By Anonymous
I’ve worked in food service off and on for 13 years, supplementing my income as a catering server and bartender. I’ve met some famous people, peed in a lot of fancy bathrooms, and gotten to take home thousands of dollars’ worth of rich leftovers. I’ve also seen some shit go seriously wrong.
Catered events function on the iceberg model: only a small fraction of the labor is visible, which goes for the fuck-ups too. I’ve been with companies that score work by underbidding the competition, only to then skimp on food — cue line cooks grimly unwrapping Costco chocolates and plating them. But mostly, my employers shave off labor costs. That means habitually understaffing. Guests will already be arriving while floor captains are still mounting fussy centerpieces.
More prosaically, though, catering staffers are unnecessarily overworked, which leads to mistakes and contributes to a general atmosphere of “Well, my boss doesn’t give a shit, so why should I?” At least, that’s what I assume that chef was thinking the time I observed her drop a tray of baked Cornish game hens on the floor and pick them all right back up, continuing to prep them for a meal. The really gross part was that she dropped the food on one of those cruddy perforated rubber mats, the kind that looks like a black Connect Four rack, and which you sometimes see busboys hosing off on the sidewalk while a black film dribbles into the gutter. The chef shot me the deadliest look as she plated that game hen. I sort of sympathized and said nothing. What was her alternative, really? No entrées for one-third of the party? Who among us hasn’t observed the two-second rule?
Most catering servers tend to be well-educated people with interesting back stories, and a lot of us genuinely care about the business, or we wouldn’t be in it. But we also do it because we need the money. Since you don’t accrue sick pay for irregular contract gigs, people will show up for work quite ill and then proceed to handle guests’ food. I’ve seen sneezing servers plead “Allergies!” when it’s clear they have a bad cold but couldn’t afford to miss out on $300. Staffers with stomach bugs “confess” they’re hung over, only to run to the toilet, fooling nobody.
Of course, you can’t create a completely antiseptic bubble anywhere, but there’s a lot of filth in San Francisco’s kitchens. I’ve been in some that are nasty as hell, with moldy grout and standing water and walk-in fridges that stink of rot. There’s one bartending company that schleps its glassware not in washable plastic racks but in increasingly weathered cardboard boxes. The dirties go back in that same cardboard box, which obviously isn’t sanitized before the next round of clean glasses is packed in it.
California makes all front- and back-of-house staff take an online food-handling course, but I’ve seen mayonnaise-heavy dishes left exposed to full sunshine for three hours while guests help themselves to seconds, scooping plenty of bacterial-growth medium onto their plates. If anything, I’m now the world’s biggest non-germophobe because I’ve seen the resilience of the human immune system tested in a way I never thought possible. (Once, I lost a Band-Aid behind the bar. I don’t know what happened to it. I should have been wearing one of those finger-condom things to cover it, but I wasn’t, and it just disappeared.)
Quick and easy corporate events are my bread and butter, but weddings are my favorite. They’re long, so you get overtime, and they’re generally happy occasions with a nice gratuity at the end. But the scale of the undertaking is a breeding ground for disaster. Groomsmen treat the preceremony lineups like a bachelor party and drink until they puke. Acrimoniously divorced parents make a big stink about where they’re seated. Once, I saw a coordinator completely flip out because the chef brought the wrong wedding cake. Granted, that was a pretty bad screw-up, but the 200 guests didn’t have to know, and they certainly didn’t have to witness the resulting conniption. It stopped cocktail hour dead.
A guest going into anaphylactic shock because they ingested something they’re highly allergic to is terrifying. It seems to happen at weddings, possibly because after two glasses of champagne, people let their guard down. Maybe the server passing the apps forgot to enumerate all six ingredients in the hors d’oeuvres, or maybe a glutton just grabbed something off the tray. People in the middle of a conversation don’t always realize they just dipped their chicken in romesco sauce, which contains nuts, and then they almost die. It’s hard for a party to recover from EMTs entering the dining room.
Medical emergencies aside, I love watching drama unfold, especially in situations in which you’d normally shy away out of embarrassment, but professional duty requires you to stand right where you are, behind the bar, facing the show. The most amazing thing I’ve ever observed was at a gorgeous outdoor summer wedding in Westchester, New York, when the drunk and visibly pregnant underage bride started screaming at her husband of five hours that he was ruining her wedding by getting even drunker than she was. It was magnificent. But the most satisfactory wedding was the one where I went home with the best man.
Those kinds of extremes are pretty rare, though. Usually, big events are a nonstop parade of petty indignities and VIPs who act like their affluence allows them a special dispensation from common courtesy — people who have a general contempt for servers, bartenders, tipping, and the like. Ultimately, every catering employee, having been repeatedly walloped by a stranger’s vanity, entitlement, and sheer vulgarity, sooner or later turns into Carson from Downton Abbey, appalled at the decline of manners and likely to judge everyone for their ghastly ignorance.
This story is part of our week-long anonymous package. To learn about all the juicy secrets being revealed this week, go here.
Photographs courtesy of Thinkstock
