The Fringes

Restaurants are a great side hustle for writers. Personally, I waited tables through five U.S. states, for well over a decade of my life. And I’ve seen this scenario countless times: Someone enters a restaurant, usually with a group of people, and immediately launches into a verbal tirade about how they’re going to have a bad experience. Let’s call this person Bill, for no other reason than he needs a name. So, Bill’s food is never right when he goes out to eat; he could order no sauce and it comes out with sauce. He could order cheese on the side but the cheese will be on top… He already knows his food today will be messed up. Everyone else’s food will be right, but not Bill’s.

I could be standing at the table taking a drink order from each person in the group and as I round the table to Bill, well, forget about the drinks. He’s already angry about the food I haven’t yet messed up.

Every time I would think, “Not on my watch,” because there’s a certain confidence—some may say arrogance—in a well-seasoned wait staff. Challenge accepted, Bill. But inevitably, the die has already been cast.

I can bring the drinks and they’re perfect. I can bring appetizers and then the salads and all is still perfect.

And then I’d get the call to the kitchen that something was amiss. And I’m thinking, “Not Table 42. Not Table 42….”

I walk in the kitchen and the Chef is already yelling my name. “We’ve got a problem with 42.”

“Noooo!” I cry as if I just lost my hand to a lightsaber. “Ok, tell me.” And I’d listen.

And it would be some astronomically ridiculous situation: The new hire bumped the sous chef who sliced a finger and bled all over the dish and it was the last beef wellington we had prepared. The Chef is picking up the slack but now there’s no one available to work with the puff pastry. We’re also out of potatoes. Someone was plating large portions by mistake; we have more roasting now but it’ll be a half hour. A plate broke in half. There are shards everywhere. We need to de-shard the kitchen before we make any more food. The ship is going down.

And in all of this, I’m listening for what I can do to course correct. Maybe the ship is only listing. Maybe it can be salvaged. Because one way or another, the hungry people will be fed.

Everyone in the kitchen, from the chef line to the salad prep to the dessert table to the waitstaff passing through, everyone starts offering solutions. (You gotta love kitchens for that.) And suddenly, the servers organize and take turns washing dishes. The dish person is now freed up to decontaminate the chef line. In the great restaurants, the owner is there. On deck, helping out. The owner takes the sous chef’s place.

The owner, coincidentally, ordered the wellington. Now that everything’s falling apart, the owner can’t possibly sit down and eat the wellington and the potatoes they ordered.

“In theory, that makes one extra wellington in the house. Can I have that one?” I ask the Chef.

“Take it!” says the owner.

The Chef agrees, and starts calling out dishes, alerting everyone on the line where we’re at and what needs plated next. The ship is being righted.

I deliver the entrees to Table 42. I’m flushed from the stress and the steamy dish room, but in the low lighting no one notices.

Bill loves the wellington. His dark cloud has been abated.

“My pleasure,” I say. And that’s all I say. He tells me this is the best meal he’s ever had and the best service, too. He can’t believe it. I thank him and let him know I’ll pass on his words to the Chef. And I move on to my next table and everything that fell apart while I was in the kitchen for four minutes (that feel more like fifteen minutes in restaurant time).

The lessons here are, One: If you’re looking for things to go wrong so you can complain, then things will always go wrong. You go where you look. There’s absolutely no other accounting for the layers of the kitchen meltdown except that some bad mojo entered the restaurant. Systems that never break down will collapse under the weight of that kind of cloud. And Two: If you look for them, you will almost always find a team of people, usually in the fringes, who can fix all of it for you. No more dark cloud. No more mistakes in your wake. Only delicious wellington and perfectly roasted potatoes. Life sometimes is organized chaos, and it’s what the team in the fringes does best. And anytime you like, you can leave the land of “I’m the exception” for the Promised Land of “I’m exceptional.”

Go on. You deserve it.

~

My first book, Upside Down Kingdom, is based in the restaurant world and was taught in a college Humanities Course. Get your copy here.