Flashback: Houlihan’s Restaurant, Bethel Park, PA. It’s the mid-90s, and my feet are sore and achy. Hair is in a messy bun. Cheap makeup floods the pores of my youthful face. I am 19. A sea of sweat drifts into the collar of my long-sleeved Eddie Bauer dress shirt, the uniform we were forced to purchase.
In the kitchen, I peer impatiently over the stainless steel shelf, wondering if the next plate the cook throws up will be for my table. I accidentally singe my hair on the food warmer above my head and can smell it burning. Shit. I am a terrible waitress, but it’s the only job I’m qualified for that will pay my rent. I am a single young woman, determined to make it on my own.
A small radio hangs over the pots and pans where Oasis and Green Day affirm the soundtrack to our lives, ‘Boulevard of Broken Dreams’ and ‘Champagne Supernova.’
I hide sometimes when I am overwhelmed in the walk-in fridge until my hands get cold and I have to face customers. Everybody takes smoke breaks out the back door behind the garbage cans. We have to either smoke or risk a nervous breakdown. Things happen fast in a restaurant. They have to; otherwise, people get hangry, and food gets cold.
Those restaurant days were long and arduous. I spent at least eight years of my life working in restaurants, from the time I was 15 years old. But sometimes I forget I even had that life, that I ever was a waitress (and also a hostess, busser, cocktail waitress & bartender). I moved around a lot, so I have worked everywhere, from my hometown Mennonite restaurant in my teens to an Au Bon Pain and an Irish Pub in Philadelphia, to a pub in London, a Tex-Mex restaurant in Washington, DC, and a 70’s night disco club in Pittsburgh. I even worked at both Bob Evans and Denny’s at the same time while attending a local community college!
Recently, while binge-watching the Emmy award-winning psychological drama series ‘The Bear,’ I was taken unexpectedly back to my yesteryears of working in restaurants. The single-camera close-up videography lends a level of intimacy and rawness to seep through. The closeness and proximity to the actors’ faces hurl viewers into the scene. Thus, I started recalling my gritty, greasy kitchen days.
Restaurant work is HARD. It’s fast-paced and emotionally charged. Customers can be real shitheads when they are hungry. It’s funny how they will typically become much nicer as soon as they get their food!
People say everyone should be forced to work in a restaurant at least once in their life. It’s a challenging, humbling experience. Sweating it out in cramped kitchens while trying to make everything perfect for customers just to get a decent tip in order to pay your car insurance will bring anyone to their knees. Cheerfully balancing a tray of 12 cocktails over your head without spilling them through a rowdy, drunken crowd to have enough money to pay for your college textbooks this semester should make you remember to “always tip your servers and bartenders” for the rest of your life.
Some restaurants I worked in would not allow the servers to take notes when taking orders. That meant I had to remember what a table of six or sometimes ten people ordered at a time … and keep their entire order in my head long enough to get to a kiosk to type it in and send the order to the kitchen. That includes when people ordered things “on the side” or different steak temperatures. And then I needed to remember it again when I picked up the food and served everyone. And if I didn’t remember, customers could be very unforgiving.
But even though I rarely think about those days, they made up an integral part of who I am now. I learned to work hard, remember things, multi-task, be punctual, and deal with aggravated people. It fostered stamina, grit, and a tolerance for pain and unkind people. It taught me how to move quickly when I need to get something done fast.
Serving others also taught me about empathy and being human. Because when I go out to restaurants now, I understand what workers may be going through or dealing with behind the scenes and that their job is not easy. People are vulnerable when hungry – even if they have only been hungry for the last hour or so. And everyone has to eat! Bringing people their food in their time of need, even if I was being paid to do it, is a modest, obliging way to connect with people.
And that makes me wonder – does serving others make us more empathetic?
Most of us have jobs serving someone, whether they are our boss, managers, clients, customers, students, or patients. But do we look at our job as if we are serving other people or helping them somehow? Or do we view our jobs as something we must do, a task that needs doing to get paid? Or, if you are super lucky and have a job working in the arts – do you view your job as serving your audience, viewers, readers, listeners, etc.? Or do you do what you like/love and cross your fingers someone else will fancy it also?
Maybe it is all about perspective. I don’t think working in restaurants made me more empathetic at the time because I was only working to make money and pay bills, and I did not view it as a way to help others. At the time, I was trying hard to put one foot in front of the other, literally and figuratively. That was a mistake on my part … because I have learned over the years that when you do your job – any job, whether you are in customer service or an attorney or a pilot or a construction laborer – when you do your job to help others, to make someone else’s life easier or happier, you also tend to do a better job, tend to get promoted, tend to succeed in general.
Now, I view my day job – an online marketing consultant – as a service that helps my clients by adding value to their work lives. Over the years, it has proven true: if they have a good business, I have a good business.
What about you? Have you ever worked in a restaurant? How did it change your perspective on life? How do you view your current job and its purpose, and has it changed over time? Have you watched The Bear?
We’d love to hear your introspection!
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