Rolling Silverware Really Bites

Anyone who has worked in a restaurant knows what a roll-up is and I ain't talking about the fruit kind. I'm talking about the silverware that gets "rolled up" into a napkin and placed lovingly on the table in your station. This is only a facet of your job if you work in a high class establishment that uses linen napkins and not some skanky cheap ass bitch place that uses paper napkins, also known as most of the places I have worked. Doing your roll-ups usually is a part of your sidework at the end of the day. I personally never minded doing them because you got to sit at a table in order to do it and what other sidework is there that lets you sit? It's probably the last thing you do at the end of your shift and you just want that shit done so you can go home. I can't tell you how many times I have looked at a rack of sliver and figured that it was clean enough and rolled those bitches up into a napkin. Depending on the place, you have to roll a certain number of them to be considered finished. At Houlihan's we had to do fifty. We had to roll them up and lay them in a row of five and then stack five more on top of that until we had a big stack of semi-clean silver ready for the dinner rush. Since we all hated doing it at the end of the day, we started getting into the habit of doing our fifty before the shift started and then hiding them somewhere so at the end of your shift all you had to do was pull the stack from the hiding place, show it to the shift manager and call it a day. This eventually turned into a problem. When we had six servers who all wanted to do their roll-ups in the morning and then hide them, it meant that we were short 300 roll-ups to put on the tables for lunch. Now I don't know about your restaurant, but most of the time utensils are moderately important. So of course, that practice was put to a halt. Another thing we did to avoid the nuisance of rolling silver was to share the same stack. For instance, Jane, Randie, Corrine and I would together roll fifty. Jane would then take the stack to the manager to show him that she had rolled her necessary amount and he would give her the all clear. She would then bring the stack to Randie who would then go to a shift leader and show the same stack of fifty and also get the all clear. Then Corrinne would show the stack to a manager and then I would show it to the shift leader and then bolt the hell out of there because it would only be a matter of time before someone working the dinner shift would notice that instead of 200 roll-ups, there were only 50. That only worked for a few times before they caught on, but I think it was pretty fucking genius of us. Not to mention lazy.

The answer to this issue is clear. We should all use paper napkins and plastic utensils. Not only is it much easier for the servers, it is also cost efficient for the restaurant and also good for the environment. Okay, so maybe it's a bit more expensive for the restaurant, but all they have to do is add twenty cents to the cost of a soda and it will blanace itself out. And maybe it's not all that great for Planet Earth, but hey, we are talking about making life easier for servers and I think Mother Nature would want it that way.

Waiter, There's a Spot on My Glass

Have you ever had a table ask for a mug of hot water and then when you bring it to them, they use it to sterilize their forks and knives because they think they aren't clean enough? Usually, it's an old lady who does this and then she makes her brow-beaten husband do it too. It's like they think we don't have a highly skilled and well-paid dishwasher in the kitchen making sure each and every plate, glass and utensil is sparkling clean. All dishwashers I have ever worked with take immense pride in their job and want to ensure cleanliness for all. I should know, because it was my first job in the food service industry. Just kidding. Dishwashers don't give a shit. How many times have you seen a fork that had a dried piece of whatever the fuck on it and rather than going to find a new one, you just scrape it off and give it to a table? Or what about when you see a wine glass with lipstick on it? The right thing to do is get the lipstick off with a napkin and then run it through the dishwasher again but plenty of times, I feel that the napkin wipe is good enough. I'm not saying that it's right, I'm just saying that it happens. Whenever I eat in a restaurant I work in, I use the to-go utensils. The ones that come in the little plastic bag with a napkin, salt and pepper are the only ones that I know are clean enough for me. Picture the knife that is being used to spread butter across that delicious hot roll. That knife is the same one that I wedged under table 23 yesterday to keep it from wobbling. Or that spoon being used to eat smooth creamy vanilla ice cream? Yeah, I used that spoon a few days ago to cram down the sink and unclog the drain. Or what about the salad bowl? Yep, that was under the same sink last week catching the drip from the drain that I unclogged with the spoon.

One place I worked (crappy ass VYNL, 78th and Second) often had a problem with the dishwasher. The machine, I mean and not the highly trained man who ran the machine. It would not work and the poor guy would have to do it by hand. Or maybe the hot water was out so it was going through the machine but only using cold water. One day when I got to work, my co-worker told me to make sure to use plastic forks and to-go containers when I ate that day. I always did anyway, but asked him why. "No soap." Uh huh, we were fucking running the dishwasher without soap. Think about that the next time you're licking your plate clean. Bon fucking appetite.