"waitress" news and stories

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.

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.

Photo: Joe Shlabotnik, Flickr.

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.

Photo: David Sifry, Flickr.

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).