Imagine a job where your coworkers range from the age of sixteen to seventy-two, with enough scandal to rival Hollywood, and yet camaraderie that puts any other team to shame. The best part is, you never know what work will be like when you walk in for the day.
That’s restaurant life.
People yell at you when they order wrong, ask you the difference between chicken alfredo and fettuccini alfredo and then their child throws spaghetti all over you and the table. Glamorous work. All of this happens while soft music plays over a thrum of lively conversation and clinks of silverware against plates. This is called front of house or the floor.
Restaurants are for going out and having a nice night: a night free from the kitchen and thinking about what to make or what groceries to buy.
For some.
For those behind the swinging doors, it’s a night of cooks barking orders, food rushed from window to table and servers breaking more plates than a big fat Greek wedding.
Back of house, the kitchen, is where all the fun happens. Servers are yelling through the food window for missing dishes. Cooks and backup create strings of words that would make a drill sergeant look like a saint. Dish washers vibe with the music, maneuvering through the crowded floor with stacks of dishes.
Working in a restaurant can be a test on anybody’s mental fortitude, but as Christ-followers, it tries our relationship with God and other people as well.
My roommate and I have worked together in a restaurant for over a year now. We have seen staff come and go, people from all walks of life.
People notice a difference when a person is in Christ. People notice it in Lewis. Having grown up singing with her parents in church and still a prominent and active member, Lewis is a strong reminder of the strength we have in Christ. One day, during a particularly busy shift, I was getting mad at who knows what and went to her to talk about it. She just chuckled.
“It’s not anybody’s fault; it’s just the rush,” Lewis, a senior pre-med cellular and molecular biology student, said. “People have to know that when everyone is moving, no one is paying attention to what is happening other than what they are trying to do.”
There have been many times after work that we come back to the dorm and just vent. Recently, there was one particularly stressful shift that had everyone in the kitchen on edge.
One thing to know about serving before we continue is how a shift works — at least where I work. You come and clock in like any other job, but it’s when you get off that it can get weird. Your schedule tells you if you are going to be a base decline — staying until the rush slows down — or if you are a closer — the last ones on the floor for that shift.
Now this particular day, I went in to work at noon, and Lewis came in at 4 p.m. I was scheduled to be a dinner base decline, and so was she. Staggered shifts like that ensure that there will be enough servers on the floor at any given time to accommodate an appropriate number of guests. However, they don’t alleviate any of the tension from the servers themselves, especially when it gets to 8 p.m. and you’re on your fiftieth, “Hi, my name is —, it’s a pleasure to ser—” just to get interrupted and told that they all want cocktails, waters, and breadsticks and will be splitting the check seven ways.
That Friday, Lewis and I lay on the floor, staring at our living room ceiling, debriefing our shifts of the day.
“I had a lady decide that she wanted carbonara and then got mad when it came out and wasn’t her usual ‘white sauce.’ She wanted alfredo. There is a picture of the carbonara. On. The. Front.”
“Well, I had to comp a table’s thirty-five-minute ticket. The kitchen got behind because of the two parties of 15 that came in ten minutes apart but ordered at the same time.”
“The grill cook yelled at the sixteen-year-old again. He’s forty.”
“I think we’re down to three bartenders. They had to fire the new guy.”
While we talked through the horrors of the shift, we drifted to the praises we heard from people that day: parents travelling to see their children at college, siblings out with their elderly parent.
“They’re going to see his brother,” I said. “He just beat stage four cancer. Completely!”
“I had a kid who just turned 4!” Lewis said.
“I had a sweet lady who just turned 90!”
You never know who you’ll meet when you walk into work. Lewis has helped me see that they are still all Christ’s children, and to honor His image, we work to serve others.