Waiting on Tables

Serving can be an undignified job with little growth and long hours. It’s often a starting point for new immigrants, the maintenance income for drug addicts, the side gig for theatre kids, or the penultimate option for the failed and depressed. The day you start serving, you can see the “Dead End” sign on the faces of your new co-workers. But serving can also be one of the best jobs for the unskilled and the over-educated. No matter your situation, it’s reliably there. At least that’s what we thought.

In 1999, The New Yorker published a little-known writer whose most recent culinary failure had inspired him to become “a traitor to my profession.” He described restaurants and the practices that servers see but always try to hide from their tables. His name was Anthony Bourdain. The next year, he published Kitchen Confidential with the plot line of a classic Greek comedy: the hero rises from lowly beginnings in the kitchens of Cape Cod, out of drug...