My only day as a waiter was a difficult balancing act
MY first hour as a waiter had started ignominiously. As I made my way across the beige-marbled floor of the lunchtime restaurant, to table number three, two empty wine glasses and a bottle of Chilean house white balancing precariously on the tray in my right hand, I slipped.
I swayed, the chilled bottle and glasses doing cart-wheels mid-air. With customers looking on in pained amusement, I kept hold of the feckin’ things and made it to the table.
Things were about to get worse: one group kept changing their minds, wanting something else at the last minute; and a fight with the toilet-paper dispenser in the downstairs disabled loo reduced me to hysteria.
So how did all this Fawlty Towers-like imbroglio come about? Travelling back and forth in recent weeks to my home town of Roscommon, to stay with my mother, who is just out of hospital, I met a friend, Martin Bennett.
He had been head-hunted to launch a new up-market townhouse restaurant and bar, called Jackson’s. which was overseen by head chef, Jasim Dewan.
Now, Martin knows restaurants: his glowing CV includes stints at the Dorchester Hotel on London’s Park Lane, the QE2 luxury liner, and the award-winning Rockglen Hotel near Clifden, Connemara.
Spread over 13,000 sq feet, with 150 ‘covers’ for diners in one sitting, nine guest rooms on two floors upstairs, a designer bar and a kitchen the size of a small house, the re-launch of Jackson’s was no small feat.
Being back in Roscommon and having worked for my uncle in his bar/restaurant in Clifden 30 years ago, as a student, I said I was happy to help out as an unpaid favour.
"Let’s see," was his less-than-enthusiastic response. "I’ll call ya if I’m desperate."
Hardly a ringing endorsement, but with the restaurant flying it with the launch on St Patrick’s weekend, and Mother’s Day on the horizon, I was called in.
Initially, it was good craic. I put on my waiter clobber, was shown where to pin the orders on the service board (near the kitchen door), and how to handle service as the chefs ‘plated up’, all like a scene from one of the myriad of restaurant programmes on the telly.
A friend, Patricia Mullaney, came in for moral support.
As the owner of a popular bar in the town, Patricia, too, knows her stuff.
She ordered home-made fish-cakes (€7.95) and a glass of wine (€5.25), and I made sure I entered the kitchen through the door on the right, and exited by the left-hand door, so as not to cause a culinary road-crash. I took to it like an adult back on a bicycle.
"How am I doing," I asked Patricia? She smiled patiently. "It’s good that you’re not too busy just yet," she replied. Great: another ringing endorsement.
I soon found out what she meant.
Restaurant now busy, one group, polite but aloof, placed their order. Then, as we brought the plates out — turkey and ham, special of the day — they suddenly decided to have soup for starters.
So back the plates went, the meals to be redone, the chefs checking my dockets with the justified, and irritated, precision of the professionals that they are, all of us smiling away: the customer is still always right.
Then, disaster struck. With the place hopping, Martin pulled me aside. "Do me a favour: run upstairs and get toilet rolls for the disabled loo."
Now, it hardly takes a degree from Trinity or UCC to change a loo roll, does it? Wait and see.
Because, in a manoeuvre that genuinely took me nearly half an hour of anguish, up and down stairs twice, diners looking for service, the dispenser in question was a big plastic white yoke: to place the loo rolls correctly involved the intricate, finicky task of clicking little red-and-blue wheels and clips to insert the bloody things.
It was like conquering the Rubik’s Cube. After four, frantic attempts, fingers trembling, the sweat genuinely pouring off me, I finally clunked the feckin’ lid down. Back on the floor, the other staff looked at me incredulously: I’d been in the loo so long they must have thought I’d had a dose of dysentery.
That fiasco aside, my short time at the coal face came to an end on Saturday afternoon.
And my panicked experience prompts a larger, apposite question: have us Irish, as diners and customers, become more polite or even ruder?
From my little experience that weekend, and from talking to friends in the business across the entire west, the surprising answer is that we are, in fact, now better-mannered than we have been for many years.
As one friend, who owns a famous restaurant in Co Galway, told me: "You still get some awkward ones, and in the madness of the Celtic Tiger, there’s no doubt that, with all the money then being flashed about in such a macho, show-off way, people thought they had a right to treat staff like dirt."
"Now, with half the country brought back down to earth or ‘NAMA’d up’, people are more humble, less showy and, crucially, more accepting of people working in the hospitality business. Look, at least a waiter has a job."
Funny how things change. And funny also, that, in my inept performance at Jackson’s, not one customer showed the faintest sign of arrogance or annoyance.
Lucky, again, that it was St. Patrick’s Day weekend. Because with me taking the orders in a job that takes no prisoners, those customers displayed the patience and manners of a saint.
