Evening fourteen: The waiter, the police, and the restaurant manager
Posted on | June 11, 2009
I though it would be a good idea to learn how to wait on tables.
I mean, it can only make me a better cook if I have some idea what happens to my food when it disappears from my kitchen.
So I did something incredibly clever. Or brave. Or stupid.
I volunteered to be waitstaff.
The restaurant
Our school has a restaurant (and I’d like to take a moment to encourage you to visit the restaurant of your culinary school; if my school restaurant is any indication, the food will be delicious and the prices quite low for dining of this caliber) where the third term students (right now I am nearly mid-way through my second term) do all the cooking.
The thought of the cooking terrifies me. But it does not terrify me as much as waiting tables.
So I figured it would be smart to volunteer to be your-waitperson-for-the-evening right now, when the pressure was not on.
I mean, it was a volunteer gig. So how bad could it be, I ask you?
I’ll tell you this. My respect for waitstaff everywhere shot right up. Tremendously.
The restaurant manager
After a day at school (and an afternoon race home to do some laundry so I would be presentable), I was in the restaurant by 6:00 for an hour training with the restaurant manager followed by a 7:00 seating with service until 9:00 pm.
Now, the restaurant manager is this terribly personable guy with enormous green eyes and tattoos up and down both arms. He gave me the tour of the place, filling me in on the intricacies of waiting.
“When you bus the tables, you put the silverware in the first bus tub and stack the plates in the other tubs.”
“I keep extra forks and knives out front so you can just grab them if someone needs them.”
“Every table gets fresh bread and a bottle of water. If the table has more than four, give them two baskets of bread and two bottles of water.”
“The pepper mills are here. I don’t offer pepper because I believe in lazy service. But if someone asks for it once, then they are a pepper person so keep it coming for them.”
“Never speak to the expo. If you want to get their attention, touch them on the shoulder then step back. They will talk to you when they can.”
(The expo is the person who is expediting the tickets, in other words, telling the kitchen what you need and making sure they get it and it goes to the correct table.)
“The tables are numbered the way people read, left to right. If I put two tables together, I use the higher number and mark it on the seating chart.”
“When a table has finished its entrees, you have to go to the kitchen and tell the pastry cooks to fire their desserts.”
It’s simple stuff, sure, but more involved than I ever knew.
The police
Then, because the restaurant is licensed to sell wine and beer, I got the rundown on the liquor situation.
See, because students typically do not have a license to handle alcohol, they are not, by law, permitted to do so. So the restaurant manager makes it very clear that I must not, under an circumstances, pour drinks.
However, he did tell me I can take drinks to the tables because, although I am not legally allowed to do so, he’ll pull the disability card if he is caught. (He does have a disability which you could assume would make it very difficult for him to maneuver in this ever-changing maze of people and tables and chairs. However, with the arms of a football player and the grace of a dancer, if you did assume that, you would be quite wrong.)
He also tells me I am required to check the ID of anyone who orders a drink.
Then he turns away to greet our first two customers who, as it turns out, were friends of his. He gives each a glass of wine. Then, a woman walks in and orders a glass of wine, too.
He asks for her ID, looks at it, is about to hand it back, then looks at it again, looks at her, squints at the card, then hands it back, telling her he can’t serve her.
According to her ID, she is too young.
Not according to her ID, she was an inspector.
So she took her ID, told the restaurant manager what had just happened, let him know that a police officer would be by shortly, and left.
In the next twenty minutes, anyone who had heard what happened, came by to congratulate the restaurant manager. And a police officer did, drop by. They exchanged a few words and smiles, then he used the bathroom and left.
And, although every one of my tables ordered at least one drink, I just realized it never dawned on me to ask for ID from any of them. Thank heaven all were clearly adults.
The waiting
The tricky part of waiting, for me, is taking the order.
See, I’ve worked in service industries before, so dealing with people is no problem. But that simple little pad was designed to torment me.
Now, you only need to know two things to take an order: The abbreviations for all the dishes and how to enter information on your pad.
You can’t write “Pan-seared halibut cheeks with seasonal greens in a light vinaigrette” or whatever every time someone fancies some fish. It’s too long. And your pad is too short. So you have to remember to write, say, “halibut” or “fish” or whatever the restaurant abbreviation is. And you can’t make up your own abbreviations, they have to be universal for the restaurant so your co-workers can understand them. And, of course, you have to remember the abbreviations for all the dishes, from starters to desserts.
But, delightful as it was to remember abbreviations for twenty or so dishes, it was easier than remembering all the wines and beers we offered. When my table of eight started ordering their drinks, I just grabbed one of the printed wine lists and wrote on it. Much easier.
And, yes, of course, you would think writing things on the pad in the correct order would be easy. And it was. For all my tables except my largest one. For that table, I accidentally wrote items the wrong way and had to rewrite the order. I scooted behind the bar to quickly fix my mistake, when another student waiter asked me what I was doing. I told him, he offered to read the orders out to me. Nice fellow; this make it very easy for me to rewrite the orders quickly and properly.
The waiters
I was waiting with two other students. One, the female student, was very kind whenever I had a question. She had done this before. Clearly. The other, a male student who helped me fix my order, didn’t like one of the guests.
“See the woman there, at that table? She’s a real bitch.”
“Which table?”
“Eight.”
“Eight? The one over there?” (I was still struggling to remember which table was which.)
“Yeah. By the window.”
“So which woman?”
“I dunno. One of them.”
“The one with the hair? In the corner?”
“Yeah. Such a bitch. Gave me such attitude.”
“Screw her.”
“Yeah. Screw her.”
The food and the people
When the food was ready, whomever was around took it to the table, whether it was their table or not. We were all also supposed to keep an eye on all the tables, replenishing water, bread, and coffee as needed, as well as removing dirty dishes and cutlery.
And the people were lovely; complimentary about the food (compliments I took back to the expo) and gracious about little flubs (not every table got all their entrees, for example, at exactly the same time). It was a pleasure to serve them.
The evening
The restaurant does only one seating, at 7:00. So, by 9:00, people have left or are finishing up. At that time, the restaurant manager called me over and told me to eat my dinner (I was asked, about half an hour earlier, what I wanted). I had the halibut cheeks which were incredibly good (dusted with fennel pollen and served with fiddlehead greens and other vegetables), and chatted with him and the chef instructor for the evening.
The, a bit footsore (I had only been on my feet for three hours, so I can’t imagine how waitstaff manage 8 or 9 or even 10 hour shifts) I trotted on home.
You know, it was kind of fun.
Comments
3 Responses to “Evening fourteen: The waiter, the police, and the restaurant manager”
Leave a Reply
June 11th, 2009 @ 8:28 am
Kudos to the restaurant manager and to you. Sounds like you made the most of the experience.
A friend of mine hit up one of our local culinary school’s in-house restaurants recently. He enjoyed it greatly. Details with pictures, if you’re interested: http://endorphinbuzz.blogspot.com/2009/04/4-course-meal-cycling.html
BTW, if someone carded me, I’d be flattered. I was never carded when I turned of age to be served alcohol. Now, I’m a tad older and really don’t mind.
Your post reminded me of Hannah Howard’s on Serious Eats: http://www.seriouseats.com/tags/Served. Both reinforce the fact that waiters work pretty hard and should be treated with respect.
June 11th, 2009 @ 8:43 am
I waited tables for years, through my early twenties and while my kids were young. It was good money and I could do it at night.
My number one rule when waiting tables was to treat your kitchen staff as friends and allies. You need to be in their good graces and they in yours. I would bring them homemade cookies and keep them filled up with soft drinks. They forgave my occasional error and I theirs. They saved my butt on more than one occasion.
It made my nights so much more pleasant. Many waitstaff treat their kitchen’s terribly. And suffered for it.
June 15th, 2009 @ 9:13 pm
I waited tables for one summer in college. if I had to I could do it again. I’m on my feet almost asmuch now as I was then. and they hurt as much.