Everyone should have to be a waiter
In London time shrinks. Where I once felt as though I had two handfuls of it, I suddenly have one. Having extra small hands this allotment seems specifically unjust. I come home to half-made beds, dirty dishes and unfinished emails. Mid-activity I’m hoovered out the room onto semi-ugly streets, lowered underground to crouch between strangers’ armpits, before being regurgitated up an escalator and spat onto the almost always rainy streets of King’s Cross, where I shuffle to the hum of harrumphing commuters until I eventually smear my soles on the mat of a steakhouse.
Working at a busy restaurant can feel military. Shifts are fourteen-hour endurance tests to see how long you can stand being yelled at while smiling, running while aching, serving while starving. After shifts staff members moan quietly in the locker room, seemingly shell-shocked, wounded by the world.
Beyond the physical demands and sleep deprivation, service itself requires strategy and tact, and although no killing is involved, customers can make you consider violence. Waiters wear expressions like war paint. Required to be polite at all times, expressions become tools for preserving dignity when clicked at, or when a supervisor tells you to apologise for something that’s not your fault, or a customer asks you to uncork that wine bottle so sexily again.
Expressions are armour in a place where many patrons seem to be coming not only for a meal but for the experience of being served – the experience of being pandered to, always right, the master, entitled to your subservience. Regardless of who a person is in the world, in a restaurant the Patron is Boss. Which is why: everyone should have to work as a waiter at least once in life. We should all have to stand on the other side of entitlement. People can be perfectly reasonable beings until they walk into a restaurant and are told the tarte tatin is no longer available or the lamb chops are out of stock or their table is a little close to the door. All human survival is suddenly called into question. Will the night go on?
Yes, yes it will, unfortunately for the waiter it will, go on and on. Occasionally time in London does expand but it only happens at work. When nights finally do end and a day off eventually rolls around, we too go in search of a restaurant to be served in, looking for a little retreat. If the experience is not perfect, the waiter is the first port of call. He or she is the buffer between you (or me) and the myriad things that don’t meet your (or my) expectations. It’s an awful buffer to be.
But, in many cases, not the worst. Restaurant underbellies ooze rot and grime, most of it in the kitchen banter. Exhausted kitchen porters bear the brunt of unending abuse, dealing with dishes smeared with the marks of someone else’s pleasure, alongside infamously hotheaded chefs. This low-paid muck is sealed off from the polished tables and sometimes hard-to-swallow prices of the perfectly plated.
In many London restaurants roles seem ranked according to the wealth of a person’s origin: Ghanaian cleaner, Nigerian kitchen porter, Italian barman, Kiwi supervisor, British chef. On the upside you get to know people from all over. One of the best things about cities like London is how you can travel to a single city and visit the globe. When in a slog of job it’s a joy to discover your sense of belonging is less attached to the mud and more closely wound up in a welcome and newfound sense of community, and when you’re practically living at work, colleagues become family. In the uncaring arms of a big city, a restaurant can become a refuge, often from customers seated a few feet away.
Not that everyone is welcomed with equal warmth. I work with a man who arrived in London six months before me. He once told he’d made only one friend since he’d arrived. When I mentioned I’d be leaving he said well then he’d have none. He works in two restaurants seven days a week, occasionally taking Sunday off to go to church. He spends three hours a day commuting. He listens to BBC podcasts to get to know the people of the foreign place he’d fled to. While I mop the restaurant floors, he mops the bathrooms and sings, hymns that drift upstairs and make the early hours before the world arrived my favourite time of day.
In a world built on class and status, working at a restaurant you gravitate towards a different system of gauging people around you. Where my sense of a person has too often been influenced by the things they could boast about on social media – what they’d published, their luck in love, how arty or successful they appeared to be – I’ve found there’s a more reliable system of weighing up who’s worth being close to and it’s entirely based on kindness.
As you get older it’s harder to see things from other angles, because you have to walk further, and you’re not as fit. When we get stuck in our ways, working at one desk towards someone else’s set of goals, depleted by the slog, in one version of reality where, mired in ambition, failure, gossip and regret, it’s easy to forget what really counts: leaving a big tip.
Gratuities are often shared among front and back of staff. And every day in the prep kitchen at the basement of a restaurant, a blushing twenty-year-old from Poland chops onions. Every time I go downstairs the fumes sting my eyes and they well up as I gasp for fresh air. After service one day, as we put on our jackets for our respective commutes home, I said ‘Alex, do you still cry when you cut onions?’ With a hopeless shake of his head, he grinned. ‘Every time.’
