When I was young, I logged a lot of hours as a waitress.
None of those hours were logged in any place fancy: no executive chefs, no sous chefs, no tall white toques.
My first waitressing gig was at the neighborhood Big Boy, where at any given time there were two or three guys manning the line, grilling up the burgers, frying up the onion rings. John. Danny. Timmy. Bob. Don. Mel. The other John, who worked in the basement prepping items for the line. I seem to remember him breading the onion rings.
I don't remember all the fellows - and they were all men (or boys-to-men) - who I met during my two summers and one Christmas vacation working there, but they were a combo of blue collar, hardworking guys and hippies, who weren't quite as hardworking as the blue collars, but tended to be pretty interesting. John (upstairs John), Danny, and Timmy were brothers, and genuinely nice men. (And cute.) Bob was a nasty a-hole. Don was okay, but a bit rough around the edges. (I think he'd just gotten out of jail.) Mel talked about writing a novel called 86 that Dream. John (downstairs John) was a very handsome Jamaican guy who loved Tom Jones, and blared his music.
Sometimes the cooks fought with each other. Sometimes they yelled at the waitresses. But the only violence I ever witnessed at Big Boy was when a busboy had a bit of a breakdown and started beating his head against the cement block wall in the basement.
Union Oyster House, my next waitressing stop, was far fancier and more upscale than Big Boy. It was a big tourist destination, had a full bar, some fancy - or what counted for fancy 50+ years ago - menu items (Oysters Rockefeller, Lobster Thermidor), and had supposedly been a haunt of pre-Jackie JFK when he was a young Congressman representing Boston. (Amazing to think of it now, but when I waitressed at Union Oyster, JFK had been dead less than 10 years.) All that, but no head chef toque-wearing nonsense.
We had cooks, mostly Jamaicans, a couple of Greeks who mostly handled the raw shelfish and steamers, and a salad maker named Willie who made salads and shrimp cocktails with a perpetual stogie hanging out of his mouth. His big line to all the waitresses, which he must have repeated dozens of times each day was, "I had a dream about you last night. We was making love." The Greek guys spoke very little English, but were always inviting the young waitresses out to the Club Plaka. (One night we actually went and had fun slurping down retsina shots and doing some sort of circle dance with a scarf.)
The Jamaican guys were riotously funny, if you consider occasionally frying up cockroaches in the Fisherman's Platter mix riotously funny. The funniest thing they did happened on a night the power went out. They had a small generator that could keep some lights on, but the AC was gone, and this was a hot August night, and for some reason the busiest night of the summer. The managers put candles out in the dining room and we carried on. The kitchen - as you can imagine - became unbearable, and the Jamaican fellows running the giant gas stoves and fryolators were bearing the brunt of it.
Their complaints fell on deaf management ears - The house was full! The show must go on! - until the cooks figured out how to shut the place down. They took off all their clothing, and the half of the waitressing staff composed of little old first gen Irish ladies from South Boston weren't going to go into any kitchen where there were a bunch of naked men. Bonus points that these men were all Black.
At the Oyster House, everyone yelled at each other all the time, but most of it was wisecracking, bitching, trashtalking. The only time I saw anyone berated was when I forgot to leave a chit in at the bar for a drink called a Golden Dream. Louie, the bartender, hunted me down in the dining room, grabbed my arm, and screamed at me, "Give me the dupe for that Golden Dream."
To finance a cross-country wander and a four month hitchhiking trek through Europe, I worked after I dropped out of grad school at Durgin Park for a year. Durgin, now closed, was - along with the still-surviving Oyster House - a venerable Boston tourist trap.
The owner during my time there was a temperamental maniac who put on a daily screaming and yelling performance, with the waitresses being his favorite targets. (His second favorite target: the customers.) It would take a book - or at least a long chapter - to describe just what an insane environment Durgin was. But I don't remember insanity among the cooks. There was Billy B. (Billy B. couldn't read, so couldn't tell what was on the order slips we submitted. But we had to call out the order when we hung the slips, and Billy B. flawlessly took care of everything from memory.) Henry-the-Elder. (Short and rugged, and a truly nice and kind man.) Henry-the-Younger. (Who looked like Ichabod Crane and was a good kid.) Glenn, the maniac owner's son-in-law who sometimes worked the line, was an object of our sympathy and pity.
Durgin was hectic and loud, and the owner was as nasty as they get. But he was so over the top, and the old gal waitresses, which Durgin was famous for, so knew how to play him like a fiddle (which they regularly did on behalf of the young gal waitresses he went after), that the craziness was pretty much a laughing matter. And I never saw abuse to or from the cooks.
My waitressing career ended over a half century ago, and wasn't at any high-end restaurants to begin with, but things seemed to have changed. The advent of the celebrity chef, the emergence of the international culinary scene, the world of the "must be seen there scene" restaurant, the extreme and extremely fussy food innovations. All this has turned many of the big deal restaurants into wildly intensive environments that are brutal to work in.
I read all about it in a NY Times article from March that focused on René Redzepi, a world renowned chef I had never heard of, who stepped down from Noma, a world renowned restaurant I had never heard of. Days before Redzepi had announced his down-steping:
The New York Times [had] reported allegations that Mr. Redzepi had punched, slammed and inflicted other physical punishments on cooks from 2009 to 2017. (Source: NY Times)
Yikes!Okay, yikes!, but something that's a lot more widespread than one chef at Noma.
The situation at Noma has apparently:
...lent new urgency to a conversation in the global restaurant industry about how to fix professional kitchens once and for all. Although past scandals and the #MeToo movement have resulted in better conditions at many restaurants, chefs said bullying and abuse still persist at too many others.
Dominique Crenn, the first woman in the United States to head a restaurant with three Michelin stars, said it is well past time to change the notion that performing at the highest level in the world’s top kitchens requires humiliation, intimidation or violence.
“We have been talking about this forever,” she said.
The up and coming chefs, it seems, just aren't going to take it any longer.
A growing cohort of chefs — people who are young, who are not men and who are very online — say they want to hold the industry to account for the abuse and discrimination that have persisted in restaurant kitchens.
...Tiffani Faison, a chef in Boston, said that public awareness of abuse in restaurants has risen since 2017, when celebrity chefs like Mario Batali were accused of sexual misconduct and dethroned, but the reckoning didn’t go far enough.
“We changed the curtains, but we didn’t remodel the house,” she said. “And we still haven’t cleaned out the basement where we hid the skeletons.”
Whether you're working in the unglamorous sorts of restaurants I worked in, or some $1,000 a plate glam spot with an eleven month waiting list to sup on the likes of vaporized truffle gnat eye, restaurant kitchens are going to be hot, tense, noisy, and hectic. Plus dangerous: boiling oil, hot stoves, knives. Comes with the territory. But they don't need to be toxic and abusive. No workplace does.
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Image Source: Etsy
