Waiting; The True Confessions of a Waitress by Debra Ginsberg

were allowed to boss line cooks and other kitchen workers around), and then executive chefs (responsible for menu plan ning, design, ordering, and kitchen personnel). In contrast to the rest of the kitchen employees, all the cooks had previous experi ence preparing food. Some had been employed by the park for several years.
    Chefs and cooks are an interesting breed. They work in a controlled frenzy, often producing mass quantities of food with individual specifications for each dish. They have a small space and a limited time frame in which to operate. They are responsible for producing food that is not merely edible but tantalizing and attractive. And they do all of this, literally, in the fire. I have worked with very few real chefs who didn’t consider what they did an art form and who weren’t truly disturbed if they turned out plates that were obviously below par. But most chefs receive very few accolades. They can’t stroll around gathering compliments from the guests who eat their art. Instead, a chef has only the server as a link between him (or, rarely, her) and his “public.” Unfortunately, servers are often too busy with their own problems (usually that their food is coming out too late) to care about the chef ’s efforts. In many cases, the chef is correct in assuming he is underappreciated. More often than not, I’ve seen a chef place a particularly beautiful dish on the line only to have the waitress cart it off without so much as a smile to acknowledge his efforts. Clashes between the chef and his crew and the waitstaff are therefore routine.
    So it was no surprise that while there were some internecine wars among the cooks, they were united on one point: they hated the waitstaff. Waiters and waitresses were considered money-grubbing scum who had no clue to how hard the kitchen worked for them. In my long career as a waitress, I have seen variations on this theme but have never experienced its absence, whether the chef was a talented and experienced artist or a third-rate cook. At any rate, the cook’s level of expertise matters not; if he wants to, he will make a waitress’s life hell and no amount of skill on her part will save her. On the flip side, a wait ress who gets on the cook’s good side will invariably experience less stress and make a lot more money. I saw ample evidence of this at Yellowstone and have never forgotten it.
    For as depressed as I was over my own job, I felt a deep, unmitigated pity for the waiters and waitresses, many of whom had no prior experience in a dining room. From my vantage point in the pantry, I watched them slam through the kitchen doors, frantic and sweating:
    “Where’s my oatmeal?”
“No, no, I wanted over easy, not scrambled!”
“Anybody seen my toast!?”
    “I can’t find the Thousand Island dressing!”
    Full trays of food were dropped regularly. Many waitresses broke into tears on a daily basis.
    As befitting our lowly station, we kept pretty quiet in the pantry, but the cooks were relentless, torturing the waitstaff at any opportunity. They were generally a scary lot, hardened by their service at the hotel. Singularly unfriendly and crude beyond anyone’s expectations, these men made a game out of ignoring the waiters and harassing the waitresses. One popular trick (a crowd pleaser to this day) involved putting up a thermonuclear plate on the line and waiting for the waiter to touch it barehanded. Invariably, after the waiter shrieked in pain, the cook would smile and say, “Careful, it’s hot.”
    The cooks called the servers by number as the dishes came up, often delaying delivery of a particular order until the frenzied waitress gave up waiting for her food to come up and headed out to the dining room to apologize for the lateness of a meal. The moment her back reached the door, the cooks called her number and then berated her for not arriving at the line sooner. Server number nine, a lissome beauty from Tennessee and a particularly slow