As a waiter, I wasn’t really a person. I was the help—I was a server and therefore, a service. At times I was no more than a dumb conduit through which an individual or group’s dining experience was composed and executed.
I was basically furniture. And as furniture, people spoke to me in ways I never could have imagined.
One man told me, without a glimmer of humor, that he was on a first date and his night depended on me—as he stated, “I plan on whining, dining, and sixty-nining my date.” The woman sitting across from him blushed, cringing.
“So,” he went on. “At least for this table, there’s more than just your gratuity going on if you get my drift.”
I asked him if he’d like to hear about the specials. And I asked her if she’d like to call the police. The man laughed past my suggestion and ordered a Bordeaux, anything we had in stock really, the best in the house.
As a waiter, I was tremendously diplomatic. Accommodating, even. Neutral, but encouraging. That is, until there was any mention of the tip. The first and perhaps most important discovery I made while waiting tables: the moment any guest mentioned the tip, even in casual passing, it was a sure sign I was about to get either zero dollars or a card with a prayer on it, which was like getting stiffed followed by a sanctimonious kick in the pants.
“Jesus wants to give you the greatest tip—Eternal Life.”
I understood that poor tipping was often a result of poor service, but what set me apart from many of my colleagues was the order of events. They would often complain about receiving crappy tips, but in their case, the shaft was preceded by their inattentive or grumpy service. This created a self-fulfilling prophecy unique to the service industry—once a server convinced themselves that a certain demographic was a poor tipper, they would provide them with bad service, resulting in a low tip, fulfilling their prediction.
In contrast, I’d made up my mind that people are inherently rotten and that everyone was going to leave a lousy tip, no matter what. Perhaps stupidly I still committed to providing them with top-notch service anyway.
That is not to say I didn’t notice several commonalities between the customers by whom I kept getting burned. Over time, these patterns developed into identifiers of those who were much more likely to leave a poor tip. These traits are as follows:
The after-church crowd
Pinstriped suits
A tendency to use “lunch” as a verb
White men
Pleated khakis
Anyone on a business lunch and paying separately
Cufflinks
White hats
Boat shoes with no socks
Whenever anyone’s card was declined. That was also a sure sign of a bad tipper. Especially if they wanted to argue with me about their declined card, instead of discussing the matter with their bank. Their most common argument always left me puzzled, “No,” they’d say firmly. “That’s the good card. I just used it, it should be good.” While I was never a whiz at math, I was still able to grasp how deposits and withdrawals work. If, as they claimed, they’d just used the card, that could be classified as a “withdrawal,” therefore increasing the chances the card’s balance would be pushed closer to its limit and, consequently, closer to being declined. For all the years I worked in service, I could never find a way of pointing that out without sounding patronizing. So I usually didn’t say anything. More to the point, as far as a server’s intuition for poor tippers, this was a useless identifier since it only made itself known after my award-winning brand of customer service had already been spent.
Aside from the customers, sometimes it was the circumstance that foretold poor tips. I’ve worked a couple weddings with open bars and found, paradoxically, few if anyone tips for a free drink. Another notable shift rife with lousy tippers was serving the lunch rush at Giovanni’s Italian Restaurant. Servers who were condemned to work this shift were most often being punished.
For starters, the lunch shift was notoriously heavy on side-work, either cleaning up from the half-assed closing shift the night before or, when I worked a “clopen,” closing late the night before and opening bright and early the next morning, I’d be cleaning up my own mess I’d wickedly chosen to leave myself in the morning.
The Giovanni’s location I worked at was in the business district. This was before the restaurant was destroyed by arson—a fire which many believed was set by Giovanni himself in order to reap a windfall from insurance to fund a pricey move to a posh location on the waterfront at the marina in the bay. Being in the business district I got to sling lunch, day after day, for the absolute worst diners in the industry: the power-lunchers. Mostly business groups. Often parties of four or more. All separate checks. In addition to being cartoonishly rude, always in a hurry, grumpy, entitled, and beset by a swarm of digestive sensitivities, this crowd was, by a good measure, the very worst tippers.
So it is perhaps counterintuitive, with so little financial incentive and such a high propensity for drama and abuse, I adored serving these fizzing lunatics. It was their social dynamics I craved. Nowhere else was corporate intrigue, casual chicanery, and sociopathic social maneuvering on such flamboyant display. I wanted to be close to their drama, eavesdropping right from the source. And so, I catered to these loathsome parties slavishly. Promptly refilling their waters-with-lemon. Apologizing obsequiously for forks that had perceived blemishes from the dishwasher. Backing away from tables with dramatic humility and taking with me all the juiciest, most salacious horror stories to dish with the back of house staff.
So when a business-formal group of eight arrived for a very special, very important lunch one day I eagerly assigned myself as their waiter. Meeting them at the reception desk, right away I could tell they were trouble and bound to be fascinating when I discovered a hitch in their reservation. Their reservation was for the next day, a Saturday at 11am.
The one in charge rapped on the reservation book with her knuckles, “No,” she said. “No no. I made this reservation a month ago. And I am a regular here so, no. There is no mistake in our reservation. If there’s any mistake in our reservation, it is your mistake. Your mistake and you will need to find us your best table for eight business leaders who have some very important things to discuss.” To the shy group behind her she implored, “Isn’t that right, ladies!”
She was answered by varying degrees of enthusiastic cheers.
Of course I found them a table. The mixup with their lunch reservation was inconsequential since no one actually needed a reservation for lunch but they were free to make one if it made them feel more important.
The same person who’d performed such a conspicuous and unnecessary power play at the front desk chose a large round table in the back of the restaurant near the bustling kitchen because, as she put it, she wanted her team to be “close to the action.” I immediately identified her as the leader of the group. Although, this being a power lunch, she was likely not the person to foot the bill. Probably, this group would pay with eight individual checks which was a pain in the ass, but fine by me if it meant the group’s entire tip was not solely dependent on someone who seemed to enjoy using workaday social transactions to exert their power over service staff in order to feel superior.
I waited as they took their seats, watching for whoever would take the very corner seat, the seat that had a crack perspective of the whole restaurant, the exits, and more importantly, everyone at their table. This strategic position was of course occupied by the group leader. Other diners—apparently on the opposite end of the power spectrum—seemed condemned to sit at the least inviting seats of the round table, seats that were just inches from the busser and waitstaff’s main thoroughfare between the dining room and the kitchen.
Their disadvantageous position at the table seemed reinforced every time I or anyone else brushed past them either rushing into, or bursting from the kitchen in the back. Several times people in these seats jumped, wincing and yelping, “Oh my god, you scared me!”.
As per usual, Giovanni materialized next to me, shouting.
“Nate!” he barked. “What are you doing talking to these beautiful ladies when you should be serving them!”
He just loved to perform these impromptu, tableside coaching conversations in which he’d go on dramatically about some perceived gaff I’d performed, or some oversight I’d made which potentially threw our guests' dining extravaganza into peril. For these tirades and for front-of-house schmoozing in general he’d crank up his Sicilian accent, laying it on thick with snaps and bouffant gesturing.
He said, “What is the matter with you? Let’s go, let’s go here, like this.”
He brushed me to the side and bent down on one knee, clasping one unfortunate guest’s hands in his. He raised his hands to the heavens and said to the shocked woman, “My darling,” and he lavishly draped his hand across his heart. “You tell Giovanni what you want for lunch today and Giovanni make it for you. Something…” he kissed his fingertips, “real special.”
He got up, satisfied with his demonstration. He said, “See? Now that is how you are to serve these beautiful women!”
I recoiled at his molesty performance. Maybe women in the old world didn’t mind being talked to like they were simple children. But not in our Pacific Northwest town which was renowned for its pearl-clutching community of sanctimonious faux-liberals, this was the kind of performance that could get a scathing review in the community section of the local newspaper. Which is why, to my astonishment, my table of strong business leaders swooned giddily at this treatment. They giggled even as he made his way around the table, looking down their blouses and fastidiously re-arranging their silverware or water glasses, pointing out how terribly our sloppy, good-for-nothing bussers had set their table.
“These American bambinos. They don’t know elegance.” he pointed to me, displaying how he’d partially re-arranged the silverware for the ringleader in the corner. “You see? Boom! Now this, this is what dining…how you say? The romance of dining yes? Yes. Even for a professional lunch with these beautiful women. It is the romance that counts, yes? Yes.”
The woman in the corner beamed, perhaps feeling properly vindicated for the made-up debacle over her group’s reservation. She raised an eyebrow and shot me a haughty, vengeful glare.
As much as I disliked my boss, I had a great deal to learn from him. In fact, I think of all the terrible jobs I’ve had, the most I learned was from my horrible bosses. Although, the lessons I took away from those dreary days were likely not the lessons they’d hoped to impart.
At Giovanni’s, I learned how to work with an abusive, bi-polar tyrant. During the frequent occasions he’d spin out on an inconsolable tear, I learned how to keep my head down and navigate around him to get my work done. As a manager for the front of house, I learned how to discreetly put employees in touch with OSHA and how to navigate their labyrinthine bureaucracy to document the atrocities they’d been made to suffer at the hands of our psychotic proprietor.
“Mama help me,” he announced to our large party, seized in a moment of mocking prayer. “I am needed upstairs. I leave you in our young waiter’s hands, eh?” He gave me a solid pat on the back, poking his fingers in his eyes, and then at me. “Buuut, I’m watching you eh? Yes!” And to the table he finally announced, “Any of you need anything, you talk to the Giovanni!”
After everyone settled in and were tucking furiously into the complimentary bread, I came around to take their orders, beginning with a florid monologue through the daily specials, all of which got raised eyebrows and exaggerated sighs of delight.
After composing a symphony of the meat option, one of them responded, “Ohh, that sounds devilishly good.”
During my soliloquy about the fish option, one of them interrupted me asking, “About the halibut. Does it taste like fish?”
At last, I concluded the specials and turned to taking their orders. Instinctively, I began with the woman in the corner, who was leaning forward on both elbows, desperately trying to catch my attention, but without making a scene.
I offered, “Let’s start here, yes?”
“Yes,” she said, satisfied. “Let’s do that.”
But instead of asking me to recall one of the daily specials, or to order anything on the menu, she closed the menu and pressed it onto the table with her fingertips.
She said, gazing heavenward, “I’m wondering if there’s something…oh, I don’t want to be a pain but…” She went on, “Ugh, the fish sounds lovely, but too greasy. Ew. The pasta sounds good but, so many carbs!” For this next part, she used her hands to compose her meal out of stardust in the sky, “I’m wondering if the chef could make me something that was light, but filling, i’m thinking creamy but with a bit of citrus. And for god’s sake, if I have to look at another noodle! I mean, am I right ladies?!”
Everyone nodded emphatically, hating noodles.
I said, “I’ll see what the chef can cook up.”
She seemed skeptical. As if I hadn’t understood the cosmic spectrum of textures and flavors of the meal she was imagining.
“Rest assured,” I offered. “It’ll be super duper.”
I turned to take the order for the woman next to her, who seemed on the fence about a similarly gargantuan decision.
“Oh, you know what?” she admitted to everyone. “Whatever she’s having sounds incredible! I’ll have what she’s having.”
And around the table they went, one after the other, hesitating momentarily to consider the dish they’d settled on, before caving and opting for the mystery meal, not without their individual alterations of course.
One asked, “If there’s butter, I don’t want butter. I prefer heavy cream or olive oil.”
Someone else absolutely hated capers. “I hate capers!” she almost shouted. “If there’s capers in my dish then I just don’t know what!”
“Got it,” I said. “Extra capers.”
Another loved the idea of the citric flavor, but asked for a substitute of vinegar since they were allergic to citrus. Another was gluten intolerant. Another was over chicken. Just, done with eating bird altogether. And of course, no carbs.
As I gathered their useless menus, I made a little joke about how a group with such an aversion for carbs would choose to eat lunch at an Italian restaurant.
Someone shot back accusingly, “Why is that odd? Many of us are gluten intolerant.”
“I didn’t say it was weird,” I corrected her. “I said it was funny.”
The back of house staff who’d been listening in on this nightmare, were agog as soon as I pushed through the doors to the kitchen.
Travis, the head cook, and a dear friend of mine pointed at me with his incredibly sharp knife. He hissed at me, “What the fuck was that shit? What does she think we are, magicians?”
Tactfully, he pointed out the several contradictions in their meal. Light, but filling. Buttery, but with no butter. Citric, but without citrus. Italian, but without carbs.
“Why the hell would you order fish?” he wanted to know. “If you don’t like the taste of fi–”
He stopped suddenly, looking behind me. I turned to see one from the large group who appeared in the kitchen searching for the bathroom.
Graciously, I led her around the corner to the ladies room where she spent the next twenty minutes.
The head cook and I worked furiously to design a meal assembled from the disparate moods and whimsey I’d gleaned from our picky diners. We went with a bold choice: a veal picatta.
A small make-shift station was set up in the far end of the kitchen where the veal cutlets were to be tenderized. Our salad chef and even the dishwashers were tapped to gang up on the veal cutlets with large, deadly mallets, causing a substantial ruckus beating them into a thin mash. After the veal had been pummeled to smithereens, the cutlets were dredged through flour (save for those cutlets destined for the gluten intolerant) and, with a pinch of salt and pepper, dropped into sizzling hot saucepans as a dash of white wine exploded into flames. The obscenely tender cutlets browned luxuriously in the pan and were quickly removed and nestled into a bed of blanched spinach. The drippings in the pan were emulsified with a glug of cream, wine, capers, and fresh squeezed lemons—the rindy fragrance of which swirled through the kitchen and billowed into the dining room in zesty, ribald whorls.
On my way out the kitchen to see to my other tables, one of the power lunchers caught me by the sleeve. “Whatever it is your team is making us back there,” she said with more of a threatening edge than I cared for, “I only hope it tastes as delicious as it smells!”
The veal picatta was paired with a small but rich scoop of portobello mushroom risotto in a garlic and white wine and cream reduction and elegantly topped with a sprig of dill. For a vegetable side we went with a pasta primavera with gorgeously ripe tomatoes and caramelized asparagus tips, topped with a conservative dollop of goat cheese and, standing in for the poisonous pasta, thick ribbons of flash seared zucchini.
For the lady who hated capers the chef substituted small jewels of sundried tomato. For the woman who was allergic to citrus the lemon juice was substituted with a marsala wine reduction to make a quick and dirty veal marsala. The magicians in the kitchen produced a meal that was nothing short of a goddamn miracle—each plate a work of art, an intoxicating bouquet of sultry flavors and velvety textures, rich colors and aromas swirling deliciously and, perhaps most importantly, adequately catering to each diner's unique picadillos.
As I set the steaming plates in front of each guest, they sighed with bawdy delight, eagerly shaking out their napkin and draping it across their lap.
“Oh gawd,” someone said. “It just looks so delicious it’s making me drool!”
As I gagged at the image of grown adults drooling uncontrollably, the missing diner finally emerged from the women’s room fully refreshed. She took her seat at the helm of her beautiful lunch and without conversation, hungrily tucked in into her veal.
Normally, I was a pretty good judge of what industry my power lunchers were representing. If it was one of the gigantic, fifty-person-or-more lunches for the Downtown Business Alliance, it was much more obvious since it was a networking event and each person had a nametag with the business they were representing.
But for the life of me, I was struggling to pin down what this group was selling. They could have been either lawyers or in real estate or cosmetics. Whatever they were, they were scammy and weird. Their discussion was more about influencing people and the behaviors of America’s most powerful business leaders rather than the customary brass-tack machinations of our local community of wheel-dealing corporate elite.
As I refilled waters, or cleared plates throughout their meal, I caught only vague morsels of their conversation. I learned, for example, one of the most effective ways to assert dominance over clients, and people in general, is to hold someone’s gaze and refuse to be the first person to look away.
The woman in the corner laughed about how she just couldn’t, no matter how hard she tried, she could never ever remember anybody’s first names.
“But you know what?” she said. “First names aren’t important. Nicknames are.” She went on, “Of course, you’d never call someone their nickname. At least not to their face, and not right away. But if you can find a really great nickname—something that might be funny, never about their appearance, but something that really hits home—you can work to dominate the person organically, through their own community, whether that’s their friends or coworkers, without them even catching on until it’s too late!”
To my horror, everyone at the table nodded at this fervently. One person was taking notes.
At this point, the woman in the corner asked me about our selection of desserts.
“I come here all the time,” said this person I’d never seen before. She went on to the rest of her table, “And you guys, they have this cake that is absolutely to die for. I mean, literally it is deadly. It’s in the name…”
She snapped her fingers at me. She said, “Oh you know the one, the deadly cake thing.”
I helped her along, “Yes, that would be our Death By Chocolate Cake.”
“Yes!” she clapped gleefully. “That’s the one! Tell us about that.”
The Death By Chocolate Cake was a slice of cake that was about six inches tall. There were four layers of dense dark chocolate cake, separated by equally thick layers of rich ganache. Each slice was topped with a generous layer of cocoa buttercream frosting and further drizzled with melted chocolate. As a waiter, I never mentioned how much a dish cost, unless I was asked. It was unseemly to talk costs. But in the case of the Death By Chocolate Cake, I found that mentioning its prohibitive price tag often gave anyone considering the dessert a real-world estimate of its overall girth. To anyone else who might still be on the fence about the cake I concluded its description thusly: “The Death By Chocolate Cake is great for anyone who’s recently been dumped by their boy or girlfriend, wolves, or a family of five.”
As I was delivering this punchline, Giovanni rushed to the table from whatever he’d been doing this whole time in his office upstairs. Again, he cranked up that farcical Sicilian accent, “How you ladies like your lunch? It makes you strong and ready to work, eh?” And even though he had nothing to do with creating their meal, he said, “I’m glad you like. You tell all your friends I make for you, something,” he kissed his fingertips again, “Really special today, eh?”
He suddenly spotted something on the table, and said, “Ow!” clapping his hands in prayer. He picked up an errant spoon and held it up for the whole table to see. “Mi gazza! What is this! Oh my god I’m afraid this boy hasn’t been taking care of you like the ladies you are.” He went on and on, fluttering over the women obscenely, again, and bizarrely, to their utter delight.
When we were alone in the dish pit, Giovanni finally dropped the accent. He said, “What the fuck is going on out there?! If they want the cake, you let them order the cake. What the hell is wrong with you? And with the spoons, how many times do I have to tell you? Over and over again I tell you. Clear the dishes as you go. Yes? You walk by the table with empty hands, you miss an opportunity. Again, how many times? It’s like I’m talking to—”
Giovanni had a way of berating and humiliating his employees until he was reduced to just a pair of flapping lips flapping. Finally, I suggested, I should go and tend to my table and help them decide how to wrap up their lunch?
“Yes, yes,” he said. “Of course, go. But this isn’t over. You and I, we talk later about how to serve, yes? We start from scratch. We start from the beginning? Maybe how to properly set the table? How to sell a fucking dessert, go go go—”
After finally escaping Giovanni I returned to my table where I discovered the Death By Chocolate Cake had sent the power lunch off the rails.
I asked, “And have we made a decision on the gigantic slice of cake?”
“Oh! I just don’t know,” someone was saying. “It sounds so rich! And after that lunch?!”
“I know!” said someone else. “It’s just too much.”
“Ladies ladies,” said the leader in the corner. “It’s not as if you’re on this planet forever. Remember, life is short. If you want the chocolate cake, you should order the chocolate cake and enjoy it too!”
I interjected, “Do we maybe need some more time to decide about dessert?”
“Yes, thank you.” said someone. “I think we need a moment while we all consider whether we should commit suicide by chocolate cake.”
As I slowly backed away from the table, I heard someone correct her, “It’s not suicide,” they said. “It’s ‘death by,’ as in, it was the cake did the killing.”
I kept a safe distance from the table, but remained within earshot, bussing and resetting tables and seeing to my other guests. At one table, two heavily perfumed men (both in pinstripe suits with cufflinks) asked me what all the screeching in the corner was about.
I offered them my best guess, predicting it had started as a business luncheon of sorts but was now a meeting about chocolate cake. The men seemed smugly confirmed by my guess, one said, “Typical.”
“Right?” responded the other. “If it weren’t for chocolate cake they might actually be able to seal the deal, you know what I mean?”
“Not really,” I said, relinquishing my tip from this table.
Perhaps stung I hadn’t gone along with his joke, the man turned serious. “Listen,” he said. “Whatever that drama is about, can you ask them to tone it down? We’re trying to enjoy our lunch over here.”
“Amen,” said the other man. “Do that for us, and there’s a big tip in it for you, got it?”
Of course, I said nothing of the sort to my power lunchers. Instead, I asked again if anyone had come to a decision about the chocolate cake.
“You know what?” said someone bravely, finally, “I’m going to go for it!”
Someone else said, “Oh my god, Sarah. You can’t be serious?”
“I am!” said Sarah. “And a cup of coffee as well.”
“Well then, Jesus Christ.” said Sarah’s friend. “If you’re getting one, then I’m getting one as well. And a coffee, but make mine a decaf. I just can’t drink caffeine after noon, it makes me so jittery and I’ll never fall asleep tonight!”
“Oh my god,” someone else spoke up. “You better put me down for one as well! And a coffee.”
And again, we went around the table, one after the other, each diner finally caving and ordering the Death By Chocolate Cake. Only one person ordered with any semblance of humor, ordering a coffee and, she said “What the hell, I’ll have a slice of the cake. If I don’t finish it, I’ll take it home and snack on it for the next month or so.”
I couldn’t help but notice the woman in the corner.
As her companions were ordering up their deadly cakes, she was keenly leaning forward, stabbing both her elbows onto the table with her hands clasped. As each of her sycophants ordered cake, she offered snaps and notes of encouragement saying “You go girl” and “Get it, girlboss!” She seemed to be immensely enjoying watching her handiwork unfold as if according to some master strategy. Finally, everyone at the table had ordered a slice of the Death By Chocolate cake. Everyone but her.
“I assume,” I asked. “You would like a slice of the cake as well? And maybe a coffee?”
She reached across the table to hand me her dessert menu. She said, laughing, “Good god, no! I’ll have a hot water, thank you. A hot water with a slice of lemon.”
