Waiter Nightmares

In one dream, my college roommate told me she'd be walking down a peaceful tropical beach, when she'd suddenly come upon ten tables that all needed service right then.

A friend of mine who worked the insane schedule of the lunch shift at Boulevard followed by the dinner shift at Jardiniere told me he had a recurring dream in which he'd be working at both restaurants at the same time, and somehow had to take all of his orders and put them in the computer at Boulevard, then manage to get across town on the Muni to deliver all of the food that must have come up on the line by then at Jardiniere. Ouch!

My waiter nightmares are usually a simple re-hash of the stress of the shift I've just finished. It's usually pretty bad when I start a new job (and they never went away for the entire four months that I worked at one of San Francisco's top restaurants this spring) but then taper off after a couple of weeks. I haven't had any since starting work at the New Restaurant, which is a good sign.

I think that because a restaurant shift is so fast-paced, there isn't much time to process the stress of the job during the shift. It's wham, bam, thank-you ma'am (especially in a busy lunch place, where 200 covers are crammed into three hours), and you're off work with a shot of Fernet in hand. It's not until your body has time to relax and de-compress during sleep that your mind can think about the stuff it's gone through that evening. I sometimes wake up with a start, remembering in my sleep some small error I'd made--did I give that to-go box back to the table? did I adjust the tip properly or did I short myself again? why was the GM giving me the hairy eyeball at 9:23pm?

Get Out of the Way

Remind me to never, ever, own a restaurant. I've been working 5-6 shifts a week at the New Restaurant, and while the bloom is still on the rose enough so that it's not too much of a big deal to spend nearly every waking moment working, I just can't understand how anyone would want to actually own a restaurant and willingly spend all of their time there!!

I will ideally work 2-3 nights a week in a restaurant where I make a gajillion dollars a night so I can afford my San Francisco rent, cocktails, yoga membership, and designer-jeans habit. When I was working doubles all week this spring, I lasted about three months before I quit all of my jobs and disappeared deep into South America. I'm determined to be more of an adult in 2007, like maybe keep the same job for more than a few months and save up some money for longer than it takes to buy a plane ticket to somewhere exotic.

**

Last night after bumping into yet another drunk chick buying a cocktail from the side of the bar that's right next to the kitchen, the chef looked at me, rolled his eyes, and asked, "Now why don't you blog about that?"

Tight spaces in restaurants are such a funny integral part of the way the dining-room floor and the kitchen work. There's something that develops, I call it the Restaurant Ballet, and it's the way people working very very quickly in a very small space move around each other; spinning about it rapid, graceful pirouettes, trays filled with martinis held perfectly aloft. Cooks slam knives down in precision, throwing pork chops on the grill as they reach through each others' arms in an octopus-like Tetris move to shake a frying pan as it's just starting to smoke.

When someone who is not in tuned with this dance comes into the space, it throws a wrench into the works. That's why there are metal bars to separate the service well from the rest of the bar, and why chefs give the hairy eyeball when a server steps over the invisible boundary between the side of the line where the food comes up and the side of the line where the food is cooked.

Sometimes customers unwittingly (or knowingly, which is worse) cross this line, and insert themselves into the spaces where we are trying to work. Everyone has their own tricks to get these people out of there without asking "Could you please move?" which would be a complete non-non in the fancy food world where the customer is always right. My tactic is to bump a purse every single time I walk by. Even if the purse's owner is not in my way, she will be soon. If I actually bumped someone on purpose, I'd feel guilty (I'm of Nordic descent and I'm extremely tall and sturdy) because I'd probably take them out, so a gentle purse bump every six seconds does the trick pretty quick.

One of my coworkers has no compunction about throwing an elbow, but only to guys. He lets the girls stand wherever they want. One waiter tells a story about passing a plate of hot food very, very close to a customer's ear; not so close that it touches them, but close enough that they realize something bad might happen if they don't get out of the way--although what the in-the-way-person doesn't know is that the waiter, an absolute master of balancing, will never let a drink spill or a plate drop, no matter how much drunken gesticulating goes on at the table by the people who are about to eat and drink the goods we deliver.

Restaurant Ballet keeps you in shape, but I think it's also the main cause of Waiter Nightmares, a topic which deserves its own post. More on Waiter Nightmares tomorrow...

Restaurant Girl Reviewed

Restaurant Girl is in San Francisco magazine this month!

An anonymous veteran wait­ress and freelance journalist offers readers "an inside slice of restaurant life" with her lively blog at Restaurant­GirISpeaks.blogspot.com, a mix of gossipy accounts of restaurant drama; philosophi­cal musings on her life as a waitress; and detailed, food snobbish reviews of local restaurants. Anyone who's ever worked in the restaurant business will chuckle know­ingly at her insights, but even if you haven't spent any time as a server or host you'll enjoy her confessional, perky prose, The site perfectly conveys the ups and downs of work in the food-service industry, bemoaning the stinginess of a transvestite Barbara Walters look-alike one day, rejoicing that her new hairdo got her some extra-good tips the next. One post mischievously describes a particularly slow and unlucrative evening that she and a co'worker spent sneaking across the street to a dive bar to pound drinks. Restaurant Girl never names the places she's worked, so part of the fun is guessing which restaurants she's writing about. So far I've gleaned that what she calls "The Bistro" is a little place somewhere in Pacific Heights and that "The Res' taurant" is near Market and Church. As she posts more, maybe we can figure out exactly which places she'o giving us the dish cn. BYRON PERRY

Rain Has Come

And thus begins my year of never-ending winter. It was so lovely to have a month of sunshine upon my return to San Francisco from South America, but today the rain has arrived, reminding me that I missed summer entirely this year and am now in for two more months of winter. Sigh. Last night I went to Angelo Garro's forge in SoMa and helped Angelo and Jeff bottle wine. Helping to make wine is fun! Although I worked at wineries for years (Roshambo, Iron Horse Vineyards, and Michel-Schlumberger), it was always as a tastron, an events coordinator, or a tour guide--never in the cellars.

We bottled 50 cases of the 2005 Pinot Noir, drinking plenty of it as we went along, and finished the evening with a lovely dinner of homemade Penne (Angelo's nephew, Giatano, was cranking it out of an ancient machine as I arrived) with a sauce Angelo made with tomatoes from Jeff's parents' house in Healdsburg and sausage made by a friend of theirs whose name I've forgotten but is supposedly a famous sausage-maker. We also had a tomato salad (just fresh heirlooms with olive oil and vinegar and dried oregano that was hanging from the ceiling in bunches, from Angelo and Jeff's plot in one of the city's community gardens), and lots of songs (Hope from the Lincart gallery pulled out a guitar and proved she's got a set of pipes as soulful as Gillian Welch) and laughter. It amazes me how Angelo can have such a slow-food, Sicilian lifestyle right in the middle of San Francisco. Having been introduced to a group of people to whom simplicity and friendship is so important to is inspiring.

After bottling the pinot (two barrels), we punched down the grapes we'd picked last Wednesday. My hands are completely stained purple (although I managed to escape with my clothing free of wine-stains), and I have to wait tables tonight. I'll just wear them like a badge of honor, shrugging casually and saying, "Oh, you know how it goes during crush! I haven't had a day off in weeks and everything's covered in various stages of wine. But, you gotta do what you gotta do!" like a seasoned pro.

Blogger of the Week #54

Restaurant Girl is Becks & Posh's Bay Area blogger of the week, aw shucks! Thanks for the honor!