So this post isn’t exactly my normal raging style, at least not yet. I’m sure it will end up being evil at some point, however, so don’t lose faith just yet.

Readers, if you have anything to add, different things you do at your job, please post them in the comments.  Let’s let people know it’s not as easy as it looks.

This post and my next are going to be on the opening and closing things that a typical restaurant server has to endure every shift, and what we have to endure DURING the shift from the masses.

For opening:

First, we have to get up early, which itself just plain sucks. We get to work, and we usually have to wait in the cold for someone to let us in. If it’s someplace like Shoneyland, it’s also going to still be dark as Shoneyland servers have to be in at 5am. First things first, coffee must be made. It doesn’t matter if we don’t drink the coffee, if we want the cooks to make food properly in the morning, we must have this vital lifeline of the day. Caffeine is what we survive on, never forget that. Bring your server starbucks, and you’ll gain a lifelong friend. If you’re currently involved with a server, buy them an espresso machine for Christmas, or Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Yule, or whatever holiday you celebrate. It’ll go a long way into sustaining your relationship. Otherwise, get them a reloadable starbucks card and keep it filled baby.

After the coffee is made, you have a couple of minutes to down it, then you must start everything else. This is where we like to have little old lady servers, as they’ve been doing it themselves for centuries, and they know how to work it right. Kids just out of school, or on summer break, should be on night shift because they just plain suck.

At this point, post coffee, tea must be started, and lemons cut. Some places have those nice lemon slicers, that if you’re not careful will become finger slicers. Use these wisely, they can be your best friend or your worst enemy. You never want to be the first table a server has after they’ve cut themselves on the lemon slicer and gotten the juice in their finger. If you see a server holding their finger, or see what looks to be a new band-aid, be nice to them, or your food will be horribly wrong and you might not eat until lunch.

After lemons are cut, it’s time to stock up the server line. We have to make sure that there’s tea bags, coffee, filters, hot tea’s, sugar, and all the rest of every single condiment in the store, stocked up and ready to go. This takes a while because you usually have kids closing the night before, and they never do anything right, they’re too busy fucking around or getting high. This usually takes up the bulk of our time, until….

Salad and dressing station. Many places (salad bar’s being the exception to the rule) require the servers to prep house salads in advance of the shift, especially for a lunch shift. We also have to prep the soups of the day and get them out on a steam table, we have to rotate every dressing into a new pan, new dressing on the bottom and old on the top, which becomes a quite messy endeavor and really pisses us off.

Next we have dessert prep. This is by far the most tedious thing on a day shift. It generally involves spending time in a freezer pulling pies or cheesecake, filling up cups of pudding (T.G.I.Fridays) and shoving little gummy worms into it, prescooping ice cream, cutting hot fudge cake to be made into hot fudge cake sundaes, filling sundae mugs, and various other things. By this time you’re cursing the management for not having proper prep staff and having you do it all yourself, and you slip and fall on something dropping an entire pan of preprepped desserts all over yourself resulting in a cacophony of cussing and breaking glass, not unlike a fireworks display.

Now you have time to sneak out for a final cigarette before checking the drink station. Drink station involves putting all the little spigots back on from the night before, after rinsing off whatever cleaning solution was used, testing each drink to make sure the heavy as fuck syrup boxes don’t need changing, filling the ice in each ice bin (little old ladies are strong and do it themselves or bitchy and know the proper commands to make the work release convicts do it for them). Then we have to make sure there are plenty of “skraws” and “nakkins”, especially in a breakfast bar situation. Next we must check the juices (alcohol free restaurants only).

Finally, with about 4 minutes before opening, we run out to the floor with our little bin of sweetners and a broom and dustpan at our side and a towel at our waist. We restock and clean nearly every table in the dining room that hasn’t been done the night before by the kids, because we know that someone will bitch about not having enough pink stuff for their water with lemon.

After opening, we have whats known as Running Sidework.

This involves, but is not limited to: Keeping ice full, even during busy times. Dropping everything to cut more lemons, fill the ice, stocking glasses, making tea, making coffee, making soup, making salads, sweeping entire dining room, changing sanitizer water, helping wash dishes, sweeping server line, taking trash out, restocking desserts.

As you can see, serving tables is NOT limited to just bringing out your food and being a convivial conversationalist. It involves actual work, much of which only a couple of people do while the less worthy servers stand around gossiping about who they fucked the night before and who gave them gonasyphaherpyaids this past weekend.

Next time you don’t see your server because he/she is in the kitchen for too long, think about asking if it’s busy back there before you go off about them being lazy and not doing what you need, because we’re usually very hard at work for you. If we don’t do many of these things, springs1, even when you’re sitting waiting on a drink, sometimes there’s a valid reason for it. These are jobs, and in order to take care of you, the customer, we have to actually DO these jobs.

Ribeye

No tag for this post yet.

Related Posts:

How to make a better Strawberry Daquiri

No matter what you think, the customer is NOT always right!

People think they can get away with anything

Round Table vol. 11