Behind the scenes....

If you’ve never worked in a restaurant…there’s a lot more to it than just taking an order and delivering food….


Before the restaurant opens in the morning, someone has to be there early to get everything set up. Mornings, before we open, are actually a pretty cool time to be there, especially when someone brings in donuts. Now, if you haven’t had enough coffee….the first thing you do is brew a pot…nothing smells better than a fresh pot of coffee…sometimes I swear you can get the benefits of the caffeine just from the aroma of the coffee permeating the building…..(take a deep breath all of you coffee drinkers, you know what I mean)

Now, get busy! Polishing a water glass doesn’t sound like much, until you have to polish 80 plus glasses. Everything we need for the day has to be brought out….lemons need to be cut…gotta bring out the cream, make iced tea and lemonade, fill the parmesan cheese bowl, put the butter in a chilled container, get three bus tubs, one for glassware, one for silverware and one for dishes, remember to turn on the bread warmer, stock glassware, tea pots, ramekins, soup cups, table clothes, napkins, straws, to go containers, coffee cups, saucers, water glasses, fill ice bins, polish silverware and roll it into napkins, sample soup (optional), on any given day I usually forget something, so I’m sure I did here also.

It’s not unusual to see the owner vacuuming…again, someone has to do it. There are no little elves running around just dying to do this for us.

After you’ve placed your order, it’s blast off time for your server……we’re the ones who make your salad, ladle up your soup, fill the bread basket and get the dipping oil and/or butter. So please be patient when we arrive back at your with all this stuff, only to see that you quaffed down your diet coke in 5.2 seconds and weren’t standing by your side eagerly waiting to refill it. And why is it that people who drink diet soft drinks, on the average, drink twice as much soda as those who drink regular soda?

Throughout the shift, we are running racks of glasses through the dishwasher, washing, sorting and polishing silverware, and resetting tables. When the lettuce bin goes empty, we have to get another one, when the Ranch dressing runs out, we have to refill it, when the ice is low, (you get the picture), we refill it. And so it goes throughout the day…..if you’re not into multi-tasking, then this wouldn’t be a good fit for you.

When we close, everything that needs refrigeration has to back to the cooler, the bread warmer has to be cleaned out, more silverware has to be rolled, coffee pots need to cleaned, all surfaces need to be wiped down so they look shiny and new, and so on and so forth.

Where are those damn elves when we need them?