Syncophant on Rye: When to Stop Thanking Your Server

Seems like the good folks over at Chow.com heard that I was a terrific waitress. They've ocassionally consulted me about some "server point-of-view" questions. Here's one...

The Best of Restaurant Girl

I sent Waiter over at waiterrant an email congratulating him on making it out of the restaurant industry (for now, anyway). He walked out of his last shitty job with dignity and is now working on his book full-time. Hooray, Waiter! Waiter was so cool that he even put one of my postings up on his blog as a guest post.

Since waiterrant is super popular, Restaurant Girl Speaks has gotten over 5,000 hits since my post went up this morning, so I thought I'd offer new readers a few links to some of my favorite postings. I haven't worked in a restaurant since December, and my ramblings of late have mostly been about traveling and not about food or restaurants at all. Of course, if you want to read about what waiters do when they save up their fistfuls of tips and jump ship, there's plenty of that, too.

So here's a few links to what I consider my most entertaining entries:

This one's where I met exiled Portland restarateur Michael Hebberoy and fell under the spell of his eloquent charms.

This one's where I met Angelo Garro, who's now a huge mentor and someone who lets me eat his Sicilian pasta with more frequency than I probably deserve.

Here, I expound on the vicious cycle of waitress cash earning/shopping.

If you've ever waited tables at a high-end joint, you've had them: Waiter Nightmares!

Ever thought your waitress might have been drinking during service? She probably has been.

And here, and here, I pontificate on waiting tables as a career choice.

Many chefs are truly psychotic.

And lastly, the importance of sidework in respecting your coworkers.

Where, Oh Where Has My Resto Girl Gone?

In case I even have a readership anymore, Hello There. Since I got back to San Francisco from Austria/Germany/France, I haven't worked in a restaurant. Like, I'm actually DONE working in restaurants. Which was the ultimate goal, but now that I'm not a waitress any more, What the Heck am I supposed to write about? So, paralyzed, I didn't write anything for two months. Well, I actually wrote a LOT, but all paying work. Stuff like editing a website, freelancing for the warring alternative rags here in town, and trying to get my dam' name in more national magazines. All the while, drinking plenty of Jeffy B.´s homemade wine and going out to eat (I was even on Nightline a couple of weeks ago when dining at Incanto with Harry Denton).

So Restaurant Girl isn't gone, just morphed into one of those annoying chicks who's all, Um, Waiter? Let me be super high maintenence and tell you how to do your job because I used to wait tables. And because this town already has a proliferation of bloggers who eat out and write about it, I won't bore you with what might be my increasingly out-of-touch opinions about the San Francisco food scene. Nobody's more in the know about what's going down, what's hot, and what's not than waiters at the in-spots, so I'm not going to try to do that, either. Maybe I'll start cooking.

Vienna, part II

Vienna has all the things I like about Europe in one place. It has the
bohemianism of the best bits of Paris, the beautiful old buildings
you find everywhere but maintained with Germanic sensibility, a
vibrant art scene, the nightlife of Madrid, and terrific food. Oh, and
GREAT coffee. Mmmmm, coffee. And the Austrian sense of humor is much
drier and British-like than the German sense of humor (which is pretty much non-existant), so I am enjoying laughing a lot.

After the first 24 hours I was ready to move there. Beautiful buildings, nice people, clean and tidy, parks, thriving arts scene, and it's more liveable (read: cheaper rent) than San Francisco. My friend Rob the Rockstar took it upon himself to show me everything we could pack into three days, and he said it barely skimmed the surface. We were out every night to several clubs (they don't close until 5 or 6am) and then sightseeing all day.

It rained on Saturday but we went to the Nachsmarkt (Noshing-Market) anyway and got a bunch of yummy antipasto for dinner. On Sunday Rob had to work at the theater (he works backstage at Vienna's oldest Cabaret, called Simpl), and during the day I went to a museum with one of his roommates and one of his girlfriends (of which he has many; it was so funny to watch the girls literally throw themselves onto him in the clubs, and, well, everywhere!).

The installation was really interesting, the artist had taken a bunch of the museum's permanent collection and arranged it as a collage interspersed with her own paintings (all of which had texts written on them), photographs of her with the museum pieces, a video installation, painting on the museum's walls…she really turned the museum/art show structure inside out and to be inside of it was almost surreal, since the exhibit was made for that museum, and it was HUGE, it took up an entire floor. We were in there for almost 3 hours and I could have done with more but it was time to go to the theater.

I got to hang out backstage for the end of the matinee, and met all four of the actors (supposedly the most well-known comedians in Austria, although Rob says there aren't many!), one of whom was voted the "Second Most Handsome Man in Austria" by a women's magazine. I don't know who the #1 was but it was probably either Arnold Schwarzenegger or Rob. It was fun seeing everyone rush around for their costume changes and see the crowd and the stage on the monitors backstage, then get to sit in the sound and light booth and watch the cabaret at night. Although truthfully I only understood about half of what was going on, because so much of the humor was accented. I thought I was fluent in German and then I went to Vienna and felt like a doofus because I kept having to ask people to repeat stuff.

Wien and Wieners

Having spent the weekend in beautiful Vienna with a dear friend I met in Chile last summer, I was still giggling after three days every time he would say, "This is how the Wieners do it," or something relating to Vienna's inhabitants, which are called "Wieners" in German.

I arrived after getting up at 5:30am to catch my Germanwings flight (the cheapest airline in Germany now) from Suttgart to Vienna, just under an hour trip. My friend Rob met me at the airport with a giant picture of me that he had taken of me in Chile (where I am holding a packet of maxipads called "Ella: feminine towels") and printed out in black-and-.white with the maxipads in original color.

After shopping for the fixings for a giant Austrian breakfast (bread rolls, herbed cream cheese, sliced cheese, sliced meat, yogurt, fruit, juice, coffee, granola, and hand-rolled cigarettes for his "dessert") we came back to his house (which he shares with four other people), which is nearly entirely decorated with zebra-print material. His room is painted "Porno Red" (self-described) and he spends as much time getting ready to go out as I do. In short, HOT!

After a power-nap, we saw a lot of beautiful baroque old-city Vienna as well as the Stephans Cathedral, which was a little disappointing as you have to pay 3 euros to climb the stairs up the
tower for the view, and then it stops halfway at a gift shop. We cooked dinner (vegetables in a coconut-milk curry with basmati rice and a giant salad that everyone stuck a fork in at one time or another) and then went out to a show, some friends of Rob´s were opening up for an Italian cover band called Eurosmith.

The lead singer looked and acted and sounded so much like Stephen Tyler that it was a little creepy because you´d think you were at an Aerosmith concert but then you look around and the place was filled with semi-nerdy metalheads and older Austrian Aerosmith fans, and it was in a smallish beer-hall. They totally rocked.

After the concert a group of us went clubbing, there´s an old wall that surrounded the city in the olden days, but now the wall (which isHUGE) is hollowed out and filled with shops and things, and one area had nightclub after nightclub. It was really fun, soo packed. I definitely felt like we had found the party in Vienna.