Last evening, at a neighborhood restaurant, I had a splendid meal, and not the least splendid thing about it was our waiter. He efficiently answered questions about the menu. He refilled our wine glasses at precisely the right moment. He paced delivery of courses—drinks, salad, entree, coffee—at the perfect length. He was cordial without lapsing into familiarity. Middle-aged, knowledgeable about the dishes on offer, reserved, he never came to the table to ask if everything was all right, having already made sure it was. At the meal’s end he set down the check and quietly disappeared. When he picked it up, he thanked us for coming to the restaurant. Perfecto, the entire performance, and much appreciated by all of us at the table.
Mastery of any job is always impressive, but mastery of the job of waiter in our time is less and less in evidence. More and more waiters and waitresses—”servers,” in the politically correct term—are young people just passing through until something better turns up. When you summon a waiter to your table in New York, the joke is, you call out “Actor.” In Los Angeles, when a young person tells you he or she is a actor, you ask, “At what restaurant?”
The effect of this shift in the people who are waiters today is to democratize the job, for better or worse. I would say worse. Under this new dispensation waiters assume they are your equals. How many times have I heard a young waitress respond to the ordering of a certain dish by saying, “Oh, that’s my favorite!” Or, after one has ordered, adding, “You ordered very intelligently.” All one can do when this arises is set one’s tongue firmly in the side of one’s cheek, and say, “Thank you.” What one really wants to say, of course: “What do I care if I’ve ordered your favorite dish?” and “How would you know what an intelligent order is? You’re a waiter, kid.”
These young waiters and waitresses are also likely to address the people they serve as “guys,” as in “Everything all right here, guys?” I suspect “guys” came into vogue owing to the worry that addressing customers as “ladies” and “gentlemen” somehow feels politically shaky, if not incorrect. I suppose heavy-breathing academic feminists would not in the least like to be addressed by waiters as “ladies.” Yet to call many formidable women of a certain age “guys” seems quite nuts.
Then there is the waiter’s or waitress’s announcement of his or her first name, “I’m Trish [or Tyler] and I’ll be your server.” I always want to answer, “I’ll try to forget that, Trish.” These same waiters have an unconscious skill at unfailingly interrupting serious conversation at crucial points to ask, as often as four or five times through the course of a meal, if everything is all right.
My first memorable encounter with waiters was with Jewish waiters, refugees from Hitler, during and in the years after World War II. These men combined resignation with impatience, and never abstained from tart replies. I remember as a kid of 6 or 7, at a west-side Chicago Romanian restaurant called Joe Stein’s, asking our waiter if he had any soda pop and, if so, in what flavors. “Ve got pop,” he said, “ve got red and ve got brown.” Jewish waiter jokes became a staple of comedians. The punchlines eliminate the need for the full jokes: “Vich one of you gentlemen vanted the clean glass?” “You vanted the chicken soup, you should’ve ordered the borscht.” “How do ve prepare our chicken? Virst we tell him he’s going to die.”
The generation of these Jewish waiters, many of whom put conversational pepper in the food served in big-city delis, is long gone. A Chicago deli I sometimes go to called The Bagel has a gay waiter who, minus the accent, has adapted the brusque manner of the old Jewish waiters. If one hesitates too long in deciding on one’s order, he is likely to say, in flutey voice, “Hello.” I once asked him why he never told me I ordered intelligently. “Because,” he replied without hesitation, “you don’t.” In appreciation, I always overtip him.
Democracy has no real place in dining out. Your waiter might be more worldly than you, a superior person in every way, but he remains, while on the job, your waiter. Which doesn’t mean he has to take guff, but he ought to respect a certain distance in the transaction between you. He’s working, after all, for tips. One useful tip might be to make plain, before he comes on the job, that he would do better to knock off the first names, the comments on your ordering, the “guys” bit, the interruptions, and the rest of it, and just, thank you very much, bring the food.
