BW Boutique Hotel

Remembering orders, being vigilante and regulating the flow of work all play out in an emotional field. “Eating is the most intimate act,” writes Lin Rolens, “we are encouraged to perform in public.” And Dorothy Sue Cobble, who has studied waitress unions, observes that waitresses “are responding to hungers of many kinds.” This emotional field has economic consequences. The very meaning of service is defined within it. To understand and appreciate more fully the thought behind waitressing, therefore, we need to ponder the many layers of what “service” means in the waitress- customer encounter.
To begin with, this encounter calls forth historically shaped conventions for the serving of food that are associated with the house servant. In Frances Donovan’s 1920 account of waitressing, The Woman Who Waits, published during the first stage of the feminization of food service, there is explicit treatment of the association of maid and waitress—and of the waitress’s desire to distinguish her work from that of a housemaid. But the association remained (my mother’s uniforms, down to the modified caps, resembled stereotyped maid’s apparel) and is reflected in a number of routines of service: from modes of address, to the sequence of questions about the order, to customs for serving and clearing food. (“[Djishes are placed on the table without noise,” notes a 1932 educational tract on waitressing, “. .. the hand must be trained to slip dishes into place very close to the table rather than bring them down directly from a height.”) Conventions and symbols change over time, and vary by the type of restaurant, but waitressing continues to involve the acquisition of customs of service—and one’s accommodation
to them. The residue of the servant’s role rankles the women I spoke with, and they resist it in a number of ways: from covert criticism and ridicule of haughty behavior (my mother’s typical response) to direct rebuke and declaration of status, letting customers know when they’ve crossed the line. One means by which the waitress expresses agency is through her use of skill and strategy to regulate the flow of work. “The customer has the illusion that they’re in charge,” observes one of the waitresses I interviewed, “but they’re not.” It’s the waitress who must “get command of her tables,” who is “the commander in chief of her section.” This waitress still performs the customs of service, but within routines of practice that she controls.
The encounter between customer and waitress potentially gives rise to a further range of emotions and social scripts, in addition to that of server and served. On any given shift, a stream of customers enters with needs that vary from the physiological—and the emotions that attend hunger—to the desire for public intimacy. And the waitress, depending on the type of restaurant, her reading of the situation, and her own history and motives, may fulfill, modulate, or limit those needs and desires. There has been a fair amount of sociological study of the emotional dimension of waitressing and similar occupations, and this research tends toward two broad-scale findings.
The first is that providing service requires “emotion management” or what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has termed “emotional labor.” Regardless of what the waitress actually feels, the interaction with the customer requires that she display emotion that is dictated by the social and economic demands of the restaurant. My mother illustrates such emotional labor through her account of a churlish regular, a man who was always sending his steak back to the cook: “You’ve got to make an effort to try and please him, even though you can just kill him.” Generalizing to all
difficult customers, she advises: “Just try the best you can to be nice to them. Even if they’re rude to you, you still smile and just go on, because that’s your living.”
The second finding is that the roles afforded to the waitress in her encounter with the customer play out within stereotypic gender scripts: the waitress becomes servant, mother, daughter, friend, or sexual object. The house uniform and policy, customs of service, and other restaurant traditions contribute to this construction of gender-in-the-moment as do broader expectations from the culture at large. Though I surely wouldn’t have understood her behavior in these terms, I recall the sense I had watching my mother work that she smiled and laughed more than when at home, a quick, not-quite-true laugh, flirtatious, with a touch on the arm or shoulder, a focused vivacity. As she summed it all up while we were sitting at her table, “You’ve got to be damned good, damned fast, and you’ve got to make people like you.”

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