Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress (5 page)

I spread several applications around the town we lived in and received a few job offers. The one I decided to take was at Petit Morsel: An Eatery, which was a new family-owned restau
rant near my house. My first clue to the trouble that lay ahead should have been the fact that the restaurant chose to advertise itself as “an eatery.” Any restaurant that feels the need to instruct patrons that they are actually supposed to eat there is a little frightening.
Eatery
also implies that the restaurant has absolutely no idea what category their menu falls into. (Come and eat here—we don’t know what we’re doing, but we know you’re supposed to put it in your face. Hey, it’s an eatery, right?) But, of course, I didn’t know any of this at the time. I was just happy to have a job.

Petit Morsel was very dark, in terms of both its design and the mood of its owners, a young couple who took turns cooking, cleaning, and managing. The tables were made of varnished tree stumps, and the counter area, where guests ordered their food, was framed by a series of heavy wooden beams. The ambience, complemented by rough-hewn candles on the tables, was cave-like. The menu followed along similar lines. Most of the dishes contained either tofu, millet, or sprouts. Vegetarian fast food was still considered fairly revolutionary in those days and had none of the flair or lightness of the current “spa cuisine.” And
so, despite their meatlessness, those plates weighed a ton once they were piled with this “healthy” fare.

The owners of Petit Morsel hired me grudgingly. They didn’t really want to spend extra money on labor, but it was impossible for the two of them to do everything. I was interviewed by the wife, who made the job seem as unappealing as possible. “You’ll have to do a lot of cleaning up,” she said. “You’ll be responsible for keeping all the tables wiped down and you’ll have to carry lots of dishes.” When I told her that this wouldn’t be a problem, she sighed. “OK,” she said, “then I guess you can start at the end of the week.”

My job was to take orders at the counter and then deliver the food to the table when it came out. Because I went to school during the day, I could work only the dinner shift, which usually began at 5
P
.
M
. and ended by 8 or 9
P
.
M
. I rarely worked with the husband. Most often I worked alone with the wife. On those nights, she prepped and cooked all the meals and then washed all the dishes. Although I could see that she worked very hard, I found her to be an absolute misery. She was worse when her husband was around, bitching almost constantly about how hor
rible everything was. At least when he was absent, she frowned in silence.

After my second or third shift I became aware that Petit Morsel had a totally inadequate ventilation system. When I left the restaurant, the smell of fried tofu clung to me like white on rice. Fried food, I learned, is singularly smelly when its odors linger in the air or on an individual. I smelled so bad after my three or four hours there that my father, who usually picked me up from work, had serious qualms about even letting me sit in the car. He would hold his nose and complain the entire way home, saying things like “Don’t they notice how it stinks in there? It’s almost unnatural.” My mother complained even louder when I walked in the door. She couldn’t stand it, she
claimed, and I was going to have to do something about it or quit the job. The compromise, such as it was, involved me shed
ding my clothes in the garage before I had a chance to pollute the house. I was treated like a walking biohazard, and while I can’t exactly blame my family, their attitude didn’t contribute to the rapidly dwindling appeal of my job.

Ultimately, though, it wasn’t the bad ventilation or the debat
able food that finally made me throw in the towel. It was, rather, the tipping situation. When I first started working at the restau
rant, the owners informed me that the tips would most likely be nonexistent. They had placed a jar on the counter for patrons to toss in the odd dollar or change when they saw fit, but since there was no regular table service, they reckoned there would be no regular tips. The guests, however—at least the ones I waited on—had other ideas. The flow of cash was light when I first started working at Petit Morsel, but soon I started receiving rather generous tips, left on the table instead of in the tip jar. The first time I saw a five-dollar bill left under a plate, I actually thought the customer had made a mistake and left his change on the table. I’ve often speculated on the reasons why this hap
pened. Perhaps the customers felt sorry for me. When the restau
rant was busy, I ran around like a headless chicken, managing up to ten tables at a time. It was obvious that I got no support from my surly bosses, neither of whom could ever be accused of crack
ing a smile. Perhaps, too, the many families who came in to eat liked the way I treated their children. I’ve never been one of those waitresses who hated having kids at her tables. Even before I had a child of my own, I’ve always felt that kids are a little more inter
esting than adults and, as the eldest of five, understood that tak
ing a passel of kids out to a restaurant wasn’t always the easiest situation to handle. A final possibility was that I simply gave good service to these people and they sought to reward me for it (this option, so many years later, is still my favorite). Whatever
the reason, after a week or two I was regularly stuffing bills into

my apron pocket as I cleared and wiped down the tree stumps.

My joy in this newfound wealth, however, was short-lived.

My boss called me aside after my shift one evening and spoke to me as she chopped vegetables for the next day.

“It’s come to our attention that you’ve been getting tips,” she said sourly.

“Yes,” I answered perkily, “people have been great. They must love the food.”

“Well, anyway,” she continued, “you’re not supposed to be keeping those tips for yourself.”

“I’m not?”

“We don’t really have tipping at the table here. If you get a tip, you need to put it in the tip jar”—she gestured to the counter with her butcher knife—“and it will get divided up amongst all of us the next day. That way it’s fair for everybody.”

The “all of us” she referred to consisted of her (the owner), her husband (the owner), the day waitress (her sister), and myself. I had real difficulty conceiving how splitting my tips four ways with that group could be considered fair.

“But I think they mean for me to have those tips,” I said weakly.

“Well, that’s not the way we do it here,” she said. “Since you didn’t seem to understand that, you can keep what you collected tonight, but starting tomorrow, you need to put everything extra you get into the jar. Good night.”

I was stunned. Everything I knew about truth, justice, and the American Way dictated that I should keep my tips. Had I fallen into a parallel universe where this was no longer the way things were done? When my father arrived to pick me up, I told him what had happened. He laughed the kind of mirthless but explosive laugh I’d come to know meant he thought a situation was particularly ridiculous.

“What, is she
insane
?” he said. “She wants you—a little girl—to give your tips to her—the owner? Ha ha ha. That’s beyond absurd. Ha ha ha. I think she must have been kidding.” He rolled down the window to breathe in some fresh air since I was starting to stink up the car. “You’re not actually going to do it, are you?” he asked.

My boss had put me in an awkward position. I was faced with a couple of grim options. I could continue to keep my tips as I received them, risk the wrath of my bosses, and possibly get fired. If I did this, I’d have to watch over my shoulder constantly and feel like a fugitive. The other option was to tow the line and dump all of my earnings into the tip jar. Somehow I couldn’t even visualize this scenario. The situation did seem, as my father had put it, absurd. Although I’d had very little direct experience working in restaurants at that point, I knew instinctively that there was almost no point in donning an apron and schlepping plates without the promise of a tip.

Waiters and waitresses come into the business for a variety of reasons. How long they stay in it is also determined by a num
ber of factors. But I can almost guarantee that all of them would agree that while they are there, their major motivator is the tip. Tips are not just a side perk. They are not an added bonus. For a waiter or waitress, tipping is the raison d’être of a restaurant, considered an absolute right by those on the receiving end. Thou shalt not fuck with the tip. The tip is everything.

Tipping has a long and colorful history in this country. Although the exact origins of tipping are lost to the distant past, there are a couple of different theories on how it all began. The most com
monly accepted tale is that tipping began in England hundreds of years ago. In order to provide some motivation for faster service, the story goes, coin-filled boxes were placed on the tables of
eighteenth-century coffeehouses (some say sixteenth century, but who’s counting?) and marked with the words “to insure promptness” (or promptitude). Thus, the acronym TIP. There is some quibbling over the details of this particular theory. For one, acronyms themselves didn’t exist until the twentieth century. For another, English etymology tells us that the the word
tip
was actually a medieval term meaning “give it to me” (although it sounds crass, this theory seems to hold the most weight, for me at least). Still others (who have time to think about these kinds of things) claim that tipping began in the Roman Empire—
stips
being Latin for “gift.”

Regardless of which theory, if any, is the true one, the cus
tom of tipping obviously found its way to the United States and remains, for better or worse, a firmly established social ritual. Public misunderstanding of exactly why, how much, or whether to tip leads to some very interesting interactions between patron and server. On a small scale, the customer literally holds the server’s fate in his pocket. This imbues the customer with a cer
tain amount of power as soon as he sits down at the table. And power, as the saying goes, corrupts. In a way, the server is imme
diately placed on the defensive. Her livelihood is not determined so much by whether or not she takes an order correctly, brings the food on time, or smiles often. Rather, she must gauge a cus
tomer’s mood, pick up cues as to his background, and based on all of this, anticipate his needs and wants. The server is, effec
tively, the customer’s private dancer for the two hours he sits at her table.

Food servers depend on tips for their living more than those in any other tipped profession. The reason for this is simple: waiters and waitresses are the only employees who can be exempt from the minimum wage. Although this varies from state to state, it is rare to find a restaurant that pays its servers
more
than the minimum wage. The theory for this is that servers
will more than make up the difference with their tips. This win-win equation is further emphasized by the notion that should employers pay their servers adequately (and this would have to be a pretty penny to convince servers to put up with the vagaries of the business), they would have to raise the prices of their menu items to make up the cost, making dining out much less affordable. Tipping is still optional, after all. Unless a preset tip is worked into the bill (usually for large parties or banquets), the amount of extra cash a patron leaves at the end of a meal is up to him and based, supposedly, on the quality of service rendered. Sounds reasonable. However, there are many variables that inter
rupt a seamless implementation of this fairly simple notion.

One such variable is the tip-out policy. Almost every restau
rant I’ve worked in has required that servers tip out a certain per
centage of their tips to other workers. The tip-out where I work now is as follows: 15 percent to the busboy, 8 percent to the bar
tender, 5 percent to the hostess, 5 percent to the food expediter, and 2 percent to the extremely underpaid wretch who makes cof
fee drinks. The math is easy to do. In order to walk out the door with $100 in tips, I have to earn $155 (and when I do tip out, I am sure to have detractors, my busboy chief among them, who will claim they did all kinds of work for me that they didn’t get paid for and curse me on the way out). On some nights my bus
boy, who services three waiters at a time, will actually make more than me (and this after he tells me, “Listen, I take care of you tonight, make all your tables happy. Twenny percen’ tonight,
chap
parita,
OK?”). The bartender makes more than me every night.