What can I get for you?

news & reflection

I finished watching season three of The Bear last night. I love the show even though my nagging defiant disorder wants me to hate it. The show is beautifully made and thoughtfully researched. From the anger and urgency of service while onion scraps and Band-Aid wrappers commingle on the floor to the cost of butter. Although, the implication that Carmy has a better technique to remove a wishbone than Thomas Keller was a little far fetched. I love the screaming but more notably, the silence.  

I started working in restaurants when I was fifteen. I was hired at a tavern in my hometown as a dishwasher a few nights a week. I was the youngest person in the kitchen and the only girl in the back of the house. The line cooks, who were twice my age, would say horribly crude things to me. How they wanted to hold onto my pigtails while they fucked me, as they “could tell I was a freak.” At this restaurant I went from fishing soggy breadsticks and broken glass out of the sink trap to filling water glasses and clearing plates in the dining room to dictating ticket items to the cooks, pulling food out of the window, and handing it off to a runner or taking it to the guest’s table myself. I quickly learned how to return blows from the other side of the line. I could handle the harassment. I could serve it right back. I could handle shitty pay. I was hooked. 

When I moved to Pittsburgh for college I got a hostess job at a steakhouse. The dress code was business casual, including a mandated three-inch or higher heels. The servers would loiter around the hostess stand, flirting and vying for their chance to be sat next. One time, a server came up behind me, threw up my skirt and grabbed my buttcheeks. I started joining everyone at the bar after service when I was nineteen. Three years later, my coworkers and I celebrated my twenty-first birthday at that same bar. At that restaurant, I went from hostess, to busser, to expo, to cocktail server, to barback, to lunch server. I learned how to tie a tie. I ironed my shirt in the stockroom. I worked full time while going to school full time. I worked multiple doubles a week. I watched people leave to pursue their Big Boy Jobs. I watched people die. I trained countless new guys in every FOH position. I watched multiple couples meet as coworkers, fall in love, and get married. I fell asleep in pre-shift. I had the chef scream in my face so close to me that his sweat dripped down my forehead. I cried in the walk-in. I spilled drinks on customers. I ironed everyone's shirts in the stockroom. I had a family. I got fired. I was crushed. 

When I graduated Mortuary School, I moved on to my own Big Boy Job in a funeral home. I went on to work in a lot of other restaurants over the next ten years. I was a hostess. I was a busser. I was a waitress. I was a bartender. I was a cook. In my early twenties, working in the restaurant was something I did to pay my rent. That's why I thought everyone did it. Everyone, in my mind, including myself, would go on to their big boy jobs and leave the restaurant industry permanently in their storied past. I would leave the Funeral Home twice to return to a restaurant. Once temporarily and once permanently. I can't put it down. I can't let it go. I love this industry. It's in me. I love everything about it. I love every creep freak who wants to work in it. 

The reality is crying in the walk-in. The reality is volunteering to go to Depot so you can get out of the restaurant then sitting in the car with your eyes closed for ten minutes and telling your boss the lines were long when you get back. The reality is being great at cooking and never getting an opportunity because the infrastructure in your city is dog shit and there aren't enough hoods to go around and it costs fifty thousand dollars to put one in and you've never seen even five thousand dollars in your life. The reality is building your dream, watching it die, then forcing yourself to accept a position in someone else's restaurant earning half as much. The reality is working in someone else's kitchen with nothing to show for it until you die. It’s waking up every day asking “Why am I doing this to myself?” and mostly not having an answer.  

At the steakhouse in my early twenties, my line cook boyfriend and I would talk about our future plan to own a funeral home and a restaurant right next to each other. We would feed the mourners and get them drunk, it’s honestly a great idea. I’ve always romanticized a place for people to come in hungry and leave happy at my hand. I never wanted to own my own funeral home but I’ve wanted my own restaurant for as long as I can remember.

This week I wrote the biggest check of my life to buy my own restaurant. To ask all day “What can I get for you?” What a dream. 

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Special thanks to Kelsey Swintek for her hard work on this and all brothmailers.

Happy Tuesday
I love you
-the BMer

the only existing photo from the steakhouse days