The Broken Yolk - bastion of San Diego casual fare. Kim Harper: "I never look at what people tip me. "

Dinner at Tapenade Restaurant is a memorable experience. The cordial ambience, the feel of that which is unmistakably French, and service like a brilliantly engineered heist: the help comes and takes you from your worries, replacing daily stress with gustatory delights. And what delights!

Never say “today” at a table, at least not the way I hear seemingly every server say it. “Would you like pepper TODAY?”

The heady depths of reduction sauces. Heights of chiboust, confit, and coulis. The half-vanished art of textural balance. And in the end, the immeasurable value of experiencing that which is enjoyably different. All to taste!

(Forgive me. The preceding, though heartfelt, was indeed a shameless plug. I’m actually the headwaiter and part-time maître d’ at Tapenade Restaurant on Fay Avenue in downtown La Jolla. Sorry.)

Peter Jargowsky, George’s at the Cove: "You have to create yourself, you have to create your service personality, every night."

Photo by Joe Klein

But there it is. I love the restaurant where I work. And I’m not ashamed to hype the place because I know that we can back it up. Tapenade Restaurant reminds me nightly how working in the service business can be genuinely fulfilling. The cuisine is incredible, and the clientele, in general, seem to appreciate the quality of what we offer. In fact, if I might intone this next sentence without the least decibel of irony, then I would like to mention something that I feel increasingly, after 3 years at Tapenade and 17 continuous years in the service industry: waiting tables can represent a noble course for making a living.

Not only noble but heroic too. If it’s true that Americans fear public speaking more than death, then we food servers stare down the fear of fears more regularly than any other professionals I know. And we do so to provide selfless (though paid) pleasure for strangers. There you go. Heroic.

As for my claim to a certain nobility, perhaps I do place too high an estimation upon Life Experience. That is, perhaps I personally overvalue the pleasures of a dining event; but no. I’ve seen other people who feel it too. Appreciators, I call them. And maybe their potential appreciation, and the way I pander to them, only makes them hedonists and makes me a kind of Hedonist Facilitator. Whatever. The fact is, I get a spiritually uplifting kick out of trying to create a memorable Life Experience for people I hardly know. And I’ve embraced this line of business for my career.

So what got into me? Am I weird?

I decided I had to try to find a fellow Career Waiter who shares with me this unusual sense that waiting tables is an Entitled Profession. And I decided that if I could find just two of these lifetime servers and write their case studies, then I might illuminate an unlikely occupational enthusiasm.

Case Study One centers around Peter Jargowsky, who works at George’s at the Cove on Prospect Street in downtown La Jolla. I gravitated to Jargowsky because his staff at George’s beat out my team from Tapenade for last year’s San Diego Magazine “Best Service” award.

Better than we are?

And the folks at George’s seem to think that Peter Jargowsky is one of their best. So, then…the best of the best? Well, I had to see it.

My wife and I decided to go to George’s for dinner and to have Peter Jargowsky perform as our waiter.

The facts are these. Peter Jargowsky has been a server at George’s for over five years. He has grown into a fully consenting adult, he’s married, and he doesn’t excessively hang loose or party or hang out; he went to school, and he tried some other occupations; he’s deeply religious; and a long time ago, Peter Jargowsky came to this levelheaded professional decision: he waits tables.

And as it turns out, Peter Jargowsky is witty, effortlessly funny, and happens to be a refreshingly articulate speaker. Throughout our dinner, he was very present and relaxed and in the moment. At one point, Jargowsky described the George’s decor as “muted and masculine,” and then, when my wife said that she didn’t like the look, he immediately responded, “We maintain this image so that we do not distract from the presentation of the food, since that is the most important thing. If the place were too pretty, then you wouldn’t be able to focus on the appearance of the dishes.” Then he smiled wryly and added, “I hope you liked that. Because that was my own personal line of spin.”

Cleverness, and never missing a beat, and having your own personal line of spin are all attributes that help immensely if you’re going to be a Career Waiter. Jargowsky also knows his food and wine, serves from the left and clears from the right, seems graceful under pressure, and takes pride in his job. (And after having dinner under his tutelage, I don’t know if he’s a better waiter than I am, or if his team is better than mine, but it’s like apples and oranges, or better yet, like fish and cheese: the George’s waiters are fabulous at George’s, and the Tapenade waiters are terrific at Tapenade, and I don’t know if you could break it down more fully than that.)

Case Study Two takes place at the Broken Yolk Cafe in Pacific Beach. The Broken Yolk is a bastion of San Diego casual fare — the so-called turn-and-burn — on the other end of the dining spectrum from the fine choreography of Tapenade or George’s. But the choreography at the Broken Yolk is super fast and super fierce. The servers there are the definition of efficient, and friendly to boot. An extraordinarily crack crew. Their headwaiter’s Kim Harper, who smiles easily and has a truly sincere hello. Her eyes are almost unbelievably blue. Today she’s attired in her red company T-shirt, gray sneakers, and a small black apron over charcoal-colored sporty shorts.

And she’s got seven tables turning at once, full seats along the counter, and more potential patrons lined up waiting at the door. Her fellow servers are rushing by, every direction, a narrowly controlled chaos. It’s impossible to detect, among the irregular clamor, one coherent conversation.

This is Sunday, just your typical Sunday at the Broken Yolk, and today Kim Harper will take care of over 100 people. That’s 100 hellos and more than 100 smiles, and by the end of it, Kim Harper’s smiles and hellos will still seem honest as a child’s, as warm as fresh quiche. She’s like a still point in the rush, relaxed as though aloof to breakfast bedlam. Even when the guy at the next table sounds short with her, she doesn’t roll her eyes or tinge her sincerity. She overpowers the negative energy with genuine kindness.

It might surprise you to learn that Kim Harper has a master’s degree in journalism. She owns her own home. But the Broken Yolk is where she makes her ample living. “You know, I have a lot of people who say to me, ‘You have a degree? What are you doing here?’ And I’m, like, ‘I’m here because I enjoy it. I chose it. I chose to do this. I like to do this.’ ”

Growing up, we were taught about the noble professions — doctor, teacher, firefighter, engineer. From ages 4 to 17, like most children, I went through stages, wanting to become each one of them. Athletic but delicate, I even tried, and subsequently respected, at a safe distance, those overheavy labor-intensive trades, like toiling in construction. Instead, I stayed in school and studied to write. And to make money while I studied, I waited tables.

And now I’m a full-grown adult, married and stable. I have a master’s degree like Kim Harper. But, like Peter Jargowsky and Kim Harper, I’ve decided to earn my livelihood by waiting tables. (Now, I’m not sure what the significance of this is, but I am currently a wAiter and a wRiter, with a difference between my vocation and my avocation of only one letter.)

Anyway, Jargowsky and Harper are more or less “waiter-naturals.” That is, they each more or less innately wait tables. Not I. The first night I worked in a restaurant, one of the customers made me cry. It took seven years before I became even comfortable at my tables. (I’ll tell you more about those stories later.) And yet the money, and then later the sense of something higher, kept Jargowsky, Harper, and me committed to the waiting game.

We acknowledge that an air of the deadbeat surrounds the humble servant. We know what people see beneath the studious appearance — that we are lazy, unfortunate, or, at least, in a certain way, lesser. Indeed, a myth pursues the server, and the trouble is, that myth’s got legs; it’s a myth with history.

The fact of the matter is that waiters were always of a lower social caste. They had their quarters in an annex or in the bowels of the house. They worked in full view but lived on the sly, alternately within and away from the watchful gazes of the masters. And even these days the average waiter hasn’t finished school. He stays out all night and sleeps until late.

But none of those perceptions bothers the Career Waiter anymore. I’m cool with all those old connotations of being a server. The stuff that bothers me now about the job is actors and students. I mean, they’re the ones who give waiters a bad name, forgetting orders and mis-adding checks, not filling sodas, and taking their own long, sweet, slow time, chewing gum and chatting while customers linger neglected in their service sections.

Or maybe my trouble, the trouble that I had with this career back when I got started in it, was that I saw waiting tables as being less of a job because it’s just a trade. You learn it on-site. There’s no required school for it.

But what if a person did finish school, and then finished the next level of school, and the next level even after that. And if that person owns property and goes to bed and wakes up with most of the rest of the people in our daily world? Can that person enjoy being a Career Waiter? Has he or she discovered this profession’s underlying nobility? Or has this hypothetical individual merely scaled the Pinnacles of Purgatory, reached the Apex of the Ordinary, and achieved a Zenith in Betweenness, a Summit of the Second Class?

For me, the Career Waiter’s story is not about those dreams he once had, those misty dreams that fell beneath the Great Table-Waiter’s Wayside. It is not about how he was supposed to be a schooled specialist. It doesn’t have anything to do with how he was going to win professional grants and contests and publish copious books, or how he was planning to live a stable life in a big house on the outskirts of a glamorous city. The Career Waiter’s story is not about time off with pay, with which the Career Waiter would travel and stay in villas in small European towns. It is not a story about transfers to other divisions in powerful corporations.

Instead, for me, the Career Waiter’s story is about how he has first accepted, and then finally celebrated, his lot. Now he wins contests for selling the most scallops, and he publishes copious bills. He lives unpredictably, a year or two in each new place, renting apartments on the outskirts of assorted restaurant rows. He gets no paid vacations — ever. And when the Career Waiter becomes bored, he packs his belongings into a van, and he moves. He just moves.

The truth at the center of a Career Waiter’s story, the motivation behind it, is this: Career Waiters earn, in many cases, just as much money as the practitioners of other occupations, but instead, Career Waiters work far fewer hours, usually 25 to 33 hours per week. I personally have traveled and lived and worked all over the United States, and even in other parts of the world, and of course I never take my work home at the end of the night. Instead, I have more time to write. The fact is, this alternate lifestyle — working when other people play and playing when they work — is pretty great.

Peter Jargowsky didn’t get started waiting tables until he was laid off from his previous job. But unlike me, he took to his new line of work almost immediately. “I was working to get my real estate license in New Jersey in the late ’70s, and I got laid off. I needed a job, and so I started busing tables at one of the casino coffee shops in Atlantic City. I was 20 years old. Took to it like a duck to water. I love hospitality. People think I’m crazy. I’ll spend four or five nights here, and then I’ll have a dinner party on one of my nights off, because I just love to entertain people. I like to have people in my home. I like to cook for them and serve them. I get a big kick out of the dining experience, both going out to dinner and being on the other end of it. So I’m pretty much a natural.”

Does a natural have to give up any dreams to become a career waiter?

“I’m not sure that I let go of something, but I definitely discovered that I love waiting tables, that I love the restaurant business. Besides waiting tables I’ve also managed restaurants along the way, and now I’ve come back to waiting tables. And I’ve been fortunate to work at really nice, successful restaurants. I do think that waiting tables while you’re going to school, or while you’re training to do something else, is really not a bad way to go. But no one should ever think that the job isn’t a real job. You know, it’s like anything. If you’re going to wait tables, then be the best waiter you can. If you’re going to be a cocktail server, then be the best cocktail server you can. Don’t have the attitude that this is beneath me, and I’m really an actor, or I’m really a doctor, or I’m really whatever it is I want to be when I’m done waiting tables. Because right now you’re a waiter, right now you’re serving people, and you should carry the pride while serving people that you can carry with you into your career ambition, whatever, but if you’re waiting tables, then be a really good waiter.”

Kim Harper would seem to agree. “I waited tables off and on through college and then I worked as a bartender in Cincinnati, and I left the job I had there to go into the clothing retail business, which I did for about five years. And then I moved out here, and I came to the Broken Yolk, and I’ve been here for about six years. I have a master’s in journalism, from Ohio University, and I got my undergraduate degree from Ohio State. I lived in LA for a few years. But I’ve stayed here for six years at the Broken Yolk because I really enjoy it. I really like our customers. I like the hours: up early, out pretty early, I still have my whole day. And when I leave, I don’t have profit-and-loss statements to deal with, no stress, no headaches, and every day’s, like, a new day, you know, nothing carries over from each day.”

Harper goes on. “You know, I know this is going to sound really strange, but I still like being around all the people; it’s the people, it’s getting to talk to so many people from so many different places. And I do enjoy…maybe that’s it, I’m a talker. And all the things you learn… And I like the freedom, the freedom of this lifestyle, absolutely. You know, I’m pretty happy. I would leave if I weren’t happy.”

Of all the abilities that are essential to being a good waiter, the people skills strike me as the most important.

Peter Jargowsky says it this way. “I think that a lot of the public thinks that waiters make a lot of money for waiters. You know, this guy waits tables and he makes $40,000, $50,000, $60,000 a year, waiting tables. Like there’s some kind of problem with that. Like you shouldn’t be able to wait tables and make that kind of money or something. But it’s not an easy job, by any means. It’s not easy to read a situation, to read people. But reading people is definitely part of the job. And so, I guess I apply a principle that I adhere to: sometimes it’s a challenge to turn the other cheek. The thing is to try to approach every table such that: these people are happy, great, I’m going to keep them that way, and these people are not happy, can I turn them around before they leave? And sometimes you have to keep bringing yourself back to that, and bringing yourself back to that, to re-create your service personality every single time, because, you know, we’re human beings and we could have had a bad day before we got here. But you have to shake that off, and you have to be resilient to the people who are also having a bad day who can just be such jerks.”

Could he recall any specific jerks?

“At one point in my career I worked in a restaurant that had regular guests, guests who could be difficult, and there was this one particular gentleman who was very demanding and treated you like you really weren’t there and spoke down to you, and he would call you over to the table, and then he’d continue to talk to his guests while you’d stand there. He was oblivious to the fact that you might have two or three other tables that also should have some of your attention, and this particular gentleman had a reputation among the rest of the waitstaff. And the way I dealt with that man was, I acted like he was my best friend. I acted like I was so happy to take care of him. And he would always tip me well. He never stopped being a condescending jerk, but I like to think that he tempered it a little bit at least when I was taking care of him. And so it goes: kill ’em with kindness.”

That’s one way of looking at it: kill with kindness. Perhaps the most specialized aspect of a waiter’s job is to turn negative energy positive, to never let anything get to us. Unruly patrons, unkind chefs, hasty paces, and the deadly pressure never to forget: all of this translates into stress, stress, stress. Stress is perhaps the main nemesis of the waiter. I remember the first few years I waited tables, I would be standing there taking an order, and my mind would drift a bit, and I’d assess myself and realize that my butt cheeks were tightly clenched. I would have to remind myself to relax.

Perhaps the most glaring sign of my own stress reactions was shown to me one afternoon at a restaurant where I worked in Denver. I took a rushed midshift break to use the restroom, faced the mirror, and realized that my mouth was twisted into an unintentional grimace. I couldn’t even feel it, but I was generating a deep wrinkle in my right cheek that appalled me. I thought I was starting to look old and ugly. (I was 22 at the time.) So I gradually formulated a theory about facial tectonics, about how to relax the fault lines in my face, to keep the tension from registering, to reduce the strain and pressure before potential facequakes.

Another sign of stress is the famous Waiter’s Dream. In one of my old dreams, I had the window section at an eatery called the Mile Long Restaurant. Throughout this nightmare, I was forgetting little things, no lemon with the tea, no spoon for the soup, no fries with the steak, and I would have to run back to the kitchen, and then return, a mile each way. Needless to say, I woke up sweating with the covers wrapped around my neck.

But I don’t dream like that too much anymore. Now I wake up and realize that I was waiting on famous people all night. In my own restaurant. With no problems in sight.

In real life, I do love people. At least in small doses. And there’s no better way to meet a lot of people in very small doses than to wait on them. One time, I had an older woman ask me if there were any wheat products in a particular dish, which was an important concern for her because she was “rude and intolerant.” I leaned forward and put my hand on the table (I do this a lot…I find that touching the table stands in as a kind of figurative surrogate for literal contact between the patrons and me). I said, “Come, now. You don’t seem all that rude and intolerant.” And her husband slammed the table with his fist and raised his voice to tell me, “She said she’s gluten intolerant!”

Any good waiter eventually becomes an expert on the subject of Killing Kindness, but Kim Harper, especially, seems to be made of kindness. She exhibits exceptionally undisturbed facial tectonics. She listens well. And she laughs a lot, or more like giggles. She giggles because of what she’s saying or because of what someone else is saying, and she also giggles a lot because of what she’s thinking. I notice as I interview Kim Harper that it’s often difficult to tell why she’s giggling. It’s difficult because Kim Harper often thinks better of saying the things that she’s thinking, even though these things might cause her to laugh. So she’ll think and laugh and then shift her thinking and stop laughing, and she’ll speak of something unrelated, something that has nothing to do with laughing at all. The great part about it, talking to Kim Harper, is that it isn’t unsettling in any way; in fact it’s all rather engaging.

Kim Harper speaks. “Someone said to me in line once at a grocery store, when this other person cut in front of me and I just said, ‘Go ahead,’ they said to me, ‘You’re the girl from the Broken Yolk. Are you always nice?’ ” (She giggles.) “Waiting tables has made me a lot more calm. I think I’ve learned to turn just about any situation. You know the old line of ‘catching more flies with honey,’ and I don’t mean a fake ‘um-hum, whatever you say,’ I mean, like, really, really friendly.” (Giggles again.) “Waiting tables has taught me how to be friendlier, how to lose my attitude, to enjoy myself, and I do enjoy myself when I’m waiting tables.”

As for me, I never enjoyed myself while waiting tables until I had done it for a very long time. The first night I ever worked in a restaurant, I remember I served shrimp scampi over linguine to a raven-haired woman at a table for two. (Incidentally, this was over 17 years ago, at Steak & Sword Restaurant in Connecticut.) This woman complained to me so viciously about my mistake with her scampi (“Linguine? You stupid boy, I specifically said ‘rice’ ”) that I was reduced to inconsolable blubbering behind the kitchen door. Had a perfect stranger ever been so wantonly mean to me in my life?

Right then, I should have seen the signs. I was not born to serve or to wait.

But these 17 years later, I’ve worked long stints at the Spring House Hotel and the Atlantic Inn, both in Block Island, Rhode Island; at the Left Bank, in Truckee, California; at H. Brinker’s, in Denver, Colorado; at the Delaney House, in Holyoke, Massachusetts; at Josepina, in New York City; and now at Tapenade, in La Jolla. At Tapenade, by the way, every night I can easily convince myself that I’m doing something good for the people around me.

Kim Harper definitely does good things for the people around her. She has the same open smile, the same generous attitude for every single one of them, whether they’re sipping mimosas and ingesting omelets or they’re wearing the same clothes as yesterday and wolfing coffee and buttered toast. Kim Harper regards all of her customers the same.

“I’ll tell you something, and this is kind of a secret, um, I shouldn’t even say this, I…” It’s a weekday afternoon by the time I catch up with Harper, and the service is over for the day, but she still looks fresh and lively, as if the stress of the morning hours dissolved before it ever reached her. We’re sipping water in the back of the restaurant, a tape recorder on the green table between us, and she’s rolling her eyes and looking for words, seeming as if she’s about to tell me the naughtiest, juiciest tidbit I can imagine. Of course, she’s smiling a little and softly giggling. She’s squirming in her seat, biting her lip, a disarming lightness attending her like fairy dust or something. It occurs to me that she would look perfectly at home if she were swinging her feet above the floor from a chair that was way too big for her.

But really her secret turns out to be a grand piece of food-server wisdom, and I think she doesn’t want to tell me for the same reason that Zen monks don’t televise the solutions to their ancient koans. Or maybe she’s embarrassed, because, although she works for tips, she’s simply not about the money.

“For the most part, I pick up the money — I don’t go from table to table and count, like, I…if there’s a bunch of bills here, I grab it all, and I don’t look at it, and I stick it in my pocket, because, in the end, it all comes out good. I never look at what people tip me. Because why upset myself and get myself upset for my next bunch of tables?” (She laughs contemplatively…and on my tape recorder it sounds as though a different voice picks up after the laugh, a slower, more serious version of Kim Harper’s personality.) “I treat all people evenly, very much so. I think, oh, this guy’s this critic, and this guy’s this critic, but he’s going to get the exact same service as the guy over here, who’s homeless and he has to count his dimes out to pay. I’m not going to belittle anybody; they all get the same smile and the same service.”

And how refreshing is that? Imagine if our politicians served us with such integrity, without swaying their ideas based on popularity in the polls. I wonder if Kim Harper has any ambitions to run for office.

Peter Jargowsky probably won’t ever run for office, but I think he’d be good at it. At least he’s good at making speeches. For example, he always seems relaxed when he talks. He’s distinguished-looking — his trimmed sideburns are tipped with gray — really very calm looking, and of course he demonstrates exceedingly relaxed facial tectonics. He doesn’t use his hands much to express himself, and he doesn’t raise his voice. And yet he’s a master of emphasis, of modulating the way he says things ever so slightly — the pitch or tone or cadence of his words — to let you know exactly what’s important, or just to make sure that you understand precisely what he’s saying. I imagine that a party of foreigners who speak no English would be able to follow Jargowsky if he told them the specials.

So I realize, as I’m transcribing our interviews, that I will have to use italics a lot. Jargowsky seems to speak in italics. He doesn’t underline much or speak in boldface type, but it’s as though italics are built into certain parts of his voice.

“What I’ve learned from waiting tables is, whether you’re waiting on that couple who’s here on a gift certificate because it’s their anniversary and their kids got them a present, or otherwise they would never eat at a fine-dining place, whether you’re waiting on them, or whether you’re waiting on the guy that comes in all the time and spends big bucks on big wine for himself and his socialite friends, the thing I’ve learned is that everybody deserves your respect. You have to create yourself, you have to create your service personality, every night. You have to be a professional. You have to make sure that you’re not bringing anything to work with you, no emotional trauma, nothing that happened or didn’t happen to you that day. And whether you expect these people to leave you $10 or $100, you still have to give them your best. And the way to do that is to be really proud of the product, be proud of your job, and be proud to do what you’re doing. I want people to say good things about the dining experiences that they have with me.”

Well said, Peter Jargowsky.

This is the point in our interview when I remember one of my own old theories. I think that waiters are like the bridges between scarcely navigable islands, the glue between jagged moving parts, the translators trying to piece together good sense from dead languages. The customer has to be happy, the manager has to be happy, the kitchen has to be happy, and the bottom line, the restaurant has to be happy. It’s like balancing on a tightrope while juggling corkscrews. And in the end, if the waiter can be happy too, well then, the dining experience can be a thing of beauty and a joy forever.

But sometimes the customers are crazy, or the manager is crazy, or the kitchen staff, well, the kitchen staff is always crazy.

Jargowsky tells me about one of his experiences. “I worked once with a really crazy chef in one restaurant. And I’m not telling you which restaurant it is, because it still exists, but the owner of the place was this chef. And he was an alcoholic. And he would drink a double espresso. And a shot of vodka. And a double espresso, and a shot of vodka. And a double espresso and a shot of vodka and a double espresso and a shot of vodka, and he would work himself into such a drunken rage, while he was expediting. And one time a waiter goes out into the dining room, and he accidentally took the wrong food out to the wrong table, and this chef comes out into the dining room, and it’s full of La Jolla socialites, and he stands and yells at the top of his lungs, ‘Stupid [expletive deleted] waiter!’ ” (Brackets Jargowsky’s.) “And I just remember all of these little old ladies from La Jolla just cringing in their chairs.”

But of course Jargowsky was able to save the situation for his own customers that night. He was able to take the circumstances in stride and to make the best of them. “I think I just turned it into a good-natured joke. You know, sometimes that’s all you can do.”

And the only way for a waiter to do that kind of thing well, to turn an unfortunate state of affairs into a positive condition, is to have a good persona. The waiter’s persona is his or her bread and butter. It’s like a writer’s voice or a painter’s style. Every table, every night, like an actor in a play, a waiter must reprise his or her own personal role. It took me seven years, seven years, before I started to feel comfortable in my waiterly persona. Before that, I was too aware of myself, of how stupid and unnatural I sounded as I asked people, “Would you be interested in a beverage this evening?” I thought I sounded like a radio announcer, forced, canned, and a little over the top.

I remember the summer when I gradually began to feel more natural tableside. It wasn’t some momentous thing. Over the course of a few weeks I just realized that I wasn’t self-conscious, that I could say these unusual phrases and sound like myself, and that I could be happy doing it.

Now I might honestly say that some of my satisfying triumphs were wives who’ve told me, “My husband was in a terrible mood, and he was very rude, I apologize. But you should know that you made him feel a lot better. I don’t know how you did it!” (Patience, I tell them, patience and smiling, “getting small” and going inside the situation, bringing the smiles out of it, wherever those smiles are hiding.)

Maybe the best thing about waiting tables, even better than the money, is the person I alluded to previously, the one who makes a server feel that he or she is doing something special for people, as though maybe food service could be almost kind of noble. As I mentioned earlier, I call those special people Appreciators. I love Appreciators. I even work hard to try to be one. They look at you differently. They have another kind of energy. An Appreciator stands out in a crowd: she or he will usually be the quiet one, the listener sitting pleasantly and noticing. Appreciators enjoy things; that’s just how they are. And that’s the kind of person that I like to meet; the kind of person that I want to be.

But instead of being a true Appreciator, I am an Annoying Perfectionist, and because I am an Annoying Perfectionist, I have a couple of peeves about the professionalism and performance of my fellow waiters, especially fine-dining waiters.

Peeve One: I think it’s important never to ask people if they’re “still working on” a dish. I don’t even think it’s wise to ask if they’re “finished” or “still enjoying.” At most, I might ask, “Shall I take?” But usually, I try to accomplish messages such as this one in silence, replacing words with simple, slow, open-hand gestures, so as not to interrupt.

Peeve Two: A waiter should never say “drink” at a table, or “another.” Instead, just gesture slowly toward the empty glass (slowly!…if there’s a sip left, the patron must not think that you’re going to steal it!) and ask after the specific beverage, “A Tanqueray and tonic?”

Peeve Three: Never say “today” at a table, at least not the way I hear seemingly every server say it. “Would you like pepper TODAY?” Or, “Could I bring you a cocktail TODAY?” Or, “Will that be all for you TODAY?” Come on! Please! I always feel like saying, “Uh, perhaps I will want some pepper TODAY, although I don’t feel that I want any right now, so why don’t you just keep checking back?”

Peeve Four: A server should never let a client think that he or she is busy. It’s a bad idea to seem rushed or to engage in sudden movements. The whole time a server is taking care of a table, he or she should remember to undertake every sentence, every question, each hand gesture, all the reaching for bottles and glasses, all the pouring and serving, v-e-r-y s-l-o-w-l-y. A fine-dining server should be like a flash in between tables, especially when it’s busy (and once a table is aware of my presence, I may move more quickly as well), but, in general, a server should always move his or her hands with a definite, confident slowness around the clientele. That way, they know what the server’s next move might be, even before he or she makes it. No suddenness, nothing to break the mood, no surprises.

Peeve Five: A server should never be too friendly and informal with a client. It’s better to maintain a formal distance by using the phrases “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” or “I’m sorry, ma’am,” or, in a French restaurant, “No, madame.” This works well everywhere, by the way, not just in a restaurant. I can’t tell you how many common daily situations I’ve turned around by calling a complete stranger “sir.”

Peeve Six: A waiter should never slouch or joke or lean around when on the job. He or she should realize that a server is always on display. At every moment in the restaurant, especially out on the floor, he or she may be subjected to scrutiny. Therefore, all of a server’s movements, the way he or she walks or carries plates or opens a bottle of wine, the look on his or her face, should be contemplated and considered. I learned a valuable personal lesson regarding this last year, when I went to Tijuana and watched a bullfight. I took a cue from the amazing matadors who worked the ring. Every movement those flashy men and women made was intentionally ostentatious, fully considered, done for show. I’ve tried to carry this over to the dining room floor, working the room, signaling my colleagues, sweeping in to clear a plate, pouring wine, always ready to smile, flamboyantly flourishing my serviette.

I’m not perfect, of course, but I do get to try to be perfect, five nights a week. It’s terrific practice. And in the end, I love to think that other people, people I hardly know, might talk someday about one or two of their finer life experiences as having occurred during dinner with me. I picture myself as the ghost in their recollections — dressed in the black vest, the bow tie, and the long white apron — the ghost who gave them spirited suggestions. n