Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (12 page)

For the rest, Deane explained, there were a coterie of older waiters (most of whom, he claimed, were gay like himself ) mixed with younger women like myself who had been hired by Hans. I began to get a sense of what Hans felt was a better “bot
tom line.”

Deane also took it upon himself to warn me that the diners I would wait on were all members of the club and that there was “a reason they are called
members,
if you know what I mean.” They were very wealthy, old (sometimes ancient, Deane stressed), bitter, racist, sexist, and generally in ill health. So many of them had dentures, he said, that they were forced to gum their steaks to death. “Tapioca,” Deane said, “is a very popular item here.” Because I was so new to the job and eager to make a good impres
sion, I purposely disregarded this bit of information, storing it for later use should I need it.

Finally, Deane showed me around the labyrinthine corridors and rooms that made up the club’s dining facilities. The main dining room was made up of two vast rooms decorated in muted institutional beiges and olives and separated by a shortened wall. The bus stations (where coffee, trays, dishes, silverware, and frantic food servers were kept) were hidden from the diner’s view behind similar walls. Two ballroom-size banquet rooms were located just off the main dining room on one side. On the other side, a short passage led to the Men’s Bar, a darkly paneled atavism containing leather chairs and plenty of ashtrays. Although women were allowed in the Men’s Bar, they were for
bidden to enter its subdivision, the Card Room. Cocktail wait
resses were the only females permitted to grace the Card Room, where relics of another age (the Civil War, maybe) smoked,
drank highballs, played poker, and feebly grabbed at the back
sides of said cocktail waitresses. Oddly, there was actually a set of waitresses, I learned, who
preferred
to work the Card Room.

The kitchen, which serviced all these areas, was very clean, very white, and large enough to get lost in. All the chefs were meticulously attired and all boasted formal training. (A couple of them, I noticed, were quite good-looking and one of them was a dead ringer for Bruce Springsteen. Deane informed me that “Bruce” was in the middle of a hot affair with a married banquet waitress and that this was the scandal du jour.) Obeying the usual rule of thumb, however, the chefs more or less detested the waitstaff with few exceptions.

Contributing to the whole
Upstairs, Downstairs
feel of the club were the stringent rules that all food and beverage employ
ees were required to follow. We had regulation uniforms and shoes (which were hideous in every way), which we were to wear only in the Dining Room. We had to enter the club not only by a separate entrance but by a separate street, following a long corridor connecting two buildings. We were not to be seen in street clothes anywhere near the dining rooms. Thus, we were all assigned a space in a locker room to change. There were spec
ifications for hair length (above the shoulder or tied back for women, very short for men), nail polish (forbidden), facial hair (moustaches only for men), and earrings (posts only). We were provided with one meal per shift, but it had to be eaten near the locker rooms, in a staff dining area far away from the Dining Room. We were not permitted to enter the club for any reason other than work.

I began to feel that I was in over my head very soon after I was hired. This was fine dining, after all. The salad fork had to be placed exactly thirteen inches from the teaspoon on the place setting. Carol walked around doing random inspections with a tape measure to make sure this rule was followed. The napkins
had to be folded with exactly the right number of creases. We were required to serve from the right and remove plates from the left. We used tray service in the Dining Room and so each server was required to lift and balance large trays holding a max
imum of six full-sized dinner plates with covers. I had never lifted a tray that size in my life and I wasn’t sure I could do it.

The menu in the Dining Room came from the same Jurassic time period as the members who ate there. Cholesterol was an unknown enemy, and more was always better. Breakfast items featured tapioca (actually, tapioca was a staple with all three meals), sausages, bacon, pancakes, and eggs tortured in every imaginable way. These meals were a kind of upscale version of breakfast specials in truck stop diners across the country. Shrimp was a very big item for lunch. There were shrimp cocktails, shrimp salads, and grilled shrimp platters. There were also a variety of salads (the Cobb presented nightmarish flashbacks to Yellowstone) and sandwiches, including the ultimate in fatty excess, the Reuben. Most of the members couldn’t finish half of what they ordered and most of them demanded that the unfin
ished portions be wrapped. Those who didn’t usually put their cigarettes out in their half-eaten sandwiches, signaling a rather unpleasant end to their meal.

The dinner menu was a grateful nod to the traditions of old-style steak houses. There was filet mignon, prime rib, rack of veal, rack of lamb, and ad infinitum. A regular offering, “Surf and Turf,” was extremely popular. Having never seen it before, I was baffled and asked Deane what it meant.

“Oh, you must know,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Surf, where the fish swim . . . ”—he made swimming motions with his arms. “Turf, where the cows graze . . .”—he made hoof-stomping motions with his foot. “Oh, Lord, what’s the matter with you, girl?” he said, exasperated. “Steak and seafood. I can’t
believe
you’ve never heard of this.”

“Perhaps,” I told him, “it’s a bit before my time.”

The pièce de résistance, however, was the flaming Steak Diane, prepared tableside by Tracy, the inappropriately named linebacker who was our maitre d’. Poor Tracy was a tortured soul (also a writer, he confessed to me) who felt he was destined for much grander things than service in the Dining Room. He’d recently dragged himself through college with no help from his alcoholic, abusive parents and had promptly married Lisa, a pretty young waitress who worked beside him in the Dining Room. Lisa wanted to start a family right away and Tracy wanted to wait as long as possible. This was already the source of fre
quent quarrels between the two. The stress was often evident on Tracy’s face as he wheeled the stainless steel cart over to a table and set a steak on fire.

Dinner shifts were added to my schedule soon after I was hired. I suspect that this honor had less to do with the fact that I was a good waitress and more to do with the fact that I was young and willing to work up to five split shifts a week.

The split shift in a restaurant is a grueling one, fitting in eight hours of floor time over a ten-hour period. Add the time it takes to get dressed and commute to and from work, and the amount of hours involved in one day’s work can easily add up to twelve. Besides this, split shifts can sometimes be less profitable than single shifts since, to avoid paying overtime wages, man
agers phase out waiters working splits first, truncating tips. Other restaurants I worked in allowed waiters to work splits off the clock and stay as long as they wanted, but the Dining Room was fastidious about obeying certain labor laws.

I felt entirely unequipped to handle dinner shifts in the Din
ing Room. There were many more details to attend to, for one thing. Table settings were expanded to include soup spoons, glasses for white wine, and goblets for red. The napkins for din
ner had to be folded into a standing fan as opposed to the flat
fold for lunch. Dinners went at a much more leisurely pace as well, so that there was more time, in Carol’s words, for “a higher quality of service.” None of this bothered me. What did frighten me was the fact that sooner or later I’d have to open a bottle of wine, and I was absolutely clueless as to how to go about it. I was also going to have to haul a giant tray on my own, a feat I’d managed to avoid up to that point. But by far the most terrifying prospect for me was the thought of deboning a whole fish at the table. I resolved that I would find a way to weasel out of that one forever. For my first few dinner shifts, I struggled with the tray. It was sheer adrenaline and terror that allowed me to get my dishes to the table without dropping any of them. Still, I received some rather puzzled stares from my customers as I awkwardly set the tray down on a kickstand, which the busboy had grudgingly found for me. Wine was another story. I enlisted Tracy’s help at the table, claiming that I was too busy or that he knew more about the type of wine the customer was ordering. Tracy was willing to help when he could, but I started running out of ruses. Finally, my moment of truth arrived in the form of an order for a bottle of pinot noir. Tracy was busy incinerating a steak at another table, and despite his friendliness I couldn’t ask Deane for help. I was, after all, supposed to know how to do this.

As I stood trembling with the bottle in my hand, I received help from an unexpected quarter. Belinda, who was about my age and had been hired a week before me, saw my trepidation and took the bottle from me.

“Want me to do that for you?” she asked.

“Would you mind?” I asked. Belinda didn’t need further prompting, flounced over to my table with the wine, and opened it expertly without ever putting the bottle down. When she returned, she said, “You don’t know how to open wine, do you?” I admitted that I didn’t but told her to keep mum since it would
surely be my job if anyone found out. Belinda, who had been waiting tables solidly since her teens, took it upon herself at that moment to teach me everything I needed to know. We began a friendship that day that would last through three years and as many restaurants.

Belinda came over to my apartment with a bottle of wine the following night and had me practice opening it over and over while we drank its contents. I would use what she showed me that night to great effect and profit in every subsequent restaurant.

A brief note about wine: I found that, like many things, success
fully recommending and serving wine is as much about acting as if you know what you’re talking about as actually having any real knowledge. The reason for this is that most of my customers over the years have known much less about wine than they’d ever admit. Most people know that they prefer either red or white and then select wines based on what they’ve heard about chardonnay, cabernet, Chianti, merlot, or Riesling. There is cer
tainly a difference between good wines and bad wines, which even the most uneducated palate can discern. Beyond this, how
ever, much of what appeals in a wine is entirely subjective for the average diner. People have been trained to ask for white wine with fish and red wine with meat, and some of my customers have actually become visibly disturbed when I recommended switching colors with these dishes. The only way to know what you really like is to experiment with different wines and then order accordingly. It’s pointless to order a wine based on price or what somebody else thinks you should be drinking.

I saw a perfect example of this type of wine blindness a few years later in an Italian restaurant with a fairly diverse wine list. A fellow waiter who claimed to be something of an expert had rec
ommended and served an expensive bottle of Tignanello, which is
an Italian blend of several different grapes made in very limited quantities. He had been so enthusiastic about the wine that his table had left him a quarter of the bottle for his own consumption. The waiter foolishly left the bottle in the kitchen, where it was promptly drained by a couple of his coworkers. Upon discovering the absence of the bottle, the waiter ranted, raved, and accused everybody of being thieving scum. Another waiter, sick of hearing the complaints, rescued the empty bottle from the trash and replaced the Tignanello with the same amount of house red, a hideous blend not even worthy of being called jug wine. The injured waiter retracted his earlier slanderous comments and invited the second waiter to join him in a glass. The two then sat at the counter at the end of the shift and drank.

“Ah,” said the injured waiter, savoring his glass, “this is really the stuff, isn’t it?”

“Mmm,” struggled the second waiter, who was choking on uncontrollable laughter. Although he tried to contain himself, the second waiter came perilously close to giving himself and the ruse away by literally falling off his bar stool with convulsive hysteria.

Chances are, then, that unless you have an expert or somme
lier at your table, your waiter or waitress is recommending only what he or she likes personally or what the restaurant has instructed him or her to push. I can always tell if my customers know what they’re talking about when it comes to wine or if they’re merely trying to impress someone else at the table by ordering something expensive or sending back a bottle that is clearly fine. Mispronunciation is also a clue. Those who add the
t
on the end of
cabernet,
for example, are usually in the same league as those who ask for “a cup of chino” when they want that ubiquitous coffee drink commonly known as a cappuccino.