Serves Us Right
WHISK-WIELDING rock-star chefs are everywhere these days. Same goes for sincere farmers — posing, elbow on hoe, in glossy food-magazine spreads. We applaud former Wall Street executives who open cupcake shops and lawyers who ditch the briefcase and buy a vineyard. Go to some friends’ house for breakfast and they usher you into their chef’s kitchen where they make you a macchiato with their vintage La Pavoni, garnish your scrambled eggs with shaved bottarga and later tag the food (not you) in a Facebook album.
Before some fire-escape beekeeper sics his hive on me, let me say how pleased I am. I speak for Row 14 on my last JetBlue flight — every passenger tuned to the Food Network — when I say that it’s a good time to be eating in America. But despite our infatuation with those who grow, butcher, cook, style, photograph and review our food, we still dismiss the people with whom we have the most contact in the food world: our waiters.
We have all suffered injuries at the hand of a waiter, the ill-mannered drone who forgets your lemon, disappears when you need him, overfills your glass, takes the plate you are still eating from and wonders if “we” need change for that $100 bill. It’s a shame, but the service is often the least satisfying piece of dining out.
It’s been four years since I waited tables in New York, and I now visit restaurants as a guest, sympathetic to the pressures, appreciative of the effort, but also frustrated by the lack of pride I see in my former colleagues.
In their defense, waiters work unpredictable schedules for inconsistent money. They rarely have health or dental insurance, paid sick leave or retirement planning options. Because of the high turnover that results, owners are reluctant to invest in training. So owners see waiters as expendable, chefs think they are undereducated and overpaid (on a good night, a waiter can make twice what the lowest-paid line cook or dishwasher earns, which is just over minimum wage), and diners anticipate incompetence before it occurs.
Who would want a job with so little to recommend it? Enter the proverbial Day Job waiter, wishing he were still at band practice. Or the less familiar subcategory of this species, the Creative Type, in restaurant purgatory while searching for her niche, spending her days off making soap and cork trivets.
God help you if your waiter is the surly Anti-Establishmentarian, the 25- to 50-year-old who won’t work for The Man, who chafes under his uniform tie, and who probably hasn’t spoken to his father in a while — or to you, for that matter. You’ve probably encountered the wistful Oops-I-Became-a-Career-Waiter who made twice his friends’ starting salaries 20 years ago, but brings home the same money today and is loath to try something new at age 40.
There are, of course, wonderful waiters out there. Two types come to mind. The first is the European Waiter, justifiably proud of his professional training and his genetic predisposition for deboning fish with two blunt spoons. The second is the Future Restaurant Owner, the mind-reading master who steers you to moments of epiphany, conjures away your empty sugar packets, remembers your duck-egg allergy from your last visit two years ago, and sends you home with cookies for the babysitter.
How can restaurants attract more of these professional, committed and inspired workers and how can they persuade current waiters to be proud of their work?
First, restaurants need to provide health insurance and retirement planning for their employees. One way to do this would be a service charge, as practiced in Europe, put toward paying a salaried staff. Would American diners be willing to give up tipping — and its illusion of control — if it meant providing benefits and a living wage for the people who cook and serve their food?
Tipping provides American waiters with an incentive to increase their check average by pushing bottled water, extra courses, expensive entrees and pricey wines and by showing guests the door as soon as they stop chewing. The service charge shifts the focus from the money to the experience. Instead of worrying about how much money she will take home that night — and upselling and groveling her way to that goal — a waiter can worry about doing her job well: making people happy at whatever price and pace they prefer.
Lower turnover resulting from a more professional employment package would encourage restaurants to invest time and resources in training. They might offer menu tastings (important with the ever-changing “seasonal” menus fashionable now), wine and spirits education, guest speakers (winemakers, foragers, game hunters), employer-sponsored travel and dining, mentoring programs that connect newcomers to leaders in their field, externships for service staff, and — most important — cross training between the kitchen and the dining room.
Camaraderie and mutual respect among employees translate to better communication, fewer mistakes and a more hospitable dining experience. In fact, all of us — diners, cooks, managers and waiters themselves — could do a great deal simply by treating waiting tables as a vital and honorable profession requiring skill, knowledge and infinite patience.
In the meantime, you know what would really help? A reality-show competition, say, “Top Waiter.” A contestant recycles a bread basket? “Please pack your pens and go.”
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