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Served: What to Do When There's Nothing to Do

Posted by Hannah Howard, December 2, 2008 at 8:30 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!

It’s a few minutes before eight, and the pre-theater/early crowd is booking it en masse. We’re running to run everyone’s credit cards and clear and reset all the tables.

The packed restaurant empties out in minutes. We servers take the precious opportunity to breathe. I pour a big glass of water and gulp.

“We’re taking bets on when there will be a wait,” P. says, pen and pad in hand. “What’s your guess?”

“10:03” I venture, eyeing our very deserted restaurant.

“9:29,” M. says.

“What does the winner get?” I want to know.

“Love. Satisfaction. Peppadews.” Fair enough.

We are all way off. A few minutes later, and the place is stuffed again, people spilling out of the door.

Even the busiest of restaurants have slow nights. And even hectic nights have slow moments. as someone with chronic shpilkes, I at first thought myself poorly equipped to hang out and wait. Recently, though, I’ve made peace with the inevitable chunks of unfilled time. Often, they turn out to be by far the best chunks.

Magazines and Many Cigarette Breaks

In the early days—the weeks and months after we opened—there were copious stretches of time with little to do. We had already folded more napkins than we would use in weeks. The silverware and glassware were polished and shining. The tables were set flawlessly, waiting. What ever were we to do?

It was during many of these nights when I got to know my coworkers, when they fast became friends. T. showed us pictures of her latest vacation. In the style of a diligent food blogger, she had chronicled all of her meals with close-ups. J. had pictures, too: of her wedding, of her big family in California, and snapshots of her dancing—flying gorgeously through the air.

One night, A. (an artist) meticulously sketched all of the artwork in his apartment on one of the little pads we use to take orders. Each piece of art had a story. When I finally visited his place a few months later for Christmas dinner, I knew the biography of everything hanging on his walls.

I learned about how A. met the owner, and the play they directed together. I listened to massive collections of dirty jokes. And dead baby jokes.

We played Madlibs. We read magazines. We told stories.

There’s a game A. told me about: You have a phrase for the evening, and you have to find a way to say it to every table.

For example, “Over the mountains and across the sea.”

Someone might ask what cheeses I’m feeling, and I might answer: “I love la tur. It’s really luscious and creamy, and has an awesome cheesecakey texture. And it came over the mountains and across the sea from Piedmont.” Like that.

In the summertime, we got fancy with sidewalk chalk. It was endlessly entertaining to watch passerby’s hop across the hopscotch grid we drew in cheery pink and blue in front of our restaurant.

Other Highly Creative Forms of Entertainment

When we had brunch, which flopped, there would be no customers to attend to. So I would help the chef, now one of my best friends, prep for the evening. I pressed ginger pie crust into tart shells, cut up figs, and caramelized onions. She would make us something to eat—her famous rosemary parmesan popovers, or poached eggs with greens; I would make us blood orange juice and prosecco mimosas. And we would eat, drink, pull pork, and pit cherries, chatting and singing along to the radio. It wasn’t such an awful way to spend our morning.

When I was a hostess, we would wage rubber band warfare, shooting them hard at each other’s butts and backs across the dining room.

When I was a cook, we once staged an Iron Chef, doing whatever we wished with the beautiful, massive scallops that we were not selling as customers were nonexistent. They got turned into ceviche, roasted in the oven, pureed into soup, and stuffed into tacos. If we weren’t going to work in our ready-to-go stations, at least we got to play in them.

Obama!

The best slow night as of late, and certainly the slowest slow night, was the evening of the presidential election. Everyone was somewhere with a TV: with friends or family at home, out a bar. Later, people danced and cheered and partied in the streets. Not us! We were stuck at work in an empty restaurant.

So we huddled around A.’s blackberry. When Obama’s win was for real, we popped a bottle of bubbly. J.’s husband came over with a few bottles of wine. We went next door to the bodega for tortilla chips and made nachos. With nothing else to do, I whipped up some pico de gallo from what I could find in the walk-in: roasted peppers, cherry tomatoes, cilantro, red onion. We had our own party. We hung out, and danced, and laughed, and drank. It was a truly great night.

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