A Day Behind the Curtains

You’re a server in a busy restaurant that recently earned two stars in the newspaper, the stars increasing business threefold, to a point where your owner and managers are hiring anyone with a heartbeat to help fight the deluge.  The only giveaway I will allow is that this happened in Washington, DC, long ago in a galaxy far away.  At this new-American restaurant on the edge of Georgetown, we served everyone from Cabinet secretaries and news anchors, to obese tourists from BFE still wearing their Smithsonian t-shirts from earlier, parents who brought their about-to-graduate high school senior on a campus trip to GW or Georgetown and/or AU, and the many government drones who have always been that town’s sadly uncelebrated backbone.

You wake up with your 9am alarm and survey your surroundings, because they may or may not be familiar.  You’re in your apartment, but something is off.  By the time you pull your glasses on and light your first Marlboro of the day, you realize that the change is due to the cleaning lady you can suddenly afford, now that the restaurant is busier than ever.  Thor is striking his hammer against the inside of your skull, thanks to the four (or maybe five, possibly six) beers you chased with shots of Jameson at The Guards last night.  You wash down a handful of Motrin with black coffee that’s fresh and hot, thanks to you having the foresight to buy a coffee machine with a timer, and chase the coffee with another Marlboro.

A shower fails to completely pull you into the land of the living.  Your work clothes are right where you left them draped on the couch when you came home: a white Oxford shirt, black chinos, restaurant necktie, and black Doc Martens.  You stare at these clothes balefully while you wait for the caffeine and nicotine to kick in, then check to see if the shirt is too wrinkled or stained to wear again.  It isn’t, so you pull everything on, and double check that everything you need is pre-loaded in your apron pockets: wine opener, pens, notepad, and crumber.  Into your bike messenger bag go your apron, an extra shirt and apron, a book to read in case it’s slow, and a legal pad for random scribblings you think might go into a book one day.  Since this is the year before your first cell phone, you check your answering machine in case you missed a call from the restaurant, telling you they don’t need you for the lunch shift.  No such luck.  On your way out, you check your mailbox in the lobby, because you occasionally get mail intended for the Dan Kim who lives in apartment 104, and vice versa for yourself in 401.  Dan Kim’s probation officer had knocked on your door last year, much to the surprise of both of you and the other Dan Kim.

The cab is waiting patiently for you, even though your car is parked nearby, because you may or may not be sober enough to drive home around midnight tonight.  You promise yourself you’ll be a good lad and head straight home after your dinner shift, but the devil on your shoulder laughs sardonically because he knows better.  The taxi deposits you at the front door of the restaurant at 10:25, while deliveries are coming in via the side entrance that leads to the basement.  You have another smoke before you enter through the side door, and shake hands with another server.  Jim is, like you, also in his late twenties, and unlike you, already looks fifteen years older than he is.  Jim often acts as your wingman when you’re pounding drinks back at Nathan’s, and your back-waiter if you’re the front for a large party.  You have no idea where he’s from because this town is nothing if not transient, if he has a family, or even what he did before he worked in restaurants, but you do know he’s an awesome dude to have at your side when you fall into the weeds.

“Good morning, people!”  The manager is about three levels of cheery past what’s acceptable for the restaurant equivalent of pre-dawn.  You brush past him to get the coffee machine running, only to find out the prep and line cooks have long since beaten you to it.  The largest glasses you have are pints for draft beer, which work fine for when waiters and cooks need to inhale coffee before lunch service.  You try to tune Cheery Manager out while he says something motivational, and also try to not focus on the fact that he should’ve clipped his nose hairs before work.  There are only three servers for this midweek lunch shift, one bartender, one food runner, and one busboy, so we split duties without Cheery’s input: Jim will set up the patio, Darlene will set up the ground floor dining room in the off-chance that someone will want to sit there on a lovely late-spring afternoon, and you will assist both when not polishing glassware and cutlery left by the night crew — which happens to include all of you on this shift.  Since official DC won’t hit us until about 12:30, we have another hour and a half to finish last night’s work.  The busboy rolls silverware inside linen napkins for the patio, lugs buckets of ice from the kitchen to the bar, refills sugar caddies, warms up the bread, and prepares ramekins of whipped butter.  The runner sets up Chef’s expediter station in the basement kitchen, making sure Chef has all the sauces and garnishes he needs to finish plates on the lunch menu.

Chef comes upstairs to brief us on lunch specials, any items he’s run out of (86’d), and anything he wants us to push, like the sea bass that hasn’t sold well this past week; that sea bass will eventually find its way into the weekend’s bouillabaisse special if we don’t sell it by tomorrow.  Chef looks like he got run over by a road grader on the way to work, with 8:00 shadow on his face, a chef coat that looks like a murder scene after cutting meat all morning, and a voice full of gravel because he closed the bar with you last night.  The specials are the usual, because what Chef prepped yesterday morning still hasn’t sold by today: lobster and crab ravioli with sautéed shiitakes, roasted asparagus spears, and buerre blanc; a lump crab fritter appetizer drizzled with red pepper aioli and served with a cabbage red pepper slaw; Chincoteagues are your oysters of the day; the sorbets are raspberry and mango.  He leaves the front-of-house crew with this nugget of wisdom before he retreats downstairs to the kitchen and a pint glass of cappuccino: “Don’t fuck up and make me come after your ass during lunch.  Dinner, sure, but not lunch.  I ain’t got time for that shit.”

“Oui, Chef,” you reply in unison, then scramble to the side door for one last smoke and a breath mint before the lunch rush.  And ho lee shit, what a lunch rush.  The twelve tables on the patio filled up first, as always during the season, with overflow bleeding into the ground-floor dining room, those guests surly because they either couldn’t score a patio table or weren’t famous enough to do so.  [Side note/confession: Christiane, it was an absolute pleasure to wait on you, and I’ve had a low-key crush on you since the late nineties.]  You and Jim split the patio, six tables each, and Darlene juggles up to eight tables at a time inside.  It’s like the restaurant version of a hamster on a wheel, because you know all of your guests had to be back at work within an hour.  With that said, however, it’s still the DC of the 1990s, so many of your tables also need cocktails or a glass of wine before they order food.  One cable news anchor likes to start his lunches with two Citadelle martinis, extra dry (which means Kevin might merely look at the bottle of vermouth), then visit again after his evening newscast is over.

Servers have but one hard and fast rule between courses: clear, crumb, mark.  Clear the previous course, use your crumber to get any food particles off the tablecloth, then set the appropriate cutlery for the following course.  Try to not stare longingly at the guest’s double Macallan, or covet the kind of job that would allow you to enjoy a midday whiskey.  Get them out, so you can turn the table and make money off the next guests at that table.  Thankfully, you rarely have to worry about “campers” during lunch, guests without a care or a clue, who would occupy a table long past the time you needed it back.  You try to make small talk with your regulars, guide them through their dining experience, but lunch is so fast that you devolve into an order taker with a notepad.  You can tell who’s in a rush, so you don’t even bother telling some guests what the specials are; which of your patio regulars prefers Pellegrino instead of tap water; who might only order an entrée and an iced tea.  All of this helps you turn your tables that much faster. Even one minute helps.  Please don’t order an espresso or cappuccino, you silently beg everyone who sits in your station, forcing me to slave at that damn machine like a barista when I could be taking an order, or bringing drinks to another table.  Clear, crumb, mark.

In the blink of an eye, you’ve turned the patio tables three times each from noon til 2:30, when the kitchen mercifully closes.  The patio service station, which is a rolling cabinet with our point-of-sale computer, credit card machine, water and iced tea pitchers, racks of extra glasses, and big plastic tubs for dirty plates and silverware, looks like it got hit by an F5 tornado.  The bag for dirty linen next to the service station is overflowing with tablecloths and napkins.  Mustafa the busboy and Ahmad the food runner are cousins from Tunisia, and absolute work horses.  Soon after you started here, you gave Mustafa and Ahmad nicknames, Chelb (dog) and Yakhara (piece of shit) respectively — thank you, US Army, for sending me to the Middle East so I could learn to insult Arabs in their own language — but the cousins are good sports about it because they know that the crew, without exception, respects the hell out of them.  Chelb moves like the Tasmanian Devil cartoon, but he could barely keep up with empty bus tubs — let alone refilling the pitchers, running downstairs for bread and butter for each table, and helping us reset tables.  Yakhara slowly comes upstairs and looks bedraggled as hell after running every single plate from the kitchen to a guest.  He has sauce stains on his shirt, a dot of butter on his tie, and pieces of what look like sea bass dotting his shoes.  You, Darlene, and Jim don’t look much better, but you also know better than the cousins how to avoid stains.

How much damn longer, you think.  Lunch ends at 2:30, but that doesn’t mean the last guest has left, or that the shift is over.  Time for sidework, the bane of every server’s existence.  Glasses and cutlery need to be polished after they emerge from the dishwasher’s pit, every table needs to be properly set for dinner, salt and pepper shakers refilled, service stations restocked, cappuccino machine cleaned, ketchup bottles married, the restaurant swept inside and out.  Only when all of this tedious work is done, you don’t have any guests at your tables, and you start to wonder if polishing silverware can give you carpal tunnel, are you allowed to check out with Cheery the manager.  You run a report at the point-of-sale computer, make sure the credit card tips on the report match the signed slips in your apron pocket, and cash out.  If, for example, one table paid $100 in cash, and another left you a $20 credit card tip, you would owe the house $80.  Now multiply that by … check the report … Jesus wept, 28 covers (1 cover = 1 guest who orders an entrée) … and Cheery tells you that you owe him $440.  That leaves you with $190 for yourself.  Not a bad lunch at all.  Servers are supposed to tip out busboys with 2.5% of our total sales from the report, food runner 1.5%, and bartender 1%, but everyone always rounds up.  After tipping out Chelb, Kevin, and Yakhara, you’re walking with $125 just before 4:00, which gives you almost an hour before the second half of this double shift.

You have two options at this point.  You can stay at the restaurant and wait to see what Oso the sauté cook makes for family meal, or you could leave and enjoy the late spring day yourself.  The sky is clear and it’s finally warm enough to not need a jacket, so this isn’t a difficult choice.  You invite Darlene, but she’s staying; besides, the sous-chef is her girlfriend, so Darlene eats better than almost every server in Washington.  You call Frank from the hostess’s phone and — hello, cute new girl who’s probably a Georgetown or G-dub undergrad, what’s your name?  “He’s not here,” Frank says after the second ring.  You give Frank your order and tell him you’ll be there in about ten minutes, five of which you spend chatting up the new hostess until Jim yells at you to move your ass.

It’s a quick walk and one cigarette from your restaurant to the ginormous tourist trap restaurant on the Georgetown waterfront, but the patio bar is open and Frank is working, his circular bar full of restaurant people on break like you.  You can’t miss them, everyone is wearing white over black.  Frank shakes your hand, then Jim’s, and places a pints of Foggy Bottom ale in front of each of you.  Just before your crab cake sandwiches arrive, Frank puts up two more beers.  Having someone wait on you, especially when that’s how you earn your living, feels absolutely extravagant.  You also keep curling your toes inside your shoes, because your feet hurt like hell and are about to cramp up.  You and Jim barely talk to each other during your lunch, or even with Frank, whose bar is full of tired waiters and bartenders who also aren’t in the mood for idle chitchat.  You eat quickly, pay your tab, leave Frank a 30% to 35% tip because that’s an unwritten rule when you’re in the biz, and mosey on back to the restaurant for dinner service.

The first thing you check when you return — oh, hello again, new girl, I’m Dan” — is the floor plan for the night, which causes you to mutter “fuck my life.”  Pete, the general manager, assigned you to the upstairs dining room tonight.  No Jim to be your professional security blanket, he’s in the main dining room on the ground floor with Darlene, who taught you almost everything you know about waiting tables.  Just you and the bitter old guy upstairs.  At least we’ll have Chelb.

The pre-shift briefing kicks off at the bar at 4:45, with Pete running down the reservations: how many total covers he expects, which large parties are going where, which reservations are celebrating a birthday or anniversary, and anyone with a special need like food allergies or request for a specific server.  During dinner we have two runners, Yakhara and Miguel, and three busboys to cover seven servers (three on the patio, two downstairs, two upstairs).  Then it’s Chef’s turn, and he doesn’t look any better than he did six hours ago, but at least he changed into a new jacket.  You’ve got the same specials as lunch, just larger portions and higher prices for dinner.  Sorbets and oysters are the same as before.  86 pork loin, push sea bass and rabbit.  If you’re lucky, Pete will taste you on a new wine he brought in for the list, but not today.

Every table in your station gets polished.  Settings straightened, wine glass placed at 10:00 from every water glass, any wobbly tables fixed with a piece of folded cardboard under the table base, chairs dusted, tea candles lit and placed inside clear glass votive holders.  Pete fiddles with the music volume, settling on the mix of Gipsy Kings and Sade and George Benson that everyone else plays, and now … you wait.  You, Chelb, and Hal, the bitter old guy who probably waited on President Truman back in the day, retreat to your little alcove service station upstairs to fold napkins.  Every restaurant has a Hal.  Hal smokes too much, drinks too much, complains too much, makes way too damn many inappropriate comments to every female employee, and otherwise acts like Archie Bunker with low blood sugar.  He’s a real treat to work with, since he also won’t lend a hand when you’re in the shit, while fully expecting you to pull his nuts out of the fire.  You pass the first hour of dinner ignoring Hal’s diatribe against the owner, the managers, the chef, the regulars, and hostesses who are all conspiring to keep him in the poorhouse.  Instead you trade insults with Chelb, teaching him how to swear in Spanish and Korean, while he helps you with your horrible Arabic.

You finally get seated around 6:30, but not until after the patio fills up.  Your first table is a six-top — six covers; a party of four is a four-top, and a party of two is simply a deuce.  Your station is the round table near the top of the stairs, which can seat up to eight, one square four-top, and two deuces against the wall.  The cute hostess gives you a smile that makes you hopeful for later after work, and seats the group.  Three adult couples, thank the good friggin’ Lord, no teenagers or children bugging you for a burger (no burger, but can I interest your son in the herbed tenderloin on ciabatta from the lunch menu?) or another Coke refill.

You greet the table, and one of the women immediately begins complaining that she’s cold, and why couldn’t they get a patio table?  You maintain your neutral expression while dying inside.  This starts a cascade of real and perceived slights from the others: they’re still cold, they’ve gone from annoyed to disproportionately pissed off because they still want a patio table, it’s too dark in here, do you have flashlights to help us read our menus, and you haven’t even gone over the specials.  Pete swoops in, because he’s awesome at reading people at the front, and explains that because they hadn’t specifically requested a patio table when they made their reservation, he couldn’t keep one open for them.  A bald faced lie, because you know at least a dozen regulars who never make reservations yet almost always get a patio table, but the complainers buy it.  Pete lies again, and assures them he’ll turn up the thermostat.  You congratulate yourself for not rolling your eyes, because it’s warmer inside than out, and hope that Pete’s words have a psychosomatic effect on the guests.  The only concession Pete makes is turning up the dimmer switch a quarter-inch.

You finally tell them the specials, inform them that we’re out of pork loin (sad face), but that you highly recommend the sea bass and rabbit (trust me, you’ll love it).  You get a quick cocktail order, writing on your pad while seeing both your deuces get seated in your peripheral vision, and give Mrs. Complainer’s husband the wine list.  Chelb hits the table with a bread basket and a ramekin of butter, then follows up on your hand signal for tap water.

Prioritize: whom to greet first, now that you’ve been double-sat?  One deuce is a couple holding hands across the table, they’re in their own world and can wait an extra minute.  The two florid faced older white men in suits look like they’re having a meeting, so you quickly get a drink order from them after leaving the six-top.  You use the age-old server’s cop out on the couple, “Hey, guys, sorry for the delay, but I’ll be right with you,” ring in the first two tables’ drinks, then return to formally greet the romantic couple.  They’re talkers, which means they want to actually get to know you, which makes you immediately think two things: you’re on a date for fuck’s sake, pay attention to each other, not me; also, I would totally steal your girlfriend and leave you a blubbering mess on the sidewalk.  But first you have to run downstairs and get two tables’ worth of cocktails from the bar.

You disengage from the couple, don’t even check to see if the deuces have bread and water because Chelb is a stud like that, and almost bowl over the cute hostess in your rush to fly down the stairwell.  This time she doesn’t give you a smile, just a look of pity or horror, you can’t tell which.  No time to consider that, you have to balance a tray with eight cocktails back up the stairs, and Kevin at the bar was wondering where you’d been.  “Those drinks are dying, Danny,” he says disapprovingly, one of his many gruff Kevinisms.  He’s also your mentor and helped you land this gig, so you hate to disappoint him in any respect.

You drop off drinks at the first two tables, get a cocktail order from the couple, ring that in, then return to the six-top to take their dinner order.  Do the Stairmaster to and from the bar.  By the time you’ve got the two old men’s dinner order, apps are hitting the six-top.  Mrs. Complainer’s husband wants to order wine, but Pete does his hero thing again and discusses the wine list with him, until Mr. Complainer decides on a bottle $50 below what his wife originally mentioned; the bright side is, Mr. Complainer is getting two bottles, and Pete handles wine service for you.  You do the kabuki theater of offering stale black pepper from an oversized pepper mill for the six-top’s apps, check on the couple and talk to them some more, and since you don’t have anything to lose, start flirting with the girlfriend.  Yakhara serves the old men their salads just as you start clearing the six-top’s empty app plates, but Yakhara sees your hands are literally full and does the pepper thing for you.  You deposit the dirty plates in a bus tub in the alcove, then return to crumb the tablecloth and refill wine glasses.

The couple do the raised finger thing to indicate they’re finally ready to order, but it’s like they’ve never been to a restaurant before in their lives.  They ask questions about almost every single item on the menu, ask you about possible substitutions, then you give them another server cop out: “We can substitute some items on dishes to accommodate food allergies, but otherwise, Chef asks that you respect the integrity of his menu.”  You smile at her but put on your serious face when talking to him.  You try to guide them as best you can, and recommend sharing two apps, followed by a salad split for two, then entrées.  They ask more questions, but eventually give in and accept your recommendations.  Then he falls another peg in your estimation by ordering the second cheapest bottle of red on the list, a Nero d’Avola from Sicily you’ve seen in the Safeway discount wine display.

You mark the six-top with the appropriate silverware for their entrées, then clear the old men’s salads.  Yakhara and Miguel trudge up the stairs, arms full of stacked plates.  You need to be there at this moment, if only to make sure that the correct food is served to the correct guest, and not auctioned off like we’re some slapdick casual-dining chain whose servers have “flair” on their uniforms.  One final check, and even Mrs. Complainer finally looks pleased.  Time to mark the old men — steak knives for their sirloins, naturally — and drop off cocktail forks for the couple’s apps.

“How are y’all enjoying everything,” you ask the six-top, a hopeful look on your face.  Mrs. Complainer wants you to give Chef her compliments, because this is the best and freshest sea bass she’s ever had.  You smile and nod your thanks, while not admitting that you personally saw it arrive the day before yesterday, very likely three full days after it was caught.  Mr. Complainer downs his chardonnay like a steelworker hitting a boilermaker at quitting time, and tells you this is the most fabulous dinner they’ve had in ages.  Apparently, all is forgiven.

Problem.  Not one, but both old white men wave you over.  You ask what you can bring for them, but one of them has gotten even more red in the face, the color of which you’ve never seen besides the villain in a Captain America comic book.  Both their steaks are wrong.  Seat 1, facing the exit, ordered rare, but it looks medium.  Seat 2 had ordered medium but looks rare; Yakhara inadvertently switched the steaks.  You apologize profusely, and offer a round of drinks on the house.  In the meantime, you clear the incorrect steaks and haul ass downstairs so you can show Pete, standing near the host stand, then Chef in the kitchen.

“What the everlasting flying motherfuck are you trying to show me?”  If swearing were a competitive sport, Chef would’ve won a gold medal in four languages long ago.  The kitchen is ridiculously hot, damn near a sauna, with a hood vent that can’t keep up with our recently increased volume.  You explain the situation.  Chef, a native of Dearborn, Michigan, hurls a long stream of fluent-sounding Arabic invective at Yakhara.  I understand maybe three words, two of which involve carnal relations with your mother.  “Ring new steaks in, Dan.  Get Pete to comp the first two, so at least I can account for them.  Gimme fifteen minutes.  Miguel, you run these fucking steaks exactamente, or I’ll rip out your ojos and skull fuck you to death.  ¿Entiendes, pendejo?”

Back on the Stairmaster, with a pause at the top of the second landing to wipe the sweat off your face from spending all of two minutes in the sweltering kitchen.  Pete is already talking to the old guys, apologizing and explaining that new steaks are on the way, and Seat 2’s face seems to have returned to a darkish shade of pink.

Clear, crumb, and mark the six-top for dessert, then drop dessert menus.  Clear, crumb, and mark the couple for their salad course.  Return to the six-top in case they’d like coffee, tea, espresso (please, no), or cappuccino (for the love of God, no).  They’re older, so they order regular brewed coffee, regular and decaf, but the actual orders ultimately won’t matter because after about 6:00, Chelb and the boys stop making regular coffee.  You make a grand show of writing the order down anyway.  Each couple decides to share a dessert, which is fine by you.  Maybe you’ll actually get to turn this table tonight.  While you ring in the dessert, you order an extra dacqoise with a birthday candle, because Pete had mentioned that one of the ladies was celebrating her birthday.

Miguel saves his own sight by delivering the correct steaks to the old men, then returns downstairs to get the six-top’s desserts.  Yakhara serves the couple their salad, and a quick look at them tells me they won’t need you for a while yet.  You drop in on the oldsters, who are so busy chewing that they simply give you a nod and a thumbs-up.  You thank multiple gods that the six-top hasn’t ordered different coffees like you’re the counter man at Starbuck’s, and serve coffee.  It’s all decaf, but you maintain the charade because there are folks in this town who will cut you if they know you’ve served them decaf.

Miguel lights the birthday candle on the dacquoise at the top of the stairs, and intuits whom to place it in front of, based on the person receiving the rest of the table’s attention.  Miguel is good like that, and he’ll make one hell of a waiter someday.  Yakhara follows with each couple’s dessert.  The old men pantomime signing the air, so you bring them a check while they each take a last bite of steak.  The couple are holding hands again, but you notice that she’ll sneak a look at you every now and then while they eat their entrées.

The old men thank you and shake your hand on their way out, but have only left you a 13% tip; their faces go into your mental Rolodex of shitty tippers.  Mr. Complainer, on the other hand, does right by you and leaves you 22%.  You clear the couple’s entrées, chance another grin at the girlfriend, and delude yourself by thinking you might almost be done for the night.  You’ll have to do sidework after the couple leaves, but it’s only 9:00, damn near a half day in this industry.  But Pete ruins that fantasy when he runs up the stairs.  “Dan, we need to push some tables together.  We just picked up a ten-top.  Hal is too busy, so you’re on it”  God. Damn. It.

Three hours later, which makes it almost thirteen hours after the taxi brought you here, you’re finally done.  Your quads and calves hurt from the Stairmaster.  Your lower back isn’t quite screaming at you yet, more like whimpering.  You step outside and start the recovery process with a full body stretch and a Marlboro, inhaling spring air along with the carcinogens.  Then you remember that the cute hostess slipped you her number — right after she admitted that she had a boyfriend back home, wherever the hell that is, you weren’t exactly paying attention.  What you need right then is liquid therapy at The Guards, a mere three blocks away.  Darlene, her girlfriend the sous-chef, and Jim clocked out before you and are waiting for you there.  Before you left the restaurant, you bribed one of the new servers to cover your lunch shift tomorrow.  You don’t have to be in until 4:00, which means happy hour will begin in about five minutes.

Cheers, folks.  Another day in paradise.  I’ll leave you with every server’s fantasy of what they’d like to tell their guests.