How to Wait a Table

More of a Love Letter than an Actual Guide

Vincent Van Gogh - Café Terrace at Night

I’ve worked in hospitality for most of my adult life - I’ve poured pints in pubs, managed the floor of busy restaurants, and worked making tacos and quesedillas in the kitchen of a Mexican eatery. But if there’s one side of the job I love and miss more than any other, it’s table service.

Waiting a table is an art. It’s about building rapport with people you’ve only just met, and providing them the service they want - which means first recognising what kind of service they’re after. It can be an experience that leaves both parties - the waiter and the waited - coming away feeling that much better about themselves. But it isn’t always. I’ve worked alongside - and been subject to - table service that has been boring, stale, and transactional. I’m here to fix that.

Table-waiting is a skill-set that will serve you for the rest of your life. It’s about charisma and confidence; time management and attention to detail; most of all, it’s about knowing how to build relationships with complete strangers. But it’s not for everyone. If you don’t feel comfortable approaching people you don’t know with a smile, or if you can’t handle juggling eight tasks of differing priority at once - try brain surgery. It’s much easier.

Prior preparation prevents perform performance

‘Prep’ is a hospo term usually associated with chefs - bucket-loads of aioli blending while fresh herbs are chiffonaded and a jus is reducing down, all the while glancing at the clock knowing dinner service is creeping ever nearer - but it applies to front-of-house as well. FOH prep comes in two broad categories: the day-of, pre-service prep; and broad preparation that’ll serve you in every shift. It’s this latter I want to cover first - think of it as the equivalent of a chef’s knife-skills you’ll need for waiting tables.

Firstly, and most importantly: learn the damn menu. I cannot stress how important this is. If you don’t know what’s on your menu, there’s no chance in hell that you’re going to serve it well. This isn’t just learning what which each dish looks like - although this is a good start! Learning the menu means talking to the chefs, finding out what a roux is (and how to make one, ideally), understanding why a dish is composed in a certain why, how flavours are balanced - we’re talking curiosity here, curiosity for curiosity’s sake: working tables means learning flavour, just as much as any chef should, because when you’re presenting a menu to a table you should be able to describe each and every dish in a way that gets people hungry, salivating at the thought of digging in to a salmon gravlax or a coconut pannacotta. Food is sex: and you’re there to provide the foreplay.

So, yes, learn the menu. And taste the dishes! Hover about the kitchen and - this is also a desperately important part of the puzzle - make friends with the chefs. There is a strange (and outdated) half-mantra in hospitality that front- and back-of-house are separate worlds, sort of a Platonic divide - this is bullshit. Make friends with the chefs and your job will be so much easier, and so much more rewarding. Ask questions - at the right times, that is, not in the middle of the dinner rush when the grills are flaming and the fryers are bubbling - and find out how the other half lives. Many chefs are (and I use the term lovingly) absolute bastards. Others only put up that front while underneath they’re complete softies. And some are incompetent fools just working for a pay-check that’ll just go towards cigarettes. Never mind: find the guy or gal who knows the most and learn from them. They’ll appreciate the simple fact that you’re interested in what they’re doing - and they might even show you a few tricks.

Learning the menu is, of course, not limited to the food: this also means acquainting yourself with the drinks. Beers, wines, spirits, cocktails - there is endless flavour to be found here, and always more to learn. Get to know the differences between an Indian pale ale and an American pale ale; what makes a pinot noir and, if you can, how to find the flavour notes in one. If the restaurant you’re working at gives you a free drink at the end of every shift (and, honestly, they should) use that to work your way through the drinks list. The more you know, the more you can bring out at the table.

Knowing the menu will also give you a foundation of understanding you can use to talk to the table. This is the other key set of skills needed in this broad preparation for the job: knowing how to talk to people. There is no one ‘right answer’ here, when it comes to conversation - you’ll have your own conversation style, and the only way you’ll survive in the job is by being authentically yourself. Putting on a character is a sure-fire way of hating the job, and a fast-track to burnout. Be yourself, and understand what it is that makes you interesting; then, use that self-knowledge and talk, and talk, and talk, until you get so good at talking it becomes unconscious.

If there is any one skill that front-of-house hospitality teaches better than any other, it is this: conversation with complete strangers. It is indispensable for hospo but is valuable for every other aspect of life. Meeting strangers, and over the course of an evening then getting to know them: it’s the best part of the job. It’s also and often irritating, because many people are fundamentally boring, self-centred, or downright nasty. But the key here is to leave those people be while indulging in the characters you’ll end up remembering long after the shift is over. We’ll talk more about this later on - understanding how to differentiate between the tables that are looking for food delivered and little else, and those that want the full ‘experience’ - but for the purposes of our broad category of ‘preparation’, make sure to focus on your communication skills. And if all else fails - fall back on the menu: talk about the food, and the drink. If you have nothing else to say, that’s the core of the job, and you can’t go wrong with it.

Finally, I want to briefly discuss those prep tasks that fall into the category of ‘day-of-service’: setting up the restaurant, or at least that section of the restaurant you’re assigned (more on sections later), and making sure you’ll have everything you could need for the service ahead - carafes of water filled, cutlery polished, drink fridges stocked, everything and anything you can think of. There’s nothing worse than having tables waiting to be served, food needing to be run, drinks ready to be sent - and then having to stop and get something menial organised like grabbing napkins from the storage cupboard. Get it done beforehand: it’ll make service that much smoother.

Also - depending on the restaurant, learn the specials. Not every joint has specials, and some only have them on the busier weekend evenings, but if where you’re working has them, learn those specials - off-by-heart, if you can. Everything I mentioned earlier about the menu applies here. A good restaurant should provide staff with a tasting plate of the special before service, so make sure to give it a try so you know what it is you’re upselling. Nothing wows a table more than describing down-to-the-detail the special of the day in a way that means they just have to order it.

Service is as service does

Let’s talk about multitasking. There’s a common misconception that any restaurant service requires a great deal of multitasking from its staff. This is just flat-out wrong. Multitasking means trying to perform two actions at once, and failing at both. No server or bartender should ever find themselves multitasking: they should be moving through a constantly re-adjusting hierarchy of tasks.

This is the core concept I want to drill into you when approaching service. A Friday night dinner service can be enormously busy - with any number of vital actions needing to be completed in only so much time. But try and multitask, and you’ll inevitably get overwhelmed. Approach tasks one-by-one. Complete them. Then move onto the next. This might seem banally obvious, but it’s something I’ve seen only the very best of FOH actually embody in their work. The inexperienced and incompetent try to get everything done at once - and they fail.

Key to really working inside this concept is the realisation that you must constantly have a part of your mind keeping track of what needs to be done at any one time. This hierarchy of tasks will be ever shifting, with new and urgent responsibilities emerging organically that will often slip right to the top of the list.

For example: tables needing to be cleared; a drinks ticket to be made; people waiting at the front desk; the phone is ringing; someone at table eight has a complaint and they’re looking for someone to take it out on - the list can be endless. And then you hear from the pass that there are plates ready to be run. Suddenly, there’s one clear priority: if there’s food waiting to be sent to a table, everything else can wait. Once the chefs are done with a plate, then it should be sent to the table as quickly as possible. Hot food will only stay hot for so long.

How to determine what is the most important task at any one time? Really, it takes practice to develop the intuitive understanding that leads to effective hierarchy management. But I believe there is a rough universal understanding of priority, and it aligns very well with what we in the business call ‘order of service’, the steps any server must take with their table. I’m going to outline this order of service, and show how it corresponds to how you should be prioritising the different tasks presented with you at any one time.

Greet the table. Most restaurants will have a maître d’ who will physically guide customers to their table; it is still your job to make your way over and introduce yourself. This should be done in the first few minutes from a table being seated - they want to know that they are being looked after. A simple hello and small talk can suffice, but feel free to up the charm or throw in something interesting. Let the table know who you are, and perhaps what they can expect from your service. If you don’t approach the table and don’t introduce yourself, that itself is an introduction - it shows that you’re far too busy to give a damn. If the table feels like this, you’ve failed at your job as a server. So head on over and say hello!

Introduce the menu. This can be combined with the above, but not always. Many customers do not want to be assaulted with information about the menu straight-away after being seated; they will want to be eased into the process. Some customers just want to sit down, order, and dig in as soon as possible. Recognising the desires of different tables is a vital skill that I will cover in the final part of this essay - for the time being, just recognise that you shouldn’t always launch into your spiel right off the bat. When introducing the menu, make sure to ask for any dietary requirements, flavour preferences, and also use this opportunity to continue building a relationship with your table.

Order drinks. Again, this can be combined with either or both of the first two steps: however, once again, it is important to recognise the desires of the table. Rushing your customers is a sure-fire way of making them unwelcome. While there are time-constraints on tables for any busy restaurant (as tables are often double- or even triple-booked across a dinner service), this does not mean you need to treat your tables like cattle. Yet again, this is a good time to build rapport and introduce small-talk. Get to know, in any small way, the people you are serving. You can tell a lot about a person from the way they order, and what they drink. These facts will help you out in the rest of your service with that table: try and pick up on them.

Deliver drinks. Pretty obvious, this. This is usually the best time to move onto our next action, or at least nudge your table in this general direction:

Take food orders. The expectation here is that it will take around ten minutes after seating and ordering that a table’s drinks will arrive. This will have given them time to look over the menus and come to a decision - but, yet again, we must take into consideration the desires of the table. Many customers will be very ready to order as drinks are being delivered, while others will want some time to spend enjoying their drinks and engaging in a bit of conversation before they even start to look at the menus. We must keep a gentle balance between the desires of the customer and the requirements of the restaurant in mind: if a table only has an hour and a half of time allocated before the next booking arrives, it’s best to really push the table to make a decision at this point. (It is also vital to remember that the kitchen will be waiting on an order docket. A properly-managed restaurant will make sure that bookings are ‘staggered’, meaning that there will be a steady flow of arrivals and not one large group entering in all at once which will cause a huge backlog in the kitchen. However, if you spend too long waiting for a table to come to a decision on their orders, you risk them slipping into the time allocated for the next wave of arrivals, potentially contributing to a crunch.)

Check in on the table. While the table is waiting for their food to be delivered, you can’t simply disappear from them entirely. Make sure that you are checking in on them - either for water refills, another round of drinks, and to generally keep them in the loop of when they can expect their food. This matters even on more on busier nights, where there can be a serious wait on food - it is always, always, better to let the table know there’ll be a delay than avoid them. Communication about problems is the best way to diffuse the problem (and this doesn’t just apply to hospitality; it’s a good rule for life).

Deliver plates. Now, really good servers won’t stand awkwardly at the head of the table holding plates and auctioning off to their customers. Great servers will know who ordered what - either because they have personally remembered, have written them down in their notebook, or have used their POS to assign plates to seats on the docket - and deliver it straight before them. If anything really gets a table feeling looked after, it’s this. It shows, consciously and unconsciously, that you remembered something about that table. (Of course, this can and should apply to drinks as well.) As you place - tenderly, not just slam them down - the plates before your customers it’s good to announce the name of the dish to them: just in case there’s been a mix-up or a mistake along the way. This sort of pre-damage control can go a long way!

Meal check-in. Between two and five minutes after you’ve delivered them their food, you should slip on by and ask them how everything’s going. If there’s been a mistake or if a customer has a complaint, it’s best to deal with it as soon as possible, and this is the time to get it sorted. It’s also, as always, a good time to ask for another round of drinks, and more generally build rapport.

Starters / mains / desserts. Not every restaurant runs a full three-course menu, but many do. The above steps apply to a course-based menu just as much as a single-plate service, only you repeat the steps. I feel like this is pretty self-explanatory, but as with much in hospo (and life), explaining the obvious can really make the difference.

Clear plates, final round of drinks, etc. Once a table is finished with their meals, clear the table. Again, obvious. But there is nothing worse than having dirty plates sitting there in front of you for ten minutes, fifteen minutes… and your server is standing behind the bar yarning away with the other staff. One important caveat: please make sure before you start clearing that everyone is actually finished with their food. Clearing half the table while one guy’s still finishing his steak very obviously signals that you want him to hurry on up.

The bill, and farewells. This is the final step in your order of service, and can be the finishing touch on a great evening, or be just one more nail in the coffin of transactionality. If you dump the bill on the table with the eftpos machine, or herd them over to the front desk and simply announce the total sum, then you’re displaying to your table that they’ve been nothing but a means to a financial end to you. This is disheartening for both parties. But if you genuinely ask how everything was, take the opportunity to say goodbye, and thank them for the evening, you’re showing that you’ve treated them like real people - and nothing leaves a better impression.

Think of your order of service as a sort of bell curve of steadily increasing and then decreasing intensity: seating and introducing is medium priority, drinks and food high, then post-dinner check-ins and billing falling to low. This roughly aligns with our aforementioned ‘hierarchy of actions’. Where a server will struggle is juggling the needs of multiple tables simultaneously. At any one moment you may have two tables who have just been seated and are needing introductions and drink orders, two waiting for plates that are sitting on the pass, and three other tables finishing up and expecting the bill. Based on our understanding of priority, we can roughly approach this as follows: deliver plates, make introductions and drink orders, and then see to the bill with those that are left.

Service can be stressful. Multiple competing tasks - and multiple competing tables - vying for your attention must be dealt with sequentially and smoothly; knowing the optimal order of this sequence is half the battle. But don’t be so stubborn as to conform to this sequence at all times: if a table is calling out to you for service, don’t ignore them because you’ve got it in your head that you have something more important that needs to be done. And if there really is an urgent task that can’t wait: let them know as you pass on by that you will be with them shortly. These moments of small communication can make all the difference. A table will be much more understanding that you are busy when you let them know; if they aren’t, then you’ve done everything in your power to appease them. Bear in mind that in hospitality, you can’t please everyone. Some people are just arseholes.

A few more pointers on service before we move on. First, I want to stress: stick to your section. What is a section? A restaurant should be divided into one-person areas of control: bartender, maître d’, and servers managing specific groups of tables. If your restaurant doesn’t have sections, then get out - whoever is running the place doesn’t know what they’re doing. Sections are the best way of keeping a busy restaurant under control, by ensuring that each staff member has a steady but not overwhelming workload. Sticking to your section, then, means working where you have been assigned - don’t go into the bar to make your own drinks, and don’t go serving other tables. You’re interrupting the carefully managed flow of another staff’s section, which - even though you might feel like you’re helping - can actually cause them to lose control of where they’re at. It also reduces the number of faces any one table has to keep track of, keeping a one-on-one relationship between table and server intact over the course of the evening.

Of course: if another staff member asks for help - help them. And if you desperately need someone to run drinks to one of your tables - ask. You are a team: but you are a team that functions most effectively when each of you sticks to the specific delineated task you have been assigned.

This leads to my second key pointer when approaching service: communication. We have already encountered this in regards to table service, but I want to pivot and address this on a staff level. When staff members stop talking to one another, service fails. Let the chefs know when you are about to take orders on a table; let the maître d’ know that you are about to send them a table for payment; let other servers know that you just sold the last special. The more you communicate, the more you are in to win. But notice how I use the word communicate, not talk - we’re talking direct language, here, not fluff. We all have so much time: use it wisely. This is especially pertinent when talking to chefs, who have exactly zero tolerance for bullshit, and want to hear in as few words as possible just what the fuckup is and what you need them to fix. They’d rather hear that than you stumbling over an excuse and an apology.

Gears, explained

In this section, I want to cover what I consider the most important skill in hospitality. It is a subtle creature, one that is infinitely helpful to understand but difficult to get your teeth into. I’ll call this skill ‘changing gears’.

This relates in two key areas: first, speed and intensity of service. Changing gears here means upping your speed of action when needed: low gear for quieter shifts and the starts- and ends-of service, high gear for those crunch times when you need to be everywhere all at once. There is no use being in high gear when service is quiet - you’ll just burn yourself out. High gear does not equal stress - it simply means that you are operating at full speed. If you’re approaching service with the method of shifting hierarchies as described above, you shouldn’t feel stressed - you should instead be aware that you have a lot that’s needing to be done. That might be ‘stressful’; but it’s your choice to succumb to that and let the pressure get to you. The gear metaphor really works here because a car moving at high speed but in a low gear is pummelling the engine in an unhealthy way; likewise moving straight into high gear won’t get you anywhere. It’s all about flow: shifting gear when necessary as required. If you’re a good ‘gear-changer’, then when things start getting really busy you can move into that with momentum and grace, and be the calm at the eye of the storm. There’s really no better feeling than this.

‘Changing gears’, however, has another usage. We can apply this metaphor onto table service itself, and in recognising the needs and desires of a table. A table that wants only the bare minimum of service - only drinks and food delivered in a timely manner - are a ‘low-gear table’; as such, they don’t need quite as much energy and attention as a table that wants a more personalised, social experience. A ‘high-gear table’ wants the full bells and whistles: lots of attention, and personality to go with it. Once again, being in high gear for a low gear table is an inefficient use of your time; a low-gear interaction for a high gear table won’t go anywhere fast either. So bear this in mind.

How to tell if a table is high- or low-gear? This is a tricky one. Every person is a unique individual; even then they might be in a good or a bad mood, or have something going on in their personal life that means they’re more or less willing to be open to the ‘full’ hospo experience. A young couple on a date night might initially appear to be a low-gear interaction - they are more focussed on themselves, enjoying one another’s company. But they might (and I have encountered this many a-time myself as a server) also be very willing to have a bit of a banter, relishing in the positive attention you give them, which will serve only to make their date night that much more memorable. (You have in your power the ability to make or break someone’s first date. Remember that!) A large family gathering might seem like a high-gear interaction, in that there are many people requiring attention, but in reality need very little beyond simple service: they’re far too busy talking with one another to care about what you’ve got to say.

This ability to pick up on the needs and desires of strangers is, in my mind, a skill so useful that I believe it to be something of a superpower. It is something that must be learned through practice. There are many different social cues that you can pick up on in the first five minutes of interaction with a table that will demonstrate what level of service they are expecting - readiness to converse, laughter at a bad joke, interest in the menu or the specials. (And bear in mind, our gear metaphor also allows us to change when required from low- to high-gear, meaning that sometimes a table will need more attention at different times in the evening.) Think of it as acting like a mirror, reflecting the energy that you are given with a respective energy of your own.

Recognising these social cues will serve you not just in hospitality, but in social interaction throughout all areas of life. The skill of recognising and meeting a person’s wants and needs will take you a long, long way. So practice it. Not everyone is going to be so naturally attuned to this, but I believe that we all have the capability to grow our social muscles in this way. We evolved to be social creatures: there is an intuitive understanding that we possess that allows us to pick up on each other’s mental states. But if you’re too busy freaking out about the five other tables that are waiting for service, you’ll never be open and present enough to make that initial connection. Keep a level head, and manage your hierarchy: then let your personality shine. Not only will you be better at your job, but you’ll have a ball while doing it.

Hospo I love you, but you’re bringing me down

With all this said - hospitality is a bitch of a job. There’s a reason why I’m no longer in the industry. I miss waiting tables; but I miss it in the way where I’m glad that I’m no longer doing it as a job. It served me (pun intended) very well when I was doing it - but I’ve got better things to be doing with my time. The high intensity demands of the work, the late nights, and the steady stream of anti-social arseholes you will inevitably meet: they wear you down and burn you out.

But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone and everyone as a line of work. If you’re in your twenties, it is the job you should pursue. (I could be biased.) The skillset it provides - in particular people-skills, and time and hierarchy management - is invaluable throughout life. The rush of a good service, the defeat of a bad service: the experiences you’ll have in this industry will better you. Or they’ll break you. There’s always a chance that you won’t rise to the challenge. But I think the test is worth the outcome, either way. Even those I’ve seen who couldn’t handle the stress of the job - and they were many - learned something intrinsically valuable about themselves that has served them ever since.

And to those of you reading this who have never served a table before: next time you’re in a restaurant, remember that you’re not the centre of attention. You’re one part of an intensely complex machine with supply chains extending out across the world, served by competing personalities all with their own lives and problems, and - even though we servers really do (most of the time) want to give you a great experience - we can’t always serve your every need. No, we can’t make you an eggless omelette. No, we’re not sorry about that.

Hospo: you were good to me, and I’m thankful for that. Maybe in the future, when I’m an older man, I’ll return to table service. But these days, I’m happy just to sit in a restaurant and watch the well-oiled machine flow all around me, thinking of times gone past.

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