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...
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Last week, I learned that many believe a server should never address a customer about a tip. Others chimed in to agree.
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I have never before said a word about a tip. Maybe my thank yous are slightly more emphatic when a tip is extremely generous, but I’ve never approached someone in the reverse situation and asked what was up. But Friday night, I felt different.
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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! Yesterday was one of those days: I was feeling pretty awful. I had a vast number of pages to write, a deficit of sleep, and my head throbbed annoyingly. To top it off, a mighty constellation of pimples had materialized on my chin. I tried to work some magic with concealer before I left for work. But makeup wouldn’t do it. The pimples were too red and vicious and gross. I felt totally, unbearably gross. But I Soldiered On Once I got to work, things started to look up. I had...
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Waiters are usually working when everyone else is playing. During brunch, this is more explicit, more painful.
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Glitches can seep into even the most meticulously planned reservation book. Sometimes, a blameless party will have to wait for the table they reserved. Nobody wants this—not the diner, and certainly not the restaurant. But it happens.
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The restaurant biz has a disproportionately vast amount of dirt. Gossip flows like booze.
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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! When we first opened, our restaurant was perpetually full of friends and friends of friends. One of these friends had waited tables with one of our servers at an Upper West Side spot. Now, he was working for an Italian wine importer. Almost two yeas ago, on a sticky summer night, I poured him a glass of Italian wine. We chatted about it. This was my first gig waiting tables, I was not yet 21, and I was proud of my new ability to partake in oenophilic conversation without making a...
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Did Mr. Restaurateur actually urge his waitstaff to keep the “alphabet technique” in mind white doing their jobs? Yes, apparently quite frequently. The analogy fit: The restaurant’s goal is to do whatever it takes to make the customer leave feeling good.
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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! “You look dapper,” I told Andrew, my friend from school, who always looks dapper. On Friday, though, he was all dressed up and looking especially suave in a vest and a cherry-colored shirt. “I just had an interview,” he explained. Turns out the interview was at the sister restaurant of a place where I worked for two years. “Was it X. who interviewed you?” I had to know. X. is the general manager there now, my former boss, and a friend. Sure enough, Andrew had met with X. I promised to...
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