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| Photo: wwarby, Flickr |
Hanna Raskin's first waitressing job was at a small Greek diner in Michigan. In the 15 years since, she's worked at a chop suey joint in Mississippi, an exclusive Arizonan country club, a vegetarian eatery and an Irish pub. She currently picks up odd shifts at a seafood eatery in the North Carolina mountains, where she cracks crab legs for helpless tourists. This is the seventh in a series of posts.
At my restaurant, each server is issued a service-station style workshirt with his or her name neatly scripted above the left breast pocket. It's a homey touch (albeit one that's largely subverted by my colleagues' propensity to wear someone else's shirt.)
Most servers aren't all that eager to reveal their names to their customers, since there's nothing more irritating than hearing someone repeatedly shriek your name when you're standing 20 yards away. The most undignified aspects of serving seem somehow even more demeaning when paired with one's own name (as in: "Hanna, will you clean up this mess my son made?" or "Hanna, I want you to cut the crusts off my sandwich.")
Worse still, a name is just a gateway drug for prying patrons, who figure that once they're on a first-name basis with you, they're welcome to inquire after your education, age and marital status.
Servers know customers who interrupt their recitation of the nightly specials to ask their name aren't just wondering what to put on their glowing comment cards.
While I sympathize with my fellow servers' Rumplestiltskin-esque instincts, I've never refused to tell a table my name. I even wear the right shirt. But I have balked at more personal questions, wondering how knowing my exact height (I've heard of much worse from fellow servers) could possibly improve my guests' dining experience.
To be fair, the vast majority of questioners aren't coarse, just curious. Most chummy customers don't particularly care what time their server gets off work; They're far more interested in asking questions typically posed by mothers and therapists – Are you on a diet? Why are you working here? -- and tend to be deeply disappointed when they don't get soul-baring responses.
Great service entails knowing the menu, anticipating a customer's every need and unobtrusively serving and clearing plates in a timely manner. But does it also demand that servers answer every intimate question a table lobs at them? Just how personal should a diner expect to get with his or her server -- and is standoffishness a tip-altering offense?
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