Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  There was a woman who liked to come in for an afternoon glass of wine. She was well-dressed, educated, classy, and it was obvious to every person working there that she wanted to be left alone to drink her riesling and read her book. Except Marcello. He thought any female sitting alone ‘Sad . . . so sad’ and decided she was overdue for the Marcello charm offensive. After he finally backed off she beckoned me over. She spoke slowly and evenly. Politely, even, considering the words coming out of her mouth. ‘Keep him. The fuck. Away from me.’

  I hear you, lady. I despised the customers who fell for Marcello’s crap and left him a big tip so he danced around like a crack-smoking capuchin monkey, waving the money in the air and singing ‘Marcello is the greatest’. He had an impressive following of devoted fans. Older men tended to like him, because he was so deferential. Groups of businessmen, who enjoyed the sensation of their balls being licked. Plenty of women, I’m ashamed to say on behalf of my sex, loved the flattery. Sad . . . so sad.

  The whole ersatz Italian thing worked for Marcello. The food world is in thrall to authenticity, and waiters like Marcello are canny enough to serve it up steaming on a platter. Ciao bella, grazie mille signorina, bene, bene. Marcello was as Italian as it was possible to be yet he’d never been to Italy. He’d never been outside of Australia. He would have choked to death coughing up the money. The furthest he got was one of those islands off the coast of Queensland where he took his wife on their honeymoon and spent the whole time complaining about how much everything cost. To save money they ate sandwiches in their room every meal, except for the free breakfast buffet, which he attempted to eat clean before pilfering sausages for lunch.

  We later found out—through George, no less, who’d grown up with him—that as a young man Marcello had reinvented himself as Donny and been a super-stud with the ladies. Hard to fathom when looking at this cock-a-hoop village idiot, but people often hold onto the haircut from the age they felt the most attractive—it’s the tonsorial equivalent of hitting the pause button—and Marcello/Donny sported an extravagant centre-parted 1970s mop that spoke of a John Travolta-esque, disco-dancing past. It was disturbingly easy to imagine his don’t-take-no-for-an-answer waiter skills being honed on a succession of neighbourhood girls. Let Donny put his hand—there.

  It’s no accident that so many waiters are unemployed actors. Waiters outrageously play up their accents, if they’re lucky enough to have one. I once had a French waiter charmingly tell me, ‘If you wear ze time, ze time wears you,’ (translation: If you wear a watch you’re too conscious of the passing of time . . . I think) only to later overhear him talking in the kitchen about some bird he’d rooted. Waiters are full of it. They talk about their time living in Mexico when they went on a package holiday to Cancún for two weeks. But customers love it. Authentic waiters! Authentic food!

  Marcello’s florid Italian-isms aided and abetted his evil brand of suggestive selling. A sober and dispassionate ‘Would you like some sides—maybe a bruschetta?’ is just plain uninspiring compared to the carnival of fun into which Marcello turned it. Just try to imagine the thick-accented flourish of ‘Let a-Marcello take care of some sides for you. Some a-bruschetta, a bewdiful rocket and pear salad.’ Five times out of ten, or two times out of four, the people at that table would sit there thinking, ‘Who is this pleasant chap who has taken it upon himself to bring us some delicious-sounding sides for free? It must be that wonderfully traditional Italian notion of hospitality.’ Then of course they’d get the bill and be either so drunk they didn’t notice (Marcello was equally good at upselling wine) or too embarrassed to mention a misunderstanding they blamed on themselves.

  * * *

  KATHY

  A woman vomited into a glass and handed it to me.

  * * *

  Another lesson: the customer is always wrong.

  Oh Marcello. Marcello, Marcello, Marcello. King of the dining room. Scourge of the Star. The enemy of all that is right and decent in this world. Marcello, who when asked ‘Why do you always talk about yourself in the third person, Marcello?’, responded as if his grandmother, mother, aunts, sisters and all ancillary female relations had just been accused of prostitution. ‘Marcello is not number THREE! Marcello is number ONE!’ he screamed, his mop of grey hair quivering like a rabid squirrel trying to fight its way out of a bush. He stormed off to the kitchen, roaring his new mantra: ‘NUMBER ONE! NUMBER ONE! NUMBER ONE!’

  Can you name a celebrity waiter? Bet you can’t. If you can, you’re in the industry. That’s different. Every industry has its celebrities. The waste disposal caper will have some crack garbologist whose peers are in awe of the way he sorts rubbish from recycling and can tell PET plastic from polypropylene at twenty paces. It just doesn’t count if it’s in-house.

  If chefs really want to be the new rockstars—pause for laughter—then at the very least waiters deserve to be the new support act. But they’re much further down the food chain. They’re more like the roadies. The pit crew. Waitering has not become an acknowledged realm of celebrity. Chefs have appeared on Dancing With The Stars. Waiters have not.

  Read any restaurant review. It’s all Chef this and Chef that and maybe one throwaway line about the service. Waiters are the ghosts in the machine. I’m guilty, too, Your Honour. My reviews left the waiters more or less invisible. Disposable and unimportant. Mea culpa. I’m sorry. It’s time to stand up and proclaim this state of affairs is unfair. Inequitable. Unjust. This terrible cult of chef-worship must shove over and make room in the bed for the waiters who have to deliver food to tables with lines like, ‘This dish is a memory of Chef’s childhood when he was forced down the coal mines to support his destitute parents and nine siblings. We call it carbon, pit-pony and tears. Enjoy.’

  Sorry to tell you this, big chef-person in the kitchen thinking you’re hot shit: consumer surveys consistently show that diners remember the service over the food. Okay, so a handful of customers are going to photograph each plate, bang on endlessly about the subtle use of vanilla with the marron and generally be stereotypical food wankers mocked by all and sundry. They’re your elite, SAS-style of diner. Normal, everyday, garden-variety people just want to go out and have a nice time. They want to eat some nice food, drink some nice wine, have a nice chat with friends. Nice is the operative word for what they’re looking for. They don’t know more than nice. They can’t define nice, they can’t elaborate beyond ‘It’s . . . nice’, but they know nice when they experience it. And they know that nice begins the minute they walk through the door. Ultimately, even if the food has been knitted from fairy wings and the restaurant is a high-concept take on Lady Gaga’s bedroom as designed by Marc Newson, if the waiter is un-nice then the experience is going to be a dud.

  Telling nice from naughty? I’m eternally glad that is someone else’s problem. It’s something even Santa can’t pull off with any degree of consistency, so what chance does a normal person have? Further muddying the naughty/nice waters is the fact that it’s terribly easy to be a good waiter when everything’s going right. Even mediocre waiters can accidentally find themselves being good ones when the mood is right. A good service brings to mind the velvet click of expensive machinery. A bunch of people working together with one mind, like the legs on a centipede. Exhilarating stuff. When it’s going bad the illusion of the cohesive whole shatters and each shard refracts a separate, mercenary individual who’d rather stick glass in their eye than pick up any slack from a co-worker in need.

  The domino theory didn’t exactly come to fruition in SouthEast Asia but you can witness it first-hand any day of the week in a busy restaurant. All you need is one piece to fall and it’s game over. One section starts lagging behind, waiters begin hissing at each other, the kitchen keeps banging out food that sits forlornly under the warming lights at the pass while the chef, in a state of foaming crisis, rings the bell ding ding ding ding, but the violence of the tone transmits the message ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls’, or its modern iter
ation, ‘Enter the kitchen and DIE’. Diners will learn more than they ever wanted or needed about the chef’s semi-illiteracy or the bartender’s boyfriend troubles when the game known as ‘passing the buck’ begins, and all the while the whole place falls into a state that looks more like the aftermath of a frat house party rather than a properly functioning restaurant. More and more patrons will start doing that universal little wave—the helpless hand flutter, like a bird in a cage—that means they’re trying to get the waiter’s attention without causing them additional grief, although if ignored for too long they’ll invariably quit the nice guy act and raise the stakes to the full vigorous arm wave that means ‘Get the fuck over here NOW’. A handy rule of thumb is that if you walk into a restaurant and there are more than two tables waiting to be cleared, do yourself a favour and leave. The scenario is unlikely to end happily.

  If I ruled the world, restaurant owners would be encouraged to hook up prospective employees to a polygraph machine for a lengthy interrogation, or at the very least shine a bright light in their eyes while wearing military regalia. How else to judge their likelihood of being the weakest link in the chain—a passenger who’ll need to be carried when the going gets tough? Hit them with the big questions. A table comes in ten minutes before closing time, what do you do? A large group wants to split the bill based on the exact measurement of wine consumed—do you let them?

  Finding that truly great waiter is like finding the perfect pair of jeans or the ideal tropical holiday destination unspoiled by hordes of tourists. Forget it. It’s an illusion. A beautiful illusion. Greatness comes but once a year, if you’re lucky. Better to concentrate on rectifying the mistakes that even supposedly good waiters make every day. Things so commonplace they’ve become unremarkable, but no less annoying for it. Some of these things are so entrenched that the horse hasn’t only bolted, it’s taken the car and trailer with it. But please, for the sake of all that’s good in this world, let’s give it a try.

  * * *

  MYFFY

  I started off as a short order cook, but I’d occasionally wait tables if the restaurant was short staffed. I was, um, pretty unpolished. My favourite thing to do, and remember I was at uni at the time, was to try and make ‘fuck you’ and ‘thank you’ sound like the same thing.

  * * *

  HAVE YOU DINED WITH US BEFORE?

  I was once asked this three days after the restaurant opened. (What to say? ‘Yes. I’m a regular. I come here all the time.’) I don’t need to know how the restaurant ‘works’ or the ‘concept’ behind it. Even that Japanese soldier in the Borneo jungle unaware the war has ended probably doesn’t need share plates ever explained again. Restaurants shouldn’t need explanation. Any restaurant that does need explanation is a bad, over-thought, overwrought restaurant from which you should run away at speed. Just once I’d like a waiter to say ‘Have you dined with us before?’ and if someone at the table says ‘No’, hit them with: ‘This is a restaurant. We serve food. You eat it.’

  NOT A PROBLEM

  The ‘not a problem’ waiter is one step up from the ‘Hi, I’ll be your waiter today’ waiter or the table-croucher who thinks getting down to the customer’s eye level will increase intimacy instead of making them feel they’re getting a pep talk from Coach ahead of a really important Little Athletics meet. Why is everything not a problem? Why, indeed, should it be a problem when you’re just doing your job? Do you think saying three words instead of one perfectly serviceable ‘yes’ will show you’re working harder, or that you deserve a bigger tip? Or is it simply that if you say ‘not a problem’ enough, the entire restaurant will be appraised of the fact that you do not, in fact, have a problem?

  DON’T KNOW THE ANSWER? JUST MAKE IT UP!

  In some ways this is an unpleasant by-product of a bigger issue, in the way of pink slime in the meat industry, permeate in the milk industry, or travel allowance scandals in the political industry. Namely: chefs who make waiters too scared to ask questions. Alternatively, telling diners barramundi is a Japanese freshwater fish, cilantro is a smoked chilli, and avruga is premium caviar, could be a symptom of a waiter who just doesn’t give a crap.

  WHAT’S GOOD? EVERYTHING!

  It’s a big menu, you want to order well, how about a little bit of insider knowledge? Please, please, offer something. Anything. Even pointing to the big-ticket items involving foie gras and truffle would be preferable to the bland cop-out of ‘Everything’s good!’—although don’t point me to the prawn gumbo on the specials list, which is a transparent way to get rid of last Friday’s seafood.

  THE MEMORY CHALLENGE

  Wow. How impressive. You don’t need a notepad to write down our order, you can do it all with the power of your mind. Honestly, we don’t mind being interrupted another five times if you want to ‘just check’ a few minor facts such as whether there were three steaks or four. On second thoughts, how about you just buy a notepad? No one’s going to think badly of you, and your memory game is making us a bit jumpy that our triple-cooked chips have already been forgotten.

  THE STORYTELLER

  I’m just going to get your drinks, then I’ll come back and take your order. I’m just going to set your table now. I’m just going to set another table then I’ll see how far off your mains are. I’m just going to clear your table. I’m giving you way too much running commentary when I should just shut the hell up and get on with doing my job as unobtrusively as possible.

  THE OVER-SHARER

  So you used to be married and you’re studying to be a vet and you’re really excited about your trip to Bali next month. Awesome. Let’s keep the veil of mystery up, thanks all the same.

  THE WAITER WHO SAYS ’BON APPEÉTIT’

  Are we in a restaurant in France or any French-speaking part of the world? No? Then please fuck off (Veuillez foutre le camp).

  THE ’HOW IS EVERYTHING?’ WAITER

  How is everything? Well, you’ve just asked a fairly intangible question and it will take some time to formulate a reasoned and considered answer—if I was in a position to answer, which I’m not, considering I’m currently chewing a mouthful of food, and come to think of it I would prefer to eat my meal than engage in chit-chat with someone who simply requires me to say ‘good, thanks’ and would not know how to react should there be an actual complaint.

  THE SNOB WAITER

  Why so superior? I’ve come to eat in a hip pizzeria, you work in a hip pizzeria. We’re in this together. So what if I occasionally like to get down and dirty with a bit of Hawaiian action? It’s my culinary bit of rough, and I’m normally only a little bit ashamed, but then you go and say ‘We don’t do Hawaiian’ with a little trill of a laugh, one of those fake operatic la-la-la’s clinically proven to reduce the receiver’s height by a foot and a half. ‘But we do,’ you say, brightening visibly, ‘have a Queenslander.’

  ‘A Queenslander? Why, what’s that?’

  ‘It has pineapple. And speck.’

  And finally we arrive at the wine waiter. Somewhere in the distant past the evolutionary tree split off and created the great apes, humans, and a separate species known as the sommelier. A lot of people think sommeliers are scary but they’re not—they’re really super-fun guys and the most important person in any restaurant. Just ask them.

  Okay, okay. It’s a cheap shot to pick on the somm. Fish in a barrel and all that. It’s not their fault that the average person treats dealing with the somm on a par with going to the dentist: delicate and expensive, but necessary if you want to keep eating at fancy restaurants.

  It’s a lonely job. Most people just want to get out of the transaction as quickly as possible with their dignity and credit card intact. A quick wham-bam, second cheapest bottle of wine ma’am kind of thing. I find it a bit sad that someone can study for years and years only to have people recoil when all they want to do is share the glad tidings of a cheeky Argentinian Torrontes that has the wicked snap of knicker elastic.

  Sommeliers aren’t sneery
anymore. Some of them get more excited about those trendy low-intervention Orange wines with their sock-drawer musty strangeness than anyone reasonably ought, but they took the pole out of the backside some time ago. It’s just taking the news a while to filter through. Diners remain on high alert. It’s as if they suspect that if they relax too much the sommelier is going to reach over and start rummaging through their wallet. But a somm stumbling across someone who loves wine as much as they do will be overcome with joy. One of us! Someone they can talk to in their wine-speak mother tongue, all silky gamay this and fleshy shiraz that. God they love that shit. They’ll keep sidling back to the wine-appreciating table like a dog that’s been kicked too many times and just wants a ruffle behind the ears. Fair enough, too. Most of the time the job must feel a bit like looking down at lobsters dangling over a pot of boiling water, if lobsters could look panicked, instead of just lobstery.

  Wine service is one of the most profoundly uncomfortable experiences a person can go through (see also: public speaking, death). It’s a little bit like taking a car to the mechanic. You don’t really want to know that the carburettor had to be cleaned and the throttle shaft replaced. You just want to know that the bloody thing was fixed, and that you weren’t too badly ripped off in the process. Same goes for wine. Florid wine-speak just makes people squirm. They’re feeling vulnerable. It’s a performance for which they don’t know the lines or the cue marks. They don’t want to be laughed at for dabbling around the shallow end. They want to be affirmed that Sir or Madam has an eye for quality at a reasonable price.

  Gosh it’s awkward. But it needn’t be. There’s a story about the actress Cameron Diaz visiting St Kilda restaurant Circa, when she interrupted the sommelier’s wordy introduction to an expensive French red with the immortal line ‘Just give me the juice, baby’. Talk about popping the bubble of pretence. Of course, a customer without the natural attributes of Ms Diaz mightn’t be seen so much as a charming thespian as a complete philistine. But maybe it’s a risk worth taking if you don’t feel up to smiling appreciatively when the somm talks about a ‘slightly feral but still delicious background note’. Up to you.