Don’t Eat the Olives

If the chef is feeling generous, he cuts us an orange to start the day. In a few minutes, the now empty restaurant will be full and loud. For six hours, we set tables, clear tables, serve food, polish silverware and glasses, clear bins, cut bread, take out the trash. We’re out of spoons, so I’m polishing the ones that have just arrived when a waiter asks me to fill water at one of the tables, a chef in the kitchen is calling for a basket change, and the line chef is yelling at me to serve the food that’s ready to the table that isn’t set yet because we’ve run out of spoons. 

We are bussers. We may work more than the waiters, but at least we’re paid less. We are bottom dwellers in the restaurant’s social hierarchy, or as the busser training me said, the bitches of the kitchen.

I work at a Michelin star restaurant, so the clientele is strictly those who can afford it. Finance bros just out of their frat boy eras, talk corporate jargon over midmorning glasses of wine. “It’s just like a three million dollar contract, but I told Brian, given the upside of the deliverables, if we ride out the market fluctuations, we could capitalize on the bubble.” They have settled into their new roles with terrifying adaptability. They are secure, arrogant, entitled. They (not you) earned this position – it is their birthright. Their jobs are immutable, as unquestioned as the laws of nature. When the revolution comes, their heads will be the first to roll.

There’s a blonde with striking, Norwegian features, wearing an immaculate, off-the-shoulders white dress. She’s seated opposite a guy who had the decency to wear a polo shirt with his sneakers, and she’s doing a commendable job feigning interest in his self-involved shop talk. I’m a judgmental busser and I form the picture quickly. What she really wants is security, but that’s too vague. Money is more concrete, and close enough. She’s calculating if she can trust him or if she can do better. Sure, he’s dull and self-absorbed, not particularly handsome or funny. But he can afford to take her here and he seems to know what he’s talking about. Maybe she can earn his protection, his provision, for however long his interest lasts. All she has to do is give him a smile, her body, maybe. 

I see it every day. Boys with money and girls with beauty. I always think the girls can do better, but maybe the boys can, too. Or maybe they deserve each other. 

Overhearing conversations can be hazardous. A large table is sitting in the content afterglow of skirt steak on a bed of romesco with red onion marmalade. “I told you this place is amazing. If I ever take a date here, I know I’m getting laid.” He’s bragging, but I believe him. I hate him, and hate myself, and hate a world in which it’s true. That a woman who wouldn’t even see me would give her perfect body to a certifiable douchebag for the price of a skirt steak on a bed of romesco with red onion marmalade. 

People speak freely as we clear and set tables, because we do not exist. The busser uniform is a cloak of invisibility. We are unseen and ignored – cogs in a machine that creates someone else’s experience. Even when I make eye contact with the redhead in a low-cut dress and we exchange smiles, there is an impassable gulf of separation between us. I do not inhabit her world.

There is a world of beautiful people who wear Panerai watches and Cartier jewelry, who own apartments in Flatiron, and vacation in Europe. They work in something corporate and lucrative, they play tennis, and get laid. I do not live in this world. I know money can’t buy happiness, and even the rich and beautiful have problems and get sick and die. But from where I stand in the kitchen, it seems like their lives are better. Like their world is happening, and mine is not. 

Maybe if I take a couple years and a hundred thousand dollars in debt, I can get my Master’s degree, get a job on Madison Avenue, work my way up, and eventually afford to eat here. Or maybe there is a caste system even in the Land of the Free, and there are beautiful rooms I will never get let into. Maybe the deck is stacked against the many, forcing us into the working life so we can prop up the privileged few who get to live. 

Or maybe there’s not actually any difference between those who eat at the restaurant and those who work in it. The kitchen has as vibrant a cast of characters as any table. There’s Suzie, the Hawaiian chef on whom I have a work crush, who draws bees and flowers on the receipt paper. When she returns home, she will open a restaurant that brings native food back to Hawaii, honoring the culture of her ancestors. By day, Raymond busses tables, and by night he rap battles in Spanish. Half the wait staff are taking acting classes and getting headshots, and the rest are into real estate or photography, in relationships or in school. Behind the humble work, we nurture secret dreams and ambitions. We wanted more and so we live with less. Even those without ambitions beyond the restaurant are special. They are first generation immigrants who raise families and rent a small room in the greatest city in the world, and who’s to say that’s not enough? Maybe our world is happening, just as legitimately as that of our customers. Just as legitimately as that of the homeless tramps who walk by on the street.

In Tortilla Flat, Steinbeck wrote of poor, disenfranchised Mexicans in Monterey as if they were King Arthur’s knights of the Round Table. Maybe they were. “Everything is a circle. A lady in Eaton Square is coarse and honest as an Aston whore.”* All any of us ever have is a human experience and it is the same one everyone around the world has, the same one everyone throughout history has had. Peter Dinklage said there are not more important, shiny people out there. As one of them, he would know.

If one day I am allowed into these beautiful rooms, I imagine the view from the inside will look a lot like the kitchen. Knowing me, I’ll probably wish I was back in the kitchen. Everything becomes desirable as soon as it’s avoidable. I don’t suppose it matters. In the end, even the bitches of the kitchen have it pretty good. We have honest work and camaraderie, and if we’re lucky, Suzie is behind the counter and she cuts us an orange. 

J.

*Peaky Blinders

Aug. 13, 2024