The Split Charge Dodger

The wife turned in a great performance the other night . . .

At work, of course! You know we work together. She encountered an archetypal customer and really checkmated him but good.

This scenario is complicated and enhanced by other delicious factors. Usually, Split Charge Dodgers ply their trade solely in the company of their spouses – too embarrassing in front of another couple. Also, these people were Separate Check people as well.

Dave and Jennie are a favorite couple of ours. He’s large and genial; she’s blonde, sweet, and warm. At the beginning of this year’s football season, they recognized us at Monday Night Football Happy Hour at a local restaurant/bar. Dave bought us a couple martinis, sat down and chatted for a few minutes. After that, we were fast friends (restaurant-wise). When we wait on Dave and Jennie, they always insist we pour a glass for ourselves from their bottle of wine. Dave has twice surprised me with the gift of a beautiful Cuban cigar. And, big surprise, they always tip really well – like 30%.

It’s Saturday night and Dave and Jennie have a reservation for four. They arrive a few minutes early and I get them drinks. Dave has brought in a couple nice bottles of wine. I open the first to breathe, and we chat a bit. The other couple joins. She is an attractive woman in her late-40s. The husband is in the restroom. She says she drinks martinis and orders a Goose up with olives, and a house Chardonnay for her husband.

I return to the table and it turns out the husband actually wants a vodka tonic. No problem of course. She gets her martini and goes, ‘Oooh. I’m sorry, but I drink dirty martinis.’

‘I’m sorry, I thought you just ordered Goose straight up. I’ll fix –’

‘You did,’ Dave said to her. ‘You just ordered Grey Goose.’

At this point, the Wife is there to start waiting on them and she says we’ll bring some olive juice on the side, pointing out it will be fine because it’s already chilled. I return to the bar with the wine, order the vodka tonic. A few seconds later Frank the bartender serves up what looks like a Cape Cod. ‘I ordered vodka tonic.’ Frank: ‘I know. But Dave just changed the order to splash cranberry.’ In the service well, I couldn’t see that Dave had slipped around to the other side of the bar. Okay, fine then.

I give the guy his drink. The wife has already dropped off the jigger of olive juice. We’re both sighing. I say, ‘We’ve decided we’re both going to wait on you, because this is obviously going to take two waiters.’ Laughter, and I get out, leaving them to the Wife.

They don’t order for awhile. The Wife confides that the couple – who appear to be new/prospective friends, kind of on an audition perhaps – is a real piece of work. ‘She Dodger’ (let’s call her) is completely wacko, as evidenced by the fiasco ordering drinks.

It’s finally time to place their entrée order. Before the Wife can ask ‘He Dodger’ about his selection, he requests separate checks, ‘Because I don’t eat an entrée.’ Even though Carney’s has a policy against it, Dave and Jennie are friends and good people, so the Wife says okay. ‘But,’ says She Dodger, ‘we want to pay the corkage fee on the wine.’ Dave and Jennie protest a bit. She Dodger: ‘No, you paid for the wine. It’s only fair.’

So She Dodger, Jennie, and Dave order real entrees. The wife gets back and tells me the pathetic story, noting how Dodger Couple think they’re so clever – pulling off in a single swipe, the hat trick:

1. Separate Checks
2. Dodging The Split Charge
3. ‘Splitting’ The Cost Of The Wine In Their Favor.

We immediately start gloating that these cheapskates are going to freak out when they see Carney’s Corner’s corkage fee: $25 per bottle. It’s absolutely going to kill Dodgers Couple when they see that $50 on their half and they realize they could have bought a couple low end bottles right off the list for $20 each. Which, had they been responsible for the wine, they definitely would have done (bought low end wine). Compounding our delight, we know Carney’s secret that $5 of each corkage fee goes straight to us waiters. Ha-ha!

This scenario provided a lot of amusement for us the next hour or so. We were also not surprised to see that He Dodger despite his claim that ‘I don’t eat an entrée,’ went after She Dodger’s plate of food like a homeless man.

Afterwards, Dave is talking cigars and scotch. The wife asks if anyone is up for a nice single malt after dinner. He Dodger, antennae receiving signals of a bigger bill, interrupts, saying, ‘No, just the check.’

Dave is actually a little crestfallen. ‘Well, I guess I’ll have to have that scotch another time . . .’

‘That’s all right, Dave,’ says the wife. ‘I’ve got a couple drink chips. Have your scotch, and take the other chip for another time.’ (Carney’s has free drink chips as promotional tools, or in this case, instruments of torture.)

The wife gets Dave his free Lagavulin, then returns to tell me her master stroke. She really burned He Dodger by coming up with the free drink chips. Through the meal, he showed no shyness towards alcohol, when it was already paid for. But come the end, he slammed the door to avoid jacking up his bill. Then he got absolutely played when Dave ended up with a free drink – and there was no possible way for He Dodger to say, ‘Oh, it’s free? Then yes I want one.’

Pure sweetness.

The final sprinkle of chopped nuts on the sundae came when the wife pulled the old, ‘Two Charges, One Presenter, One Pen’ trick. I like to feel that I invented this trick, wherein, in a split-charge scenario, you make it very difficult for the cheapskate to tip you poorly. With two pens, (and especially with two presenters) each party can retreat to their own voucher in relative privacy – the cheapskate to commit an anonymous drive-by shooting. With one pen, the two people wait on each other, making it too risky that the generous person will see what the cheapskate tipped. Of course, it’s imperative that you give the presenter to the cheapskate, so he does not have the option of signing last and quickly folding his weasel droppings into the presenter before the generous tipper can see it.

Properly executed, ‘Two Charges, One Presenter, One Pen’ usually leads to a consensus approach: ‘So, what do we tip?’

I believe the generous tipper usually wins this, though not always. Generous people are often also courteous, polite people who might be sensitive to making a cheapskate feel . . . well, cheap.

Anyhow, the consensus approach went down, and He Dodger was forced to tip 25%. It just kept getting better.

On that one, I’d like to give the wife a ‘Very nicely done, ma’am!’

Advancing In The Restaurant Industry

Jeanie, in a comment on the blog, recently mentioned that after 18 years in the business as a waiter, she’s going to attend a college (University of Phoenix online) to get a Hospitality Degree. She wants to ‘do something else in the industry.’ I commented on her comment, but I thought I would expand on that comment here. It’s a very good topic for a restaurant blog.

Unlike most of my posts, where I expound as if I know everything there ever was to know on the subject at hand, I admit in advance I don’t have complete data here.

I do have a complete subset of data, however: my own.

The restaurant industry, for better or worse, is very old fashioned. You get your first job by meeting someone personally (usually multiple times), and it’s that contact that convinces your employer that you’d be a good hire. From there, it stays old fashioned. If you want to be a waiter, your best bet is to do your time as a host or a busser, impressing your bosses whenever you can, and wait for something to open up. Restaurants prefer to promote from within.

Likewise the jump from server to manager. Yes, all restaurants hire managers who have managed previously elsewhere. But those managers almost always get their first management job by being promoted from within their current restaurant. I’d also say a majority of GM’s come from the assistant manager ranks in the same company, if not even the same store.

Taken even another step, I’ve found regional managers are usually plucked from the best GM’s in a company’s stable.

Beyond that, I have no idea – though I would guess that upper level management spots do get filled by headhunters more than promoted from within.

The obvious moral to my story is that it’s probably more effective to dedicate ones time to climbing the ladder within the business, rather than getting a degree. At the very least, you’ll be getting paid for your ‘education.’ You’ll also have the ability to make more contacts as you move up.

Another factor is the consideration of where you’ll be after you get your degree? Likely, you’ll be applying for assistant manager jobs, just like you would have been getting almost automatically through working in the restaurant. The advantage of the degree is it’s possible that you’ll be ‘fast-tracked’ to a GM promotion – more so than the working slug who just traded in his apron for a $99 suit.

All that said, you’re still mired in the same hierarchy as the rest of the managers trying to get promoted into the corporate side . . .

But then, maybe I’m missing Jeanie’s point. Maybe she wants to get into banquet coordinating? Or hotel management (which is a whole other huge can of worms compared to running merely a restaurant). Or maybe she wants to become a chef? There, it would probably be imperative to have culinary school experience if she aspired to more than being a garden variety cook or head chef at a mom ‘n pop place.

If anyone has more firsthand information about the upper corporate echelons, let me and the rest of us know.

* * * * *

I’d like to thank the writer of the So You Want To Be A Waiter blog for giving me the Gold Standard of Shout-Outs: an actual blog entry commending Waiternotes and linking to the blog.

I poked around his/her site and couldn’t find a name, but I did try. Incidentally, the blog (fairly new) is excellent. The premise is ‘THE BEST BOOK ON WAITING TABLES THAT YOU HAVE NEVER READ – YET.’ As such, it covers in concise fashion a lot of basics about the food serving profession. There’s even been a ‘Glossary’ post, defining waiter jargon like ‘deuce, roll-ups, crumbers,’ etc.

He’s really on to something here. And it’s not a dry textbook in the making, as he has plenty of regular-style, more conversational blog posts as well. Not to mention, he/she was smart enough to recommend Waiternotes.

* * * * *

Yesterday at Michael’s wasn’t much of a day. I walked with $58. I’d had just two tables, and was down on covers, but Mickey was saving me for the 7-top reservation.

At one p.m. three ladies congregated at the front desk. They were in their sixties, dressed like dance hall tramps from the Wild West years, the ‘cherry on top’ if you will being gaudy wide-brimmed Crimson hats laden with feathers and ribbons. I had no doubt this was to be my 7-top.

Mickey led the three ladies to my meticulously-buffed table for seven, and handed me the reservation chit. It read like one of the best waiter practical jokes ever:

Party Size: 7. Table 12. Web Reservation. Notes: 1^st time diner. This is a group of Crimson Hat Ladies – our request is for separate checks. Some of our ladies do not drink. Thank you. REQ A ROUND TABLE. Ms. P’s bday. Has cake in fridge. Please don’t cut until the table sees it.

I would have looked around to see the other waiters and manager laughing at me, wondering if I was buying the gag . . . But here they were. The Crimson Hat Ladies!

Yeah, Just Like This, But This Lady Is A 10 Compared To Mine

Four rhetorical questions: Separate checks? Their own cake? Not drinking? Are you kidding me?

Perhaps they also expected to pay with an expired coupon, and intended to order just two entrees to share buffet-style. And brought their own hot tea bags?

It actually turned out they were just fine. Three of the seven had wine or cocktails. They all ordered entrees. They were very polite and easy to work with. Even the separate check thing wasn’t a big deal for two reasons: A) they let me know in the beginning, so I could make sure each item was on its proper seat, therefore making it a simple computer maneuver to print up the checks; B) They each paid in cash, with exact change. Frankly, because of those things, paying out the table was no more difficult than any other table.

Lastly, the final aggregate tip was right in the range of 20%. Thanks Crimson Hat Ladies!

Ciera’s Nightmare

Tonight I worked with Ciera and Carney and Mark. Did you read yesterday’s post?

The drama was not over for Ciera. Carney was very snippy and condescending with her tonight. I sometimes find it amusing when Carney treats an employee this way; other times I find it irritating; but I always find it strange. And that’s because Carney herself is such an inept manager. Don’t get me wrong: She’s an excellent baker, a pretty good promoter/PR person, and maybe a good administrator (running the books). But for one, she’s not good at handling people, and for two, she hardly knows anything about serving or bartending – even after all these years.

As an example, she once  deigned to chastise me for putting the bill on the right side of the check presenter. ‘I thought it didn’t matter,’ I said, ‘but, okay.’

‘Oh, no. This is just like a book,’ she said. ‘When they open it up, they look at the first page, on the left.’

So, like, if they didn’t find it on the left, they’d close the check presenter and give up?

Well, I described the bombshell of Ciera getting Mark to cover her shift without clearing it with Carney yesterday. Today Ciera had to work brunch with Carney. Ciera said it was hell. Carney scolded her for being disrespectful. She theorized that they were ‘too much friends’ that Ciera didn’t treat her enough like a boss. Ciera wondered, to me, why Carney thought they were friends? Carney asked if she was sticking it to her because of an incident a few weeks ago when Carney flew off the handle at her, for which Carney later appropriately apologized?

Tonight I had quite a bit of sympathy for Ciera because Carney orchestrated a Waiter’s Nightmare for her to live out. There was a party of 16 with a limited menu, and a set price of $40 a head, including tax and gratuity. However, there would be 8 separate checks. And the cocktails would be on separate tabs. And if that wasn’t enough, the desserts were also on a separate tab, to be paid by one individual. Then, instead of allowing Ciera to tally separate bar tabs for the separate parties and then merely add that tab informally to the $40 per person, she insisted on integrating the bar tabs into the dinner checks. Carney then drew up her own dinner checks for presentation purposes, making Ciera transfer her own log of drinks served onto the new checks. And, of course, the bar tabs had to have their 20% tip added in as well. Making it even more complicated, the guests didn’t understand how the whole thing worked, so they started squawking and questioning everything.

Imagine Making Up 8 Of These ... For One Party

It was a disaster. Fortunately, these were long-time guests with whom Ciera had a very solid relationship. But a disaster that the guests happily accept is still a disaster.

Ciera didn’t help things by picking up Table Eleven early in the evening. Did I mention Table Eleven some earlier post? Carney’s has ten tables in the dining room. When Ciera wants to have a quick glass of wine she ‘orders’ one, takes it in back, and chugs  it next to the women’s restroom. That’s Table Eleven. Some nights Table Eleven rings up quite a tab.

Tonight she was keeping her evenflow going with a vengeance. Her head really wasn’t in the game. Her personality is excellent, so the guests always like her and she gets good tips, but when it comes to the logistics of manual checks, she’s a mess. And on a night like tonight, she needed an extra-clear head to combat the mathematical/logistical rat’s nest Carney devised.

But as I always say during the worst kind of hell shift, ‘No matter what happens, this night will end.’ And sure enough, it did. We made over $200.

The ‘No’ Lady

Because it was sort of an uneventful day at Michael’s, I’m going to inaugurate a new feature in Waiternotes: Today’s Featured Customer Type.

The list is long, and filled mostly with irritating people. I suppose the reason I (we) have such a list is that the morons stand out, stick in your memory. While the cool people blend in, simply because they’re the vast majority. You’d typically have one or two of these a night, while the other twenty customers were perfectly normal.

As we go on, see if you recognize these people. If you’re a waiter, you’ll remember. If you’re not a waiter, maybe this type is you, or your father-in-law. And let me know if I’ve missed a particularly offensive characteristic of this character type.

The ‘No’ Lady

From the moment she walks through the door, she seems to be girding for the battle to prevent you (the restaurant) from getting any of her money beyond the absolute minimum.

The hostess might first encounter the ‘No’ Lady when asking if her party would like to have a drink in the bar before being seated.

‘No’, she responds curtly. <Crisp shake of the head.>

When you meet her at the table, the perfunctory solicitation of a cocktail order gets the same response: ‘No.’ Like a murderer hooked up to a polygraph. 

‘Iced Tea, then? Soda?’

‘No.’ She’s shaking her head before you finish asking.

Never mind up-selling, you’re not selling anything here.

Get ready to cringe when you launch into the specials. She’s shaking her head so soon, so fast, you wonder if she has a nerve disorder. She breaks you off in mid-sentence describing the Veal Scall –

‘No!’

Too bad the other guests were listening intently. She actually interrupted you.

Maybe I’m old, cynical, or just plain mean, but nowadays when this happens to me, I do one of two things:

1. I stop in my tracks conspicuously – mid-sentence, mind you – and say, ‘Okay. I’ll give you some time with the menus.’ And I walk away.
2. I smile at the ‘No’ Lady and say, ‘Okay, then you won’t be ordering the Veal, but maybe these other folks here are interested in hearing about it.’

Ditto for all possible add-ons during the meal. Appetizer? Salad? Dessert? After dinner drink? NoNoNoNo. Her ass is clenched so tight, I’m surprised she doesn’t blow out a lower disc.

Of course, the ‘No’ Lady isn’t totally the ‘No’ Lady. She’ll gladly say ‘Yes’ to more free water, more free bread, more lemons for her fish, every extra sauce you can possibly bring for free, and extra candies that come with the bill.

Speaking of the bill, there’s a high likelihood she’ll either be pulling out a calculator or a pocket tip chart. Equal odds that her contribution to the bill will involve single dollar bills, even coins. Notice that there is no chance in this scenario that she’s not going dutch.

Fortunately, you, the waiter, had the chance to ‘No’ her back:

‘And we’d like to have separate checks,’ she says.

‘No.’

* * * * *

There’s no such thing as a completely uneventful day at a restaurant, of course. Today at lunch I had but three tables. A single, $5. A nice six-top, $60 on a $330 check. And a couple enjoying a birthday to whom I really gave great service. That was $53 on a $147 check. Walked with $100.

Don’t ever get in a bad enough mood to give any less than the best you can do. I wasn’t in a bad mood at all today. However, that table could have been as nondescript as two cocktails, two salads, two entrees, and ‘Thanks for coming.’ Instead, I did every possible thing in my power to make it an enjoyable meal.

They were an attractive couple in their late-twenties. They had not alerted anyone it was her birthday. My first approach, I noticed her give him a kiss, then put something back in a box. I got no other clues through the meal about a birthday.

In fact, it didn’t matter to me anyway. I could tell they were having a special day, enjoying each other and the meal immensely. Michael’s is not cheap, so it seemed obvious they were treating themselves.

I decided such an occasion deserved a free dessert. Michael’s will give a dessert to anyone for anything – B-day, Anniversary, Graduation, for any problem that’s occurred during the visit, or just because the server or manager thinks they’re ‘cool people.’ At an expensive restaurant, it’s our way of just saying thanks for coming here.

I decided, with the B-day hunch, that they would warrant a dessert. I ‘fired’ a Baked Chocolate Pudding – an advance-order dessert like a souffle.

So it came that they asked for the check when I cleared their table. My timing on the baking time was perfect, and I returned with the check and a birthday dessert as a complete surprise to them.

Further, when it happened that I was right – it was her birthday – I got the digital camera, took their picture, and printed up a Michael’s souvenir photo.

Amazingly, the picture thing didn’t seal the deal. They’d given me the check at that point and said I could keep the change. I didn’t look inside until I finished with the photo printing.

Then, of course, I made a point of visiting them again and thanking them for the generous tip.

You have to understand how people feel. Waiters often forget that their customers have the same feelings they do. If I gave someone a 33% tip on an expensive check, I wouldn’t expect to be acknowledged beyond the ‘Final Thank You.’ But if that extra acknowledgment did happen, it would make me feel good.