One night at the staff briefing the manager said, ‘customers have complained that they can see you eating. Please don’t eat in sight of customers in future.’ One of the new assistant managers, hungry during shifts, had introduced a bag of hummus chips to the waiting station and had taken, during pauses in service when everyone in the dining room had had their needs met, to eating hummus chips, and offered them to other waiters. Half of the waiting station was out of the sight of customers ninety-nine percent of the time, unless they sought themselves to enter the hidey-hole where we dried glasses, made coffee and took a breath between circuits of the dining room and the kitchen and trips to the upstairs pot-wash and the downstairs drinks cellar.
The bag of hummus chips was stashed in the hidden half of the waiting station and left open for us. Relaxing into this situation the assistant manager would sometimes stick her head out from the waiting station, hummus chip between finger and thumb, to see if anything was needed in the dining room. Then we followed suit: she was above us in the staff hierarchy after all. We became used to the practice. Then the assistant manager would sometimes lean against the drinks fridges, the bag of hummus chips in hand, eating them and offering them to fellow waiters. We enjoyed the spell of conviviality; we were eating together now. But of course it was a category error. On one such occasion, a customer must have caught sight of the phenomenon and complained to the manager. I am not sure how the complaint was made, whether by email or phone. We didn’t know which customer had been moved to complaint by the sight of us eating. They knew that they were the diner, and we were not. That was the end of eating hummus chips at the waiting station.
I admit that the way that the assistant manager ate the hummus chips and then licked her fingers and then walked over to speak to customers set me on edge. I found it quite disgusting. But then when I also ate the chips and sometimes licked my fingers, I began to find my doing so disgusting, too. It felt physically wrong to eat during work time when we were on show almost constantly; I felt dirty, which is odd because when I am cooking for friends at home and eat crisps and then serve food, I feel clean enough.
When work is at mealtime, when is mealtime? When can I eat lunch when working a lunch service and when can I eat dinner when working a dinner service? When I was a full-time waitress, my time to eat was squeezed and squeezed and squeezed. Luckily, so to speak, one does not feel the effects of hunger too keenly unless it’s a slow shift because adrenaline – the hormone that defines waitressing in a busy restaurant – suppresses appetite. Snatching moments to eat the hummus chips triggered the release of even more adrenaline, so I didn’t want too much anyway.
Dinner service began at 4.45 p.m. – in time to hoover and clean the restaurant, prepare bread and butter portions, restock fridges from the cellar, set up the tables and receive a briefing from the manager on the menu and the evenings’ bookings – and finished whenever the last customer left and cleaning had been done at around midnight on a busy weekend evening, or much earlier on a quiet weeknight. I would begin getting ready for work at around 4.15 p.m. or earlier if I needed to shower too and earlier than that when our landlord sold the flat we lived in and we had to move further away. I would finish whatever other work I was doing at home, brush my hair and sometimes my teeth, put on make-up and deodorant and some black clothes. 4 p.m. is too early for me to eat dinner, so I might eat some toast or similar if I remembered, before leaving the house.
The interval of time between the 4 p.m. toast and the food I would eat at the end of service was uncertain and depended on how busy the restaurant was and how long customers wanted to stay and whether I had eaten dinner before another of the waiting staff on a previous night. As things slowed the manager, or assistant manager would nominate waiters to go and eat. Sometimes it could be early as 10 p.m., at other times it could be 11.30 p.m. or midnight. There was no set mealtime for staff, our mealtime was after the end of all other mealtimes. If we were busy and diners wanted a lot from us then they got a lot and we waited.
There was much debate about whether we could be permitted to eat our dinner at a table where a customer might see us eat. In contrast to the diner as furious as a baby at the sight of its waitress attending to her own appetites, there was also the daddy customer, who was warmly paternalistic and a shade resentful of shelling out his own hard-earned money for food we were eating for free. That is to say, sometimes customers liked to see me eating at the end of my shift and would watch me and then tell me how they felt. They said I was lucky to eat the food in front of me, which was similar to theirs but plated without garnish.
Sometimes it was really good, especially on the rare occasions when everyone could eat together because all the customers had left and the chefs would make a large dish of hot steaming pasta, or if there was a big bit of meat that had to be cooked and served that night. But some foods really lose their sparkle an hour or so after intended consumption: pasta, once fluid and silky becomes a rigid lump; lamb fat turns hard and waxen; rare meat appears raw. Under the gaze of the customer I felt like a dog whose owner took pleasure in watching it eat, but who also resented the scraps in its bowl and its beastly appetite.
Image © Europeana
