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Served: My First Restaurant Job

Posted by Hannah Howard, December 9, 2008 at 9:00 AM

I blog by day and wait tables by night. I'm excited to bring you Served, dispatches from the front of the house. Enjoy!

I was 17 and about to graduate from high school. My parents were moving to Hoboken, New Jersey. By default, I was going with them.

During my first-ever trip to the place, I got off the train and walked across the street and into the first establishment I saw—there was a neon orange sign above the door and a shiny, modern, spacey feel. The Wolfgang Puck Express was right on the waterfront, the New York skyline majestic across the river in the sunshiny afternoon.

I decided that a job in a restaurant would be perfect for my summer before college. I loved food, and cooking, and restaurants. It would be totally different from school. I could give my brain a break, and make some cash. I would have something to do in Hoboken, where I knew not a soul.

The super skinny girl at the door snapped her gum a bunch of times and disappeared when I asked if there was someone bosslike I could talk with about getting a job. She did not reappear, but a swaggering dude in a chef jacket did.

"So, you're looking for a job?" I nodded. "Have a seat." He brought us Diet Cokes.

He read my resume back to me, which was peppered with normal and less normal high school activities: a Planned Parenthood internship, a bunch of poetry awards. L., the chef-jacketed co-owner–manager, had been a creative writing major himself. He assumed that my Ivy college plans denoted intelligence. Take it from me, intelligence is pretty far low on the list of gelato-scooping qualifications. But L.'s staff consisted mostly of high school dropouts and he was clearly stoked to have someone to talk about Wallace Stevens with.

"So I need a gelato girl," was the verdict.

"I can be gelato girl!" I enthused, and only then asked, "What exactly is gelato girl's job description?"

Later, I learned the gelato/sorbet cart was one of L.'s last-ditch attempts to breathe some sweet, creamy life into a dying operation.

The Birth of the Gelato Cart and Girl

Months later, L. told me his side of the story. The night before, he had watched an episode of Everyone Loves Raymond in which the family takes a vacation to Rome and Robert falls for an incredibly sexy gelato store shopgirl.

The next day, a guy came to L. at Wolfgang to pitch his gelato and sorbet. He would give L. a posh gelato-holding cart for free if L. would agree to stock it with his product.

Minutes later, I showed up. I was the last piece of the puzzle. Someone to (wo)man the new gelato cart. And someone who read books! What was there to lose? Summer was on the way, the gelato was delicious, and business was slow. And Everyone Loves Raymond was fresh in L.'s mind.

The Dirty Work

At noon every day, I would show up and L. or a busboy would help me roll the unwieldy cart outside. The flavors were stacked up taller than I was in the walk-in freezer: coconut, dulce de leche, nocciola, stracciatella. There was mango, raspberry, and lemon sorbet. I would load them into the cart carefully.

"You should taste all the flavors," L. told me, "but don't give them to the staff." This seemed kind of callous to me. It was summertime, and they worked hard. Didn't they at least deserve a small cup of vanilla?

The gelato scooped into perfect, silky globes, but the sorbet was as hard as ice. I would chip away at it as the customers looked on with pity and/or impatience. That is, when there were customers. A failing restaurant cannot be resurrected by a single new product. Even a spiffy one. The cart and its contents (and my labor) did little, if anything, to attract crowds to the increasingly empty Wolfgang Puck Express.

Most of the time I stood by my cart in the blistering heat. I came to think of it as my cart. I would make a list of flavors for L. to order. I would recite poems in my head. I would clean the cart. And clean it again. There was nothing else to do.

"Why is the cart so dirty?" L. would always accuse. But it was never dirty. I knew this because I stood there all day, cleaning it.

My Partners in Crime

It was a bizarre summer. Even from the fast food–esque establishment with few customers and big problems, I learned a lot about working in a restaurant. I would go with one of the cooks to get beer for the place. I was 17; he was 19. We would return from the liquor distributor with a whole cab full of booze. This was somehow not a problem.

The cast of characters was hilarious, and slightly depressing. One of the girl cashiers would tan in the park across the street and show up to Wolfgang in her tiny bikini. She was hot; she looked good. But clearly, it was highly ridiculous and inappropriate to be hanging out at work in a bikini. I don't think anyone ever said anything.

There was a girl who was always bawling in the bathroom about her boyfriend, and a manager who told me she stole cash from the register.

I would sometimes ride with the delivery guys, all men from West Africa, as they drove teriyaki salmon salads, roast beef sandwiches, and pesto pizzas as far as Jersey City Heights and Weehawken.

L. would come outside and keep me company. He was full of stories. I learned about his divorce, his novel, his dying business, and the girls he was dating. We would go to the park across the street, lie in the grass, look at the skyline, and smoke.

When I came back a few months after starting school, Wolfgang Puck Express was gone. I can't say I was surprised.

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