Tag Archives: Waiting Tables

What kinds of scotch do you have?

The other night I was at work waiting tables. This couple comes in and asks to see a whiskey menu. We don’t have a whisky menu. We have a pretty big liquor selection, but this isn’t the kind of place that puts all of their spirits on a separate list.

I tell the customers, “We don’t have a menu, but I can tell you what we carry. What are you thinking about, bourbon? Scotch?” The woman says, “Scotch.” The man pipes in, “Single malts.”

Damn. I wish they said bourbon. I can actually name all of the bourbons that we have. And I like bourbon. I’m not a huge scotch fan. I imagine that when talking about liquor, about hard alcohol and taste, it’s all pretty relative. The first time I tried beer I thought it tasted terrible. It was all I could do to finish a whole bottle. And booze? Please. Who doesn’t have a memory of trying to take a shot of something but not getting your throat to be able to physically swallow what’s inside your mouth? But you try something enough times, you get past the gag reflex that is your body’s way of telling you to avoid the poison you’re about to ingest, and then maybe you start to not mind the unusual flavors, maybe even appreciate some of their subtleties.

But I’m definitely not there with scotch. It smells like the inside of a machine. It’s like whoever distilled it took some regular whisky and mixed it with a can of WD-40. Whatever, not my cup of tea.

Here I am, called out on my scotch chops, by paying customers, customers who, if all goes well, will hopefully reward my service with a cash tip. First thing’s first: can I get through enough of this interaction to make it look as if I know what I’m talking about?

Kind of. I could rattle off a bunch of scotches that we carry. Maybe not all of them. Maybe like eighty percent of them. Because what am I supposed to do, tell this couple that I’m not sure? That I’ll be right back? Anybody that sits down and asks for a whisky menu is probably going to be a little dissatisfied if their server can’t even answer their first whisky related question.

And then say I go try to find somebody who might have an answer. This is a busy restaurant. It’s going to take forever. The couple is going to get impatient. My manager might get impatient, or fake impatience if he or she also doesn’t know the answers I’m looking for.

List of scotches. Single malts. I decide to ignore the single malt aspect of the question and just start naming brands. I’m guessing Johnnie Walker was probably a stupid thing to start out with, because as the words escape my mouth I can all of the sudden clearly see the label in my mind and it says “blended scotch whisky.”

Whatever, I’m already going, and I’m just warming up. Macallan. That’s a good one because we have two Macallans. So I can say Macallan twelve and then Macallan eighteen. The same with Glenlivet. And that’s great because saying Glenlivet reminded me that we also have Glenfiddich. One of those two Glens has a twelve and an eighteen year variety also, but I can’t remember which, so I just pretend that they both do. This is nice because that’s four more things that I just got to say.

I feel like I’m doing great. I’m saying all of this nonsense without hesitation, just rattling them off very confidently, smiling, pretending like I’m the king of Scotland. The Glenfiddich triggered in my mind the super Scottish sounding brands, and so I continue with Oban. How do you pronounce Oban? I remember one time overhearing two managers having an argument over the pronunciation, but realizing that I had a fifty-fifty shot of screwing it up wasn’t helping with my confidence.

Lephroaig. I forgot about Lephroaig. I hope these people pick something soon, I thought, because my mind wasn’t making any more mental connections and if they didn’t stop me I’d have to stop myself, maybe repeat something, maybe mention Dewar’s, or the ultra expensive Johnnie Walker Blue, or Jameson, which isn’t a scotch at all, but seriously, just pick something to drink.

The woman doesn’t even look up but finally says to me, “We’ll take two Lephroaigs, neat.” As if her dismissive tone wasn’t bad enough, she pronounced it, Lef-roig, where as I had said, Lef-roe-ag. I’m positive by her own confidence that I was probably in the wrong on that one, that I definitely butchered the name, betraying not only my lack of knowledge about the very things I’m supposed to be knowledgeable about, but also my fumbling of an entire drink order. What kind of drinks do you have? I don’t know, but let me stand here and arrogantly pretend like I know what I’m talking about.

I felt kind of stupid, but whatever, I told myself, how many people order scotch? How many times have I ever had to put in an order for Lephroaig? It seems to me that, if your palette is refined enough to appreciate Lephroaig, you shouldn’t be going around to restaurants that lack a dedicated whisky menu and asking for a list of single malts. Just throw out some names. “You guys have any cool scotches? Glenfiddich? Lephroaig?” That’s what I would do if I were some sort of a connoisseur.

I wouldn’t go around with my obscure knowledge of fine spirits and correct the pronunciation of my waiter. When people order the rosemary focaccia bread and pronounce it “f-f-foh-cack-ck-ia?” I don’t turn my nose up and offer them a linguistics lesson. I just go with it. But I guess the fault lies with me. Technically, that’s all within my job description, knowing what we have available for purchase, and I failed.

Still, when I brought over the glasses from the bar, it was gross, from a non-scotch guy’s point of view. The smell, everything that I hate about scotch, it was amplified, this single malt especially unbearable. And after the couple paid and left, another server came over, helped me bus the table. And she was like, “Oh my God. What’s that smell?” It was just the empty glasses. It was still overpowering. And I was just like, “Yeah, it’s that scotch. Nasty, right?”

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.”

Just a little late

Man, sometimes I really don’t want to go to work. I’m in my comfort zone right here. I’m writing. I’m getting shit done. But I have to leave this house in about an hour and a half. Which means I have to get up off the computer in like an hour. But I’m always pushing my luck. It’s a really bad habit. I’m constantly aware of what time it is, of how many minutes I have left to myself, but despite that knowledge, I’ll always just kind of willfully ignore it.

So say I commit to getting off the computer at three forty five with the end goal of heading out the door at four fifteen. I don’t have to be at work until four forty five, which, considering that I have to get there and change into my waiter’s uniform, that really means four forty. I ride my bike to work every day so I know exactly how long this whole thing is going to take.

But that’s like four steps, four different time deadlines, plus the present moment, which is all that really exists anyway, but I’m not about to get all philosophical. I have right now, then three forty five, then four fifteen, four forty, and finally, four forty five, the moment when I give up any semblance of freedom and commit to following somebody else’s rules for the next eight hours or so.

I never get going exactly when I’m supposed to. I’ll always push it. Five minutes. Ten minutes. And each step along the way, each deadline invites multiple opportunities to keep pushing it even more. So I might not get up from the computer until three fifty, or three fifty five. That’s OK, I’ll just haul ass and rush through the getting ready for work phase. Maybe I’ll make up the lost time. Maybe I’ll just run around the house extra fast and I won’t be running late anymore.

But all of that hustling, I’m frazzled, I’m frantic. I don’t want to hurry out the door just yet. I’ve got to calm down some. So I sit in front of the computer for a second, or pick up a magazine. And then my brain is calming down, and I’m getting engaged in something else, an article, a web site, whatever. And I’m still constantly looking at the clock. It’s four ten. It’s four fifteen. And now, OK, it’s four twenty. I’ve got to get going, I’m late.

And now I’m riding my bike, I’m really pushing it. This part of the commute is the most difficult to make up lost time, because while I’m always feeling up to the bike ride, sometimes I’m just not capable of really giving it my all for the entire duration. Maybe it’s really windy. Maybe it’s raining, or I’m tired, or I’m hitting a bunch of red lights.

But I could still get there on time. Maybe be exactly on time. Maybe only five minutes late. Everybody else will be lining up for the pre-shift staff meeting, and I’ll show up with them. I won’t be dressed, and so I’ll say that I’m technically not late, but my boss might disagree, seeing as how I’m not ready to go, that I am technically late. But I always punch in right away, as soon as I’m in the door, so that way if, months from now, the higher ups all decide to come at me with a list of recorded tardiness, I’ll be able to be like, what are you guys talking about? I’ve always been on time.

And say I make it all dressed, ready to go at four forty five. There’s still time to fuck around. I’ll think, well, I’m pretty good on time here, let’s get a cup of coffee. And then I’ll get a drink. And a snack. It doesn’t stop.

I think I’ve said all I can say here. But it’s just that, I have to deal with this every day. I’m always looking for two, three extra minutes, time that isn’t there that I insist on having anyway. I just need to stop working, that’s the problem. Anybody want to start donating to the Rob Doesn’t Have to Work Fund? It’s going to cost you, I’m not going to lie. I don’t have expensive tastes, but I eat a lot, all the time, and I drink a lot of coffee. So yeah, that’s going to add up. Bills, utilities. But just, everybody give me a dollar, please, and then get your friends to give me a dollar too. Come on.

Background music

One of the worst things about working in a restaurant is having to listen to the same background music every day. Why do we have music at restaurants? Who thought that it would be a good idea to constantly pump random songs into a dining room? Is it part of the dining experience? I don’t think so. Music is such a personal thing, all about tastes and preferences.

But whatever, you don’t go to a restaurant because you want to hear music, you go because you’re hungry, and so chances are you’re not even paying attention to what’s going on in the background. In fact, I’m trying to think right now, of all the places that I like to go out to eat, do any of them have music? I have no idea. But I’m sure the wait staffs at those restaurants are all very aware of the music.

I’ve worked at three restaurants in my life. The first one was in high school and college. The boss just pumped a soft-contemporary FM radio station throughout the front of house. In the kitchen, all of the chefs blasted Dominican music. At least radio stations keep things mixed up. Sure, they play mostly the same songs every day, but they’ll throw in a few wild cards, probably for their own sake as much as any listener’s.

What was great about that first job was that the whole place was run by a fifty-fifty mix of high school kids and recent Dominican immigrants. So there was a lot of joking around, a lot of changing the restaurant’s radio station when the boss went out to run an errand. Sometimes we’d feed in a metal station or a merengue mix and then keep it at a low enough volume where customers wouldn’t complain.

The boss was a great guy, but he had a crazy temper. So when he got pissed, it wasn’t like he’d fire you or anything, he’d just kind of scream and curse for a few hours, in half-English half-Italian, with the staff trying to act contrite while at the same time holding back the laughter. “You motha-fucking a-morons with your-a motha-fucking a-music! What are you a-looking at? Don’t you have a-something to do? I’ll a-give you a-something to do! Wipe-a down tha fucking counter! A-you! Go a-clean-a the motha-fucking bath-a-room! A-mooove!”

After college I thought I was done with the restaurant business. But the sitting in a chair and pretending to do work while really surfing the Internet all day business wasn’t working out, and so I started a-waiting a-tables again, full-time. This restaurant was in the city, so longer lines, higher prices, more of an expectation to treat it like a real job.

Unfortunately, the general manager at this restaurant was totally incompetent, a serious drug addict who, rather than actually manage the business, just left everything as it had been set up decades ago while she holed up her office all day getting good and coked out. The music situation there was this really old CD player with a few mix-CDs compiled sometime ten to fifteen years ago.

It used to drive me crazy, hearing the same twelve tired songs over and over again. The staff asked about getting an iPod or satellite radio, something to mix it up, but the GM wouldn’t have it. She probably loved hearing us complain, anything that made anybody else a little bit less happy was probably all that she was looking for in life anyway.

But she had no idea how to run a business, and so we started making our own CDs and throwing them in the rotation. Things got out of hand. When Whitney Houston died, somebody made an all Whitney CD. One time the GM was storming through the restaurant, screaming at this person and that person. In the background, Whitney was belting out the Star-Spangled Banner. It was such a surreal situation, again, everybody trying not to laugh at the boss’s obliviousness to the business, to life.

I’ve since switched restaurants, this time to a more upscale place. Like I have to wear a tie. Like I have to say “beverage” instead of “drink” and “guest” instead of “customer.” They have this ridiculous sound system with a bunch of songs programmed to coincide with the time of day, with the weather. It’s a little more organic sounding, but working there day after day, it’s equally ridiculous. Certain songs get stuck in my head that, had I never taken this job, I’d never even have heard in the first place. And I’m all for eclectic tastes and getting outside of my comfort zone, but most of the music is unlistenable. I’m thinking that maybe they’re doing it on purpose, just to get people to pay their checks and leave faster.

Whatever, it’s not a big deal. Every bullshit job has their fair amount of bullshit to deal with. Bad music on repeat is just a staple of the restaurant industry for whatever reason. I don’t get it. The restaurant doesn’t assume everybody likes veal and automatically serve everyone veal. But they do it with smooth jazz and bossa nova. Just, the next time you’re out to eat, pay attention to the background noise. Think about what it would be like to hear that same song in an hour, in two hours, tomorrow, the next day, everything on repeat, over and over and over again. Crazy, right?

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.