On My Work…
Street and co. Part one.
I have spoken before about how working in restaurants had contributed many defining moments to my young life. Through this difficult time it was still the case. For a few years on and off up until this point I had been working at a restaurant called street and company in downtown Portland maine. But in an act of defiance from being faced with returning to college I had chosen to return right as I was to go off to college.
Some fine dining restaurants are well oiled machines that are run to make sure that each minute detail is in the right place at the right time. They never run out of food, each person is an ideological carbon copy of everyone else. Even the cooks are mild mannered and amiable at these fine dining restaurants. This is not street and co.
Each night working at street feels as though if there was one less person working there in any position the restaurant would stop in its tracks. Each night it feels as though we are a matter of hours away from losing the battle and being unable to continue service. It feels like your grandpa's old stick shift chevy that has had makeshift upgrades sprinkled in over the night. It feels in my opinion, exactly how a restaurant should. Everything, item or cloth or piece of silverware is where it is because it needs to be so that the restaurant can continue to function. It is a blues symphony. It is a thing of beauty not because the food is excellent but because each cog maneges to keep turning even though many cogs are rusted out and there are no spares. It is the most enchanting entity I have ever been a part of. However, all this wonderment was lost on me at first.
I started at street when I was seventeen. My first position was a “servers assistant” basically semi-professional bitch. I would run around bussing tables, running food, and sprinting down to the dish pit to request “six lobsters”. Everyone would tell me how to do things or what to do and for my first few days there I was completely overwhelmed. The vail slowly lifted from my foggy eyes. I started getting glimpses of the intricate dance that was the waitstaff movement. One Step forward, stop, whirl called to the other room, bus a table, carry six glasses (left hand), eight napkins (under arm), as much silverware as you can fit in the top stacked glass, two dessert plates with one half empty coffee cup on top of it, inside the half empty coffee cup there is a small ceramic container of cream and one of sugar (right hand), the check (under other arm). Then four side shuffles around the squeezed together tables, move to walking forward, some grab the check from under your arm, seven steps to the kitchen, turn right, let the napkins fall from under your arm into the laundry bin, turn left let the half eaten pecan pie fall into compost, set down glasses, put dirty dishes in bin. Turn left again, walk into the walkway, dodge the host with guests by walking one step forward and one step up into “the city” (one of the dining rooms), whirl back around and watch them go. When they have moved on retrace steps to the table you had just cleared in “the burbs” (another dining room) whip it, set it, whirl, the other host is leading guests to that table “just in time” you think to yourself as you rush to answer the call of “runner!” from the kitchen. The intricate series of movements that hopefully took you less than sixty seconds repeats and morphs and repeats again and morphs again for the next four hours.
It was at this time that I began to appreciate the food. It was so fleeting, for many weeks I tried nothing, I was only forced to gaze at it longingly as I whisked it from the pass to awaiting, drooling, tables time after time. After a few weeks of this I was forced to conclude that if hell existed that it would not be far from what i was experiencing. Working from four to midnight, working with mouthwatering, stomach turning, gut wrenchingly good food. So close but yet so far…
Slowly but surely I got tastes here and there. Each night someone would fuck up in a way that caused food to be “wasted”. This was far from “waste” as far as I was concerned. The “wasted” food was quickly brought down to the dish pit for anyone with twelve seconds to spare. Grab a forkful of pasta dripping with butter, flaky fatty fish, decedent creamy confections or a hearty potato and sprint back to whatever you were doing. I tasted the best food I had had to that point in my short and uninformed life so far in these short, concupiscent, sperts.
With the repetition that working provided along with, skill and speed comes the flow state. The constant forward, backward, up, down, turn, punctuated with auditory glimpses of quiet classic rock coming from the lounge, overlaid with the blaring throng of rich new yorkers partaking in some serious indulgence, induced me into a trance of sorts. I began to really enjoy the middle four hours of work. It flew by and it allowed me to think about nothing else. The hours or roll ups and endless waiting around for guests to be done at 11:00pm dampared my love of the work somewhat. I left midway through summer to embark on my gap year.