All you world-weary waiters take heart — CNN’s Anderson Cooper may dodge gunfire while reporting from war zones, but your job really scares him.
On Tuesday he talked with Eatbeat restaurant reviewer Marilyn Hagerty, where he admitted that he was “the world’s worst waiter” when he did the job as a teenager, because the customers would make him too paranoid to function. “I used to beg people not to sit at my station because they made me so nervous,” he told his 85-year-old guest, who became an internet sensation after writing an earnestly positive review of her local Olive Garden in Grand Forks, North Dakota.
Since her praises of the Italian chain restaurant went viral in early March, Hagerty has been appearing on talk shows in New York, where she reviewed the upper East Side’s Crown — known for its menu of Italian-inspired continental cuisine — and where she warmly invited chef/owner John Delucie to dine with her at Olive Garden.
As for now, Cooper is sending Hagerty on a cruise to Italy for her next big meal, and she said that her only problem now is picking a guest to accompany her. “Everyone is now my best friend,” she told the Grand Forks Herald — the paper that’s published her reviews since the 1960s — “I never knew I had so many friends.”
