Working in a restaurant can be a real headache. It can be unpredictably busy, issues in the kitchen become problems the serving staff have to face up to, and customers good and bad can become increasingly difficult with each round of drinks.
One of the worst things about the job, though, is closing time. It’s tough enough to get everything tidied, cleaned and ready for the next day as it is, but it’s considerably harder when some customers won’t take the hint and get out.
It’s a curious breed of entitlement to sit in an increasingly empty restaurant without making any moves to leave – dinner’s long since done, staff are milling about turning chairs upside down on tables, maybe the lights are being procedurally turned off.
When those cues aren’t enough, serving staff generally need to take things into their own hands if they want to be in bed before midnight.
Writing in Food and Wine, former restaurant worker Daniel Lavery explained that, if customers didn’t catch the hint from a simple ‘We’re closing in 20 minutes’, he had another trick up his sleeve that rarely failed.
After reminding customers that restaurants do in fact close, Lavery would occasionally encounter people who thought the 20-warning didn’t apply to them. In that situation, it was time to bring out the big guns.
If they didn’t take the hint right away, I’d come back and repeat myself in 10 minutes, this time wielding a wet rag and aggressively wiping down nearby tables: You’re still here? I need to wipe all the tables down with this wet rag!” he explained.
“That always did the trick. The clean, wet rag is the universal sign of the server’s final authority, because it means you’re a cleaner now. I no longer live to serve; I live to wipe the crumbs away, and that includes customers. The cooks are all heading home. The busboys are long gone. Management is a distant memory. It’s just me and the rag now, friends.
“You hate to have to use it – it’s such an overpowered weapon in the table-waiting arsenal – but sometimes they drive you to it.”
Judging by the general vibe, we reckon Lavery took a lot of pleasure in wielding that overpowered weapon.
Hospitality is all about the tug of war between basic reason and customer expectations, and any win for the former is worth writing home about.
Featured Image Credit: Bloom Productions/Getty ImagesTopics: Restaurants and bars
Rachael Davis