"FoodService" news and stories

Restaurant menus abound with unhealthy choices. Photo: smoorenburg, 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 ninth in a series of posts.

Server discretion, like sobriety checks and seat belts, helps prevent deadly car crashes.

Backed by laws that decree certain ruin for restaurants that serve drinks to overly intoxicated patrons, most servers don't hesitate to cut off customers who've had enough. But they're understandably reluctant to police other equally dangerous behaviors observed at the table, raising the question of whether servers ever have an ethical obligation to intercede.

Restaurants are in the business of providing their guests with food and drink, which makes the prospect of withholding either seem counterintuitive at best. But when the requested item would harm the diner, does the "just doing my job" argument falter?

My husband and my sister-in-law are both currently working in food service, he a part-time caterer while he returns to school, she a table-waiting lifer. Both have recently been involved in that dreaded of all most crooked food service behavior: the manager who wants in on the tips.

For J., who usually tends bar and has a knack for earning a boatload of tips, one manager in particular has been tipping herself out of the bartender's pool at the end of the night. She's the only manager in the company who does it and he won't report her (though I've suggested it) because, he tells me, she's so miserable. Life is not treating her right - who is he to make it worse?

I say, though, it's a matter of principle. Food service workers may not share a very large body of common ethics, but there are two that are universal: (1) always tip generously when being waited upon by others and (2) managers may be paid less than they deserve but they never, no never, get tipped out.