Anthony Bourdin and why everyone should wait tables at least once in their lives
"You can always tell when a person has worked in a restaurant. There’s an empathy that can only be cultivated by those who’ve stood between a hungry mouth and a $28 pork chop, a special understanding of the way a bunch of motley misfits can be a family. Service industry work develops the “soft skills” recruiters talk about on LinkedIn — discipline, promptness, the ability to absorb criticism, and most important, how to read people like a book. The work is thankless and fun and messy, and the world would be a kinder place if more people tried it. With all due respect to my former professors, I’ve long believed I gained more knowledge in kitchens, bars, and dining rooms than any college could even hold" - Anthony Bourdin, 1956 - 2018
I loved Anthony Bourdin for his wit and irreverence and for his generous and curious spirit. So when this quote popped up in my feed yesterday I cheered to myself. YES! I agree wholeheartedly. For a lesson in messy humanness, in all its beauty and ugliness and everything in between, working in a bar or a restaurant can’t be beat. As Bourdin says, the world would be a kinder place if more people tried it.
The particular establishment that came to mind when I read this quote was a pub I worked in for about 8 months in my early 20s. It looked a charming, traditional village pub from the outside - all hanging baskets and cheerful umbrellas over tables in the beer garden. Inside was a motley crew of bar staff, some students like me saving to travel and some old-timers. And then there were the ‘regulars’, alcoholics some of them, probably, looking back on it.
There was the local who would occasionally try to get a blush by popping his balls on the bar as he paid for his pint. I learned to pass him his Carling without a flinch. A life lesson in how to deal with badly-behaved men. It came in handy.
There was the gentleman who ran the vegetable store who would sit at the bar by himself every night on his way home from work. He always had two pints. He was silent study in aloneness. People said he was a millionaire. That was probably village gossip but he tipped me 50p for every drink he bought. On Saturdays he brought his wife in and they would sit in the family room on the other side of the bar. Those nights he had two half lager-tops whilst his wife had a dry white wine…this in the days when you had two wine choices and both came from a box mounted on the wall. If they spoke to each other I never saw it happen.
The landlord was an ebullient and charming raconteur at the start of the night, but violence shimmered close to the surface as he worked his way through his customary 12 pints a night. He would yell into our faces that we were clumsy and useless – then he would stumble down the cellar steps to change a keg. He once threw a full aquarium down the stairs in a rage. His wife was steely and proud and usually drunk herself whenever I saw her. She came down to the bar once with a black eye but no one said anything.
On Sundays the regulars came straight from church for a couple of swift pints before heading home for their roast dinners. No mobiles then of course so exasperated wives would sometimes phone the pub and ask me to send their men home. The men would raise their fingers to their lips and laugh as they downed the dregs. They were always back on their bar stools for reopening at 5. The drinking and the darts (and the wives’ phone calls) were all as much a part of the Sunday ritual as the visit to church.
The human dramas that played out there were sometimes comic and sometimes tragic and often both. One man came in one night garrulously telling how he had woken up that morning tenderly holding in his arms a maggot-ridden roadkill fox he must have scooped up as he staggered home after last orders. Raucous laughter erupted as he told his tale, but there was uneasiness in it too.
A young man of Indian heritage joined the staff for a few months. Before he left he offered to cook all the staff a traditional banquet and so the landlord gave him the run of the kitchen. He spent all day creating an astonishing feast of curries, daals, breads and vegetables. We all sat down late one evening after closing to eat together this feast that had been prepared with such dedication and something like love. It was a weird home of sorts briefly.
And some (many) nights were deadly boring, in which absolutely nothing happened at all. Just the same old soft rock tunes playing on the jukebox.
I learned a lot in that place. I was treated with kindness by people with not much. And sometimes like nothing by people who had lots. I learned to read people and how to stick up for myself. I once copped a tirade from the landlord for over-filling the pints. Shaking, I stared him down and dared him to hit me. He backed off and never raised his voice to me again.
I fell in love and had my heartbroken in that pub. I grew up and toughened up. When something unpleasant happened to me there on my last night, the lot of them – the regulars, the staff and even the landlord came around me. I remember a visceral sense of being protected that I have not experienced in the same way before nor since.
Here in Auckland our bars and restaurants are all still closed. I don’t go out too much these days anyway and my days of pulling pints are behind me, I think. But I am looking forward to the day when hospitality can reopen its doors. For many reasons, for the sake of people’s livelihoods and to give us all places to gather together again. Also to provide places of such rich, messy, irreplaceable learning.
Photo credit: Ethan James for WSJ Magazine, set by Marcs Marcus