"waitress stories" news and stories

I recently took an order for a bowl of she-crab soup. What made the request notable was our restaurant hasn't sold she-crab soup for more than three years.

Like many customers in the Internet era, my guest had over-researched her visit. She'd pulled up a website to find an outdated menu and plotted her meal according to its points. Not surprisingly, she was devastated to discover her dream dinner was unattainable. In a town crowded with savvy tourists who've been planning their getaways for months, it's a scenario that occurs almost nightly.

Waitressing is hard work, and servers are always grateful when their guests acknowledge as much. What's less appreciated is when customers try to make our jobs easier by stacking their own plates.

"Oh, let me help you," well-meaning customers say as they balance an emptied soup bowl atop an unscraped salad plate – using the very same phrase children typically employ in the kitchen before they dump a sack of flour on the floor. For servers who innately understand the art and physics of plate stacking, it's terribly frustrating to be handed a wobbly tower of dishes and silver that has to either be set down and reassembled or carried gingerly to the dish room before the server can return to the table to do in two trips what might have been accomplished in one. Servers will always thanks you profusely for your help – and wish to themselves that you'd just let them do their job.

Are you the kind of customer that stumbles into a restaurant ten minutes before it closes, expecting the same level of service you would get if it were 6.p.m.? In some eateries, you may get that kind of professionalism, but clearly, many restaurant staffers disdain these types of customers -- especially if they endlessly linger, cause waitresses to miss the last bus home and prolong the day of kitchen staff who aren't paid overtime.

Dozens of websites are littered with complaints from fast food and casual restaurant staffers who say that customers show little regard for them when it comes to closing time. Should a restaurant that stays open until 10 p.m. take all comers until they lock the front door? If customers come in at 9:55, should the staff be compelled to stay until those customers devour their last morsel?

Some restaurants try to accommodate their clientele even if it's right at closing time or slightly after. Seating customers after closing time is "possibly the worst policy... that I have seen at a restaurant" according to the Insane Waiter, one of the many blogs that chronicles the travails of the food service industry. The "waiter" told a demanding couple that expected to be seated at 9:55, when the restaurant was closing at 10 p.m, "I'm sorry, but we have people that need to get home to their families, that's why we have posted hours."

If a high-tech machine could zero in on the vector of malfeasance in most restaurants, where would it land? On the runny-nosed prep cook? A money-skimming bartender? Nope: I'm putting my money on the coffee pot.

There are restaurants that make a very big deal out of coffee – or at least all those coffee-based drinks that end in "o". But, in most eateries, coffee's an afterthought and is treated as such by servers.

In every restaurant where I've ever worked, servers pour their own coffee. That means it's not necessary to ring up a cup of coffee, and many servers I've known have become lackadaisical about it. Sometimes coffee's on the check, sometimes it's not – it usually depends whether or not the table was deemed deserving of the freebie.

More than two decades ago, the nation's collective moral conscience was momentarily seized by minister Robert Fulghum's credo All I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, a warm and fuzzy list of rules for living that led off with the presumably uncontroversial dictum "share everything."

I didn't need to read Fulghum's official biography to know he'd never worked as a restaurant server (although it was interesting to discover he'd been a ditch digger and a singing cowboy.)

Servers generally hate sharing. Not with each other, of course – it's common to find a restaurant's last slice of pie in the server station with seven forks surrounding it. The trouble comes when customers exhibit the same behavior, insisting on splitting entrees instead of ordering their own.

The problem's largely a financial one: The decision to order one plate instead of two costs me about $5, a pretty significant sum that could have been used to buy my lunch the next day. Many restaurant owners, who are equally interested in getting guests to eat full portions, have instituted plate sharing fees to discourage such menu mischief.