriously, because, amid all this marble and ritual, someone has done something rather clever.
Being well acquainted with the salmon cornet at this point, you would gobble that thing down in the recommended two to three bites, which optimally, combine the cone, the crème fraîche, and the salmon. Mr. and Mrs. Bichalot, however, are “challenged,” as the backservers call anyone who would eat an ice cream cone with a knife and a fork. Now their table must be reset with new silverware and plates and possibly even a new bread plate
if they have left the paper or a cornet tip there. They might even need to be crumbed if they have scattered sesame seeds or cornet shards on the tablecloth. Being cornet-challenged is the first sign of danger to a backserver. The next thing you know, they will be asking for half-still, half-sparkling water, wanting the blinds lowered midsunset, and suddenly becoming a vegetarian when the first meat course arrives.
The Bichalots, having finished ravaging their cornets, are now crumbed and set with mother-of-pearl spoons, with which they will eat their caviar. “What a relief,” Mrs. Bichalot confides to Mr. Bichalot—metal implements, as they well know, can cause caviar to taste a little tinny. Mr. and Mrs. Bichalot are moving on to caviar because it is the next course of their tasting menu. If, however, the chef decides to give them VIP treatment (for example, if Mr. Bichalot’s nephew was the sous chef’s mother’s sister’s neighbor’s stockbroker, or if they were in the restaurant business themselves, or employees of Per Se or the French Laundry, or a major newscaster or politician), they will have only just begun their canapé experience when their grumbling backserver crumbed their table (with an Italian sterling silver crumber that looks a little like a razor clam).
Sometimes the kitchen will give each guest at the table a different version of the same dish, four different canapé-sized soups or sorbets, for example. Other times they will give two guests one thing and two guests another, or any other configuration that would make things exciting for a larger party. (There is a term for this at the restaurant, but if I tell you, you might go in and ask for it and I would get in trouble. Extra canapés are a gift from the chef and to ask for them, even if you are willing to pay, would be like calling a dinner guest and telling them that instead of a bottle of wine or some flowers, you would like them to weave you a new tablecloth. Please don’t do this.)
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