The Best American Poetry

DL's Drink of the Summer: The Paloma [by David Lehman]

 

Each summer I specialize in a new cocktail.

One summer (2001) it was Bellinis with fresh white peach puree

More than one summer it was daiquiris  with fresh squeezed lime juice, quick-melting sugar, and rum

Two years ago: the champagne cocktail (Konstantin Frank's best methode champenoise, sugar cube, and bitters) was how we celebrated the advent of evening.

Last year I perfected my version of a Negroni: good gin, Cynar (instead of Campari), Byrrh (instead of sweet vermouth), lemon juice, served with lots of ice in a Collins glass, topped off with club soda.

This year I have been making Palomas for Stacey.

I owe the idea to Virginia Valenzuela, who, at dinner with Terrance Hayes at Cafe Loup in March, proposed the drink (tequila and grapefruit soda) when Terrance said tequila is the only liquor that doesn't give him a hangover.

In May Stacey had a similar drink at the Gotham, with coconut -and-hot-pepper infused tequila and a splash of Cointreau.

Now Stacey is trying to replicate the infusion, while I am content mixing
1-2 shot(s) Espolon blanco tequila 
splash of Cointreau
splash of Giffard pamplemouse liqueur
the juice of half a lime,
a lot of ice.
Shake vigorously.
Add San Pellegrino grapefruit soda.
(Nellie and Joe's Key Lime juice may be substituted for fresh lime in absence of same.)

If too sweet, substitute club soda for grapefruit soda.

I make winter drinks, too, such as Rusty Nails (scotch and Drambuie) and Kilt Martinis (Koval gin, drops of Dolon vermouth, stirred well in ice, with a spritz of Laphroaig scotch floating on top).

Cheers!

-- David Lehman

Ready to Serve: Smith & Wolensky - An Ongoing Sitcom of Sex and Late Nights by Jess Smith

    The day hostess at the Washington, DC Smith & Wollensky was a former Playboy Playmate named Elaine. Well into her 60s, her waist still curved in suggestively. Her breasts were high-set and firm (whether by push-up bra or genetics, I don’t know, though I’m guessing a mixture of both). When I was hired as the evening hostess, she eyed me with a look of both contempt and intimacy - she hated me, she hated herself, etc.

“How long have you been working here?” I asked.

“Since my last husband,” she said. There was no indication of how much time had elapsed within the word “since”, no clue as to whether he was dead or simply no longer her husband.

    I took the job at Smith & Wollensky the summer I graduated as a stop-gap between college and my “dream job.” I stayed well into winter, even after I procured the 9-to-5 at a small publishing house on Capitol Hill. Having not worked in food service since I was 16, adult restaurant life was an ongoing sitcom of sex and late nights and making fun of people who made more in a day than most of us made in a year.

    Though I never consciously entertained the thought, I know I believed I’d find a rich husband working there. It was one of the fanciest, most storied steakhouses in Washington, DC - just off the main drag of powerful law firms and NGOs on K Street. Evenings saw a regular patronage of attorneys, chiefs-of-staff, senators. A German prince dined there every time he was stateside, wearing a floor-length fur coat even in warm weather. Once, Governor Mitt Romney came in with his detail, a cast of muscled young Boston men straight out of Good Will Hunting. There was also a glut of pharmaceutical executives, newly wealthy and almost always slimy, hosting over-the-top parties in our event rooms. I was regularly tipped for no reason or given a bottle of expensive champagne with a wink from some some sweaty, tie-loosened bro on his way out the door.

    My powerfully feminist ideals were dulled by the starched glamour of the Smith & Wollensky clientele. This, coupled with the reality of being on my own for the first time. I had just moved in with my boyfriend, who was still an undergraduate, and felt that sudden rush of post-grad loneliness. He still had the structure of school, the promise of a future that academics offers. I was angry with him, regularly, for living a reasonable life.

    I also developed a crush on one of the waiters. His name was Joshua - not Josh, but Joshua. He was a struggling writer (of course), working there only until he finished his novel. He had a dog named Sundown. Unlike most of the other waiters, who were gassy and brash and had accepted a life of high-end servitude, Joshua and I were still young and bright. We were in on the joke, not the butt of it.

“Did you hear Elaine used to be a Playboy Playmate?” he asked me one night. 

“I know ,” I whispered, flashing him my brightest eyes. “I’d love to write her story.”

“I also heard she poisoned her last husband!” he added.

“What?” I said.

    Soon enough, I started to become a little slimy myself. Drinking all night, leaning into the attention of men who saw me as nothing more than what I was - there to serve them. What did I think I had to look down on from my drunken perch, treating champagne like a reasonable meal? Champagne I procured by chance, no less?

    The men I worked with also stopped treating me like a lady. They shared their bathroom exploits with me, tales of cheating on their wives, and all manner of repulsive blonde jokes. Joshua quit for an editing job. The German prince stopped coming by. My life became late, and later than that. I was dragging myself out of bed at 9:30, squeaking into the office at 10am. (I’m lying to you even now - I was sleeping until 11 or later. It was not the ugliest, laziest thing in the world, but it was close.) My job at the publishing house - not to mention my relationship with my boyfriend - was in jeopardy. I was slowly, deliberately giving up a great job and a great love for a nothing job and the shady promise of a millionaire husband. A husband I didn’t even want.

    One afternoon, during our shift change, I got up the nerve to ask Elaine about all the rumors. I was too hungover to be hesitant.

“Yes, I was a Playmate,” she answered without looking at me. “And I worked at the first Playboy Club in Chicago.”

“Wow,” I said. “That must have been fascinating.”

She shook her blonde head.

“It was the same as here. Just a big game of grab-ass.”

“No,” I said. “This is a steakhouse...it’s so...different….”

“Okay, honey,” she laughed. “Just because the outfit’s different doesn’t mean the job is.”

“Well did you poison your husband?” I blurted.

“Which one?” she smiled, pulling on her coat to go.

    I’d like to say I quit that very same day, but that would’ve been too smart of me. I stayed for a few more months, weaning myself off the late nights and trying to do a better job at my better job. As far as I know, Elaine is still the day hostess there, foxy as hell at 75 and teaching foolish younger blondes how to move on with their lives.  

Originally from Georgia, Jess Smith now lives and works in New York City. Her work can be found in Sixth Finch, Phantom Limb, Ghost Town, The Best American Poetry Blog, Lumina, and other journals. She received her MFA from The New School in 2013.

 

Ready to Serve: "We don't need you to be perfect." [by Chelsea Whitton]

To be an excellent waitress or bartender, it is good to be physically coordinated and a linear thinker. I am neither of these. I am an unfailingly clumsy and largely disorganized person. It’s okay. I’m good at lots of other things.

I think I glamorized the notion of me as a surly, self-assured bartender long before I actually found myself in the role. Throughout college, I mostly earned a living caring for other people’s children. I had been a camp counselor before that. Sick of my demanding, underage clientele, perhaps I did fantasize about a job that, by its very nature, prevented me from ever having to wait on a child again. I did not realize then that tending bar can be very like babysitting, with only slightly more money and a lot less cuteness to soften the embarrassment of it all. 

In the summer of 2010, I had just finished undergrad and was still living in my college town. I was finally working my first post-grad, kid-free job: packing boxes at an embossing plant outside of town. It wasn’t glamorous, but it provided a nice break from the rapidly deteriorating situation with my college boyfriend. It was a seasonal gig with a definite end in sight, and I really liked the people I worked with. That said, it was clear that things were not magically coming together for me despite my shiny new Liberal Arts degree. But I was bearing up, I told myself. I was handling it. Basically, I had to get out.

So I moved home. There was a messy break-up. There was my parents arriving at the glorified flop-house where we lived, and covering their noses like those people on Hoarders, as they helped me gather what remained of my halcyon days, and load it into the car in bundles and piles.

Back in my hometown, a suburb of a slightly larger town, where no one I knew lived anymore, I set about sorting out my life. I applied to a temp agency. I interviewed at the mall. It was all very weird. Then I signed up for bartending school.

I could go on for pages about the various absurdities of my bartending alma mater. Its proprietor was Joanne, a middle-aged mom of two who wore three-inch acrylic fingernails and a waist-length, platinum party mullet. She had run several bars in Atlantic City in the 80s and somehow you just could tell she’d been the life of that particular party. We had textbooks. We took weekly tests. We memorized various acronyms for popular drink recipes, all of them completely ridiculous and incredibly helpful. A Blue Hawaiian is composed of Lite Rum, Blue Curacao, and Pineapple Juice; Hawaii is the Light Blue Pineapple state. Etcetera. The gist was you paid a certain amount of money to drive out to this shady-looking storefront in an unassuming strip mall every day, but once you got inside, the classroom was, for most intents and all purposes, a bar. Liquor bottles were filled with water food-colored to look like the real thing. Liqueurs were harder to replicate with dye, but they made sure that each bottle basically evoked the spirit of the spirit it was meant to represent. The “drinks” we made almost always came out muddy brown. 

I wish I could say that I entered into all of this with any sense of irony, but I was pathetically earnest and full of expectation every step of the way. I was looking for anything to which I could hitch my wagon, and this really did seem like a good enough way to pick up a marketable skill. I didn’t learn until later that bartending schools like this one are widely considered to be a joke by reputable restaurants and bars. After three weeks of daily lessons and a grueling practical exam in which I had to prepare twenty “drinks” in fifteen minutes, I received my diploma and was given the option to purchase my own bar kit from the school for thirty-eight dollars. I was told by my instructor that my name would go into a database of trained bartenders-for-hire and she would call me if she heard of any openings.

The call came a few weeks later. The local Elks lodge was looking for someone to manage their clubhouse. I had been passing my days doing chores and watching TLC on the basement television. Joanne gave me the details as I folded my father’s underwear and watched snow gathering in the little crook outside the basement window. It had been almost four months. I told her to schedule the interview.

 I suppose I’d expected something akin to a country club. It wasn’t like that. It was more like those rumpus rooms some kids had growing up—large oblong room with cheap paneling, sectional sofas, and a Ping-Pong table. The bar, with its oversized counter and comically cramped service area, reminded me of the one my second cousin had had installed in his McMansion a few years back. The interview was brief, conducted by Andy, an overweight construction foreman who was also chair of the House Committee. “We don’t need you to be perfect. We just like things done a certain way.” I smiled and said I would do my best. I was given a golf pencil to fill out my paperwork.

I was a bartender for the Elks lodge for about seven months, and it wasn’t that bad. There were the regulars—a motley crew of core Elks who came by most weeknights, to hang out, get tipsy like teenagers and, I eventually realized, to be away from their families. Each regular had a preferred beer. We stocked Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller Lite, Busch, and Pabst Blue Ribbon. These were the choices. It was explained to me right away that I would be expected to have the beer of each Elk’s choice cracked and waiting for them when they approached the bar. Should I mistakenly place a Bud Light before a PBR-drinker, I should understand that I would be committing the most serious of Elks Lodge faux pas. Gun to my head, I could probably list the beer preferences of each and every patron of that bar to this very day. I have brain cells that are currently, actively dedicated to retaining this information.

The core Elks also loved shots. They were on Jaeger Bombs when I started. They liked me to serve them in those little plastic washroom cups, and at the end of the night I’d hit the floodlights and find them littering the patio, slightly crushed, translucent, looking for all the world like deep sea crustaceans as I swept them into piles.

 When June came, the seasonal Elks arrived. These were family folks who bought summer memberships so they and their children could make use of the pool. Now, at the far end of the bar, a drive-through window, to which I’d never paid much attention in the winter months, slid and slammed throughout the day. Country music playing over the poolside loudspeakers seeped into my strictly rhythm-and-blues-filled bar. Soccer moms and baseball moms and swimteam moms with their leathery tans and neon string bikinis flocked to the window to order (did I mention that the bar doubled as a snack bar in summertime?) “three corn dogs, two rocket pops, a pretzel… oh! and a strawberry daiquiri with a 151 float, please. Thank you, Chelsea! How’s your Mama?” The tips had never been better, but I was now serving people I knew. The families of kids who’d been bullies to me in my teen years were now singing the praises of my frozen margaritas.

I drove the empty small-town roads back to my parents’ house in early morning and drank beers alone before the glowing basement television.

 When I found out I’d been accepted to the New School, I let Andy know I’d be gone by summer’s end. The word spread fast. “Why in the hell would you want to move somewhere like New York when you could live someplace like this?” “Oh honey, be careful. You’re a southerner. Those folks up there are mean.” Etcetera. I smiled and nodded. I cracked beers. I bought them shots. I’d saved the money that would nearly pay for my first year in New York City.

The last night I worked at the Elks Lodge was the annual end-of-summer Jamboree. They had the grill kids and the lifeguards handing out Jell-O Shots and sparklers, and I was three rows deep around the bar all night. I remember hitting my wall that day. I remember being tempted to walk out and light a match to this strange, exiled time in my life. Then, at the end of the night, T.R., one of my favorite Dad-tastic regulars, a core Elk, brought me an upturned baseball cap. It was filled to the brim with fives, tens, and twenties. “We passed this hat around the bar. Just wanted to see you off right. Good luck.” 

I know bartenders, and I’m not a bartender. Not really. I don’t think I ever had much talent for it. If I’m not careful, I tend to remember that time in my life as a kind of lacuna. It felt, in the moment, as if my life had somehow jumped the tracks. I had switched onto a different, undesirable course, and was now lashed to a certain, finite list of things I could expect to be and do. I think most people go through something similar, usually after college. It takes a few more years to see things clearly. It was always the same set of tracks I was on—or there are no tracks. The point is, I suppose, that figured that out.

Chelsea Whitton holds an MFA in poetry from The New School. Her poems have appeared in such places as Ilk, Sixth Finch, Bateau, Cimarron Review, and WomenArts Quarterly, among others. She earns her living as a copywriter and lives in Ridgewood, Queens.

Ready to Serve: "It's hard, and it’s hot, and it’s dirty, and you’re running ..." [by Alexandra Mendez-Diez"]

Sitting on the restaurant's patio looking at the former staff parking lot, waiting for takeout orders from the restaurant's "back door." Ownership has changed, there is a new chef running the place, and the menu has been updated from the 1950s. I particularly recommend the backdoor fish tacos, heavy on the cumin, with a jicama mango slaw. Take that mid-20th century!

There is the language of waiting tables:

Deuce, ticket, 86, walk-in, six-top, app, dupe, fire, monkey dish, expedite, station, set-up, on the board, in the weeds, all set?

The preciousness with which insignificant items are imbued:

 I would flat out refuse to let anyone touch my wine key, and on the rare occasions that I took pity, I’d watch my co-worker do so, never letting the generic piece of black plastic and twist of steel out of my sight.

The two separate apron pockets were to differentiate the blue Bic pens I’d indiscriminately hand out to customers to sign credit slips from the click pens, carefully guarded, which I would use to write out my own tickets.

From books, to clean rags, to trays, it was cutthroat competition with fellow servers. On arrival, the first thing would be to grab a black book. Vinyl with clear plastic pockets. It was the configuration of those pockets that determined which was the best, and once the correct configuration had been procured, ease of folding over, least ragged, and clean and dry were all factored in to get the most desirable. On a full night, the last person in would end up with half a book, the plastic torn, as useful as a scrap of cardboard.

A server learned how many clean rags they could get away with carrying on their person at the start of the night, and where to stash a few extras. Those most senior would know where others kept their hoard, and the obscure protocol to follow in a raid.

There was no real way to mark a tray as yours except in the moment it was laden with your tables’ food, or hoisted onto your shoulder. I once took a smaller, dirtier tray, and slammed it on the pick-up line in front of an extremely lovely woman I’d worked with for years because I’d felt she’d taken a larger, cleaner tray I felt I had rightfully claimed as mine, in mid-use. We didn’t speak for a week, and I don’t think our friendly camaraderie ever recovered.

The menu was unchanging. It had come straight from the 1950s. It was a set menu. To call it prix fixe would be to be putting on airs, but each entrée came with appetizer, beverage, salad, potato and dessert. Here were the appetizer choices: New England clam chowder, baked stuffed quahog, bluefish pate, fruit cup (a little glass dish of sliced melon, orange and grapes), and cranberry cocktail (a small tumbler filled with Ocean Spray, served on a saucer, along with a slice of lime if someone was feeling particularly inspired). Some people would ask about these items, others would laugh, and others would order unquestioning, as some of them had been doing for no less than half a century. It was offered without irony, just as the most ambitious menu item, speaking in culinary terms, featured Ritz crackers as a star ingredient (baked scallops). There was one aspect of the menu that changed, and it had changed a lot since the ‘50s. The prices. At the time I stopped working there, and moved up the hill to fine dining and a proper prix fixe, a plate of chicken fingers would set you back $26. On the menu they were referred to as chicken tenderloins, though they did come with an app, choice of beverage, salad (“garden,” pasta or cole slaw) and a slice of pie.

Then there was the repetition. Up the hill, with a French trained chef at the helm, there was always a long list of specials that needed repeating each night. But there, the kitchen had a creative flair for language. I used the term quenelle for a month without understanding what it really meant. It really does not mean much. One night a piece of fish would be served with a coulis, the next with a pistou, yet both nights the dishes were exactly the same. Down the hill, in the Basin, everything had a consistency that rivaled McDonald’s. Everything that went out of the kitchen was the same night after night, except for the rare occasions there’d be a special cut of beef  (a cowboy steak) or an overstock of swordfish odd cuts (swordfish casserole). For seven years I was listing off the same four flavors of pie: blueberry, chocolate cream, key lime and pecan. I always said them in that order. I was unable to say them in a different order. If I did not begin with blueberry I wouldn’t be able to arrive at pecan. And only when I did arrive at pecan, would I allow myself the slightest variation, alternating between a northern and southern accent in the pronunciation of that funny little nut. Peh-cawn pie or pee-kan. And I’d look up at my table of strangers and flash them my broadest grin. Their meal was drawing to a close, as was my performance for them.

Yes, waiting tables is hard, and it’s hot, and it’s dirty, and you’re running. You’re on your feet, hustling to make a buck, lifting groaning bus buckets of dirty dishes and balancing a six-top’s dinners on one shoulder. Yet that’s not what makes it hard. The expression waiting tables comes from the serving and attending meaning of the word wait. But it is the other meaning that is the greatest challenge to a waiter. At the beginning of the night, or on a slow night, when you’re waiting for someone to come in, for something to do, that’s the hard part. When you’re station is full, and you’re going full on, it’s certainly not easy, and as physically demanding as it is, and as emotionally demeaning as it can sometimes become, it is not hard. So long as you’re busy, you’re never bored. While if you lose a step, forget a table, mishear an order, it can feel like the end of the world, there is just one thing your racing against: keeping someone else from waiting. That’s it. You don’t want the kitchen waiting on you to pick up dinners, you don’t want the management waiting on you to turn in your last check and most of all you don’t want your customers waiting for their food. And there are those moments, going full throttle, when no one is waiting. You’re right there on the line to pick up table two, table nine’s check is back to the cashier, table reset, and you’ve poured table six’s wine and are standing at the ready to take their order right when they are ready to give it to you. In those moments there is a transcendence of language. You are speaking to people, describing the difference between the broiled and baked stuffed shrimp, but all your explanations are rote. Paprika, butter, lemon are words falling from your tongue, but to you they are flavorless, only sounds you’ve repeated so many times before, and will so many times again. These are specific people, sitting in specific seats ordering specific foods off of a menu. But your pen moves, and the people in seats are numbered spaces on a ticket, moving clockwise, the foods they want is transformed into BS Shrimp, LOB bk, Single HB (bk), ½ + ½ no pot. Returning to table two, the words out are the management preferred “is everything to your liking?” There is liberation in that release from the multitude of meanings of language, freedom from thought. In that moment that you walk back towards the kitchen, tearing the thin carbon-paper dupe from your ticket, “order in!” grab a small tray and begin assembling apps, you live inside of an order of operations. Just as the little slip of carbon paper moves straight across the board, signs and symbols are joined to meaning by simple parallel signs. Equal signs are the only relevant punctuation marks. Soon enough table six will transform again, as you drop the much thicker half of the ticket, distilled into a single numeric value, cash or credit. 

At the time I worked there, this was the staff parking lot. This would be a contender for the most valuable piece of real estate in the US serving as a staff parking lot. It is such, because if it's ever built on, the restaurant loses it's main draw. During the summer months the sun sets dead ahead.

Alexandra Mendez-Diez was born in Boston and moved to Brooklyn, New York from Martha's Vineyard in 2004. She chose to live in Brooklyn because she liked how the buildings were lower, and the sky was so visible, but then they re‐zoned. She spent the 2009-2010 academic year in Granada as a Fulbright Scholar in creative writing. There are far too many things about New York City, and especially Brooklyn, which she missed desperately while away to list in a short biography, but tall buildings were not one of them. She has recently begun a blog at livesinbrooklyn.com. Alexandra curates Poets At The Yard reading series.

Ready to Serve: A Drunk Serves Drunks [by Nicole Santalucia]

(Ed note: This is the fifth in our Ready to Serve series. Find previous posts here. sdh)

Faye Dunaway and Mickey Rourke in the film Barfly (1987)

The next thing I knew I was waking up under a tree in Recreation Park next to a homeless man mumbling to himself. I was pissed off he woke me up in the middle of the afternoon. He looked at me dead in the eye. I lifted my head from a pile of leaves and a few stuck to my cheek, stained it orange. I must have looked like a pile of garbage. I told this man that I had no idea what he was saying then took a swig of warm beer from the glass bottle under my shirt. This man told me that there was dirt in my drink and when I looked down I saw cigarette butts at the bottom of the bottle. I must have found an empty bottle in someone’s garbage and grabbed it before making it to the park at dawn. After getting out of my waitressing job at O’s Pub at 11pm I hit the bars in downtown Binghamton then disappeared into the brush.

My routine at work involved hiding in the kitchen, and eating a few fries and peanut butter chicken wings then serving the basket of grease to some old man in a golf shirt. Sometimes this old man was my grandfather. He’d order two or three $1.10 drafts of piss colored beer during happy hour and I would try to pull myself together and make small talk. He paid with exact change and I would keep the money. By the end of the night I’d have an apron full of dimes and sweaty dollar bills. We’d reminisce about when I played basketball in high school and I’d try not to spill drinks. Carrying two beers was the most I could handle. I’d have to focus all my energy on the pint glasses, one in each hand, and take baby steps as I made my way from the bar to the table ten feet away. I remember biting the collar of my turquoise shirt and wiping my sweaty palms on my apron, crumpling dollar bills and not tallying the drinks on the check so that I could steal the money. This job didn’t last long. I passed out in the kitchen next to a bucket of sauce. I didn’t show up for work after that shift because I knew they were going to fire me.

The last shift I worked as a waitress in 2001 I licked the back of the toilet and had puke in my hair. The usual suspects came in and out of the joint and no one seemed to pay much attention to my reckless serving. Surviving as a waitress when I was twenty-one years old meant trying to act human and blend into society. O’s Pub was a little hole in the wall in Endicott, NY, a couple of miles from IBM, where my grandfather and uncles dipped computer parts in chemicals for a living. I think the land in this corner of upstate New York is poisoned with all those chemicals. And I feel like I drank that poison. I don’t trust my memory. When I think about the year I worked as a waitress I recall the times when I didn’t make it home after my shifts. I still wake up every day thinking it's a miracle I made it far away from that life.

Nicole Santalucia received her MFA from The New School University and her PhD in English from Binghamton University. She founded The Binghamton Poetry Project, a literary outreach program, in 2011. In 2013, Nicole won the Ruby Irene Poetry Chapbook Prize from Arcadia Magazine Inc. forDriving Yourself to Jail in July—published in January 2014. Her non-fiction and poetry appear in The Cincinnati Review, Paterson Literary Review, Hawaii Pacific Review, 2 Bridges Review, Bayou Magazine, Gertrude, Flyway: Journal of Writing and Environment, Burlesque Press and others.Nicole received honorable mention awards from Astraea Lesbian Foundation Writers Fund as well as the Allen Ginsberg Award. She teaches English and Creative Writing at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania.

Ready To Serve: Black Eyed Peas & Supportive Colleagues As Emotional Mise En Place [by Lindsay Daigle]

(Ed note: This is the third post in our Ready to Serve series. You can find previous posts here. sdh)

Eleven Madison Park

In 2009, my Saturdays began like this— I’m bobbypinning my hair into a bun, tying my tie around my neck, positioning my Relais & Chateaux pin on my vest. My cuff links I borrowed from the woman next to me who is tucking a green collared shirt into her suit pants. In this locker room, there are other women around me doing the same. Some are buttoning chef coats and slipping their feet into Crocs. Others are sharing hairspray and shoe polish, pocketing wine keys, unwrapping freshly dry-cleaned suit jackets. It is 3:30pm. Most of us woke up only an hour ago.

Anyone who has worked in the hospitality industry knows the special energy reserve tapping that is preparing for a dinner shift. And anyone who has worked in a 4-star restaurant in New York City knows just how intricate this preparation is. The perfect pleats in one’s tailored pants represent sharp and accessible menu/wine/spirit/area history/etc. knowledge. The shiny finger-print-free Alessi crumber, the pocket-sized torchon, purse hooks, and several black Pilot G-2 .07 pens… stand for all the bits of the emotional, mental, and physical groundwork necessary for a successful night in the dining room. In culinary kitchen terms, we call this preparation mise en place – “putting everything in its right place.”

In the women’s locker room at Eleven Madison Park, we put our gear and uniforms in their right places. But the emotional groundwork was a bit more complicated to lay (as it inevitably is anywhere). 

This level of fine dining comes with its own unique set of extremely high standards. Management, of course, expects a great deal from their dining room staff – dedication, knowledge, positivity, character. And guests do too. At EMP, we took pride in creating truly comfortable and comforting experiences for our guests. We wanted them to feel as though they were coming home for dinner. We always strived to – as the large poster in the EMP kitchen says – “MAKE IT NICE,” no matter what it took. (This is one reason for pristine uniforms and precise service points— If everything has a particular place, the guest doesn’t need to worry that anything might be out of place.)

 And although it was our guests and our managers who motivated the service staff’s level of excellence, everyone who worked at EMP was there because they first held themselves accountable for greatness, because they were solid and honorable. It was important to us to always open-hand serve, to be able to explain the origin of a Pimm’s Cup, to be able to say “yes” to any request, to never skip a beat. We wanted to make it nice. All told, that’s a lot of pressure, especially when you’re trying not to disappoint yourself.

So how does one negotiate this emotional mise en place before a shift? How many inches from the edge of the table should the base of the bread plate rest? (i.e. “table”/”bread plate” = “heart”/”soul”?)

In 2009, for us, it was the Black Eyed Peas.

I got a feeling… One of us starts singing. …that tonight’s gonna be a good night. The rest of us chime in with the ooo-hoo’s. We’re all smiling because we mean it. We’re in this together. We’re there because we believe in what we’re doing, and because we happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who have become our best friends. Our “anthem” is a sort of plea, an attempt at convincing ourselves that tonight truly will be great – even though this is really exhausting work we’re doing. It doesn’t take a lot of convincing though when we realize our emotional mise en place has already been prepared for us simply through the nature of the business. EMP attracts remarkable staff who put each other first before anything, who support each other like collar stays.

In his bestseller, Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business, Danny Meyer (founder of EMP) says, “Well before our staff members can extend any kind of meaningful hospitality to our guests, they need to first understand the primary importance of being on each other’s side. Mutual respect and trust are the most powerful tools for building an energetic, motivated, winning team in any field.” I’m not sure Danny had it in mind that his staff would translate “mutual respect and trust” into an all-out a cappella Black Eyed Peas locker room dance party. I think he’d be pleased though, because everything is, in fact, in its right place.

Lindsay Daigle is a PhD candidate in poetry at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, where she also teaches undergraduate writing and literature. She holds an MFA from The New School. She’s interested in the poetics of place, space, and melancholy; the ekphrastic process; as well as the intersections between creative writing and composition pedagogies. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barn Owl Review, Quarterly West, The Laurel Review, and elsewhere. 

Ready to Serve: "They Looked After Me" [by Mari L'Esperance]

(Ed. note: This is the third post in our Ready to Serve series. Find previous posts here. sdh)

For nearly three years in the ‘80s I waited tables at a waterfront steak-and-seafood restaurant in Southern California. It was popular with the boat crowd for serving up large portions of red meat and copious amounts of liquor. The job taught me worlds about human behavior. There was the customer who had his seven year-old son smell the wine cork before sending the bottle back. The drunk who bit into his wine glass. The couple who sat through their entire dinner listening to music on their headphones. I earned enough in wages and tips so I didn’t need loans to attend the nearby public university. I always had loads of cash. And I’ll admit the untouched food that customers left behind kept me well fed on many a day. My social life revolved around the restaurant, as I spent nearly every weekend night there. I knew it wasn’t work I’d do forever, just a way to get by until the next better thing, but looking back I realize it was more than a job. It was where I began to make my adult self.

I started in the usual way: as a hostess, shepherding hungry people through the dining room as the sun sank behind the boats docked in the marina—the din of alcohol-tinged conversation and laughter rising as the evening deepened. Hostessing was dull and didn’t pay, so several months in I decided to try my hand at cocktail waitressing. It looked easy and fun. I lasted one night. Having not grown up around booze, I couldn’t keep track of who had ordered which amber-hued drink (Was it bourbon? scotch? whiskey?). The servers’ complex code of colored swizzle sticks and dog-eared cocktail napkins baffled me. And I didn’t care at all for the skimpy uniforms they were required to wear. So I switched to food service.

After the required initiatory weeks of bussing tables, I was taken under the wing of the paternal and ever-meticulous Arvin, a Filipino-American headwaiter who took his work very seriously. Arvin was the first person ever to teach me that if you want to master something in life, there are no shortcuts—words I’ve not forgotten, but have at times struggled to live by. To watch him open and pour a bottle of wine tableside or to tend to his customers—all with seamlessness and grace—was to observe a consummate professional in his element.

Once on my own, I discovered I was no Arvin. Waiting tables was unglamorous work; lugging heavy platters laden with steaks, lobster, and slabs of prime rib, up and down a narrow flight of stairs several times a night, was a workout. I’d be sweating an hour into my shift. It was a male-dominated environment and my sister servers and I suffered our share of "honey" and "sweetie" and uninvited advances from customers who'd had one too many bourbons. Diners were alternately demanding, indifferent, and occasionally appreciative. A few snuck out without paying their tab. Summer weekend dinner shifts were the most intense: a cacophony of voices, dishes and silverware clattering in the kitchen, the broilermen yelling out orders over the sizzle and smoke of grilling meat, bodies milling and colliding. Somehow in this charged mayhem hundreds of meals were prepared and served, leftovers were doggie-bagged, plates were scraped and washed and dried and stacked, until it all wound down to clearing last tables, balancing cash drawers, scrubbing grills, and hosing down floor mats. Then we’d unwind for an hour in the bar before hauling our exhausted selves home.

I don't miss the work, but I do sometimes wonder about my co-workers: Arvin, who I imagined would be there forever—or Bob, who taught high school English and had an ill wife and a coke problem. Jim, an aging surfer who had been there forever, and was kind to me. Single mom Cathy, who supported me after a particularly stressful shift. And Gary, who teased me mercilessly and called me Shtanky, but with love. I was young and just beginning and they looked after me.

**All names have been changed for privacy reasons.

Born in Kobe, Japan to a Japanese mother and a French Canadian-New Englander father, Mari L’Esperance is the author of The Darkened Temple (awarded a Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry and published in September 2008 by the University of Nebraska Press) and an earlier collection Begin Here (awarded a Sarasota Poetry Theatre Press Chapbook Prize). Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine, co-edited with Tomás Q. Morín, was published by Prairie Lights Books in May 2013. The recipient of awards from the New York Times, New York University, Djerassi, Hedgebrook, and Dorland Mountain Arts Colony, L’Esperance lives and works in the Los Angeles area. You can visit her website here. 

Ready to Serve: "The restaurant was my rock" [by Anna West]

Anna West at Mabuhay Gardens in San Francisco

Waitressing saved my life. In 1983, I was playing bass in a San Francisco punk band and taking speed to keep going. Most nights I practiced or played in clubs, photographed other bands, or just listened to live music till morning. I lived an hour away in the East Bay, in a house with ten other musicians and strays.        

At 11AM each weekday, wearing clothes donated by another waitress, I worked the lunch shift at the Rocking Horse, a medium fancy restaurant in Lafayette. As if I were two completely different people, I pinned up my purple/red hair and put on a uniform with a very straight below the knee skirt to greet customers. Playing hostess while waitressing became my tenuous hold on normalcy.  Some days I showed up sleepless from the night before, sucking mints to keep my breath as sweet as I seemed to the regulars.

There were so many regulars (as is the case at most places) that I could really make some cash by remembering their names and which booths they liked and by letting my small town Pennsylvania Dutch accent shine though. Addressing Mr Irwin by name when he walked in with his clients and escorting them (with no reservation) to his favorite booth meant a $50 lunch tip. The restaurant also provided the only healthy meals I ate, with free salad and bread, five days a week.

Can you believe I managed to keep that job through crank dealing boyfriends, all night parties at Mabuhay Gardens, and sometimes no sleep for days? Bands came and went, so did boyfriends, but the restaurant was my rock, my parent, my path to the future. In a tiny bit of my partied out brain, the pride I took in being a good waitress kept me putting one foot in front of the other. I’d leave an apartment in North Beach at dawn and return to my other life, with food and cash and Mr. Irwin expecting me there from 11AM to 3PM.

After leaving the Bay Area in 1984, I never waitressed again. But I can still feel the waitress backbone that kept me going on the West Coast. And I always tip well.

Anna West is a painter and photographer now living in Beacon, New York. Her work has been exhibited in New York City and in Russia, Sweden, and India. Find out more about Anna here.

"Introducing "Ready to Serve: Writers and Artists in the Resto Biz "

I'm delighted to announce that today we introduce a new weekly series, "Ready to Serve: Writers and Artists in the Resto Biz." We got the idea after reading that Stephanie Danler had landed a two-book six-figure deal with Knopf while waiting tables in a popular West Village restaurant. One of her regulars was a senior editor for a major publisher; when she mentioned that she had finished her first novel, he invited her to send him the manuscript. 

So many of us, myself included, have worked in the restaurant business, and not just in NYC and L.A., where struggling actors support themselves while waiting for a break. We've been waiters and chefs, bussers and bartenders, at every kind of establishment, from rest-stops on super-highways to temples of haute cuisine. I invited you to submit stories of your time in the service biz. We begin posting those stories today. Check back later for Anna West's tribute to her San Francisco waitressing years.

(Watch at 4:20-5:20).

-- sdh