Bad Waitress

June 8, 2023 11:26 AM

Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.
posted by HeroZero (23 comments total)

I don't really get this complaint.

Lots of people have worked in the restaurant industry, and then moved on to different jobs, because 'restaurant critic' is a job that generally conflicts with the hours of restaurant service work (not to mention the various locations).

Also, since lots of people have worked in the service industry, one could assume that lots of intellectuals have too, in various roles.

Also, people who work for the restaurant companies who write reviews of food exist - these people are not dispassionate like journalists (well as best an any journalist can be) because their own company is paying them. They are in marketing roles.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:35 AM on June 8, 2023 [13 favorites]

That was a fantastic read. I have sent along to my restaurant friends and family, who are actually most of my friends and family.
posted by mygothlaundry at 11:49 AM on June 8, 2023 [9 favorites]

I've worked for multiple food websites (most were about home cooking, and not restaurant eating, but still). I've even been in a position to hire people at a few of them.

I'm a data point of one, but I will say that the one time someone had food service experience on their resume, it was a huge plus in their favor, and they got hired.

But of course there are hundreds of thousands of restaurants employing millions of food service people all across the country, and there are dozens (hundreds, if you include local-specific sites I guess, though they often don't pay) employing.. several hundred, maybe several thousand people.

If you narrow it down to "restaurant journalists" you're looking at maybe a thousand or two people, total, across the country, if you're being very generous.

So I can see why there's an idea that sites don't hire food service people.
posted by heyitsgogi at 11:58 AM on June 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

Thanks for posting this. I had a different journey as a server but there were a couple of things that stuck out to me and brought me right back to my years of service, like this part about privacy and dignity and who pays how much and how they pay when it comes to restaurants:

Sometime mid-pandemic, I was let go from a poorly-paid writing gig with a rude message from the project lead. The way it was worded, the specificity of the ire, left me crying on my bed. Bars were starting to open up again, I was thinking about giving up and looking for another service job. My dog, ever-sensitive to my emotions, jumped on my bed and lay beside me. I had a moment of clarity: my bosses had always been awful to me. At least now I was crying in my bed, with my dog, after reading a message, instead of in public, at a restaurant, after someone berated me to my face. There is dignity in privacy. The life of the American worker is inherently undignified, but I’ve found solace in the ability to experience that shame on my own terms.

At a certain point, I did return to service, to work a few shifts at a neighborhood wine bar. Having now done the two types of work simultaneously, I can say that for me, being told that you need to rewrite a sentence in house style, no matter how rude the tone, carries more dignity than being told that you’re at risk of losing half your income if you don’t get better at cleaning up rich people’s food scraps.

People fight online about service industry culture all the time. Tipping this, tipping that. I’m too tired for all of it. I don’t want to have another viral tweet, explaining math, the exchange of goods and services. The customer isn’t actually supplementing the employees' wages. If tipping ceased to exist, the prices would be higher. So you, as the customer, would still be paying the same amount. I too believe that restaurant owners should pay their employees more.

I don’t care anymore if a European tourist tips me 12%. That’s how I know that all the people talking about tipping online aren’t actually working in restaurants. It’s useless to care about one tip over another. One of the earliest lessons you learn is that you can’t base your night off individual tips. You’ll make the most money if you ignore the numbers, otherwise you’ll get too in your head. The tips flow away like sand, I spend them all.

I’ve never received a paid sick day. I started buying orthopedic shoes when I was 28 years old. I’ve watched coworkers be sent to the ER bleeding at 3 am only to come back and work a shift the next day. I visited a place I worked at for a summer in the East Village and chatted with my former manager. He told me he’d been on the verge of leaving the job, but that his replacement had died of a heart attack on the restaurant floor. These stories are commonplace.

You just keep grinding, turn and burn, count tips at the end of the night. Then you go home and dream that your section is getting slammed and your feet are stuck to the floor and everyone’s screaming at you. Or, in my most recurring dream, I’m watching the tasks pile up, the tables staring at me, the food cramming the window, and I can’t bring myself to deal with it, so instead, I walk out the door into Midtown Manhattan and walk away from the restaurant. I think this is my version of lucid dreaming. In the dreams, I can walk away, while in reality, you’d never dream of leaving in the middle of a shift.

Beautifully put. The author also nails the obsession with appearance in the industry. At my last gig I sassed the HR person who was telling us all that we should wear makeup by asking if she also meant the male servers and the cooks and dishwasher? She did not. I loved my job as I did it but I also knew it was not healthy. This piece has been a reminder for me that I don't ever want to wait tables again if I can help it.
posted by RobinofFrocksley at 12:01 PM on June 8, 2023 [26 favorites]

This was a really good piece. Thanks for posting it.
posted by Mchelly at 12:47 PM on June 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

Thanks for sharing. This reminds me a lot of my days as a barista in the early 00s. I would pick up shifts like crazy because I needed the money, and despite being a pretty smart person, even coffee shop customers treat you like trash. (I had been insulted to my face many times in those jobs.) And much like the author, I was always either hungover or tired.
posted by Kitteh at 1:29 PM on June 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I spent 15 years working in restaurants and bars and it was incredible training for dealing with stress, harassment and exhaustion. Mostly, I enjoyed it, except when I hated it. It still comes out in my dreams. It has been 20 years since I quit my last service industry job yet when I have a nightmare it is always me in a restaurant unable to key in the order, make the register work, or get the orders out on time for some other reason.

People complain about academia (my field post service industry) but when I have a "nightmare" about arriving late to a class or having forgotten that I was supposed to give a test I always end up solving the problem and it becomes a boring dream. In the restaurant nightmares, there's never enough coffee and my stupid code to key into the register never works. It's ridiculous.
posted by Cuke at 1:44 PM on June 8, 2023 [12 favorites]

I used to eat at that IHOP once a week! My boyfriend at the time (now my husband) and I would dig around for quarters, buy a Sunday LA Times from the newspaper vending box out front, and split up the sections to share over pancakes. It's one of my nicest memories from undergrad having that quiet Sunday morning routine with him. They recognized us when we showed up and knew what we liked.

By contrast, we went to Hash House a Go Go with friends for some special occasion brunch exactly once, waited over an hour to get a table and waited over an hour again to get our food. No apologies, no nothing. That place was a madhouse. The food was good but not worth the experience. Everyone working there clearly thought they were hot shit because it was the hottest brunch spot in town at the time (and yes, part of the appeal of the place was the attractive wait staff; I'm not at all surprised about the appearance pressure). We never went back.

I was not expecting this to kick off with stories from two restaurants I had such strong feelings about! What a nostalgic read, thanks for sharing.
posted by potrzebie at 2:20 PM on June 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Jesus Christ I have never read something and been so glad I am out of the food service industry.

The amount of dehumanization in the expectations of massively high standards for pitiful pay just won’t do it. If anyone has a bunch of money and wants to do something good with it, put it towards unionizing the restaurant industry.
posted by Jon_Evil at 2:47 PM on June 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food?

Is is because service people are keen to supply their stories for nothing?
posted by flabdablet at 3:11 PM on June 8, 2023

[In hindsight I framed this badly by choosing that paragraph for the description. I was sharing this because I think it's a terrific piece of writing, not because I think it's a referendum on worker representation in service industry writing.]
posted by HeroZero at 3:21 PM on June 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

Nobody wants to hire writers to write, and now we have ChatGPT now to do it for you.
posted by jenfullmoon at 3:22 PM on June 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

I'm completely baffled by the notion that there's a person out there that imagines that writers never waited tables. I barely know anyone, regardless of current profession, that hasn't worked in restaurants (front or back of house) at some point in their lives. I know an almost uncountable number of former servers who are now journalists, novelists, playwrights, poets, editors, screenwriters, copywriters, translators. and Literature/Rhetoric/Writing Professors.

Anecdotally a surprising number of self-styled "writer" dudes from my younger days are now line cooks and (in at least a couple of cases) pretty well-regarded chef/restauranteurs.

Slightly off topic: someone needs to write an article about the phenomenon of current/former bartenders that become real estate brokers because it is a truly a real thing.
posted by thivaia at 3:33 PM on June 8, 2023 [7 favorites]

I’ve got one foot on the food media world and 90% of the people making a living In food writing and digital media have a history as a server. So count me in with those who don’t get the complaint. You want to write about food, jump right in.
posted by Miko at 7:41 PM on June 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

ChatGPT? ChewGPT
posted by allium cepa at 7:41 PM on June 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, I fell in to a social group in New York City with many people who consider themselves to be intellectuals. I’ve been privy to countless conversations about how intellectual labor is labor, about how someone needs to do the sitting around and thinking and theorizing, with the thought underlying this being: and it certainly wouldn’t be the people who carry things for a living.

I liked this. I hope she finds a better social circle soon though; NYC must have plenty of smart people that aren't insufferable.
posted by the primroses were over at 8:12 PM on June 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Well said. I’ve never seen such classism as I witnessed among young NYC self-styled intellectuals.
posted by Miko at 8:53 PM on June 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

STOP POSTING RESTAURANT STUFF WHEN I'M WORKING AT THE RESTAURANT.

Sometime this month I'll hit 30 years in the industry, and I wanted to write. And plenty of times along the way I told some person a work story and they told me "you should write a book!" So I just mostly read and slightly skimmed the article and boy howdy it presses buttons. Buttons that live in me.

I was in New York for 15 years, I remember the Ginger Man.

Tonight at work everything was normal except I had one table tell me the service was terrible, another table that got all pissed over splitting the check six ways, and an old lady fell down and broke her femur. With a small function upstairs for a bunch of electricians and a donated takeout order for our local Sharks.

no longer had to miss weddings and graduations and family reunions. When I made a new friend, I could finally hang out with them when they asked me to drinks on a Friday instead of saying I had to work.

Holidays are work days for restaurant people. It can be so hard to break in and get that respect and be a known quantity, that person that never quits and focuses on the solution not the blame when shit goes bonkers. The Biz will eat you alive, yes it will, but the rewards, the friendships and moments and memories and crazy things...and the people who come back again and again and that buzzy feeling of a busy night.
posted by vrakatar at 9:40 PM on June 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

It’s made me see that life is more than writing, it’s lessened my chokehold on dedication. I no longer identify as an ambitious person. I identify as a person who wants to make the life that they can scrape together as comfortable as possible.

I’ve been on my own difficult journey with work and my sense of identity recently, and this hit me very hard.
posted by Probabilitics at 1:05 AM on June 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Thank you for posting, a terrific read. My take is that it's not a complaint about servers not being tapped for writing jobs; it's about the innate conviction among most other professions that serving is for, you know, those who aren't smart enough to not be servers. So therefore, writing jobs are for writers, serious thinkers!
By being a server who is also a writer, who is in the moment thinking about the serving job, the hallowed aura of being a writer is just another job. One can scramble to find a writing gig like one scrambles to get a job at a state fair hawking deep fried somethings, or struggle to memorize 15 sauce ingredients. Writing and thinking and producing are not the exclusive, or better, realm of writers, journalists, etc.
posted by winesong at 8:28 AM on June 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yesterday when I saw this post, it happened to be the fifth anniversary of Anthony Bourdain's death. In fact I had forgotten, and it reminded me. I don't know whether to consider him a writer first or a restaurant person first. I think with him, they really are intertwined. I don't think he was ever a server for any considerable period of time, though.

Then again, I feel as if the whole idea of working in the service industry, and the things people outside of it can't understand, is very big in his writing. He wrote a book about the historical figure called Typhoid Mary, which, now that I think of it, resonates powerfully with dilemmas public-facing workers have had to contend with due to COVID.

So overall, he difinitely came across to me as someone who was very familiar with going out every day and serving, come what may. I have very fond memories of going to a book signing where no one had shown up yet for some reason (for Anthony Bourdain of all people!) and buying several books so he could sign them. He was soldiering on, acting like he was having a great time even though no one was there.
posted by BibiRose at 8:42 AM on June 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Is this what it feels like to be subtweeted?

Honestly, I don't know a single food journalist or professional food writer who has not spent time working in restaurants. I've worked back-of-house and front-of-house, my editor has done both, my good friend the cookbook writer has done both...etc.

The only ones I once knew who hadn't worked in restaurants (or food) have retired, or were (as the NYT does) poached from other writing jobs and assigned to the food section for some kind of lifestyle consideration, then reassigned back to something "harder" later. That's the thing that pisses me off the most: assuming that writing about food is easier than writing about the economy, and shunting writers without interest or experience to that section.

I also agree that Sweetbitter was overrated.
posted by yellowcandy at 10:29 AM on June 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I haven't read TFA but at the mention of The Ginger Man, now I guess I have to! Lived in NYC in the 90s & remember their beer selection fondly.
posted by inexorably_forward at 2:03 AM on June 11, 2023