How to Be a Person (26 page)

A
t some point or another, if you have hands and eyeballs and a cell phone bill, you’ll probably work in a restaurant. If you’re lucky and you’re good at it, you might end up waiting tables in a fine-dining establishment, like Dan Savage did. If you’re good at faking it, you’ll end up waiting tables for a giant chain, like Christopher Frizzelle did. If you vaguely know your way around a stove, you might end up working in the kitchen, like Bethany Jean Clement did. And if you’re not cut out for waiting tables or cooking,
you might end up squeezing orange juice or doing janitorial duty, like Lindy West and Brendan Kiley did—although neither did either for long.

In a certain sense, all restaurant jobs are the same: Your boss sucks, your customers are entitled jerks, and your coworkers are the best. Your coworkers are the reason that restaurant jobs can be so fun—it’s like you’re all putting on a show together. And then after work, everyone gets drunk together and talks shit about the owner, the dishwashers, the clientele. Oh, the shit that is talked! Whether you work in a restaurant for a few months or the rest of your life, you will be retelling your restaurant stories for the rest of time. And you will learn things you won’t learn any other way.

What It’s Like Working for a Mom-and-Pop Bakery

BY LINDY WEST

After college, I lived in a sagging, blue, house-shaped pile of mice in Los Angeles. The house was on Silver Lake Boulevard (on the shitty side of Sunset), and I lived there with three friends, a basenji with bowel-control problems, one million black widow spiders, an eternally wasted landlord with “power-mad dreams” (his words) living in the basement, and a trio of fashion designers upstairs who would frequently wake us at 3 a.m. by roller-skating in circles around what I can only assume was a Matterhorn of cocaine. It was the funnest place I have ever lived.

I needed to find a job if I was going to stay in LA. Just a few blocks down Silver Lake Boulevard (nice side of Sunset) was a bakery. They had great fried-egg sandwiches! And they were hiring! I worked there for exactly six hours.

Instead of a traditional job interview, the owners told me, they liked to have potential employees work a “trial day” in the bakery. This is the kind of scam that a family-run place can get away with. For my time and trouble, I would receive zero dollars, one fried-egg sandwich, and—potentially—a job. I said sure. I arrived. They put me to work in a back room preparing their very popular fresh-squeezed orange juice. The Backdoor Bakery went through many, many gallons of fresh-squeezed orange juice every day. Math fact: The number of oranges required to make one gallon of fresh-squeezed orange juice is eleventy grillion. Backdoor Bakery fact: All of those oranges were juiced BY HAND. SPECIFICALLY, MY FUCKING HAND. There was an “electric” juicer, but it only “worked” if you leaned into it mightily at an arm-torquing angle. I juiced and juiced and juiced for hours. I sweated, I groaned, my limbs cramped. Then, suddenly, I found myself momentarily alone in the room with the employee who had trained me on the juicer. She approached me quickly and quietly. “Get out,” she whispered. “Run. Don’t work here. Run. Get OUT.”

In the end, it didn’t matter, because the Backdoor Bakery never called me back. Apparently my free labor wasn’t up to snuff. I moved back to Seattle a couple months later. I really miss those fried-egg sandwiches.

What It’s Like Working for a Chain Restaurant

BY CHRISTOPHER FRIZZELLE

At a desperate point in my life, I answered a cattle call for open positions at a soon-to-open chain restaurant out in the suburbs. Since I didn’t own a car, I had to bus it. The interview process involved a written multiple-choice personality test like nothing I’d ever seen before—pages of probing hypothetical questions meant to gauge how out-of-your-mind thrilled you were to put on your pants every morning. Questions like “Do you ever have plans to go on a romantic date but then cancel because you’re doubting yourself?” All my answers said:
Absolutely not! Never! Feelings are for losers!

I got the job.

They may call it a “personality test,” but it’s more like they’re testing for an absence of personality, which makes sense considering how programmed every second of the chain-restaurant experience is. Your uniform will vary, but at this particular restaurant I had to wear a bright white shirt, a bright white apron, bright white pants, and bright white shoes—since I’m six foot five, I looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man—and say the things they trained you to say in the order they trained you to say them. Since I’d never actually been a server, this was helpful. (It’s well-known in the restaurant world that most servers lied to get their first server job; I had a friend who worked at another restaurant give me a
reference.) I had to learn the exact titles of all the items on the billion-page menu, and identify dishes based on slides, and be able to tell customers which ones had cilantro in them, and recite which beers were on tap and what the well vodka and whiskey were, all of which was a pain, yes, but once you had it down, you were set.

The stressful part was the computer watching everything constantly. You had to say a certain thing to a new table within 30 seconds of them sitting down and something else within two minutes. If a table didn’t get their food within another certain number of minutes, the computer alerted a manager, who then became involved. Stressful as it was for the server, the upside was a very focused level of service—a level of service customers don’t always get at “fancy” restaurants. The downside was that not every customer wants a focused level of service. Sometimes customers want to plant a flag, start a colony, and live at their table forever.

And, of course, the customer pretty much gets to do whatever they want. One time, late in the evening, a couple said something like “We’ve planted a flag, we’re starting a colony, we’re going to live here forever—you don’t have to keep checking in on us.” Since they wanted me to stop hovering and since I still had a chance of catching the earlier bus, I started in on my side work, which that evening involved walking into a refrigerator the size of my apartment and pouring ranch dressing from a giant square vat into a tiny round hole. The square vat and the round hole at the top of the dressing pourer were clearly not made by the same person, so it took some doing, and by the time I reemerged from the walk-in freezer, the
manager looked at me like I’d killed and eaten his children. Turns out, that one last table had changed their mind while I was in the freezer and decided they wanted to leave, and they had to flag down a manager to ring up their bill. The manager had droopy eyes and the humorlessness of a career chain-restaurant night manager, and he had very detailed rhetoric about what I’d done wrong. He got out some paperwork and wrote me up, and had me read what he’d written and then sign it, because big chain restaurants are not about human interactions—they’re about rules and timers and paperwork. But when you need a job, you need a job, and you swallow your pride and give in. I signed his stupid piece of paper and then walked to a bus station, dressed head to toe in white, to wait for the late bus home.

What It’s Like Working for a High-End Restaurant in London

BY DAN SAVAGE

I owe Jonathan Waxman an apology.

No, wait: I owe the people who bought Jams of London from Jonathan Waxman an apology. Or I owe them two or three thousand dollars—and, hey, does anyone know what the statute of limitations is for grand theft? In the UK?

Jonathan Waxman “is an American chef who was one of the pioneers of California cuisine,” says Wikipedia. He opened a restaurant in New York City called Jams in the early 1980s. It was
his second restaurant, and it was a huge success—Jams got name-checked in the 1987 Diane Keaton yuppie/ovary anxiety flick
Baby Boom
—and a couple years later Waxman opened Jams of London. I moved to London in 1988 and, through a friend of a friend of a friend, got a job waiting tables there.

Jams of London was an American-owned, American-style restaurant, but a pricey one, and it featured “American-style service.” It was a style of service—four-star but with an air of casual informality—that Brits just couldn’t do. Local waiters had two gears: lickspittle servility or barely concealed hostility. Consequently, the waiting jobs at Jams mostly went to American expats.

The clientele was moneyed—film and television stars, business execs, the odd (sometimes very odd) lord or lady—and the money was outstanding: A 15 percent gratuity was added to every check (American food, American service, American tips), and the waiters split the take at the end of the night. Jams of London was a great gig, and everyone who worked there realized how lucky they were and busted their asses for Jams, for Jonathan, for each other.

But like all really good restaurant gigs … it couldn’t last. Waxman sold Jams of London to a bounder who owned a rib joint off Trafalgar Square, and the new owner immediately revised the tipping policy: A 15 percent gratuity was still added to every check, but the money was no longer distributed to the waiters. All tips went straight into the pocket of the new owner, a man who had a large estate in the country to look after.

The new owner should’ve fired the entire staff and started over, but the place would’ve collapsed. So we were all kept on. Only now, instead of a group of highly motivated American expats who were grateful to the owners and wanted Jams to succeed, Jams of London was staffed by a group of seething, unmotivated angerbombs who hated the new owner and couldn’t wait for Jams to fail.

Here’s the thing about screwing over your employees: They find ways to screw you right back.

Which brings me to the flatware at Jams of London. The place had amazing silver—Christofle? Have you heard of it?—and before every shift, we waiters would sit and polish each spoon, soup spoon, fork, salad fork, knife, and bread knife. One day, while I sat with another waiter in the dining room before the dinner shift, I polished one fork for Jams, one for myself, one knife for Jams, one for myself, dropping each piece of silverware I polished for myself into a backpack at my feet. I left Jams that day with 12 settings—72 pieces of silver—which I still have and haul out (and polish!) at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Just the spoons—in the pattern Jams had and I have—cost $118 apiece. I discovered that a few years ago when I decided to replace one of the spoons, which I’d lost in a move, and Googled “Christofle.”

$118. For a spoon.

Jams wasn’t long for London, and neither was I. Three months after making off with thousands of dollars’ worth of silverware, I was back in the United States, and on to my next restaurant gig: making milk shakes for sorority girls in Illinois.

What It’s Like Working as a Restaurant Janitor

BY BRENDAN KILEY

One summer, I worked as a night janitor at a bakery. Everybody wound up regretting it. I regretted having to go to work at 8 p.m., as my friends were all just going out for the night, and I regretted spending the next several hours mopping and shoving disgusting rubber floor mats into industrial dishwashers. My employers regretted that they didn’t put their cache of nitrous oxide under lock and key.

If you are the kind of person who’s easily bored, I don’t recommend janitorial work. I tried to relieve the boredom of the job each night by putting on music and taking occasional hits of nitrous—we called it “hippie crack” back then. One night, while suffering a strong attack of youthful ennui (and its attendant selfishness), I went on a full-blown nitrous bender. I sat cross-legged on the floor, behind the counter so nobody could see me through the windows, with boxes of nitrous canisters and the bakery’s whipped-cream dispenser. I commenced to huffing in as much nitrous oxide as my poor body and brain could manage. I had put on some music (can’t remember what, but it could’ve been Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth, or maybe even some of the Grateful Dead’s folky/country stuff—those bands were in heavy rotation that summer) and eventually woke up to the sound of music while I stared at the ceiling.

I figured they were going to fire me. They did. Huffing nitrous
at your restaurant job isn’t a good idea if you want to keep your restaurant job.

I didn’t really care, and soon afterward got my first newspaper job, at the local community paper, covering school boards and city council and land use and other boring stuff. But it wasn’t nearly as boring as mopping that goddamned bakery floor.

What It’s Like Working as a Barista, an Incompetent Waitress, a Barely Competent Cook, and at a Shady Café

BY BETHANY JEAN CLEMENT

My first job ever was at a French bakery called La Boulangerie. It was owned by a diminutive but elegant European couple; he played the bassoon, professionally somehow, even though Americans barely knew what the bassoon was. I worked all day Saturdays behind the counter, all through senior year of high school. Work started at the ungodly hour of 7 a.m., and when I first started, I didn’t like coffee.

Within a few weeks, my coworker and I were having espresso-shot-drinking contests. By the time we closed up at the end of the day, we were pretty much mopping the ceiling to the
Benny Hill
theme song. The coffee also helped if I was hungover from a keg party, as did a little lie-down in the back on the cool tile floor. I loved making coffee drinks—the buzz of the machine, the hiss of
the steam—and did it exactingly: Don’t run the shots too long, don’t scald the milk. At the beginning, I’d surreptitiously dip my finger in to make sure the milk was hot enough; later, I realized you could just feel the side of the little stainless steel pitcher.

The true greatness of the Boulangerie was the paradise of pastry. I was always so hungry—so, so hungry. An abiding hunger lived inside me. It was smash-downable with a dose of food, but then it would come roaring back just a few hours later: HONNN-GRY! FOOOOOOOOD! I was two-dimensionally thin, to the extent that my parents worried I was anorexic, and I could eat and eat and barely make a dent in the Boulangerie’s trays full of golden croissants, the pillows of brioche, the sugar-crisped palmiers, and the little shell-shaped madeleines.