Your Hair Affects Your Tips

Really. After a week's worth of taking no effort with my hair (a taxing move, looming story deadlines, and general stress have all been factors in this sad lack of effort with the way I look), I decided to do an experiment on Friday and run a curling iron through my shoulder-length locks for the first tim since they've grown out a little longer, which produced an effect similar to Madonna's new 70's-inspired retro flip, but without the hard edges. I received eleven compliments (seven from co-workers, four from my tables), and made literally twice the money I had made the week before, with the same amount of customer covers. I wonder if this phenomenon is the same for men? I mean, men can't change their appearance as readily as we women can; in the last year I have really discovered the joys of make-up. It's like playing dress-up! I was a nerdy tomboy and really never learned how to properly apply the stuff until I became an urbanite. I'm beginning to understand why so many women take hours to get out of the house.
Tonight, though, there's a buyout, which means the restaurant is closed to the general public, I'm slingin' hors d'ouvres for a couple of hours, and I'll receive a set rate for my tie-clad services. High-placed worker bun it is!

The Heroes Return

Having been called out by a critical friend of mine posing as an anonymous blog poster for a sense of entitlement, I will do what any good writer would do and bask in my glorious hubris, celebrating my heroes return to The Restaurant. Coming back to work has been great, and I've been warmly welcomed by all of the staff, especially the other waiters. Although the summer months are slow in the city when all of us urban dwellers head out of town up to the wine country or the mountains, I'm making enough to live on, thanks to the ever-blossoming freelance gig, seems more editors these days want to print Restaurant Girl's entitled commentary on cheese, wine, and important chefs.

I got up early enough this morning to visit the farmers' market down at the Ferry Building, an unusual occurrence since I've already established that I, along with most other waiters, am a total vampire. My friend and fellow waiter Boozely heads down there every morning, but he's an anomaly; he works at a neighborhood place in Pacific Heights where he's off by ten every evening, and then he gets up early and rides his bike all day, taking a pre-shift nap before he heads in to work in the evening. I did this when I first moved to SF, but dating a bartender sort of quelches that. It's no fun to get up at 8am and go ride bikes when you've got a sweet Valentino under the covers, protesting noisily in his sleep if you try to throw them back and carpe diem. So I usually just carpe coffee instead.

Which brings me to my final and most pressing point: waiting tables vs. physical fitness. As a collegiate waitress, I didn't have time for exercise, studies, and earning a living. Eating a rich family meal every night at 11pm and then going out drinking to alleviate the stress made Restaurant Girl a chubber. Luckily when I left the biz and started racing bikes the beer weight dropped off, and I managed to maintain my reputation as a somewhat-athlete. But now I'm waiting tables and NOT collegiate, so I have no excuse and no motivation. Does the restaurant suck all will to do anything non-restaurant-related (like grabbing coffee, eating out, drinking beer, or writing about restaurants) out of the poor waiter? Is he left a shell of his former-waiter self, simply a Perrier-sipping, wine-talking, cheese-eating foodie?

Restaurant Girl's Return

Fickle Restaurant Girl has returned to the OG restaurant. The problematic general magager was let go after a six-month reign of terror, and morale is high on Market Street! While the OG crew (and the three crews after that) are now gone, the peeps who work there are a nice bunch and responsible for the most part. I forgot how much I went out after work when I worked there, Round One. At the Other Restaurant and at The Bistro, I scooted the second my shift was done--I didn't really want to be around the buildings or the people who were either ready to throw me under a bus if it made them look good to management or there to slowly die of old age, bitterly.

Having no manager presents a bit of a hectic element to working on the floor. There was a "management trainee" who seems nice (although extremely green) and duly bought the waitstaff Fernet Branca shots after the shift, but I think we're all a little wary after having an abusive drug addict "manage" us (who is now, I am told, seating people at a mediocre hotel restaurant downtown).

It's interesting that the people we'd all really want to take the job have turned it down. It was offered to a couple of different waiters (including me), the expediter (who is the real backbone of the restaurant), and the new-guy-who-is-now-the-wine-guy. Everyone's answer was pretty much, "Oh, hell no!" so now there's a Management Trainee.