The Uninvited Guest

Emma Bradfield

Picture this: it’s a busy Saturday evening shift at a Wellington restaurant. There’s glassware to  polish, drinks to run, and orders to take—but I am standing in front of a customer who has been staring at the beer list for the better part of two minutes. Finally, he turns to me and says, ‘Do you have anything that isn’t this Wellington shit?’ 

People working in hospitality have been dealing with this sort of thing since the dawn of time. The serving wenches in the taverns of old surely also had to paste smiles upon their faces and say, ‘Well actually there's a pretty clear international section on that list you have in your hand there!’ 

Serving is a profession that's been documented in movies like Amélie and tv shows such as 2 Broke Girls. People make TikTok series about it and post Instagram reels about it. It even crops up in paintings. 

Take Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks, for example. Hailed as a masterpiece that evokes the loneliness of late nights in a big city, it depicts three customers sitting in a diner and one man behind the counter. The real sucker punch is that there isn’t even a door. All I can think about when looking at it is how badly the man behind the counter probably wants to leave. Imagine being literally, physically trapped in your hospitality job. A nightmare.

So he has to stay, bearing witness to whatever loneliness is playing out in front of him. A lot of working in hospo is just that: bearing witness. A server is the uninvited guest at every terrible first date, the intruder at the family meal, the trespasser at the work event—always passing through at inopportune moments to ask whether everything is going alright. If you’re looking for true intimacy, eat at home. 

What customers don’t realise is that, as they consider the qualities of the food, weigh up the merits of the environment, and judge the service, the service is judging them right back. There is a real us-and-them divide between people who have worked in hospo and people who haven’t. Once you have, going out to eat will never be the same again. 

Nothing brings people together like a common enemy, and hospo is rife with them. Every customer who walks through the doors has the potential to become the antagonist of the hour. My workplace recently had a walk-in of eighteen people. Read that again. Walk-in. Eighteen people. The boundless optimism of a group expecting to walk into a restaurant and be promptly served almost has to be applauded. It’s the kind of behavior someone who has worked in hospitality would never even consider. 

I once had a co-worker tell me that, before he worked as a server, he used to stuff his napkins inside his water glass, thinking, well I don’t want the servers to have to touch them. He reflected, ‘God, they must have hated me.’ 

Customers who don’t say thank you, who talk over you, who make no move to pass you their plates even though they are clearly out of reach: all of this provides ample ammunition for complaint. What else is a girl to do during a slow shift but talk a little shit? 

Of course, these complaints would be no fun at all if there were no one else to do it with. 

Maybe the true loneliness of Nighthawks is that the guy behind the counter doesn’t have a co-worker to hang out with. No one to whom he can turn to and say, ‘Can these people read the room and get the hell out please?’ 

The hospo industry is, at its core, about connection. There are certain losses of dignity that come with the job that are bound to bring you and your co-workers closer together: debasing yourself in the group chat to try and get someone to cover your shift, slipping over in the dishpit, taking it too far at the staff party (who among us hasn’t?). If you can clock in and still look everyone in the eye after all that, you are almost certainly on your way to something resembling friendship. 

Young people, particularly students looking to fund their ever-more-expensive degrees, form the backbone of the hospo industry. The nighttime hours of restaurant work let you pretend you’re going to make your 9 a.m. class while also giving you an excuse not to: We closed soooo late last night. 

Often, if you’re lucky, your job will even provide you with a meal on shift. Where else can you get money, food, and alcohol for free, all in one place? 

There are downsides, obviously, to all this connection. Sometimes you have to connect with people who suck. The relationship between servers and chefs can be especially brutal. Without overgeneralising, there tends to be a reason chefs have not put themselves in a customer-facing role. Some people are simply not meant to talk to others while under pressure.

An angry chef can cast a dark shadow over any shift, especially when the things going wrong are their fault—although any self-respecting chef would never admit it. 

The real key to working in hospo, and to dealing with chefs and customers alike, is putting on a performance. There is a reason the industry is beloved by those trying to make it creatively—it requires complete conviction in everything you do on shift, particularly when moving between the customer and the kitchen. 

When talking to the kitchen, the customer is a fool and an idiot. When talking to the customer, the chef is a maniac and juggling too many things at once. If you are doing the job correctly and playing your cards close to your chest, nothing should ever be explicitly your fault. By the end of the night there should be no blame cast in your direction. 

When closing finally rolls around, if the man behind the counter in Nighthawks is a student, he almost certainly has somewhere to be afterwards. He’ll begin wiping down tables, putting up chairs, sweeping and mopping the floors, and will probably cut some corners in the process. 

Perfectionism is for people working in jobs that require spreadsheets. No one closes faster than a fresher whose friends are already in line for Dakota.