Excerpt
"I became very proud of my identity as a waitress, now that I no longer had to wear a sexless black-and-white uniform and get stiffed making cappuccinos for the bosss wife. Daves didnt even have a cappuccino machine, though we did have our share of troublemaking customers. There was a repellent couple named, I swear to god, the Piggies. The Piggies had been eating at Daves once a week since it opened and of course they thought they owned the joint. Gert or Judy would greet them like royalty at the door only to pawn them off immediately on me or Issac, a great disappointment to the Piggies. They knew about the hierarchy of the waiters. Issac and I were artsy college kids. We wouldnt last more than a couple of years. Gert and Judy were there for the duration. The Piggies could only be seated at Booth Six, a prime bit of real estate that could easily accommodate a large party of prime tippers who would eat and get out. The Piggies liked their food prepared in certain ways depending on who was cooking that night. Theyd detain me forever, forcing me to recite their order back to them, suspicious that a rookie would never be able to remember all their little nuances and pet peeves. I tried to smile reassuringly, which only seemed to aggravate them further. Meanwhile, I could hear the cooks pounding on the bell and roaring my name as orders Id placed backed up on the counter.
Once, Mrs. Piggie tasted her manicotti and puckered her already tight mouth. "I cant eat this. Theres no way Jim cooked this. Take it back and tell them I want Jim to cook it."
I carried the plate into the kitchen and told Jim, who had cooked it, what Mrs. Piggie had said. Jim, a taciturn long-suffering man who was engaged to marry the perkiest of the veteran waitresses, rolled his eyes and shoved it back in the oven.
"She says she likes it brown on "
"I know. I know. Brown on the edges, but not too brown, with just enough sauce, whatever that means. Fucking Piggies." Jim rolled the manicotti onto a fresh plate and sent me back to Booth Six.
Without so much as a grunt of appreciation, Mrs. Piggie forked up a small bite and yipped like a Yorkshire terrier whos just realized hes been poisoned. "No! This is all wrong! Did you tell Jim its for me? Honestly!"
She flung herself back against the tall wooden booth, glaring at her husband with hostility, as if to say, "Well, what can you expect from these new people?" Issac, uncorking a bottle of wine at a table across the way, shot me a sympathetic look.
Back in the kitchen, Jim stonewalled, refusing to tinker any further with the manicotti or prepare anything else for Mrs. Piggie to eat that evening. I pleaded to no avail. Finally, one of the other cooks, a loose cannon named Tommy, reached across to snatch the plate out of my hands. "Gimme that!" he shouted, throwing the manicotti into a hot pan with an entire stick of butter. He knocked them around with a wooden spoon for a couple of seconds, spit in the pan and re-plated the offending dish yet again with a fresh ladles worth of meat sauce. "There! Give that to the old bitch and make sure she eats every bite! Tell her that Jim cooked it!"
I did as instructed and anyone who has ever worked in a restaurant will be glad if hardly surprised to learn that Mrs. Piggie cleaned her plate on this third attempt, cooing contentedly over the special treatment "Jim" had lavished on her."