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Served: Feverishly Looking for a Restaurant Job

Posted by Hannah Howard, April 28, 2009 at 8:30 AM

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

I have one more week of classes and less than a month until graduation. I love my job, but it’s only part-time. I’ve been scouring Craigslist religiously and harassing everyone I know for contacts and advice. In my anxious mind, a clock is incessantly ticking.

I’m a good waiter. I would love to cook again. I miss the furious pace of the kitchen, and getting to be up close and personal with the food. But it seems like everyone wants me to be a hostess.

Richard, a friend and mentor who is an alumnus of my literary society at school, put his arm around me the other day. He had come over with homemade ice cream and I was talking to him about looking for a job waiting tables.

“I see you as a great hostess,” he said. “Either that or running the place. Not waiting tables.”

“Why?” It seemed like a strange prediction.

“It’s just what I envision for you.”

Post Traumatic Hostess Disorder

My first real restaurant gig was working as a hostess/reservationist at a fancy Michelin-starred place on the Upper West Side. The former role entailed my standing by the front door, saying hello and goodbye, and smiling unrelentingly.

The reservationist got to hide in the tiny back office. We’d have about two hours of work to do during an eight hour shift, so I read all the chef’s cookbooks, chatted up the cheese guys, and did homework. It was a bearable job if I was exhausted, otherwise I felt painfully bored and excluded from the action of service.

All of the other jobs in the restaurant seemed wildly exciting: I could be a runner, or learn cheese service, or bus tables. One day, I could join the ranks of the captains. After working as a hostess for more than a year, I told this to the GM. He was utterly confused. “But you’re a great hostess! We love you!” He was convinced hostessing was my calling. I was over it.

I left to be a hostess somewhere else, mostly for a change of scenery. I had a lot of options. Every restaurant seemed to be looking for a host. I ended up at a small place downtown. They had no maître d', so the hostess actually had responsibility. The night’s seating plan was up to me. Seeing that people were in and out was my only job; it had nothing to do with all the juicy stiff in-between.

“You’re not the best hostess in the world,” my boss told me after he unceremoniously fired me after service one night. I had spent two years working the door. I sat down on the sidewalk outside and bawled. I vowed to never be a hostess again.

I Emit Hostess Vibes

Two years later, I was working behind the bar at my restaurant when a regular who is a chef came in. She was revamping her restaurant and they needed new staff. She told me about the renovations and the new menu. I told her about looking for a job for after school.

“If you want to hostess for us,” she said, “we pay really well. We could use you!”

“That’s a really nice offer.” It was. I said I’d be in touch when school ended, if I was still looking. But I wondered why a job as a hostess had occurred first to her.

At an interview for a serving job last week, the GM asked, “Have you ever thought about being a hostess?”

“I’ve thought about it. I’ve been a hostess,” I pointed to my resume. “But I love waiting tables. I like talking about food and wine. I love being part of the meal and the dining experience.”

“OK,” he said, “It was just an idea.” Guess I sounded a bit defensive.

I’m a girl; I’m young; I’m pretty enough. These things seem to peg me for hostess-dom. If I was a guy, nobody would be insisting that I was destined for the door. I wonder if there's something else too about me that screams hostess material.

There’s the undeniable detail that hostesses pretty much never make as much money as waiters. They tend to get paid hourly while servers make tips. An hourly income of twelve or eighteen dollars an hour doesn’t hold a candle to a night of tips in a busy restaurant. There’s enormous satisfaction to working your ass off and leaving with a big wad of cash at the end of the night. Hostesses (and cooks, but that’s another story) don’t share in that.

Good hostesses—or hosts!—are hugely important for a restaurant to run smoothly. They set the tone for the night. I admire their patience and respect what they do. I just don’t want to do it.

I hope Richard’s prophecy comes true, and that I end up running the place. Cross your fingers for me, please!

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