Serious Eats
Served: The Double Life I Lead
I blog by day and wait tables by night. I'm excited to bring you Served, dispatches from the front of the house. Enjoy!
Thursday, September 11 was a perfect Columbia evening. The rare kind that made me feel all warm and fuzzy about my collegiate life.
McCain and Obama (Columbia College class of '83!) came to Lerner, our ugly student center, to talk about public service as part of the ServiceNation Summit.
The weather was end-of-summer dusk gorgeous. Police and other security-types were everywhere. Snipers hung out on the roof of Butler Library. Streets were closed, campus entrances were locked, and masses of frustrated people were shuffled through labyrinths of barricades.
And a Good Time Was Had by All
The candidates’ interviews were broadcasted from a screen on the big lawn. My friends and every other Columbia student claimed a plot of real estate on or around the Low Library steps. We brought a picnic blanket, thai takeout, and a Nalgene full of rum and coke. My friend Imani rocked her ridiculous, awesome, huge American flag shirt. The whole lawn was packed tight with rowdy, buzzing students.
We cheered, we booed, we drank. Afterwards, we squeezed through crowds, and waited, and waited some more, and eventually made it back to my house for a party. We even caught a glimpse of Obama waving from his super security-fied ride.
Home at last, we drank election-themed red and blue punch. The house was full of good friends, and friends of friends. There were law school students and a mulleted alumn who recruited able-bodied undergrad boys to load our extra dishwasher into his van (long story). There were exchange students from France who showed off their trippy Tecktonik dance moves.
The British Boyfriend
I took a break from my booze-fueled dancing and talked with Joe. Joe is my good friend Matt’s boyfriend. They met at Oxford, where Matt studied literature last year.
Joe is visiting New York for the first time. Here in the States, people find Joe’s British accent to be icing on the cake of his coolness: he is witty, warm, and smart.
The other night, Matt took Joe to my restaurant to drink wine and eat chocolate cake. Joe fell head over heels for Matchbook Tinto Ray from California—a syrah, tempranillo, malbec, and petit verdot blend. It’s rich, silky, jammy, and chocolaty.
“I loved that wine,” he cooed (so Joe has good taste, too!). “It’s so impressive that you work and go to school."
Joe is hardly a slacker. He’s had one or more jobs since he was sixteen. He’s been a waiter at a fine-dining hotel bar. He's worked in a hipster bookstore. He was a handyman for his grandmother's interior design shop, worked in a second-hand shop, in a pub, at a bank and most recently at the headquarters of the world's largest nuclear power company.
But because Oxford terms are short and the university is geographically isolated, Joe is unemployed while he is a student. When he’s at school, he’s at school. That’s it.
From Fluorescent to Chandelier; or from Woolf to White Truffles
I have spent my whole collegiate career working in restaurants. Freshman year, I had a modern novel class with a famously crazy, brilliant professor. She’d pace the classroom quoting Faulkner and Derrida and attacking the chalk board with squiggly, indecipherable diagrams about the father and the lack of the father. I thought for the first time about phallogocentricity, and read my first (and last?) Djuna Barnes.
After class, I’d stuff my Joyce into my bag, rush to the one train, and enter the disparate, chandeliered world of the fine dining restaurant where I had a hostess gig. I’d change out of my jeans and into my black suit in the coat check room. In seconds, the object of my stress would change from the research paper I had yet to research to getting the chef to dictate the night’s menu in time for the pre-theater rush.
Different Worlds
I work my ass off (sometimes) both at school and at work. But they are such different kinds of work that after taking a four hour exam, waiting tables feels like a wonderful relief. And after a night getting clobbered by a nonstop dinner rush and a screaming chef, curling up in a big library chair with some Foucault feels like a wonderful luxury.
I like leading this double life. I like that I have friends from school and friends from work. I like that I get to escape my college world for “real world.” This is one of the perks of Columbia’s location in New York City, and one of the big reasons I, and many others, chose to attend school here.
Many, many students work. And many people who work in restaurants, particularly in front-of-the-house positions, do other things too. They are artists, actors, and comedians. And, of course, they are students.
I am way lucky. I am getting a great education—both from school and from the talented people I have worked for and with. I get to exercise different parts of my brain, and see the world from different perspectives. When I graduate in May—if all goes well—I will have learned not only about lit theory, Marx, and the anthropology of consumption, but about wine and cheese pairing and how to make some damn good risotto.