Entries tagged with 'Served'
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This week: what happens at restaurants during the down time. Folding napkins, cigarette breaks, and homemade renditions of Iron Chef.
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I blog by day and wait tables by night. I'm excited to bring you Served, dispatches from the front of the house. Enjoy! When I bring the dude at Bar-10 a menu and a wine list, he is talking intently on his cell. When I come back to pour him a glass of spicy Portuguese red, he is again parleying tense, intense conversation loudly into his phone. So I go talk to someone else, then return to B-10. The man dramatically snaps his phone shut. "Whew, sorry. That was my ex-wife." I splash some wine into a glass for him to taste. "She still loves me." Uh oh. A bit too much information from a perfect stranger. "Do you like...
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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 remember winding down one of the first nights of service at my restaurant. We counted the money. To our happy surprise, it was a record-breaking night. We were all going home with plenty of cash. We had opened just a few weeks ago, and we were still un-kinking the numerous kinks in our operation. My boss got to talking about how he hoped (and knew) his restaurant beat the many restaurants where he had worked as a waiter as a place to work. It beat them pretty hard. “This is the best waiter job,” was the...
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I’ve met a lot of awesome tourists. There are some “types” of people who I have come to expect. I’m not eager to typecast, but it’s amazing how people so often behave, at least during our brief interactions, in some very predictable ways. Here's an incomplete cast of characters.
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Both the front and back of the house can be frustrating, demanding, rewarding, infuriating, and amazing places to work. In my humble experience, here's why.
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You know it's a late night when you're going home on a subway full of people making their morning commute, equipped with coffees and briefcases.
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Why did the super nice couple who professed their love for me, the wine, the cheese, and the place, leave nary a tip? Why did the angry man who grumpily guzzled his wine tip fifty percent of the bill? I'll ever know.
People are endlessly mysterious in their tipping ways.
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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 remember Zach Brooks’s reaction upon news that I worked in one of his favorite spots: “That place is like the Cheers of wine bars,” he said. Sometimes, it is. I Want to Play but Have to Work I really, really didn’t want to leave the New York Food and Wine Festival on Saturday and book it to a long night of waiting tables. I mean really didn’t want to leave. I waited until the last possible moment, then tried to hunt down a cab. The task proved more than a little challenging. When I finally got...
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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 was one of my first nights hostessing at the fancy, stuffy restaurant where I worked for more than a year. Our clientele happened to be predominately over the age of sixty. In no time, I would apprehend the immeasurable import of flats. (A revelation!) But that night, I still insisted on sporting beautiful shoes with the highest of heels. I did know that we were always to walk our customers all the way through the dining room to the restrooms. Simply pointing was unacceptable, never mind that the route was as straightforward as could be. One...
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We waiters all have different things that provoke us; things that make us grumble to each other, “I hate people!” Things that inspire even the most warmhearted and sweet to harbor homicidal fantasies. Here are a few of mine.
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