Snapshot of a Serving Shift

…yay alliteration!

I found this vignette of a day in the life of my server self in one of my writing notebooks, and it brought back a lot of memories. Actually, it may only be interesting to me; if you haven’t worked in a restaurant, you may be bored to tears by the following excerpt. Just warning you.

After reading this again, I realized that there’s a lot I miss (and a lot I don’t miss) about waiting tables. I need to write a post later on about some of the crazy things that have happened at the restaurant, such as an order for kahlua sour, the crazy Caesar salad woman and our customers’ obsession with birthday balloons. But for now, here’s the story…

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The sugar bucket says “Rice” on the side, and even though I’ve worked here for three years, I still forget that it’s sugar. Inside the industrial-sized plastic bucket is a pyramid of sharp clear sugar granules, and there is usually never a scoop. You have to go to the ice machine and steal its scoop. Then you dump the sugar into a container. I’m not really sure how often they use sugar around here. All our desserts are frozen boxed things that come in a semi from Sysco. We pass them off as homemade. If you believe that stuff’s homemade, then you probably believe Bigfoot exists too. Besides a rare in-house dessert, the only other reason sugar might be used here is when an employee wants to turn their unsweet tea into sweet tea without having to rip open fourteen packets of crusty table sugar.

Today I am in charge of setting up the beverage station. I drop a packet of tea into a coffee filter, slide it under the dispenser, and flip the Start button. A stream of tainted water hits the bottom of the silver container. I move to the reach-in for lemon slices and spend five minutes moving salad dressing jars and tubs of mustard looking for last night’s lemons that I know I saran-wrapped. The kitchen must have used them. They always steal our lemons. The door bangs shut and I go to the walk-in for lemons. These are fat yellow ovals, uncut, bruised, still marked with white stickers. I take three and claw my way past the six-foot-high speed racks loaded with tonight’s salads.

Cutting board and knife in hand, I make swift work of the lemons and throw the pieces into a clear container that goes next to the tea pitchers. I deposit the board and knife on the dishroom’s glinting aluminum counter and head back to the server station.

This sidework is mindless, something I could do in my sleep. Grab a purple container of half-and-half. Stock saucers (half of which are dirty, half of which don’t match). Pull at least one rack of coffee cups and water glasses. Later, we will inspect the cups and glasses before we use them, because they usually have a pattern of Maybelline red on the rim. That’s why I always use a straw at restaurants. Disgusting, really.

Tonight is not going to be a regular night. We have VIPs coming in. Chef told me that I’ll be waiting on them — apparently a party of eight from hospital management, all a bunch of bigwigs. Our restaurant gets VIPs about as often as Florida gets snow. Being the senior server, the task of serving said bigwigs falls to me, and even though I’ve done it several times before I always get nervous. My stomach pumps itself into a frenzy, which is stupid, because these people are just people and not even that famous on a large scale, but management wants us to treat them like they are.

Sidework complete, I wrap my apron strings around my waist, tie them in front and hide the bow behind the front of the apron. I check my hair in the reflection of the stainless steel reach-in. My bangs have grown out to my cheekbones and won’t go back into a ponytail. They always fall in my eyes when I’m serving. I push them behind my ears for now, knowing they’ll come loose in about three minutes.

I grab a server’s notepad from the stack next to the computer and head for the hostess stand to get my tables for the night. Dining is by reservation only, so we know who we will have ahead of time (well — usually).

I scan the wrinkled piece of paper that’s been copied five hundred times and find my name. I have the VIP table and five others. It makes me think about how I’m going to treat the VIP table compared to the other tables. The non-VIPers will obviously notice the nicer food and better service the VIP table gets. Chef is even going to make an appearance at the VIP table — not once, but several times, because he wants to brag about (I mean, explain) his dishes. Fancy crab appetizers on the house and Caesar salads after that and then filet mignon followed by a butter rum cake slathered in chocolate from Switzerland. Oh, and the cake is free, because one of the VIPs is having a birthday and we give people free cake on their birthday. (For clarification, the standard free cake is a squat two-layer vanilla confection with puffy white frosting and sprinkles — courtesy of Sysco.) That’s not good enough for these people. I find myself irritated with the special treatment they’re going to get. All I can hope for is a big tip, but with half the meal literally being given to them, I doubt that will happen.

It’s fifteen minutes till opening, and steam rises from the soup pots and bread warmers and potato chambers while cooks and busboys hurry to fill them. The scent of roasting meat and baked bread mingle in the warm kitchen climate. The chefs redden behind the line, pushing their baseball caps up and wiping their foreheads with the back of their sleeves. I’m in black pants and long sleeves and I hate this heat, but I prefer standing in the kitchen to taking a post by the hostess stand, where people come to ask questions about everything not related to the restuarant and the phone rings all the time.

I hate answering the phone.