Prick with a Fork

by Larissa Dubecki

  Author’s note

  Each breakout in the text comes via fellow hospitality travellers, talking about their own waiter experiences in anonymous restaurants. Elsewhere, some names have been changed for obvious legal reasons. But it all happened.

  First published in 2015

  Copyright © Larissa Dubecki 2015

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

  83 Alexander Street

  Crows Nest NSW 2065

  Australia

  Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

  Email: info@allenandunwin.com

  Web: www.allenandunwin.com

  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 92526 605 4

  eISBN 978 1 92526 807 2

  Internal design by Kate Frances Design

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  For Ben, of course

  Contents

  FOREWORD

  1 — DON’T BOGART THAT ROACH

  2 — THE BARE NAKED TRUTH

  3 — DOWN MEXICO WAY

  4 — LA GRANDE ILLUSION

  5 — BEST SERVED STEAMING COLD

  6 — IT’S A MAN’S MAN’S MAN’S WORLD

  7 — HOW TO MAKE NOTHING OUT OF SOMETHING

  8 — BABY GOT BANDWIDTH

  9 — THE THINGS WE DO FOR LOVE

  10 — WORKPLACE POLITICS: A SURVIVAL GUIDE

  11 — THE DARK ARTS OF PERSONAL ADVANCEMENT

  12 — SECOND STAR TO THE RIGHT, AND STRAIGHT ON ’TIL MORNING

  13 — THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE REALLY BLOODY UGLY

  14 — WHAT LIES BENEATH

  15 — AN UNEXPECTED REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

  16 — RESTAURANT OWNERSHIP AND OTHER BLOOD SPORTS

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Foreword

  There’s a Kurt Vonnegut line that reminds me of the decade I spent waiting tables for a living. It’s from Slaughterhouse Five, which seems appropriate given the clear parallels—the firebombing of Dresden, the alien abduction, the pervasive air of unease and existential distress. But amid all that fuss and bother it’s a remarkably gentle little thing: ‘Here we are . . . trapped in the amber of this moment.’ For me it evokes the soft, late-afternoon cottony hush before service starts. A precious hour, maybe an hour-and-a-half, this is the grownup equivalent of Quiet Time for toddlers at crèche—an enforced period of golden calm before the clang and the haste of the dinner rush. Optimism hangs in the air. Tonight will be easy; as smooth as that butter you’re taking out of the fridge to soften so it doesn’t tear the bread. A slow ease into the evening, a casual kick into first gear to warm the engine: setting tables, rearranging chairs, filling water jugs. Sweet, sweet busywork without the annoyance of those people who can make the job such a pain in the arse.

  Oh yes. Customers.

  By 7 p.m. it’s a different place altogether. The dockets are coming in like artillery fire; a dozen of them bristle angrily across the pass. The chefs are screaming, the diners are restless and the boss, a dyspeptic alcoholic with kidney stones and abandonment issues, is chain-smoking at the bar and fixing his specially patented Death Stare on any staff member who stops moving for more than half a second. Yessir, Charlie’s in the bushes.

  I don’t think anyone sets out to become a career waiter. If that’s a rude hand gesture to the industry that kept me fed for more than ten years, I apologise. It’s just that I grapple with the idea of someone being naturally endowed with the urge to serve others. At the very least such a lofty ideal is rather priestly, and hey—we all know where that winds up, don’t we?

  I’m sure being a waiter was once a noble calling with its own arcane procedures and rituals. Now, however, it’s a default position. Even the lowliest chef can claim to feel a vocational pull, but the people running the food from kitchen to table are, nine times out of ten, simple economic tourists, doing the job as a means to an end. All biding their time until real life begins, driven by no more than the mantra of youth: there for a good time, not a long time. Blissfully unaware that if you don’t exercise due caution, not a long time can turn out to be quite a sometime.

  Me, you ask? No more than a garden-variety service drone, never aiming for anything higher than finishing my shift and necking down a knock-off beer, maybe two if the boss wasn’t looking. Management? Get outta here. I’ll be gone soon, off to the land of the professionals with my briefcase and skirt-suit, my packed lunch and serious hair. But then you look up from folding napkins, polishing cutlery and de-scuzzing tables and ten years have passed. Ten years. Until that point, a third of my life. Seriously, the number of blameless people’s nights out I must have sabotaged, either through boredom or indifference or pure evil intent. It’s chastening, although in the hotly contested title of World’s Worst Waiter, I could probably lay a decent case. Believe me, I was bad. But ‘worst’ sounds boastful. And was I really that bad? Or was I just another piece of flotsam floating in a vast sea of mediocrity?

  There was my friend Belinda, for instance, who took the job title literally and mounted a spirited argument to her first boss that she had signed up only to take orders and carry food. Cleaning the bar when things were quiet? Restocking the fridge? No, no, no, if you would kindly read the job description . . . Fired from that one. At her next gig she grew tired one night of reciting the specials to each separate table, and announced to the room, ‘Listen up, everyone. I’m only going to do this once . . .’ Fired from that one, too. Or Andrea, who didn’t even make it through a single night thanks to a teensy spot of docket mis-scribing that was only picked up after the kitchen had freshly shucked twelve dozen oysters instead of twelve.

  And that’s just two former housemates. The competition is heating up. The field is wide open. The petty thieves, drunks, druggies, liars, princesses, comedians, charlatans, misanthropes and assorted oddbodies I called my co-workers are champing at the bit. Finally, a chance to excel.

  You know what I did like about being a waiter? The way each new shift erases the previous one. You’re only as good as your last spin on the floor. In that way it’s a bit like writing for newspapers, where I unexpectedly ended up after performing the career equivalent of a reverse four-and-a-half somersault pike from the 3-metre board and became a restaurant critic. Me, sitting in judgement of them. The universe does indeed have a sense of humour.

  Hospitality is a marvellous industry, really. Never a dull moment. Well, plenty of dull moments, but with the potential for something hilarious or amazing or horrifying always hovering tantalisingly nearby in a way it does not, I would imagine, if you were a console operator or a quantity surveyor.

  The real professionals of the industry have my undying respect. I’ve had the privilege of working with a few and witnessed many more in action from my seat at the best table in the house. Being a good waiter is hard enough. Being a great waiter is something I couldn’t dream of achieving if I had twenty lives instead of one. Good and great waiters alike may well sneer at my pathetic dabblings in a serious business. What would I know about the art—the art, dammit!—of being a waiter? The other 99 per cent? Game on.

  — 1
—

  DON’T BOGART THAT ROACH

  Consider the pizza. A cold and lonely slice orphaned on a clunky white plate, surrounded by the detritus of gluttony—masticated olive pits, half-eaten crusts, a limp crescent of over-marinated capsicum. It’s destined for the bin, you would think, a sign of another satiated customer who crumpled their napkin and performed the internationally recognised hand gesture of an imaginary pen on paper that means ‘bring me the bill’.

  However. Consider you’re a waiter. You’ve just spent the past four hours serving food to thankless idiots after pulling a double shift the previous day with vodka-based refreshments to follow. You woke late, with only enough time to do the minimal gesture to social civility of the dry shower—a quick spritz of deodorant over yesterday’s clothes—before fronting up to work again. The gnaw in your stomach has gone from insistent to hostile. Blood sugar levels have plummeted to dangerous lows yet to be fully understood by medical science.

  You’re bottoming out. The law of diminishing returns means the odd cigarette break, snatched in the rear laneway on an upended milk crate, is no longer enough to quell the pangs of hunger. It’s still two-and-a-bit hours until staff meals will be ready. Anyway, the kitchen has been going through a phase where they let the first-year apprentice experiment with his avant-garde food ideas as a sick joke on the waiters, regarded in this particular establishment (and in many others) as a sub-class of humans not unlike the Morlocks in H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. Unbeknown to table six, lingering innocently over their tiramisu, there is a very real danger of this turning into a hostage situation.

  And there’s that pizza, abandoned on a table, ready to be collected and thrown in the bin without a second’s thought where it will fester among a decaying food gravy of scraps and offcuts and eventually make its way to a stinking landfill. Would you eat it?

  You spy your chance. The chefs are preoccupied by a spirited intellectual discussion (‘Britney’s hot; Christina’s a dog, man’), the floor manager has disappeared to places unknown, and there’s a blind spot near the dish pig where you’d be able to squeeze into a corner, between the bin and the ice machine, and stuff that bad boy down.

  Let’s call it Il Crappo Italiano. One of those Lygon Street restaurants doing for the reputation of Italian food what the captain of the Costa Concordia did for cruise liners. Forget the nation’s proud regionalism, its produce obsession, its Denominazione di Origine Protetta swagger. Il Crappo is a swamp, a veritable red-sauce sea of shoddy ingredients with red and white checked tablecloths and, for that extra frisson of Latin authenticity, candles jammed into Chianti bottles. You might have been there. If you haven’t, you’ve likely been to one of the thousands upon thousands of places exactly like it dotted across the world. You know them: there’s a spruiker out the front, bellowing about the ‘REAL, OAR-THEN-TIC ITALIAN FOOD’ and screaming ‘CIAO BELLA!’ in the face of every female under the age of ninety on the assumption that women need only be told they’re beautiful by a glib arsehole in a waistcoat to think ‘Goodness, I really feel like lasagne’.

  You don’t need experience to work at Il Crappo. Who sold you that idea? Sure, they advertised the job like this: ‘Fun, Energetic, Vibrant, Proactive, Experienced Waiter/Waitress Wanted for Quality Italian restaurant.’ (‘Hey, that’s me!’ thinks the morose, lazy, dull, reactive dolt in desperate need of some quick coin to pay this month’s rent. ‘How do I convince them I’m their man?’) But here’s the thing you will quickly realise. Il Crappo is bullshitting just as much as you are. Working here is the hospitality equivalent of going down the salt mines. They churn through staff here like a logger going at a Tasmanian old-growth forest. Six months is considered a damned good innings. You’ll either be fired or—better still—muster the self-respect to walk out and never return.

  Il Crappo doesn’t really need to see a CV when you front up for what passes for an ‘interview’, although it will expect you to bullshit up a several-page litany of half-truths and outright lies. No one’s going to be calling your references. It doesn’t need to see a pathetic little certificate in hospitality (‘Bar, Coffee and Floor’) from trade school, a gold rosette stamped pompously on the masthead.

  Anyone can become a waiter at Il Crappo. That means you. Yes, you. And me.

  And why, you may be asking yourself, did I desire to work at Il Crappo when it was so clearly, so patently, awful? Simple. Cool people were waiters. And I was neither. This abject story opens on a gormless nineteen-year-old working casual shifts in a Well-Known Australian Fashion Store. A retail assistant. A fashion adviser. Basically I was being paid for my ability to lie to middle-aged women that a sequined bomber jacket is a fabulous investment piece that can be dressed up or down.

  Waitressing has its downsides, certainly, but fashion retail is a living death. Far nobler to operate a checkout in a supermarket, calling for a price check on cat food. Better to work on a production line screwing smaller bolts onto bigger bolts for eight hours a day, willing the rhythm of the action to dull the acuteness of time. Selling clothes is nothing more than a grand illusion that involves projecting the appearance of busyness while waiting for the next victim—known in the trade as a ‘customer’—to wander into the web of well-dressed despair. There are no positives to speak of—apart from, in my case, a sweet little scam that involved buying clothes with the 50 per cent staff discount and returning them to a Large, Well-Known Department Store for a full-priced refund. Until they twigged and started demanding receipts it really boosted the discretionary spending fund, but that’s pretty much all I have to recommend for three years’ worth of telling people their bum didn’t look big in that.

  Alternatively, I could blame the weather. This fateful day, during summer break from university where I was diligently failing both law and arts, the light on Collins Street was flattened in the heat and a thick northerly blew a hail of city grit along the tram tracks. Inside the Well-Known AFS it was fridge-cool but deserted. Melbourne was practically tipping on its axis with all the inhabitants running for the beach. Nothing to do aside from listen to my bubble-headed co-worker talk about her dentist boyfriend and all the ways he was treating her mean. I’d tuned her out. Instead I was contemplating gnawing my right arm off in boredom. And maybe it was the thought of listening to Prince’s Diamonds and Pearls one more time, maybe it was the company directive to ‘engage each customer in conversation that does not solicit a yes or no answer’, or perhaps it was simply that an old high school friend ventured by at exactly the same moment I had thrown a stack of T-shirts on the floor in order to have something to do on the long, slow crawl to 6 p.m.

  Donna didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. You could have cut my desperation with a knife. She fixed me with the considered look that translated as ‘Wa-hey, girlfriend! What the fuck?’. It was the same look that had seen her catapulted to McDonald’s shift manager while still in Year 11 before heading off to a proper restaurant where—impressively—she had to wear a waistcoat and tie. Donna was one of those preternaturally mature people already on their path in life, ticking boxes, being responsible. (We’ll discuss fast-food outlets later, but let’s get their great lie out of the way: boys and girls, working in one of these places is not the stepping stone to CEO of a multinational corporation. Swallow that line and the best you can hope for is employee of the month.)

  ‘Why don’t you do something a little more . . . er . . . structured?’ she said.

  ‘And interesting,’ she added. ‘Like waitressing. It’s fun. And you get fed.’

  Working in a retail coffin where the highlight of our day was the brief visit of Dom the flirtatious delivery driver, waiting tables seemed hopelessly dynamic. It seemed tantalisingly, sparklingly real. There was a beguiling kernel of honesty in providing an essential service. Everyone eats and drinks, but not everyone does so in a sequined bomber jacket. There was an innocent practicality in asking ‘Would you like to order?’ as opposed to ‘Don’t you love the colour of those jeans?�
�� and then realising you’d just broken company policy by soliciting a yes or no response. Serving the world coffee instead of wrapping it in the lies of fashion? I was in.

  We held a boot camp. The one thing they would ask, Donna sagely advised, once they’d ascertained I had my own teeth and no face tattoos, was if I could carry three plates at a time. It didn’t matter if I could only sort of carry three plates, and then only if they were empty, and then only if there were no sharp turns, or in fact any turns at all. That wasn’t the kind of detail Il Crappo would be interested in. Not one bit. They had to be seen to be taking their professionalism seriously; I needed to be seen to be pretending to be professional. It was a two-way street of pretence.

  In regards to the plates, the truth is there’s really not much to it. For a right-hander, pick up one plate in the left hand; use the thumb and forearm as a flat surface on which to balance plate number two; third plate in the right hand. Not to be tried as an amateur with soup, which typically comes with a base plate and bowl and is therefore excruciatingly heavy with an extremely high potential for mishap dovetailing spectacularly with an equal and opposite potential for full-thickness burns. The better guys can zip around with three plates on one arm and two in the other, but best leave that stuff to the professionals. The secret’s in the ballast—keep the feet low to the ground to minimise jolting, and activate the hip swivel so you glide between tables like Torvill, or even Dean. Smooth. You gotta be smooth.

  For anyone with the unenviable task of hiring waiters, sifting through the human flotsam can be a full-time job in itself. Hospitality is an industry that attracts more than its fair share of miscreants, thieves, liars, university students, psychopaths, druggies, borderline personality disorders and Danish backpackers. It’s a long, slogging, thankless, shitful task of trying to divine the human being lurking behind the eager face at the interview. It’s Murphy’s Law. Get a good one and they’ll soon be off to that ashram in India for a yearlong spiritual retreat. Get a complete nuffy and they’ll be hanging around like a fart in a car. Crucial stuff, though. Restaurants don’t just sell food, they sell hospitality, and whomsoever slips through the net will become its appointed representative on the floor.