Most every plate I clear looks pretty much the same: There's a typically a stain of sauce where the protein sat, a few unwanted onions shoved to the side and a spoonful or two of uneaten vegetables.
But over the course of an average evening, I'll usually encounter at least a half-dozen diners who have a very different sense of what it means to be done. These eaters -- and I'm using the term loosely here -- push back from the table after taking a few dainty bites. While every restaurant-goer is entitled to enjoy a meal in his or her own way, the under-attacked plate puts the server in a rather awkward spot.
Hard as it is for vocal diners to imagine, there are plenty of customers who are shy about saying their steak's overcooked or potato was served cold. Their untouched plates are very tactful cries for help, which is why I never whisk a still-full plate away without asking whether everything was OK.
The problem is, sometimes everything is OK, except that the diner has an eating disorder. Or was just dumped by the guy sitting across from her. Or sensed a case of swine flu coming on. Not only are guests understandably reluctant to talk about such things, they often seem to resent my posing the question.
When restaurant-goers talk about the scary things they've encountered while eating out, their conversation usually edges toward hygiene infractions and undercooked food. But what really frightens diners is the sight of a server without a notepad.
Like most servers who daylight as journalists (there are more of us than you might imagine), I'm perfectly comfortable taking notes while talking. Still, I won't break out pen and paper for parties smaller than five. That's because I believe writing down orders disrupts my eye contact with my customers and detracts from my ability to build relationships with them. Good service calls for more than mere transcription.
But I suspect my high-minded reasons for not taking notes wouldn't fly with the most skeptical guests, who like to insist I won't be able to recall their request for grilled salmon. "Are you sure you're going to remember this?," they'll ask repeatedly.
If a guest seems especially anxious, I'll make a point of writing his or her order down. But here's what I'd like to tell those nervous Nellies: Yes, I am going to remember your order. Because while the menu may bewilder you, I've been serving from it for years. It takes more than a house salad with ranch on the side and a medium-well steak to confuse me.
What matters most to a restaurant? Is it the guests, who pay startling sums of money to be there? Is it the local farmers who grow the ingredients that fill the pantry? Or the cooks who craft dishes worth buying?
No, no and no. Judging from the amount of care expended, there's nothing restaurants value quite so highly as ketchup.
Say a table orders two rounds of onion rings and a single serving of fries. By the end of the meal, those grease-happy diners will likely have burned through half a bottle of ketchup. But that bottle won't reappear in its half-empty state, nor will it be topped off from the giant bladder bag of ketchup that's a fixture on most restaurant kitchen walls. Instead, a server will slowly pour the vestigial ketchup into another under-filled ketchup bottle, creating one full bottle (and one bottle bound for the dish room).
Marrying ketchup is standard practice at every restaurant where ketchup is consumed, which – at least in this country – means every restaurant, period. With the almost imperceptible exception of hoity-toity places that make their own ketchup and serve it in ramekins, American restaurants rely on 10-ounce Heinz ketchup bottles – and expect their servers to keep said bottles looking fresh.
I have nothing but speculation and conjecture to back me up, but I suspect the heyday of the uniform is over. Because really, when's the last time you saw a cleaning woman in a too-short black dress and frilly white pinafore? It's nearly impossible to find a trash collector in a bow tie or a nurse with a starched cap these days.
But while official dress codes may have relaxed nearly everywhere, most restaurant servers are still expected to wear a uniform. Even workers allowed some sartorial leeway -- many employee manuals call for any jeans, any black pants or any red bandanna – are typically issued a standard apron. Uniforms connote professionalism, cleanliness and discipline; all fine server attributes, and all apparently forgotten come holiday time.
Whether it's a show of spirit or a cynical ploy to remind customers there's somewhere else they'd rather be, servers can be counted upon to modify their uniforms in keeping with the season. I'm guilty of wearing knee socks with jingling bells in December and heart-shaped jewelry on Valentine's Day. Still, I'm stunned by what some of my colleagues wear on Halloween night. Are customers really pleased when their servers have fake blood dripping down their faces or elk-sized antlers on their heads?
Serious diners may revile the open restaurant kitchen as noisy and passé, but the worst behaved among them should thank their lucky stars for the unfortified layout. After all, it's much harder for a server to spit in their food with everyone in the room watching.
But no amount of interior decorating can stop servers from taking revenge on their most miserable customers. Cads who pat their servers' behinds and cheapskates who order water, sugar and lemon instead of paying for lemonade should know their hijinks don't go unnoticed: Even the sweetest-seeming server will punish offenses at the table -- usually smiling all the while.
Spitting gets all the press, but few servers at sit-down restaurants like to mess with bodily fluids: Spitting's considered a rather déclassé and uninspired way of getting back at customers. Savvy restaurant workers aim for pocketbooks, not their guests' immune systems.
For workers who are paid to interact with customers, servers spend an inordinate amount of time on the floor. It's nearly impossible to get through a shift without having to stoop to sweep up cupfuls of Cheerios up-ended by a fidgety toddler, table scraps discarded by loutish diners who apparently take their etiquette cues from William Hogarth paintings or -- most frequently -- puddles of pennies.
I've worked in greasy spoons where hot dogs sold for 85 cents and coin transactions were the norm; I hardly expect a customer to charge a quarter cup of coffee. But in nicer restaurants, where servers don't bark orders across the room and salads don't arrive to the table encased in plastic wrap, coins are nothing but trouble -- any server who's picked up a check presenter and immediately showered their feet with the coins tucked inside it knows exactly what I mean.
Some of the blame clearly lies with the coin-fearing credit-card companies that issue said presenters, designed to accommodate only plastic. But there's really no reason for most restaurant customers to use change in the first place. What's the harm in leaving $72 when the bill's $71.88? Can a server not be trusted for a moment with an extra 12 cents?
I find coins so messy that I typically ignore them, even if it means I end up shouldering a portion of a table's bill. If a guest gives me three twenties to cover a $58.43 bill, I'll return $2 – knowing most guests will leave me both singles. While some of my fellow servers are far more punctilious, I still haven't figured out a good way to sort coins in my apron or rationalize the dead weight of a few rolls of dimes.
Just like heroic epics and Hollywood romances, server horror stories tend to unfold according to a very specific formula: Server meets guests. Guests like server. Server takes order. Server disappears.
While servers who spill coffee on their guests or forget to bring an extra fork are generally forgiven, there's no redemption for servers who vanish. Without their server in sight, guests feel neglected, trapped and exasperated by the entire eating-out experience. It's a rotten situation, which is why most diners who've posted here about terrible service have admitted to at some point wondering where their server went.
Assuming that question is sometimes posed sincerely, I offer here a few solutions to the Case of the Missing Server. Note that these explanations aren't excuses: Great servers don't go AWOL, ever. But there are many rational reasons, unapparent to guests, why servers can't be found. He or she just might be ...
1. Splitting checks. Here's one task that's become more laborious with the advent of computers. To prevent employee theft, most electronic point-of-sale systems are designed to make shifting guest tabs a tricky, multi-step process. Woe to the server who accidentally sticks Seat 3's fried wonton app on Seat 4's bill: On some popular systems, such an error can only be corrected by recombining the entire check and starting over. Creating six separate checks -- and gathering up six pens for signing them -- can take a server off the floor for up to five minutes (which, to a guest waiting for an iced tea refill, feels like an hour).
Many of you honestly believe restaurant servers have a cushy job that requires them to do little more than deliver food to a table and collect $180 an hour for their trouble. Fine. I'd like to call a temporary truce in the great "Are waitresses worth their keep?" debate and focus on another front-of-the-house staffer this week: The hostess.
Like most servers, I've been pressed into host duty when an employee hasn't shown up (or showed up too hungover to accurately monitor the seating chart -- hostesses are almost always the youngest, most inexperienced and least committed members of a restaurant's crew.) Hostesses have it hard.
Hostesses have to deal with customers at their hungriest, thirstiest, worst. It's not uncommon for customers who feel they haven't been seated quickly enough to hurl insults at the hostess or subject her to stem-winding rants about the crooked nature of the restaurant industry.
But here's what patrons never, ever do: In my experience manning the host stands at restaurants so ritzy that my job description included turning away male guests without jackets and in eateries so casual that "please wait to be seated" signs were dismissed as snobbish affectations, nobody once offered me a bribe.
Want to really confuse your server? Leave a 15-percent tip.
There's nothing more ambiguous than the 15-percent tip, which could just as well be a "thanks for nothing" grat from a miffed diner who always leaves 20 percent or a sincere show of gratitude from an infrequent restaurantgoer who thinks 15 percent is still the going rate for good service. Only the tipper knows for sure.
Fortunately for servers, fewer customers today seem to fall into the latter category, which is now mostly populated by the very old and very stubborn. Surveys show the vast majority of Americans have transitioned away from the 15-percent standard which ruled the food and beverage industry for decades, with the national average tip rising to 19 percent in 2008.
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.
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?
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.
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 fifth in a series of posts.
When a hostess beckons diners into a restaurant, her standard greeting is "Let me show you to your table." But to the chagrin of staffers and customers alike, a seemingly increasing number of eaters are taking the "your table" idiom quite literally. They exercise what some might call a sense of entitlement, threatening to disrupt service and the reservations system.
Traditional restaurant etiquette holds that diners behave as though they were seated at someone else's house: That's why we in the industry call them "guests." But as the cost of eating out has gone up and its novelty has faded, formality has given way to a different model. Diners now comfortably rearrange restaurant furniture, rarely asking permission to push tables together, park chairs in aisles or stick unwanted planters, vases and votives where they don't belong.
Beware! Allergens abound at most eateries. Photo: Dan4th/ 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 second in a series of posts.
My mother, who has a severe shellfish allergy, hasn't tasted seafood since the Eisenhower administration. Since she hasn't a clue whether crustaceans are salty, sweet or sour, she suspects they're lurking everywhere on the menu: "Now, does this cheesecake have any shellfish?" she'll ask her very patient server.
As a kid, I cringed at my mom's fastidiousness. Because really, who would put shrimp in granola? But with chefs now fusing ingredients at a breakneck pace and food allergies multiplying at an unprecedented rate, my mother isn't the only one asking. Twelve million Americans suffer from food allergies, and they're demanding that restaurants accommodate them.
The woman, an employee of a Tim Hortons coffee and donut chain in Toronto, gave a fussy toddler the tiny, 16-cent donut (called a "Timbit") to eat, and was promptly fired by her overzealous manager.
The woman said she would have paid for the donut, but the store was busy and she had to work.
As soon as Tim Hortons' corporate offices heard of the firing, they quickly issued a statement that the firing was a mistake (it was implied that the woman was re-hired).
Seriously, though: who would want to go back and work for that maniac? Whatever happened to the customer coming first?
Hopefully, the woman will be able to get away from the boss with the anger management issues, and get a better job. Like at the local IHOP.
I was under the impression that you couldn't get fired for political views anymore. Apparently that was the reasoning behind a waitress being fired in Arkansas this week.
Michah Qualls says she was fired for her political views, but allowed to finish working the lunch shift before being let go. She used her personal break to hold up a pro Hilary Clinton sign along the route that John McCain used to roll through town.
The article was a little sketchy on details, so it's hard to say whether there weren't other circumstances that led up to her dismissal. If she was fired for her political views, I'm sure she has legal options. Still it's hard to imagine her boss actually saying that was the reason she was being let go.
I was under the impression that you couldn't get fired for political views anymore. Apparently that was the 
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