Lileks asks today if any of his readers have ever worked in a restaurant, citing the beneficial aspects of it. Of course he wants people to respond in the comments section but we bloggers will use any excuse to publish on our own blogs.
My first real job was as a busboy at a Mexican restaurant called Ernesto’s in Vienna, VA. I was fifteen years old. It wasn’t a bad job (except the time I spilled a tray full of water glasses all over a customer. But it was his fault. He accidentally knocked the arm I was carrying the tray with with his own. Somehow this didn’t seem to matter to him much as he sat there, drenched) though I only worked there for a few months. One day we all showed up for work and discovered the doors locked. The owner, apparently deeply in debt, had absconded with the previous night’s proceeds, and disappeared. That’s the story that went around anyway.
When I was sixteen I worked at the Gino’s restaurant near the Tysons Corner Mall, a now defunct fast-food place that server burgers and Kentucky Fried Chicken. I was in charge of cooking the Kentucky Fried Chicken, and I was good, baby. Best KFC you ever tasted. I was there for at least a year, until they cut my hours back. After that it wasn’t worth it and I looked elsewhere for employment. I worked as a janitor for awhile in an office building in McLean, VA. but I got fired for not showing up for work on my eighteenth birthday. I then stayed unemployed until my graduation from high school after which I took off for Salisbury Beach, Massachusetts to spend the summer with my father.
Actually, I was only going up for my usual three-week summer vacation with my dad. But as the weeks progressed I realized I had nothing to go back to in Virginia – no job, no plans for college – so I figured, why not stay? After our three-week stay at the beach in the cottage my father had rented, my cousin and I stayed at a cottage his step-sister had rented for a few weeks. Once that ran up I went back to the city to stay with my dad and his wife. But with them at work all day and not knowing anyone else in the city I got bored and finally decided to head back to Northern Virginia. Much to the relief of my mother, who feared she was losing me.
She also was concerned about my future. Once I was back living under her roof she was insistent that if I wasn’t going to college I needed to get a job. This was end of summer, 1976. I really had no interest at the time but knew it was inevitable as my savings from my previous job, plus the infusion of cash my dad provided when I left Massachusetts, was running out. My worried mother started looking in the want ads for me and it was she who found the ad for the job at Bloomingdale’s, which was about to open its first store outside New York at the Tysons Corner Mall. When I applied it was for any old job but they hired me to work as a waiter in the restaurant on the third floor, La Provence. (There was a second restaurant abutting it called Forty Carrots, a counter where they served lighter, so-called healthier fare.) Anyhow, the job at Bloomingdale’s would change my life because it was there that I met my baby. I’m not sure if my mom ever put those two things together, that it was her actions that led to my meeting my love. Not much slips by my mother, one of the smartest and most perceptive people I know, so she probably has. But of course she is also one of the classiest people I know too so she would never mention it. At any rate, thanks mom.
Anyhow, I spent seven years waiting tables at Bloomindale’s, and I made a lot of money, enough to buy a condo near the end of my stay there. I worked a shift that started at 11:30 and ran until we closed at 8:00, so I got both the lunch and dinner rushes in. I made about $25,000 per year, pretty good money for a guy my age at that time. I was always flush back then and since the tips came all in cash (even the tips that were charged came back to me in cash at the end of the night) I often walked around with a grand or more in my pocket. My future wife worked the dinner rush because she was putting herself through school during the day. I still remember the first time I met her, when she walked into the place in her waitress outfit, her long blonde hair flowing down her back. (WOW.) I was twenty years old, she was nineteen. I’d actually quit Bloomingdale’s earlier that year and moved to Daytona Beach for about six months and had just returned and gotten my job back. My baby had started during my absence and had herself just returned from a trip to Florida. When others started asking her about her trip I insinuated myself into the conversation with my own tails of Florida, trying my damndest to impress. She blew me off.
But only for awhile. We became friends first and stayed that way for a few years, though she was always aware of my romantic interest. I hosted the restaurant’s Christmas party at my townhouse when I was twenty-two and that night, as we exchanged presents, came the first breakthrough on my many year quest for her. She claims that it was I who made the move for the kiss but I know it was her – she just couldn’t resist any longer, heh, heh. We’ve joked about that for years. She claims that if the question was put to all who knew us, who was more likely to make the first move, me or her, that she’d win the argument in a landslide. In other words, that everyone would think I made the first move. I tell her that’s beside the point. I was there and I know what happened. Still, she’ll argue the point.
But this post was supposed to be about working in a restaurant. The work itself was enjoyable – I liked waiting tables and dealing with the public. And I was good, at least if you measured by how much money we all made. I almost always made more money than my colleagues for I recognized right away that the vast majority of those eating were at Bloomingdale’s primarily to shop, not eat. They wanted a quick meal, polite and efficient service, no dessert, and the check. So the idea was to get-em-in-and-get-em-out. The more parties you could work during the rush, the more money you would make. Of course, there were always those who wanted to relax and linger, and recognizing them was also important. You might not get turnover with them but if you handled them right you could run up a big bill and perhaps get a big tip. Figuring out what people wanted and giving it to them was part of the art. As a result I had lots of regular customers, another reason I would end up making more than everyone else. Regulars were almost always good tippers.
Near the end, as my baby and I became more serious, I knew that I couldn’t wait tables my whole life. If I was going to marry her I needed something more than this. So I went back to school, starting first at Northern Virginia Community College and then transferring over to George Mason University. I continued at Bloomingdale’s with my usual shift, taking classes early in the morning. At a certain point I realized I had to quit if I was going to finish school in a decent amount of time, as my work schedule just didn’t permit me to take a full load of classes. I quit and took a job working only evenings at Blackie’s House of Beef in Springfield, freeing myself up to take late morning and afternoon classes, along with an evening class on my night off Blackie’s. And Blackie’s was fun too. More importantly, it paid the bills during my years in school. It was a completely different style of waiting tables than I was used to and it took me some time to get the hang of it. I did eventually though I never took to Blackie’s the way I took to Bloomingdale’s.
Then I got a job working for the FDIC in IT, my current field. This was during my last year of college. I took what classes I had remaining in the morning, took a subway downtown to work at the F-Dick from 12:00-5:00, subway-ed, then drove over to Blackie’s by 6:00 for the dinner shift, finally home by 10-11:00. It was an exhausting schedule and I could never do it again. I saw my baby on Sundays, usually for an all-day stint of studying at the library at Georgetown University, where by this time she was studying for her PhD.
And then we got married and I got a full-time job with FDIC. I still had to finish a few more classes up that summer to get my degree and I kept the job at Blackie’s in an attempt to make as much money as I could, having just bought a house. But I couldn’t do it anymore. After about twelve years of waiting tables I simply had no more motivation. I found myself giving away my tables to others because I couldn’t bring myself to walk up to another table and say, “Hi folks, how’s every one tonight?”. Truth is, I didn’t care how they were. I just wanted to get on with my new life. One night I walked up to the manager at Blackie’s and simply said, “I quit.” To his credit, he replied, “I don’t blame you.” And that was that.
But this post is titled “Bloomingdale’s Restaurant” and it was Bloomies that I originally intended this post to be about. It was a great place to work for a young person and we had lots of fun there. For years there was a group of us who would head out after work to have a few drinks – that was a pretty good crew. We’ve lost track of them all now but here’s to all the old Bloomies gang: Marie at the grill, John the host, Sylvia the cashier, Helen the night hostess, Juanita cooking in the back, George making sandwiches and desserts, Greg, my best friend and fellow music-lover and drinking buddy, Brian, who played in a band, Melissa, besides Greg my best drinking buddy, Monica, Saul, Adrian, Mike who also played in a band, the other Mike, Monroe who I saw years later working at the National Archives, Pam, Lynda, Jan, Ginny, and the dozens of others we came to know during those years. It was a lot of fun folks.
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