The Worst Waiter in Seattle by David Stoesz
Cafe Minnie’s was widely considered to have the worst service in Seattle, even winning that category one year in a Seattle Weekly readers’ poll. When I worked there for a six-month period in 1995, I was the target of more customer complaints than any other server. Thus, my claim to have been …
The Worst Waiter in Seattle
What was my problem?
I waited tables on and off for five years and this was the only period when I gave bad service. Before Minnie’s I worked at hoity-toity restaurants where you let the customer taste the wine and all that kind of crap. Upscale joints with arty menus that that don’t use decimal points or dollar signs, like this:
braised tuna tossed with turkish peat moss 28
seared bric-a-bracs drizzled with palooka vinaigrette 36
These were places where they care about the exact spacing of implements, the precision timing of food delivery, and what grip the server should use on a bowl of soup. What amazed me when I started at Minnie’s was how no one seemed to care about anything. Servers could be rude or slow or whatever and it didn’t matter at all. There wasn’t even a floor manager. Maybe the relative freedom Minnie’s offered was too much for me to handle after all my experience with expensive, strictly managed restaurants. Another explanation is suggested by one of many nasty exchanges I had with Minnie’s customers:
Customer: Can I substitute a salad for the potatoes?
Me: No.
Customer: But [some other server] did it for me just the other day.
Me: He must have been in a better mood than me.
I was in fact always in a bad mood during this period of my life. This was one of those periods that only later do you recognize as one life’s low points, a time when every course of action seems to lead to the same sickeningly familiar dead end. On the slightest pretext, I would inflict my shitty state of mind on Minnie’s customers:
Customer: Can I get [simple request]?
Me: No.
Customer: But everyone else does that for me!
Me: Well, I’m not going to.
That kind of exchange would then lead to this kind of exchange:
Customer: (Handing me a single dollar) This is for you, but I want you to know that you were really bad.
Me: (Taking the dollar) Fuck you.
Customer: I know the owner. You’re in big trouble.
Me: Fuck you.
But a lot of customers deserved it
Servers learn to size up and categorize people according to how much they are likely to tip and how much trouble they will be. The best customers are Hawaiians, Texans, and flamboyant gay men, people who know how to have a good time and tip accordingly. The worst are Canadians, Europeans, and other foreigners who don’t bother to learn local tipping customs. Servers also dread middle-aged white women dining in pairs. They will occupy a table during peak dining hours (preferably a choice booth meant to seat four), split a single appetizer, and demand endless refills of iced tea while they discuss their divorces.
For me, though, the worst of the worst are hipsters, and hipsters are what we had in droves at Minnie’s. And it’s not because they’re stuck up–lots of customers are stuck up. Business executives, for example, tend to presume a social hierarchy with themselves at the top and service staff at the bottom. But at least they understand that their superior position is sustained by the expenditure of money. Hipsters feel their superiority to be innate, something that resides in the good taste that leads them to dress like gas station attendants. Haughty + cheap = insufferable.
Broadway junkies
Cafe Minnie’s is open 24 hours a day, and I worked the graveyard shift, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m. A manager at a previous job once told me that the ideal of good service is ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. On the Minnie’s graveyard shift it was more like stoners and drunks serving stoners and drunks. We started drinking soon after our shift started, and many slipped into the alley to get high before the rush at 2 a.m., when the bars closed.
And despite the crappy service and so-so food, the place was always packed after the bars closed. We got all kinds, but the only ones that caused any real problems were the junkies. They would go to the bathroom to shoot up, sometimes even borrowing our dish rags to tie up their arms.
One time this guy told me with a desperate smile that he needed to run to the cash machine before he could pay his bill.
“Fine,” I said, “but leave your bag here.”
He protested, “But I’ll be right back!”
“Then it should be no problem to leave your bag.”
Looking wretchedly unhappy, he left his bag and disappeared forever. I looked inside: hypodermic needles and pornography.
Shit-canned (sort of)
It wasn’t the junkies who finally sank me, though, it was the regulars who hated my guts. The complaints which the owner of Minnie’s was accustomed to laughing off had in my case become a mighty torrent whose righteousness was not to be denied. I showed up one day to find my name had simply disappeared from the schedule. But since no one had actually told me I was fired, I continued to work, picking up shifts from other servers who wanted a day off. This went on for about a week until the owner relented and put me back on the schedule. Soon after, I was moved off graveyard to mornings, perhaps with the notion that a sober hour of the day would make me behave in more civil fashion. But I was soon pissing off a whole new segment of customers.
Merle Haggard vs. Magic: The Gathering
My new shift started at 6 a.m., so the first customers were all-night stragglers. A lot of times I’d have a table full of players of Magic: The Gathering trying to ignore the fact that it was now morning and therefore time for all losers to get lost. (Magic, for those who don’t know, is a role-playing card game played obsessively by boys without girlfriends).
I devised a two-part plan to clear out this crowd. Part one: Crank up the lights. Part two: Crank up the country music. Part two was pretty much unpopular with everyone, including the non-Magic playing customers and the kitchen staff.
One time a guy complained so much that I made him a deal: Write me an essay, I said, explaining exactly why I should change the music. He borrowed my pen and presented his essay to me twenty minutes later. Expounding on the meaning of customer service, his essay explained that the environment of a restaurant exists to please the customer, not the staff. He had a point, but I had an irrefutable counter-argument.
“You’re sitting at a table, but you’re here with your friend and haven’t ordered anything yourself,” I explained. “You therefore do not fit the definition of a customer, and your wishes mean nothing.
“But I don’t like the music either,” objected his friend.
“Well, then you write an essay,” I said, walking away.
Fired again
Another time I chased after a pair of customers who hadn’t left a tip. “Fuck you!’ I screamed at their retreating car. I must have looked criminally insane, standing red-faced in the road holding up both middle fingers. I happened to be “training” a new server at the time, and she was a little, um, surprised. “So, that’s the procedure for when customers don’t tip,” I told her.
Later that day someone called and asked to speak to the manager. I put the phone aside for a minute, then picked it up and said, “You wanted to speak to the manager?” in what I thought was an impossibly stagy deep voice. But the guy bought it. He said he had been in that morning, and described pretty accurately what had happened.
“That is totally unacceptable,” I told him. “I’m very sorry that happened to you, and I will certainly have a talk with him.”
Let the healing begin
As my own imaginary manager, I did finally decide to fire myself, a decision that benefited all parties. I ended up waiting tables for another three years after leaving Minnie’s, while going to school and singing in a band, and never failed to be a model employee. I was the lead server and floor manager for a gourmet Japanese restaurant, and even wrote the employee manual (leaving out the part about what to do when customers don’t tip). My shirts for the remainder of my food service career were always crisp and sparkling white, my face freshly shaved and politely smiling. I attracted regular customers who requested to sit in my section.
Taking professional pride in your job builds self-respect, and good work habits carry over into all other aspects of life. Believing this, I am not proud of my conduct while an employee at Cafe Minnie’s. But, though I don’t want the title of this article to appear in the headline of my obituary, to have been the worst waiter in a major American city does have a certain distinction.
In a strange coincidence, the Minnie’s where I worked, in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood, went out of business just as I finished writing this. The original Cafe Minnie’s on Denny is still open for business, however, and is the only place in town where you can get an avocado cheeseburger at four in the morning.
But if you do go to Cafe Minnie’s, and if your server is rude and slow, remember it could have been worse. You could have been waited on by me.
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