Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip—Confessions of a Cynical Waiter

By Steve Dublanica

According to The Waiter, eighty percent of customers are nice people just looking for something to eat. The remaining twenty percent, however, are socially maladjusted psychopaths. Waiter Rant offers the server's unique point of view, replete with tales of customer stupidity, arrogant misbehavior, and unseen bits of human grace transpiring in the most unlikely places. Through outrageous stories, The Waiter reveals the secrets to getting good service, proper tipping etiquette, and how to keep him from spitting in your food. The Waiter also shares his ongoing struggle, at age thirty-eight, to figure out if he can finally leave the first job at which he's truly thrived.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061801235

Steve Dublanica

Steve Dublanica is the bestselling author of Waiter Rant, which spent twelve weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. He lives in the New York metropolitan area with his joint-custody dog, Buster.

Book preview

Preface

I’m a waiter. I bring food to tables in exchange for tips. At first glance it seems like a simple job. Just be neat, polite, display some salesmanship, and don’t forget to smile. Easy, right?

What world are you living in?

Today waiters are expected to be food-allergy specialists, sommeliers, cell-phone-rule enforcers, eye candy, confessors, entertainers, mixologists, emergency medical technicians, bouncers, receptionists, joke tellers, therapists, linguists, punching bags, psychics, protocol specialists, and amateur chefs. Foodie-porn TV programming has generated a new class of entitled customers with already overblown culinary expectations and a rapidly diminishing set of social graces. Economists say that the restaurant business is a bellwether of the nation’s economic health—but I think it’s a bellwether of America’s mental health as well. And let me tell you, 20 percent of the American dining public are socially maladjusted psychopaths. We should start putting Prozac in the Perrier.

Ordering from a waiter is one of the most-taken-for-granted human experiences in modern life. We’re never more ourselves than when eating out with family and friends. While engaging in the basic rituals of breaking bread, we become a lot less guarded and a lot more primitive. Thinking that the waiter is a powerless tip slave, customers often direct that primitiveness toward the person trying to take their order. Waiting should be a simple job, but it isn’t. It’s not all gloom and doom, though. If you keep your eyes open, you’ll see the occasional crumb of human grace fall from the table. Eighty percent of my customers are the nicest people you’d ever want to meet. But I’m concerned that the percentage of people who know how to act in a restaurant is diminishing at an exponential rate.

For the last four years I’ve been anonymously chronicling my restaurant exploits at a Web site called Waiter Rant. From my server station at a white-tablecloth restaurant called The Bistro, I’ve written about the joys and pains of working in the food-service industry. Staying anonymous has let me freely chronicle my customers’ bad behavior without fear of retribution and bad tips, but it’s also allowed me to talk about people behaving beautifully, too. I’ve been fortunate that my writing has attracted millions of readers, won a few awards, and grabbed a little bit of that crazy stuff called quasi-fame. Despite all the attention I’ve received, very few people know who I am or where The Bistro is located. After three years I was confronted by a customer only once.

This book is a natural outgrowth of Waiter Rant. In addition to dishing about insane customers, tyrannical owners, and drugged-up servers, I also hope to give you a real pain in your bones sense of what it’s like to be a waiter in America today. After you read this book I doubt you’ll ever look at your server the same way again. And maybe you’ll learn how to be a better customer in the process.

So how did I end up becoming a waiter? Why did I start writing about the restaurant industry? If I’m ranting about it all the time, why don’t I just quit and get another job? Just who the hell do I think I am?

As with all good stories, let’s begin at the beginning.

Chapter 1

Amici’s

So, you take it up the ass?" Benny asks me.

What kind of question is that? I reply.

You’re a fag, the chubby Mexican says, glancing slyly at his coworkers. We all know you are. It’s okay You can tell us.

Benny…

C’mon. We know you’re queer.

No, I’m not being set upon by a gang of amorous inmates in a prison laundry. It’s 1999, and I’m in the kitchen of Amici’s, a two-hundred-seat Italian restaurant located in a hyper-affluent New York suburb. Two weeks ago I was fired from my job as marketing rep for a psychiatric health care company. Facing immediate penury, I asked my brother, a longtime waiter at Amici’s, to get me a job so I could keep eating. As a thirty-one-year-old baby waiter learning the ropes, I’m quickly discovering that the hot topic of kitchen conversation is figuring out which waiter’s gay and discussing the merits of inserting foreign objects into other people’s rectal cavities. Ah, restaurant kitchens—they’re all about tequila, buggery, and the lash.

Why you want to know, Benny? I ask. You interested in me?

Me? Benny says, untangling a wad of half-cooked spaghetti with his bare hands. "I’m no maricón."

You’re asking a guy you don’t know whether or not he’s gay. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?

No, Benny says, staring at me blankly. I just want to know if you take it up the ass.

I guess Benny’s never heard of the fear is the wish thing.

I don’t take it up the butt, I reply, a half smile playing on my lips. But your wife does. Tell her I said hi.

The kitchen guys start whooping with laughter.

Oh shit! the grill man hoots.

He got you, yo, the dishwasher says.

Pendejo, Benny says, his face reddening.

It’s not my fault you can’t make you’re wife happy, I say, rapidly egressing the area. Benny does have access to sharp knives.

"Screw you, pendejo!" Benny shouts after me.

Right back at you, I shout over my shoulder. Bitch.

After reading about this exchange you might be thinking I’m some kind of misogynistic homophobe. You’d be wrong. I’m merely engaging in a legitimate act of restaurant self-defense. My brother gave me an invaluable piece of advice when I started working at Amici’s: never take flak from the kitchen lying down. You’re always gonna get shit from the cooks, he warned. But if you just sit there and take it, they’ll run right over you. That’s why I brought it to Benny. Most waiters would get killed if they brought it to a cook in front of his crew like I did, but I’m not worried that my exchange with Benny is going to cause any problems. He’s a tough hombre who, unlike many cooks, can dish it out and take it. Besides, we actually have the makings of a friendship going on. Benny teaches me little kitchen tricks, like how not to cut off my fingers when I slice the cheese, and I help him with the occasional English words he doesn’t understand. Of course, Benny wants to know about only the weird words. Yesterday he asked me what pederast meant. I never should have told him. He kept trying to use the word in a sentence all day.

But getting into a profanity pissing contest with the kitchen crew can take you only so far. If a waiter wants respect from the back of the house, he or she has to show respect in return. And the best way to do that is to understand that kitchen staff and waiters are like the Palestinians and Israelis—separate and distinct nationalities uncomfortably sharing the same volatile piece of real estate.

A big difference between waiters and cooks is the hours they work. Waiters usually work an eight-or nine-hour shift and go home. The kitchen guys, however, are often the first to show up and the last to go home. Fourteen-hour days are common. When a restaurant closes its doors for the night, you’ll probably find half its servers getting blasted at a nearby bar. But you’ll find the kitchen guys sharing a taxi or waiting at a bus stop for a public transportation ride home. Because most fine-dining establishments are located in neighborhoods where residential rents are high, kitchen personnel seldom can afford to live close to their place of employment. That means they often have a very long commute to and from work. One of Amici’s prep cooks buses it from Queens every day. Depending on traffic, that can be a three-hour round-trip six days a week—on top of working a fourteen-hour shift. The waiters at Amici’s (at least the ones without DUIs) have cars and shorter commutes. They have free time. This disparity in leisure hours often leads to resentment between the front and back of the house. At the end of the night the exhausted kitchen guys just want to go home to enjoy what little free time they have left.

Because they’re often exhausted, I’m learning it’s in my best interest not to make the cooks work any harder than they have to. That means not running into the kitchen and begging the grill man to cook me a new steak because a customer wanted a medium-rare filet mignon and I mistakenly ordered it well done. It’s also good not to inflame the resentments constantly simmering between the front and back of the house by acting like an arrogant prick. While kitchen guys usually work at a single location for years, waiters tend to be a more nomadic lot. Cooks see the waiters come and go, so, in their minds, they’re the stable nucleus at the core of the restaurant. Waiters consider themselves the public face of the restaurant—hustling to generate the revenue that pays everyone’s salaries, including the cooks’. Many waiters view themselves as elite frontline troops while dismissing the cooks as mere logistical support. Couple this attitude with the fact that waiters usually make more money, work fewer hours, and perform less physically intensive labor, and you’ll understand why the kitchen occasionally wants to run a mouthy server through the industrial-strength dishwasher.

The kitchen guys will manifest their displeasure by screwing up servers’ orders, subjecting them to a stream of verbal abuse, or threatening impromptu sexual-reassignment surgery with a meat cleaver. I’ve met several waiters who have at least one knife-throwing-chef story in their repertoire. The servers at Amici’s aren’t saints either. Always shifting blame for their screw-ups onto the kitchen, they act like the cooks are dirty hoi polloi unfit to tie the servers’ shoes. They respond to the kitchen staff’s taunting with juicy comebacks laden with lovely adjectives like wet-back, sand nigger, and Eurotrash.

When peaceful coexistence develops between the front and back of the house, it’s because there’s a good executive chef or general manager at the helm. By making everyone realize that they’re in a symbiotic relationship, that cook and waiter in the long term need each other, good management can be like Jimmy Carter at Camp David, brokering a cease-fire between historical enemies.

Unfortunately, Sammy, the manager at Amici’s, is a good example of how not to run a restaurant. A short fat Syrian man with the demeanor of a smug cherub, Sammy’s a verbally abusive, power-mad sexual deviant—traits not uncommon in restaurant managers. Underpaid and aggravated that the waitstaff takes home more money than he does, Sammy extorts the servers into paying him bribes. Want to work on the lucrative Friday and Saturday shifts? Switch a shift? Take a vacation? Sammy’s response is to hold out his hand and say, Pay me. In addition to abusing his authority, Sammy, a married man with children, revels in making salacious comments to the female staff and spends most of his free time trying to get into their pants. He does little to encourage cooperation between the front and back of the house. In fact, I think he does his best to keep everyone fighting and off balance. Divide and conquer is Sammy’s motto. All in all, he’s a despicable little man.

Amici’s head chef, Fluvio, hates Sammy’s guts. Forty years old with long black hair tied into an aging hippie ponytail, Fluvio wears thick eyeglasses that are always smudged with grease, and his ample stomach seems incongruous on top of strong legs conditioned from years spent working on his feet. In addition to his native Italian, he’s fluent in Spanish and speaks a good bit of Arabic and French. He runs a professional kitchen, but he’s intimidated by Caesar, the manipulative and tyrannical owner who treats everyone who works for him like livestock. Caesar, an Italian raised in South America, acts like his restaurant’s a nineteenth-century plantation on the Argentinean pampas. Expecting the kitchen staff to address him as patrón, he has a penchant for calling the busboys peasants and the hostesses whores.

Here’s a typical example of Caesar’s nonsense. Not liking his grease-splattered cooks using the patrons’ bathrooms and offending the customers’ delicate sensibilities, Caesar insists that everyone use the tiny windowless bathroom next to the deep fryer in the kitchen. That miserable bathroom’s so small it would give Harry Houdini panic attacks. Technically, the waiters are supposed to use this bathroom, but none of us ever do. Half the cooks don’t either. I’m not surprised. Rizzo, Amici’s headwaiter, lovingly refers to the kitchen’s hot, cramped, porn-decorated bathroom as the phone booth of sodomy. After eyeballing that miserable toilet, I’m beginning to understand why the kitchen crew is so obsessed with my sexual orientation.

Leaving Benny and his sexually conflicted comrades behind, I enter the trattoria’s main dining room. It’s only five o’clock on Saturday night, and the place is already filling up with customers. Influxes of bull-market nouveau riche transformed this formerly picturesque suburb into a gigantic outdoor shopping mall. Oozing with corporate-branded hipness, the town’s countless rows of boutiques, restaurants, and art galleries ruthlessly compete with one another for the well-shod discretionary incomes of the yuppies prowling its streets. Situated in the heart of the town’s retail district, Amici’s sucks yuppies off the sidewalk like a black hole consuming dust from a dying star. Amici’s has the three things any restaurant needs to survive—location, location, location.

So you ready to rock and roll, newbie? Rizzo, the headwaiter, asks me.

Ready as I’ll ever be, I guess.

You’re gonna be busting your ass tonight. We’re down two waiters.

You mean there are only four of us taking care of two hundred people?

That’s right.

What happened?

Toomey and Giselle quit. Rizzo says. They got sick of Sammy’s shit.

Four waiters have quit since I started.

This place is a meat grinder, kid, Rizzo grunts. You’re the meat. Get used to it.

Do you think I’ll make it?

Probably not.

Gee, I say. Don’t hold back. Speak your mind.

It’s nothing personal, Rizzo replies. In the ’Nam I never bothered to learn the new guys’ names. Why get close? They were gonna get killed anyway.

How reassuring.

Rizzo stares at me. Gray-haired and rangy, with a build topping out at six feet two, the thirty years he’s spent toiling in the restaurant business are carved into the lines of his weathered face. If every restaurant has to have a stereotypical grizzled veteran, Rizzo is it. Like a bacterium living in acid or a tube worm eking out an existence next to heat vents several thousand leagues under the sea, Rizzo is the kind of waiter who thrives in hostile environments that would crush most servers. With calm black eyes peering out from behind a pair of rose-colored wire-rim spectacles, he looks like a cross between John Lennon and Leon, the hit man from Luc Besson’s movie The Professional.

You gave Sammy money to work tonight, didn’t you? he asks me.

Yeah. Fifty bucks.

That was dumb. Now he’s gonna hit you up all the time.

Don’t you ever give him money?

Rizzo peers at me over the top of his glasses. Screw that, he says. Don’t forget. I used to own a restaurant. I know every illegal thing Sammy and Caesar ever pulled in this joint.

So you know where all the bodies are buried.

Indeed I do, son, Rizzo says. And unless they want the IRS raiding the joint, they’ll leave me the fuck alone.

Suddenly, there’s a clatter of noise by the front entrance. A crowd of hungry-looking people surging through the front door is overwhelming the skinny girl at the hostess stand.

Oh man, Rizzo groans. Here comes the pain.

Before long the restaurant is rocking. It doesn’t help that the anorexic crackhead hostess seats me two eight tops, three deuces, and a twenty-person wedding-rehearsal dinner inside half an hour. (In waiterspeak, a deuce or two top denotes a table of two. A four top is four people, a six top is six customers, and so on.) I get the two tops squared away quickly. Rizzo taught me to always take care of deuces first. His logic is that couples at a table are probably married and sick of talking to each other, making them hypersensitive to any kind of waiting.

Of course, I get slowed down by an eight top of little kids suffering from every food allergy known to man. I am beginning to think yuppie parents lie to their offspring, telling them they’re suffering from food allergies when they’re actually not, hoping to con their hypercompetitive children into eating whatever trendy diet promises to help them grow into big, strong, overly self-esteemed junk bond traders.

I want French fries! one little brat yells in psychologically healthy protest.

We have French fries, young man, I reply, trying to keep the smile from falling off my face.

Dylan can’t have French fries, his mother says. He wants zucchini fries instead.

We don’t have zucchini fries, madam, I reply.

The soccer mom’s surgically altered perky nose scrunches up. She looks at me like I’ve crawled out from under a rock.

The waiter I had last time got them for us, she says.

I want to find waiter I had last time and snap his neck. This lady’s eating into my precious time. I can feel the wedding party’s eyes crawling up and down my back. They’ve been nibbling on bread and water for twenty minutes. I feel bad for them. If it was my rehearsal dinner, I’d be pissed, too. I’ve got to get over there.

I’ll ask the chef what we can do, I say.

You do that, the woman snaps.

I run to the kitchen to ask Fluvio if he can make some zucchini fries.

Get the fuck out of here! he screams.

I return to the table. I’m sorry, madam. The chef regrets that he cannot make zucchini fries.

I want to speak to the manager, the woman barks.

The last person I want to deal with is Sammy. He’ll probably want $5 just to talk to this lady. To humor the woman, I disappear in the back to make it seem like I’m looking for the manager. After a minute I return to the kiddie table with the bad news.

This is outrageous, the mother sputters.

Madam—

We’re leaving.

Madam, I—

Waiter! I hear a voice cry out from the wedding party. Can we have some service over here?

Right away, sir! I yelp.

I disengage from the zucchini-obsessed mommy and give some attention to the twenty top. They hand me two bottles of expensive champagne. That means I’ve got to scrounge up twenty champagne glasses and some ice buckets pronto. I race over to the coffee station where we store them.

Minnie, I say to the cute Iranian girl who brews all the cappuccinos and espressos. Do you have twenty champagne glasses?

Not clean ones.

Can you help me, please? I plead. I’m in the weeds.

Being in the weeds (otherwise known as being in the shit) is waiter lingo for what happens when the demands put on a server exceed his or her ability to fulfill them. This can happen when a waiter’s new, incompetent, or placed in an impossible situation. For me it’s all three.

I’ll help you, Minnie says, smiling.

Hey, Ahmed, I call out to one of the busboys, could you get me two ice buckets for table six?

"Fuck you sharmout," Ahmed snarls, using the Arabic equivalent of maricon. I guess a waiter’s sexual orientation is the subject of speculative interest among the bus people as well as the kitchen staff.

Elif air ab tizak! I shoot back. That’s a nice way of saying A thousand dicks your ass!

Since Ahmed is virulently homophobic, my words hit home. As I watch him turn red I’m grateful I memorized a few Arabic comebacks. I was rehearsing that one for three days. When you work in a restaurant, you can never go wrong with remarks about anal penetration.

Fuck you! Ahmed repeats.

Ahmed, I reply, if you’re gonna live in America, you’ve got to learn to say something besides ‘Fuck you.’

Fuck you! Ahmed yells, storming off.

Wow, Minnie says, as she steam cleans a glass. You speak some Arabic?

Only the dirty words.

I’m impressed.

I grab a bucket, fill it with ice and water, and drop a champagne bottle inside. Minnie runs ahead of me to put the champagne glasses on the table.

The rehearsal party’s table is set up like a long rectangle with nine people on each side. The bride and groom are seated cutely next to each other at the far end of the table. As I approach, Ahmed sneaks up behind me and slams into my back. The ice bucket I’m holding slips out of my hands and crashes onto the table. The champagne bottle shoots out of the bucket like a torpedo firing out of a submarine. It smashes down the length of the table—targeting the bride-to-be’s bosom.

Oh shit! I cry out.

The slick bottle bounces off the bride’s boobs, hits the floor, and skitters off into oblivion. Everyone’s dripping with ice water. The bride’s expression transmutes from shock into pure rage.

You idiot! she screams.

Saying I’m sorry seems pointless, so I don’t. I turn around. Ahmed’s laughing smugly.

Fuck you! he mouths. Fuck you!

Sammy comes running over. Speaking rapid-fire Arabic, he orders Ahmed and the other busboys to reset the table. Before I can go looking for the champagne bottle, he grabs me by the elbow.

You’re a moron, Sammy hisses. You better smooth things over with that table.

I’m a new waiter, and I’ve got forty customers, I plead. I need some help.

Sammy looks at me coldly. Sink or swim, motherfucker.

I stare at Sammy in shock. I’ve worked for some real jerks in my time, but they’ve all been the smiling-on-the-outside/scumbag-on-the-inside types. Sammy’s a bastard up front.

Fine, I say, yanking my arm out of his grasp. I’ll handle it.

A few seconds later, as I’m scurrying on my hands and knees looking for the errant bottle of bubbly, the owner decides to make an appearance.

What the hell’s happening here? Caesar huffs.

At first glance, you can tell Caesar was once a handsome and powerfully built man. While the remnants of his youthful vigor occasionally peek out from inside his black eyes, you can tell the ravages of time and alcohol are pulling down the scaffolding of his once good looks. Vain for almost seventy years of age, Caesar decided to combat his thinning hair by shaving his head completely bare. A fastidious dresser to boot, today he’s sporting a white silk shirt, a red silk tie, gray slacks, tasseled Italian shoes, and a double-breasted blue blazer. If he added a monocle to his ensemble, he’d look like a dissipated version of Colonel Klink.

I’m looking for a champagne bottle I dropped on the floor, I reply. It rolled under the tables somewhere.

Smooth move, Caesar says. Real good.

Could you help me look for it? I ask innocently. I’m really pressed for time.

The owner’s eyes retract into his skull. You think I’m going to help you? he hisses. "That’s your job, peasant."

Behind me I hear a diner gasp. Suddenly I’m aware that I’m on my hands and knees before a man who thinks nothing of insulting the people who work for him right in front of his customers.

Forget it, Caesar, I say. I’ll find it.

Stupido, the owner says, walking away.

I continue to search for the bottle. It’s disappeared. The rehearsal dinner’s freaking out. To this day I think a customer at another table stole it. I dart out of the restaurant and run to a nearby liquor store. They have the same champagne at eighty bucks a bottle. I put it on my credit card and run back inside.

The table’s so touched that I bought a replacement bottle with my own money that they calm down. I get a grip on my section and bring everything under control. When the dust clears, the rehearsal party leaves me a $200 tip. They were nice people. Even after spending eighty bucks on the champagne and tipping out the bus people, I’ll still make a small profit.

Finally the night ends. The other waiters and I assemble at a back table and drink cheap white wine out of pint glasses while we wait for Sammy to accept our cash-out—the money and credit card receipts we accumulated during our shift. Sammy, being a petty tyrant, won’t let any of the waiters leave the restaurant until everyone’s cash-out matches to the penny. At the end of every shift, Sammy always eats a dish of vanilla ice cream dripping with chocolate sauce. He won’t even look at our receipts until he finishes. Deliberately lingering over his dessert to remind us of his importance, Sammy’s end-of-the-night shenanigans usually tack twenty minutes onto an already long day.

C’mon, Sammy, my brother moans. I’ve been here all day, and I want to go home. Stop stuffing your face.

Just for that, I take care of you last, Sammy says, smiling mischievously into his ice cream.

Screw this, my brother says, tossing his paperwork next to Sammy’s dish of ice cream. I’m going outside to have a cigarette. Call me when you’re done.

Suit yourself, Sammy chuckles.

Wait, I tell my brother, grabbing my Marlboro Lights. I’ll go with you.

Sit down, Sammy says. I didn’t say you can leave.

What is this, Sammy? I reply hotly. The military?

Kind of, Sammy snorts.

What do you want?

Caesar was pissed you messed up that table’s champagne, Sammy says, once my brother’s out of earshot.

Hey, I bought a new bottle with my own money.

Doesn’t matter, Sammy says, shaking his head. Caesar told me to give the bride a hundred-dollar gift certificate out of your money.

What? I gasp. The price of the champagne combined with buying this woman a gift certificate means I’ll have worked this entire hellish day practically for free.

That’s the deal, Sammy says. It’s out of my hands.

Goddamnit.

There’s another thing, Sammy says, an avaricious glint forming in his eye.

What?

Caesar wanted me to fire you. I didn’t out of respect for your brother.

Thanks.

So give me fifty bucks.

Are you kidding? I ask. You want another bribe?

It’s not a bribe. Let’s say it’s a gift—for my birthday.

No fucking way. Fire me if you want. No more bribes.

Sammy looks at me, a cautiously surprised expression on his face.

Suit yourself, newbie, he says. Suit yourself.

When I get home at two A.M., there’s a message from Sammy on my answering machine. He’s taken away all my lucrative dinner shifts and replaced them with a motley assortment of low-revenue lunch gigs. To add insult to injury, he’s making me work Sunday brunch tomorrow. That means I have to be back at work in seven hours. As I toss and turn in bed, anxious because I know I’m returning to that hellhole, one question keeps looping through my mind.

How the hell did I end up becoming a waiter?

Chapter 2

The Sacred and the Profane

Honestly? I never thought I’d be waiter when I was in my thirties. When I was eighteen years old, I dreamed about becoming a Catholic priest. According to the life schedule I had mapped out for myself, I was to be ordained a priest at twenty-five, consecrated a bishop at thirty, inducted into the Sacred College of Cardinals at forty, and assume the Throne of Peter to universal acclaim soon after that. I even had my pontifical name picked out. I’ll bet I was the only teenager in the Northeast doodling prospective versions of his papal coat of arms in his notebook to keep from falling asleep in physics class. I was a religious geek.

If the thirty-one-year-old me could travel back to 1986 and tell that pimply-faced kid that he’d be working in a restaurant asking "You want pommes frites with that?" instead of running the archdiocese of New York, I’m fairly certain that kid would

Reviews for Waiter Rant

[autumnesf · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

What is it really like to be a waiter? What is really the best tip in order to get good service and be remembered? Its in here.

[reader1009-863136 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

adult nonfiction. Sick of corruption, the author quits seminary school to join the healthcare industry, but after struggling under similar circumstances, he decides to take a job as a waiter until he figures out what he wants to do next. One year turns into 7 years, and after successfully blogging about his experiences he successfully transitions into a writer. Loads of insight about the waiting profession as well as about life itself and the personal choices we all make.

[livelylady · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Informative and enlightening side of the restaurant servers' plight of dealing with us, customers. And the fact that this is told by a 30 something and not a gum-popping teen gives it more credibility. I will never be so casual and insensitive to food servers again! A must for all.

[mmaestiho · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brutal and highly entertaining.

[timothyburke · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Some things should stay blogs. It's a very thin attempt to reproduce the formula of Kitchen Confidential, but it doesn't have any of the hard-won versilimitude, sharpness of observation or personal charisma of Bourdain's writing. It's not enough to show people life "behind the scenes" if the person showing it is not a very interesting writer.

[auntie0nanuuq · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting & insightful.....

He was especially clear about his own foibles, which tend to mirror my own.

[eowyna_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This memoir is based on the author's blog of the same name. He chronicles the problems and people around him at his job at a high-end restaurant in New York. The book follows the author in his life as well as chronicling anecdotes and larger ruminations on life. He has an excellent turn of phrase, and an unflinching insight into himself and others.The first appendix lists what makes a good customer, the second lists what a prospective waiter should be wary of in a restaurant. If you liked Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential," you will probably like this as well.

[seasidereader · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential was all about shocking readers with gross conditions & practices of restaurants' food service and depravity of kitchen staff. Waiter Rant takes a gentler and more balanced approach while exposing the dining area. Customers, wait staff, owners, and managers are all fair game for skewering. Customers especially are portrayed as demanding and entitled. As other reviewers have pointed out, this is more a memoir than an expose. I liked that it served as a reminder that many workers in the service sector are underpaid and disrespected.

[scot2-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really enjoyed this book. I worked as a waitress when I was a student and I could relate to some of the things in this book. Some anecdotes about customers are very funny but the book also covered the dysfunction and unhappiness back of house. I was glad to read on the internet that the writer had totally abandoned waiting and gone back into healthcare.

[engpunk77 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I have reader's & buyer's regret, but just a little. I hate it when I interrupt my schedule of books to be read with a spontaneous gift-card splurge like this, and instead of putting it at the bottom of the list, spend the next 3 days reading it. It cracked me up sometimes, I learned a little bit, and I think Steve's a good writer. I hope he becomes a successful novelist after this pretty good debut. I don't actually recommend it to anyone I know, though.

[narshkite · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have been reading Good Reads reviews for a while now, and have learned a bit of code that works for me. If reviewers complain that the protagonist is arrogant, self-obsessed, or something of that ilk, I am generally going to like the book. Maybe I am arrogant and/or self-obsessed, I don't know, but from my perspective characters thus described are generally either very self-aware, intellectually confident and archly funny or self-deluded, intellectually confident, and interesting. Either way, its a good start for a good read. This is not a hard and fast rule, but one that works for me more often than it fails. This book is insightful, funny, informative, and relatable. Is the memoirist pompous? He is. Is he sometimes whiny? He is. But he is also, as the cliché states, a keen observer of the human condition. He gets to be the fly on the wall and let's us spy on behavior many of us don't see every day. He also allows us to glimpse his personal journey, warts and all. I briefly waited tables in college, but my interest and POV is more as a person who has for the past 30ish years eaten in a lot of restaurants. With that perspective, I mostly enjoyed this one. Though I see the authors plan to write professionally has not thus far lead to professional success, he has managed to crank out one book worth reading, and that is better than most writers accomplish.

[kittyjay · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Less an expose, like the famed Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain, Waiter Rant is more snapshots and vignettes taken from the life of a waiter in an upscale restaurant of New York. There are some chapters which cover the more salacious elements, such as the obligatory sex-under-the-table and spitting in the food, but mostly it focuses on the human aspects: the couple who could barely afford their Valentine's Day dinner, a woman who had a stroke while sitting at a table, the lonely tale of a woman succumbing to a desperate alcoholism.

Throughout most of it, the Waiter himself remains human, showing deep interest and empathy; these are clearly people, not characters to be exploited. My only complaint is near the end, where he seems to become a tad more egotistical and a tad bit eye-rolling in his navel-gazing. While he does admit that his attitude suffered due to personal changes in his life, and the growing realization that being a waiter was failing to fulfill him as a person, it rings a tad hollow. He starts quoting Sartre casually in conversation, idly drawing comparisons to Philip Marlowe, and alternates between admitting that his relationships with the other staff have suffered and professing not to care. There is an almost defensiveness in his writing in the last few chapters, as if he were aware of his faults but desperately tried to excuse them - I hate to say it, but it is very easy to see how, if these were only what he chose to represent, he might very well have become insufferable to his colleagues.

Still, overall, and especially in the first three-quarters of the book, he has a singular charm. His writing is sparse, but effective. This is not really a book about waiting in general, but of a man who is a waiter - unlike Bourdain's work, which felt universal, this definitely has a focus. It has a protagonist, the author himself, and follows his life. Being a waiter is certainly what he talks about most, but it's in relation to how it affected him. Again, less an expose, more snapshots from a man's life while he was a waiter.

All in all, it was an enjoyable read, one which had an unexpected depth to it beyond laughing at absurdist stories of the underbelly of restaurants.

[cmasson17_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I expected this to be more of an expose than a bitch fest about how shitty being a waiter is. While there were some interesting vignettes, overall, it was kind of slow and negative.

[sbloom42 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

This is a "tell-all" memoir from a psychologist turned waiter. There are some interesting back-room stories, but mostly it's page after page of complaints about customers, followed by gossip about how screwed up the other employees at the restaurant are, followed by his yearning to be a professional writer. This would have been better if he left the meta-content about writing the book out of it and focused more on his day to day exploits rather than bringing down his co-workers. For example, there's a section where he's describing how to get a bigger tip out of customers and he stops himself and says he can't give away all the secrets of a professional waiter. Why not? That's what I'm reading this book to find out! He hints at his after-work antics, but never gives a clear picture of his vices, so the ride is more more tame that I anticipated.

[dms02 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting book. Would have liked more insider info on the restaurant business and less of the authors personal life.

[snat_3 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

How did I come to possess this book? Well, the combination of a Books-A-Million going out of business sale, my mistaken assumption that it would be a collection of essays written by various people who had once waited tables, and a cover blurb from Anthony Bourdain calling it "painfully funny" was apparently a heady combination that led to this bit of buyer's remorse. To be fair, this is not a bad book, nor is it a terribly interesting one. Alas, Waiter Rant is by one waiter who depends upon his anonymity as he blogs about his job while still in the trenches (he has since been revealed to be Steve Dublanica). Dublanica finds himself middle-aged and without steady employment, so takes a wait job as a stopgap between careers--and then never really leaves. The rest of the book follows his adventures and misadventures with the surly kitchen staff, incompetent wait staff, and the snooty, entitled patrons who can make a waiter's life a living hell. I assumed (based on the description and various blurbs) that all of this would be funny. Except it's not. By one-third of the way through, it failed to elicit a chuckle, a twitter, a smirk, or even one of those weird laughs that consist of basically blowing air out of your nose really hard when something catches you kind of off-guard and you're not sure if it's appropriate to laugh. And I like to think that I'm not humor impaired. I laugh and laugh often. The problem here is that being cynical is not the same as being funny. Now when funny and cynical come together with a dash of acerbic wit, it can be a beautiful and miraculous thing (I'm looking at you, Anthony Bourdain), but there's no magic here and I'm reading it because--once again, I'm looking at you Anthony Bourdain. The other reason it failed to entertain me is because its main message seems to be that people suck. And they do, I'll not argue against that. But waiters don't have the market cornered on I-don't-get-paid-enough-to-put-up-with-ungrateful-and-crazy-all-day-long. Anyone who has any job that requires contact with the public knows this spiel. I've been a waiter, a cashier, a secretary, a teacher and the dynamic is always the same--as long as there's a customer, someone's going to be an asshole because you're there to serve them and, by God, that means doing precisely what they want when they want it and if not then they will be talking to your supervisor. Having lived this, reading about it is not how I want to spend my hours away from work.Throughout, Dublanica comes across as some kind of super-waiter and, while I have no reason to doubt that he was good at his job and took it seriously, his stories fail to come to life as he seems incapable of portraying himself as flawed. He always seems to have the upper-hand and becomes the sage keeper of knowledge for the younger employees. It also makes the dining experience seem all about the waiter: what's best for the waiter, how to keep your waiter happy, tips that help make the waiter's job easier, etc. as though it's the customer's job to cater to the waiter. Now, as previously mentioned, I've been a waitress (briefly; as part of my training, I was seriously told to "kiss the babies and flirt with the old men"--homey don't play that game so apparently my "perkitude" wasn't up to their standards and I was unceremoniously fired). And, yes, people can treat waiters terribly and there are things one can and should do to make a dining experience pleasant for all involved. Most of those things involve simple human decency. But Dublanica makes it sound like such a one-sided affair that waiters should be leaving tips to customers who jump through all the hoops outlined in the book to make it a pleasure to serve them.While some of the information about the dynamic that exists among the employees in a restaurant is mildly interesting, there's nothing really surprising here. Cross posted at This Insignificant Cinder

[erikawastaken · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Loved it. Picked it up because a friend recommended after I finished Kitchen Confidential. I almost wish the appendices weren't included though. The narrative was fun, but they pushed it into bitchy.

[coloradogirl14 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I'm attracted to work/career memoirs, particularly if they involve humorous stories about working with the public. I've never worked in the restaurant industry, but I still found Steve Dublanica's memoir to be fascinating, hilarious, and horrifying all at the same time.

The book covers all sorts of stories, from his first time waiting tables to the time he served Russell Crowe, to the couple who threw a conniption fit because they couldn't get a "good" table in the back during the dinner hour. Dublanica has already classified himself as a cynic, but he spends a fair amount of time in the book analyzing why these customers (and other troublesome diners) behave the way they do. His conclusions point to an excess of narcissism and the prevalence of a culture based on instant gratification - a cynical and depressing perspective of the American population to be sure, but as Dublanica reminds us, 80% of the people coming into a restaurant only want to enjoy a good meal. It's the other 20% that are raving psychopaths incapable of functioning in the outside world.

In addition, here's a lot of insider information about how restaurants are run, why so many restaurants collapse under subpar management, and how some corrupt owners use blackmail and general bullying to keep their pockets lined and their employees obedient. Makes me grateful that I've never worked in the food industry before...

For anyone who works customer service or works with the public, there is a lot of relatable material in here, regardless of your profession. The only downside to this was that I tended to relate a little TOO much and found myself getting angry while reading this book. Not a pleasant sensation, but if Dublanica's intention was to make people care about what happens in the restaurant business, he succeeded tenfold.

And as an added bonus, he includes a couple of appendices towards the end about how to be a good customer the next time you go out to eat. (For example, it's always best to ask for separate checks BEFORE the waiter takes your order. Otherwise it just creates an extra hassle at the end of the meal.)

Recommended for: anyone in the food industry, anyone with an interest in work-related memoirs, anyone who has had to work customer service, anyone who likes their reading with a healthy dose of dry humor and cynicism.

Readalikes:

Weird Things Customers Say in Bookstores - Jen Campbell. While this book focuses on the book industry instead of the food industry, and is a collection of small snippets from multiple book store employees as opposed to an actual memoir, it's absolutely hilarious and easy to relate to.

Cruising Attitude: Tales of Crashpads, Crew Drama, and Crazy Passengers at 35,000 Feet - Heather Poole. This memoir's combination of juicy gossip and eye-opening information gives readers an inside look at the world of a flight attendant.

Heads in Beds: A Reckless Memoir of Hotels, Hustles, and So-Called Hospitality - Jacob Tomsky. Just like Dublanica, Jacob Tomsky never INTENDED to work where he does, and now he has a huge list of stories that chronicle the highs and lows of working in the hospitality industry. Plus tips on how to get the most out of your hotel stay.

[fyrefly98 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Summary: Steve didn't ever imagine that he'd find himself starting out in the restaurant business waiting tables at the age of 31. He also didn't imagine himself starting an anonymous tell-all blog about the ups and downs of the life of a waiter, and he probably really didn't imagine that blog winning a bunch of writing awards, and eventually being parlayed into a book deal. But it did, and this is the book. Much like a front-of-the-house version of Kitchen Confidential, Waiter Rant provides a behind-the-scenes look at what's really going on among the servers of your favorite restaurants. Dublanica suggests that people let their guard down when they're eating, even when they're dining out, and the things that your waiter has seen and heard range from obnoxious to outrageous to truly touching. He also covers topics like tipping and why you should do it (and how waiters can recognize bad tippers long before the bill finally arrives), tensions between the owner and the employees and how that can affect the service, and why people become waiters in the first place, why they stay, and what can happen to them along the way.Review: This book was basically like literary candy for me. I mean, I loved Kitchen Confidential enough to convince me that I didn't hate memoirs as a genre, and I've read several other restaurant memoirs in the intervening years (Blood, Bones, and Butter, Heat and Service Included). Waiter Rant takes an approach that's more similar to Kitchen Confidential than the other two, in that while it is a memoir, and does have stories about the author's career path, and previous jobs, and personal life, and coworkers, and transition from waiting tables into writing books, etc., a lot of the book is much more general. Dublanica - who was anonymous while he was writing his blog, and prior to publication of this book - tells specific stories about things that happened to him, fights and flirtations with his coworkers, particular problematic customers, how things were at his restaurant, but he himself is only very rarely the focus of the story, and he always manages to bring it back around to a generalizable topic, a point that would be applicable to any waiter anywhere. I appreciated this, because that's what I was there to read (and fortunately, the parts that are more about the man than the job were also interesting, well-written, and mostly brief).A lot of what Dublanica says is common sense (or should be): be a reliable and generous tipper, don't try to snake a better table by pretending to be a friend of the owner (particularly if you're going to be belligerent about it), don't expect awesome service during Mother's Day brunch, etc. But he also reminded me of something that should have been obvious, but aren't necessarily - particularly just how much your waiter sees, hears, and notices. He doesn't talk a lot about the possibility of your server adulterating your food, but it turns out that there are other, subtler ways a waiter has to counter bad behavior of various kinds. (I will admit, I am now a little more self-conscious when dining out, not because I'm ever badly behaved, but because who knows which waiter is listening to and judging my conversation?) Overall, did I learn anything about the food service industry from this book that I hadn't already gleaned from other things I've read and seen? Not really. But that doesn't mean that I didn't enjoy the heck out of myself while reading it. 4 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: Kitchen Confidential and its ilk of behind-the-scenes day-in-the-life type memoirs are the obvious readalikes.

[melissarochelle_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Interesting insight into the life and times of a waiter. I certainly will be more aware of how I treat my server next time I eat out!

[mawls · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An entertaining read about life as a waiter. It definitely is capable of making one empathize with those in the industry. Many funny stories and a sarcastic tongue make the book!

[psychedelicmicrobus · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed this tremendously- a quite cathartic read for anyone who has done time in the service industry. It's funny, too. I didn't expect to be unable to put it down, or to finish it so quickly. Very well-written, not whiny or adolescent in the slightest. It's really a memoir, but it reads like a novel. It isn't boring or self-serving. It isn't a vanity project. A page-turner.

[trcovell · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Dublanica weaves stories from his work as a waiter into a compelling tale. The anecdotes and episodes, largely from his blog, have been structured around several arcs. Most obvious is the calendar year, but there is also Dublanica's waiter career and personal life. In fiction, it's a sign of poor writing when you learn more about the author than the characters, but as the title suggests, this is essentially a personal essay. I've never been a waiter, but have worked in a variety of low wage service positions. This book didn't tell me anything new about service jobs or working with customers, other than confirming that wealthy customers are just as rude as everyone else. I've worked in fast food, while Dublanica worked at a high-end restaurant. As for the particular challenges of Valentine's Day and Mother's Day, I know those all too well from the other side of the table. However, Dublanica makes well written observations of his customers and himself, with the fireworks incident being particularly poignant. Stories of cheating spouses and pushy business people getting well deserved comeuppances are always fun to read. The heart of the book is the autobiographical (and occasionally biographical) observations around finding relationships, meaningful work, and personal happiness. Most of the time Dublanica does not dwell too much on these concerns, but they are always present. He eventually realizes that writing is an outlet for his skills and interests, and towards the end, the book is about how the book came to be. A short chapter added to later editions discusses his post publication success and offers some writing tips. Again, the tips are not so much new as well expressed. He notes that, like relationships, “the romance of writing can also wear thin real quick.” To make either work requires “making time for it - whether you feel up to it not.” For wannabe writers in dead end jobs and unsatisfying relationships (not mentioning any names here), this book is inspirational. Yes, if you can observe and write well (and work at it), you can not only be published but be a best selling author. Dublanica went on to write a second non-fiction book on tipping, Keep the Change: A Clueless Tipper's Quest to Become the Guru of the Gratuity, which received some negative reviews for being less personal than Waiter Rant. I've no idea what he is doing now, but I'd like to see him turn his easy style and personal observation skills and insights to fiction.

[bookwormteri · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Good, but I wanted more dirt. I haven't read his blog, but he is a very good writer and the book was a breeze to read. I just felt unfulfilled after it. And, just so you know, when I go out to eat, I am an excellent diner...

[swedechick · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I thought the book was quite good. If possible, I would have given it another half star. There are only two things that stop me from giving the book a 4 star rating:1. Like many others, I think that the blurb by Anthony Bourdain was slightly misleading and raised expectations a little too much. (I absolutely adore "Kitchen Confidential".) To have Anthony Bourdain praise the book might change the merits upon one views the book, I know it did for me. (Admittedly, Bourdain's public profile now versus when the book and blurb was written is remarkably higher.)2. Without having read the blog that the book is based upon, I think that some of the stories might have been altered a little too much to better suit the format. While on the topic of the blog, I find the references to it slightly distracting, especially in the Russell Crowe chapter. I do realize that creating a successful book out of a successful blog isn't easy, and that is not where my issue lies. I just feel that the "promoting" of the blog is a little too frequent.

[mlake_22 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

If you have worked in a restaurant much of this will sound familiar. I enjoyed reading that someone else struggled with difficult customers, stupid questions and impossible bosses.

[clivebeale · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

"The front-of-house version of 'Kitchen Confidential'" this is not (sorry Tony). It's a vehicle for Dublanica's cod-philosophical musings with a few tame stories about the waiting trade thrown in. If you think that I'm being harsh, try this: "My psychological makeup is composed of many factors, but I think my fear of destruction is partly related to learning I had a twin brother who died at birth." Or how about, "The Bistro's been like a womb I've been afraid to leave" or "I learned that love is only one ingredient among many in a relationship". I could go on. And on. And on. He does. Cod 'n' chips, innit.Where's the gonzo? Where's the schlock horror? Where's underbelly? Where's the inside stuff that we don't know already? The chapter titled `Substance Abuse', for example, is mostly spent informing us that service staff often drink a lot. `Vengeance is Mine' should have been a litany of outrageous, devious, laugh-out-loud one-upmanship. Instead we get pranks that your eight-year old daughter might come up with: one waiter asked if the mistress of a disliked customer was his daughter [*Blammo!*]. Dublanica told another man that his credit card was denied! When it wasn't! [*KaPOK!*]. Worst of all a whole, tedious chapter is given over to the fact that waiters like getting big tips but don't like people who are mean.I could forgive some of these shortcomings but the writing is just too clumsy. Dublanica borrows heavily from `How Not to Write a Novel': the forced, extended dialogues to make a clever-clever point; the esprit d'escalier bitching; the "I'm such a screw up" pre-emptive strike etc. etc.A wasted opportunity and solid proof that a good blog does not necessarily translate into a good book.

[samuraibunny · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Certainly an eyeopening exposure to the not-so-great practices of restaurants (although if you head to the back of the restaurant you can see for yourself). But more than that, this book is just about a guy who's stuck in a deadbeat job (no offense, but that was the vibe I was getting) and the experiences that went along with it. The woes of the workplace take a prominent place in this book: angry boss, uncooperative coworkers, work overload... Everyone can relate to those problems. This book, sprinkled - nah, dunked - in sarcastic humor, makes for a truly laugh out loud read.

[jolerie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Steve Dublanica went from being a seminary school drop-out to an instant New York Times Bestseller author, but in between those two stops, he spent a number of years waiting tables at fine dining establishments in New York. He saw the good, the bad, and the ugly of the restaurant industry and decided to document the inside dirt about people, waiters, owners and everyone else in the world in an anonymous internet blog. In the end, this blog landed him a book deal and the rest is history.Waiter Rant is the first non-fiction book that I've read in a LONG time and it was refreshingly different from what I am accustomed to. Steve Dublanica holds nothing back as he dishes out the dirt on the plight of so many American waiters just trying to etch out a living in the sketchy world of fine dining. He reveals so many of those little things that you would only know if you worked in the industry and I found myself engrossed and fascinated with restaurant hierarchy, restaurant politics, and all the "crap" that we as the patrons are oblivious to or that we are responsible for inflicting. More than just a restaurant book, Dublanica shares with the readers a real human story of achieving something greater than ourselves and the fear of failure that so often holds us back. Equal parts humour and witty insights, Waiter Rant was definitely a pleasant surprise as I took my first foray outside the real of fiction literature.

[tintinintibet_1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Kind of a cross between those "hipster in the big city" pop fiction books with Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, but I'm thinking you go choose one genre or the other if you're really interested.