I started in food service when I was a kid. My mom usually took me to work with her at my grandmother’s restaurant and while she worked I would watch TV, play video games, hang out with the employees, and generally explore the restaurant. Pizza dough was my Play-Doh some days. I feel like the employees helped raise me, they always felt like family. Sometimes I’d scrub up, put on an apron and help with prep, peeling hard boiled eggs to go into salads, or garlic to go into just about everything else. A few times a week I’d take a flashlight and go around under every table before we opened looking for quarters that I could exchange for entertainment.
I’d run errands with my Uncle Mike and whoever was assisting him, usually to the hardware store to get the right tool or equipment to address an issue at the restaurant. A few mornings a week I would go with my mom to my grandmother’s house where they would count the previous night’s take while I watched Nickelodeon and ate salami or bologna (jumbo, if you’re from Pittsburgh) sandwiches with mayonnaise. We’d stop at the bank to make the deposit on the way back to the restaurant, and it felt like everyone knew us and was happy to see us. I’d buy Spree from the old-fashioned gumball machine in the lobby.
Often in the summer my older sister and our cousins would get dropped off at gram’s house to swim in the pool or play in the massive yard while our parents worked. Snack was always Pepsi and cheddar and sour cream Ruffles; lunch was always pizza from the restaurant. Sometimes our aunts and uncles would show up and a party would break out, with us kids running wild and our parents relaxing and enjoying each other’s company. Gram’s place and the restaurant took on proper noun status; if someone wasn’t, ‘up the House,’ they were, ‘down the Restaurant.’
I bussed my first table at 7 years old. One of the waitresses taught me how to separate plates, bowls, cups, silverware, and trash, how to clean and sanitize the table, and how to reset it. I still set tables the same way, napkin on the left splitting the edge of the placemat, fork on the outside, knife on the inside with the blade facing the fork. I took my $1 per hour wage and put it right back in my grandmother’s pocket, converting it to quarters and playing video games or the claw machine, which my sister and I routinely cleaned out. I remember back then we had games like Commando, Rally-X, Tron, Dangar, Batman, and of course, Pac-Man. At some point the pizza take-out area switched to pinball machines and I got pretty good. I remember the sights, sounds, and smells so well. When I make pizza at home and use too much ‘moon dust’ to get the pie off the board and into the oven the smell of cornmeal and flour smoking on my pizza stone brings me right back to that place and time. My smoke alarm normally snaps me out of it.
The restaurant was almost always packed and was my favorite place in the world. I was proud to be part of something so many people loved. Our pizza was the best in town, it even said so on the back of our shirts. Everyone had a favorite dish and were happy to tell you about it. I’d play cards with the regulars or just sit and hear stories from their lives. Sometimes regulars came to work at the restaurant. One of them swore up and down she had a ton of bartending experience and needed a bartending job to help her pay for CPA school. She had never poured a drink for anyone other than herself, but my aunts and uncles didn’t know that and hired her. She went on to be a successful accountant, and one of my grandmother’s closest friends for nearly five decades.
To me, restaurants are far more than just a place to get fed. They’re a place to go to celebrate together, to mourn together, to start something new together. Sometimes they’re where you go just because you don’t want to be alone. I think everyone should work in food service at some point, just to understand the level of interdependence it takes to serve the public, and to gain the perspective of how what seems like a simple request can require a whole team to fulfill. Done well, restaurants are like ducks, and customers never see how quickly the webbed feet are paddling to maintain that forward progress.