Tag Archives: Restaurants

Please tip me twenty percent

Every time I sit down to write something, I always have to hold back the urge to start complaining about my job, to start another one of these restaurant posts. One, and I’ve already said this a million times, there’s already a great blog all about waiting tables. So I don’t want to just do what that guy has already made a pretty successful career out of. But two, I like to stay positive, upbeat, you know, to the best of my ability anyway. Whenever I write one of these restaurant pieces, it always comes out negative, whiney, just very unpleasant.

Having said all of that, this is already a waiting tables piece. That first paragraph was just a big unnecessary disclaimer. I wait tables full-time. I spend more time at the restaurant than I spend awake at my own house. And so yeah, while I don’t necessarily want to be all about waiting tables, I’ve got to get some stuff off my chest now and then. Otherwise it’ll just fester and grow inside until one day I explode.

Today I’d like to talk about tipping. Think about gratuity, the system. It’s the system by which I and all of my waiter and waitress brothers and sisters eek out a living in this world. I work for a restaurant. The restaurant pays me something like three dollars an hour, which, and I don’t have to say it, isn’t a lot of money. It’s nothing. All of my money comes from tips, from tipping, from total strangers giving me money at their discretion after they settle their bill with my employer.

It’s crazy. It’s crazy because the people I work for still control everything that I do when I’m at work. Even though they’re paying me next to nothing. I still have to follow all of their restaurant rules, I have to shave every day, get micromanaged every ten seconds, do what I’m told, stand up straight, smile for the guests on the floor.

And I do my job and try to make sure everybody’s having a good time. Why? Because it’s my job? Sure. But also because I’m personally invested in each of my table’s dining experience. They have a good time, I do everything right, hopefully they’ll leave me a good tip, a twenty percent tip.

And that’s the whole argument. The system works because if I didn’t have that incentive of a potential tip, then theoretically I wouldn’t work as hard to earn that tip, right? Wrong. It’s bullshit. The whole system is flawed. It’s flawed because I never receive uniform twenty percent tips. A lot of my tips are fifteen percent. “Boo-hoo” a lot of you might be thinking to yourselves. I should be happy for whatever I get.

But that’s a terrible way try to make money. The standard is twenty percent. If I get like four or five fifteen percent tips, it’s like trying my hardest in school and getting nothing but B minuses. It’s like busting my ass, doing more work and taking home less pay.

Whenever I complain about the system, I invariably hear stuff like, “suck it up,” “stop whining,” “get a new job.” But that’s not how it should be. Every other real job in the world, you’re taking home a certain amount of money. Only by waiting tables does that money depend on the whims of the customers. And a lot of the customers aren’t nice. They’re just not nice people. They go out to eat, they order a bunch of stuff, they make me run around, I do it, I do my job, I smile and act friendly and do whatever I’m asked, and then these people leave me ten or fifteen percent. Seriously, that’s not a good system.

And the restaurant doesn’t care. Better luck next time. The customers paid for all the food. They didn’t arbitrarily decide to pay only fifteen percent of the check. No, they try something like that and then somebody’s calling the cops. But a ten or fifteen percent tip? “Bye! Thanks so much! Hope you had a great time! See you next time! Bye! Thanks! Bye!”

The hypocrisy is compounded when you try to wrap your head around the automatic service charge nearly universally applied to parties of five or more. Why should that gratuity be automatic? What’s the difference between five people ordering Diet Cokes and two people ordering Diet Cokes? The waiters and waitresses with bigger tables, not only are they serving more customers, but they’re serving more food, handing over bigger checks, and automatically receiving eighteen to twenty percent of those giant bills. All while the rest of the staff serving small parties just has to keep smiling and crossing their fingers, hoping that their tables choose to pay for their service, their personal employee that did everything required.

Restaurants should operate on a system of uniform automatic twenty percent gratuity. We should treat waiters and waitresses like salespeople receiving a commission. You don’t go and buy a car and then tip the salesperson. He or she gets a cut. It should be the same with waiting tables.

Oh but what about that incentive business? Maybe the wait staff might start slacking off? Well this is just a question of management. If your employees aren’t doing their jobs, they should get disciplined and eventually fired, just like at every other job. There’s no reason to assume that everyone will start sleeping while they work. No, just like salespeople, we’re going to want to bust our asses, sell stuff, bump up checks and earn bigger commissions.

Finally, while I’m up here on my soapbox, I’d just like to say, tip twenty percent. Don’t be an asshole. Leave a tip. If you go out to eat, if you sit there and have somebody wait on you, pay them for the job that they’re doing.

Done. See? That was really long and I got myself all worked up. But I had to. I was already worked up. I worked the dinner shift yesterday and my last table of the night, it was these three German people. They ran up a check of a hundred and fifty bucks, paid in cash, and left fifteen dollars on the table. I went up to them, took the money and said, “Was everything OK? Was there something wrong with my service?” and they just looked at me and said, “No, everything was wonderful. Thanks.”

I wish I could juggle

I wish I could juggle. But I only ever get the urge to try and juggle when I’m at work and I’m standing next to a big bowl of lemons or limes. I’ve been working in a restaurant since I was fourteen, so there have been plenty of occasions where I’ve found myself standing next to large quantities of fruit. And I’ve tried juggling citruses enough times over the course of my life where I can say that I’ve made some progress. But if I add up all of these little moments here and there I’d still probably only be able to count to maybe a half an hour of cumulative practice. That’s hardly enough to really develop a skill, to really get good at something. What do they say about the time necessary to master something? It’s definitely more than just thirty seconds here and there.

I always get at least two or three consecutive juggles before I completely lose control. The frustrating part is, I know exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. It’s tossing one thing up in the air, gently, catching something else, and then tossing another thing from one hand to the other. All of these individual parts are laughably easy. But patched together, the whole juggling thing, I lose it. Whenever I try, for some reason I always wind up lobbing the fruit slightly ahead of me. So I have to reach a little further to catch what I’ve thrown. After the second juggle, I automatically wind up falling forward, walking ahead, and then the throws get bigger, to try and make up for the outward motion, maybe, and I’m definitely losing at least one lime, and then I realize, shit, my boss is probably watching me, or that lemon is getting a little too close to that stack of glasses, and yeah, it never ends well, because, like I said, I can’t juggle.

Going on what I said about the whole falling forward thing, I’ve always had this idea that, maybe I can juggle, but just not standing still, like I have to be walking forward, or even running maybe, to compensate for that slight outward pitch. So the forward motion seems like it would be the perfect correction. Unfortunately, I’ve never tried it. Like I said, I really do wish that I could juggle, but I’m so rarely bombarded by the actual urge to get up and learn how to do it. It’s always at these inopportune times.

Like it’s always when someone else who actually knows how to juggle starts juggling. And they’re just standing there, tossing three things in a perfect circle, and I get so jealous, because they make it look so easy. So I’ll try and I can’t juggle and I’ll break something and, if my boss isn’t around, everybody will start laughing at me, at my clowning around. But I’m not clowning around. I’m seriously trying to juggle. It’s like, I’m watching this person juggle, and I’m staring at them, at how easy it is, and I just lock their motions in my mind, in a loop, like I’m juggling the mental image of this person juggling, over and over again, and I start moving my hands automatically, like I have to be able to do this. And I jump right in and break something.

And maybe my boss was watching. And his natural tendency, being in charge, he wants to come over and tell me to knock it off, especially if I’ve broken something, especially if there’s already broken glass everywhere. But maybe he’s more amused than he’s letting on, like maybe he saw everything, but he knows that if he comes over to try and chastise me, I’m just going to be like, “What! Come on! I swear I can juggle!” like I’ll put on this whole show that’ll only add to his amusement, and so he won’t be able to keep a straight face, and I’ll have busted through his façade of authority. That’s why I’ve never gotten in trouble for tossing around the lemons, dropping all three on the floor, one time I did it with apples, and when they all crashed down they got damaged, bruised, a total waste of produce that we just had to chuck in the trash.

One day I’ll figure it out. Look how much mental energy I’ve spent thinking about juggling just in writing this piece. That’s got to add to the training. Sometimes I think that the more you think about something, the more it’s going to happen. Isn’t that the majority of training for anything? Just getting yourself in the right mindset? And once I know how to juggle, like for real, like being able to juggle without pause, without running forward, being able to do it while holding on a conversation, I think I’ll be able to incorporate juggling into everyday life, into a practical setting. Sometimes at work the boss will be like, “Rob, can you go into the walk-in and restock the lemons?” and I’ll say, “Sure thing boss,” and then I’ll head into the fridge and I try to grab as many as I can in my arms, cradling them, but it’s an awkward position because the lemons are small enough so that I always think I should be able to carry more than I can. But once I learn how to juggle, I’ll just toss them all in the air, seven, eight, nine lemons, and I’ll walk through the restaurant and everybody will be amused, even me, amused and impressed, I did it, I finally learned how to juggle, and they’ll all land perfectly in the lemon bowl, one after the other, and the restaurant will still be busy, so I’m not going to have a chance to really revel in any of the mild applause of my coworkers, and of my boss too, he’ll be clapping gently, or giving me a subtle thumbs up. How could you not love something like that? A nice little fun diversion in an otherwise humdrum routine day.

Running really late for work

Sometimes I feel like I’m always running late, regardless of when I have to be up, or how much time I have at my disposal to be ready. For example, the other day my boss asked me to work a double shift. “No way,” I told him, “I hate working.” OK, I didn’t say that exactly, but I still said no. Not taking no for an answer, he countered “OK fine,” he told me, “How about you can come in at noon?” And I was like, all right, fine, that sounds doable.

And I started planning out how the day would go. I’d wake up at eight-thirty, get like three blog posts done, take my dog Steve for a long walk, make a nice breakfast, maybe even get some reading done. Let’s do it!

The next thing I know my cell phone alarm clock is blaring at the periphery of my consciousness. I’m trying to get out of bed but my body is completely unresponsive. My cell phone alarm is so loud, so grating. I don’t know if everybody is familiar with the iPhone alarms, but I always use the one that sounds like the red alert from Star Trek. It’s intense. But it’s the only one that even stands a remote shot at waking me from a deep sleep.

What happened? Eleven o’clock already? Jesus. I usually wake up a lot earlier. I barely had time to get up, shower, shave, and then take the dog for a walk before I grabbed my bike and pedaled to work at a pace I usually reserve for outrunning taxis I’ve accidentally bumped into in traffic. OK, that’s not really true. I don’t outrun taxis. I just got a little carried away with the length and dramatics of that sentence. Although I did love Premium Rush.

But still, I was right on the verge of being late for a shift that I was already told to come in late for. I really was biking to work a lot faster than I usually do. For the first time in the better part of a year, I had left the house without so much as putting a morsel of food in my mouth. More importantly was coffee, or the lack thereof. Brewing and waiting and sipping, it was all completely out of the question.

I made it on the floor of the restaurant literally at the very minute. And I’m not one of those guys to throw around the word literally. Like I actually punched in and it said 12:00. I made it to work and the floor manager sees me and goes, “Finally! Rob’s here. Where have you been?” That deal that the general manager made with me? That whole thing about working a double and then telling me to come in at noon? Did we seal the deal some kind of a secret handshake? Because he didn’t tell anybody else. So I had to explain myself to the other managers, telling them I actually wasn’t late, but even when I hunted down the GM, “Right?” I asked him, “Remember you said I could come in at noon?” “Right …” he had that look on his face, like I might be making it all up, like he couldn’t really pinpoint the agreement I was talking about.

The day is over. I made it through. I just can’t get over the fact that, with two extra hours added to my day, I wound up being later than ever, later than I am on a regular day when I have to be at work at my regular time. I missed breakfast, I missed coffee, and I didn’t get to write anything. My whole day at work was thrown off balance. I was having what I assumed to be a lack of caffeine induced headache, even though normally I don’t believe in those. And I was starving. I was starving and serving people delicious, delicious lunch. It was torture.

When did I become so dependent on coffee? I never drank coffee in college. I don’t even remember when it became this habit. I honestly don’t know how I got to the point where I need three cups of coffee just to feel like myself in the morning. That’s kind of crazy, right? But tons of adults drink coffee. Maybe I’m more of an adult than I’m letting myself admit. You know, aside from the whole almost being late to work at noon thing.

An intermediate guide to wine

Maybe like four months ago I wrote about how I don’t know anything about wine. I’ve since switched jobs. My old restaurant didn’t have a liquor license, so I didn’t need any alcoholic knowledge. Every once in a while some stuffy Manhattan couple would come in and, before I even had a chance to say hello, they’d instruct me to go fetch them a couple of glasses of Sauvignon Blanc. And I would just stand there, staring at them, not saying a word, waiting for them to realize that I hadn’t moved, that I was just staring straight at them, and when they would finally give in, finally look up to me to make eye contact and say, “Well?” I’d instantly flash a crazy smile and say, “Sorry! No alcohol! How about a Diet Pepsi?” It’s the little things that get me through the day.

But this new restaurant is, to slam my previous gig and, for lack of a better description, actually a real restaurant. Like I have to wear a tie. It’s ridiculous. And they’re all about wine. They pride themselves on their wine list. They do tastings with the staff whenever a new bottle arrives. When I applied for the job, they made me take this whole wine test. It was written. Pages and pages. I kind of expected it, but as is my pattern of not taking life seriously enough, I spent only about ten seconds online researching wines before I got distracted and started wasting time on Reddit.

Whatever, I told myself, I know enough about wines. Which is only about ten percent true. I drink red wine. I know the names of the popular grapes. I never spend more than ten dollars for a bottle. So I figured, just get in there and charm your way through whatever questions they ask. That is, I had assumed it would just be a manager talking with me about wine for a while. In that scenario, I probably could have done fine. But like I said, they sat me down with a written test.

I immediately knew that I was fucked. There were all of these questions about regions. I know Napa is in California, but that’s about it. And then there was fifty percent of the test dedicated to white wines. I never drink white wine. The last time I took a sip of white wine was at this Chinese restaurant called Silk Road that everybody went to in college. You sat there, ate Chinese food, and for two hours they gave you free white wine. Yeah it was out of a box. Yeah it was disgusting. But it was free booze. The last time that we went there during senior year, I was eating Chinese food, pounding back glasses of white wine, feeling fine, and then at the end of the meal I stood up to leave. It was like all of the alcohol had accumulated in my legs, just waiting for me to get up so it could attack my brain all at the same time. I was instantly like black out drunk. But not even. I wish I had blacked out, because I got so sick, really sick, everywhere. And I remember all of it. I still can’t drink white wine.

And now I’m staring at this white wine test. I wouldn’t know how to bullshit my way out of any of these questions. The worst part about the test was the last few pages were a direct photocopy of the restaurant’s wine list. Did I mention how much pride they take in their wine list? Certain wines were blanked out and I had to fill them in. Like I was supposed to study their wine list. Come on. That should have been the easiest part of the test, because it was just rote memorization. But I didn’t study.

So I’m taking this test at one of the tables in the restaurant. Five minutes go by and I figure, well, I can either get a zero, hand it in with some half-assed joke about not knowing too much about wines, shake somebody’s hand as they say, “Yeah. Thanks a lot. We’ll definitely be in touch.” Or, I could just take out my phone and look all of this stuff up.

I’m not a good cheater. I could never cheat on anything, even in high school, and not for any moral reasons really, because I think testing is just a bunch of nonsense anyway, but I was mainly afraid of getting caught. I’m the worst, constantly looking around, sweating. It’s all a dead giveaway. But nobody came over. I had enough time to take out my phone and look everything up, even on New York’s super overcrowded wireless network.

I filled out the red section one hundred percent correct. And then I thought to myself, shit, that was probably a mistake. What if they get suspicious, think to themselves, wow, this guy really knew every single question? Did he cheat? That’s what I would think if I were giving the test. But I filled it out in pen. What was I going to do, ask for a brand new copy of the test? They’d ask why. I’d say because I made some mistakes and I want to start over. They’d say just cross them out and keep going. What am I supposed to cross out the obviously correct answer and rewrite an incorrect one, to make it look more natural? I told you I’m a bad cheater.

So I figured I’d make up for it by not doing so well on the whites. I made up some incorrect answers. I left some blank. Whatever. And then I handed it in. The manager looked it over and said something like, “Wow. You really nailed the reds. I guess we’ll just have to work on the whites.” And I kind of just let out this internal sigh of relief, like I couldn’t believe I actually got away with it, like I couldn’t believe nobody even gave me one verbal question to make sure I hadn’t cheated through the whole ordeal.

But I’ve been at this job for a few months now and I’m pretty sure that I didn’t really need to know anything about wine. I still barely know anything about wine. When people ask for a recommendation, I literally point to a random wine and start going off, really convincingly, “Oh this one is just delightful. Unlike your typical Chardonnay, this one’s got a lot less of those oaky overtones. And there are so many complex aromas. You can detect vanilla, passion fruit, shnozzberry. It’s wonderful.”

But even that is super rare. I think I’ve been asked for a recommendation maybe twice. Usually people come in and are just like, “Give me a glass of the house Cabernet.” At this point I’m supposed to direct the guest to our wine list, to show them that we have three house Cabernets, that we take our wine very seriously. But whatever, I know what they want, the cheapest, and I want to minimize the number of words that have to come out of my mouth directed at that person.

The best is bottle service. Somebody buys a bottle of wine, even the cheapest bottle, and it’s already doubled the price of the check. Some of the other waiters are really good salespeople, adept at hawking off hundred dollar bottles. My strategy is a little more modest, only because I know I could never pull off those rare vintages with a straight face. If someone asks me for a good bottle, I always point out the second least expensive. The customer will look at it, think to themselves, well, out of all of these wines, this waiter is pointing me in the direction of a moderately priced bottle. I’ll take it. Which for me is a win, because I’m just assuming that the majority of the people I deal with will always default to the cheapest option. That’s what I would do anyway. And so in most scenarios, I’m bumping them up to the second cheapest option, which, done regularly enough, is a huge win for me. But like I said, I’ve only been asked for a recommendation maybe twice.

The one thing I picked up way too fast was the whole opening the bottle at the table. I say too fast because, after a month or two, I felt so confident in my opening skills, that it just escaped the realm of my imagination that anything could go wrong. So one night I had this group of four men, they each had like three glasses of Scotch at the bar and started ordering bottles of wine at the tables. The first bottle went smoothly. The second bottle went even smoother. So smooth in fact that the cork offered basically zero resistance as I pulled it out. And not expecting such an easy job, the hand cradling the bottle automatically jerked down a little bit, expecting somewhat more of a fight. The result was that half of the bottle splashed out directly on top of two of the guys I was serving. Like they were soaked. Like I couldn’t even try to clean anything up, because it was all over the both of them. It looked like they just gotten out of a red wine shower. I had to fetch a new bottle of wine because this one was noticeable depleted. What a disaster. I comped the bottle and told the manager that these guys had a little too much to drink at the bar.

Crisis averted. I think. Maybe one day I’m going to go into work and the boss will just be like, “All right buddy, this has gone on far enough. You’re not fooling anybody. Name me four types of Chardonnay right now or your fired.” And I’ll just have to be like, “Yeah, sure. But, can you hold on one second? My mom’s in the hospital and I just want to text my dad and see if she’s OK.” And then I’ll really hope that the wireless network is moving quick as I’ll open up my phone’s browser and try to load up the restaurant’s wine list.

Changing jobs

I changed jobs a while ago. The restaurant I had been working at for a couple of years decided, amongst other poor decisions, to ignore the advice of the Department of Health. “I’m going to come back here sometime in the next few weeks,” the health inspector said, “and if I don’t like what I see …” then the restaurant’s C grading would stand. For anybody that doesn’t know, all New York City restaurants are given an annual rating of A, B, or C. So the restaurant changed nothing, the guy came back, was like, “are you kidding me?” gave them the C, and left. As punishment, the general manager came downstairs in a cocaine-fueled rage, fired the closest busboy, screamed out something like, “and there’s more where that came from!” to the rest of the staff and then disappeared.

So I figured, yeah, you know what? As much as I adored my indentured servitude, maybe a change of scenery would do me some good. But I wasn’t sure. I needed to make a list, some pros and cons. OK, so, pro: all you can eat ice cream. Believe me, I took advantage of that one. Pro: Only tourists came in, meaning no regulars, meaning if I didn’t feel like acting nice I didn’t have to, because even if they did complain, pro: the managers didn’t do anything except hide out in the office, and wouldn’t know how to deal with a pissed off guest anyway.

But the con side of the list brought everything into sharp relief. No benefits, no regular schedule, constant yellings and screamings from the psychotic GM … whatever, I don’t feel like reliving my lousy job by complaining. I do enough of that in real life.

So I went online and checked out some job listings. One restaurant immediately caught my eye because they offered benefits, something pretty rare in the service industry. I walked in, went through the interviews, and here I am, new job. My old job didn’t take it so well. Even though I gave a five-weeks notice, the general manager looked me square in the eye and told me I’d never work in the restaurant industry ever again. Seriously, what a nut job.

The only problem I had in switching, and it sounds like a minor detail, but there is always so much time spent waiting around while you’re filling out applications. It’s almost enough of a deterrent in itself to actually finding a new job. I walked in the door of the new restaurant. I had to introduce myself to a hostess and tell her I’m responding to the open call. She gives me an application and tells me to take a seat somewhere to fill it out. There are like two hundred other people filling out applications. First of all, I don’t get this application stuff, because it’s all right there on my resume. Why don’t you just take a copy of my resume? Everybody puts so much weight on the resume, but every single time I’ve interviewed somewhere, they always make me waste twenty or thirty minutes refilling out everything by hand on some generic application form.

Whatever. I filled it out. I handed it in. “Thanks a lot, somebody will be with you in a second.” And I hate to ask, but I know from past experiences that I have to, “Where should I wait?” because if I don’t ask, I’ll just kind of wander around aimlessly and try not to look like I’m too worried that I’m waiting in the incorrect area. And then the waiting starts. People are being selected at what seems like totally random to sit down and chat with somebody in a suit. I wonder why people who came after me are being interviewed first.

I tell myself, don’t think about it Rob. Get out of your head. Just act natural. But acting natural only works if you’re not thinking about it. And if I really wanted to act really natural, I’d be at home on my couch taking it easy. That’s a little too natural. So I always engage in an anxious type of weird self-coaching. Sit up straight. OK, not too straight. Stop furrowing your brow. Stuff runs through my mind like, where do I look? I want to look engaged with the world but not scatterbrained. I want to look focused on something without staring off into space. I don’t want to seem fidgety, but I don’t want to be like a statue.

Finally I got called. The manager gave me a brief interview, looked at my then-current former job and said something like, “Wow, you must love it there. That place is really busy. Why are you leaving?” and I have to make up some crazy sounding answer about wanting more flexibility or growth opportunities or something like that. Nobody wants an interviewee to start badmouthing their current job. You have to stay positive. So the manager tells me to hang tight while he gets some more papers for me to fill out. More waiting.

Maybe fifteen minutes later he comes back with a personality test. It was one of those “1 for strongly disagree, 5 for strongly agree” type of tests. Stuff like, “I just hate being bossed around by women,” and I’d mark a number one. My thing is, even if you’re the biggest sexist on the planet, can’t you see right through that question? Don’t you realize that any job is going to want you to say, “no problem?”

I fill out that test. Then came an intelligence test. Then they set up another interview. Then another one. Then a uniform check. I get through all of them. What I can’t believe is that I made it through the waiting in between each round. Just showing up at the restaurant, I’d immediately be directed to a seat to wait. Indefinitely. Then someone would come with something for me to sign. “I’ll be right back to take that from you.” Half an hour of more waiting.

I got to thinking that all of that waiting had to be a part of the interview process. They had to be looking specifically for people that could go for long periods of time while sitting still. Anybody who knows me knows that that’s not who I am. So I just had to fake it. I had to clench my fists as tight as I could while trying not to go for my phone every ten seconds to check if that email wasn’t maybe something more important than one of the twenty-five emails Barack Obama sent me asking for some more reelection campaign money.

I got the job. All is well. I just feel like a lot of what inhibits me from going for new jobs is stuff like spending hours waiting around doing absolutely nothing. I know it’s incredibly shortsighted to not want to go out there because you’re afraid of waiting. But can imagine how awful I would have felt if, after all of that sitting around, they just left me there? They wouldn’t even tell me I couldn’t work there, they’d just ignore me, keep me waiting, the restaurant getting busier and busier until finally, a hostess or a waitress would come up to me and be like, “Can we help you?” and I’d try to explain that I’m waiting for somebody to come back with some papers, but they’d never show up. The dinner rush would end and finally someone else would come by and be like, “We’re closing up. Locking the doors for the night. Let’s go.”

And none of that happened. But it all went through my mind as I was sitting there, wondering what was taking so long, hoping I didn’t misunderstand some social cue, worrying that I’d somehow been overlooked or forgotten about.