I sing of the general manager. The herald, the poor, unappreciated, downtrodden soul. Cracker of the whip. Builder of the schedule. Bearer of much weight upon troubled shoulders. The one with the forced smile whose ear bends to all the complaints in the restaurant issued from staff both front and back, guests, other managers, owners. Ah yes, there was a time when I was foolhardy enough to accept this position. Yet another desperate time in my life. Still trying to find that ever elusive perfect waiting job.

The joint: Tavolo in Dorchester, MA. I was offered the position because of work ethic, not actual ability or competence. In the past I had once managed a kitchen but truth be told, I had no fucking clue. I took the job because the money was good. $1,000 a week.

A big place with decent food. Tavolo’s location and size was mostly the problem. It was adjacent to Ashmont Station, a T stop where daily shootings were commonplace. Because the restaurant was so large, staffing was difficult. Too many servers and we’d all be standing around, too little and it was total chaos.

The place was owned by this rich real estate character. He was known for large projects that included posh, low income, and section eight all in the same building. Like any of the newer constructions, the ground floor was all big windowed retail space, a bank, a cafe, and the restaurant.

To say the place was slow and overstaffed would be an understatement. As a server there I usually made $20 on a weeknight and maybe $120 on a weekend, a bunch of us in aprons standing around with our thumbs up our asses. Because of this, the servers came and went like the proverbial wind. For the moment, the chef, this crazy guy from the Azores named Jorge, was the acting GM. He knew even less about the front of house going ons that I did. I at least had worked as a server for a few years.

The one thing I was an expert on, was the differences between front and back of house, having worked both spots. Now, of course this is all generalization, but the disparities in the two are quite vast. Servers work less hours and make more money. They work hard and there is no single big reason they do make more money save the way the archaic tip system works (maybe I’ll do a post on that later). Here’s the thing: Servers have to deal with the insanity of people on a regular basis. That alone is worth the extra scratch. Anyone who thinks serving people is just “Taking an order and entering it into the system” should go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut. The average diner asks a lot, A LOT, of questions, most of them stupid. And the more expensive the restaurant’s prices, the more entitled the people get (in most cases). That said, after having had to manage them, servers are the single biggest pain in the ass to deal with. They rarely work through their schedule. They’re always switching times and going on vacations or coming in late. They complain constantly. It’s too slow, it’s too busy, I need more shifts, I’m working too much…

On the other hand, cooks are hard working, mostly on time, and have more of a concept of teamwork than their counterparts. There’s a form of military devotion and discipline in the kitchen, a chain of command. They work in mostly horrible, confined conditions. In front of hot stoves with no available air conditioning. All of this said, there’s no way the average cook would ever be able to do what a server does. They seem to think it’s easy but would never be presentable enough to be able to wait tables. Cooks love to drink beer and their overall hygiene would never be sufficient to work in the front of the house. They roll out of bed and come to work, grumpy, disheveled.

The two main areas of the restaurant would never be able to switch and work one another’s positions. Servers would cry if they had to toil in front of stoves for ten hours a day and cooks simply couldn’t take having to eat the shit sandwiches the servers do. It’s that simple.

What I didn’t know, was just how difficult this all was when I became in charge of servers in a slow restaurant. I hired and fired constantly. I even went to such lengths to hire all good looking women in an attempt to drum up more business in the place which totally backfired on me. They were all even more of a headache than regular servers. Each time I put up the weekly schedule each one of them had some sort of issue with it.

There were other factors as well. Jorge was an insane despot. The owner had me hire one of his spoiled sons and the kid was a complete and insubordinate asshole. A rich kid’s sneer and air of entitlement hovered around him in a toxic miasma. I fired many good people just because the owner’s wife didn’t like them, including a friend of mine and a bartender I totally had the hots for.

To combat all of this, I started drinking around 7:30 each night. Went behind the bar each night, poured myself a hefty glug of red wine on the rocks, then went back to the host stand and chugged away while contemplating what the hell had happened in my life. Just a few years previous I had gone to grad school in New York and planned to be a professional writer. Where had it all gone wrong? How did I become this grotesque front of house manager, drinking every night during his shift in order to quell the misery of where I had ended up? Just five years ago if someone had told me I would become this strange, overweight guy with a big ass and bad hair in a wrinkled button up shirt I would have laughed at them.

On my days off, Jorge would text or call me. “So and so didn’t show up to work!” Yeah, no shit. The place sucked. He routinely screamed at the staff and acted as if he was Jacque Pepin back there. The food was just ok. Cooks also walked out on a regular basis. For whatever reason, the owner loved him even though the largest part of Tavolo’s problem was Jorge. He had this crazy tick where he inserted the term “key part” into everything he said. “Fast pick ups, that’s going to be the key part of tonight’s service. We need to hire another person, that’s the key part of your job you’re not attending to.”

I would hire more people in anticipation of others leaving and overstaff on my days off both to appease Jorge and give myself well deserved rest. On return to work I dealt with all the gripes that ensued. “We made $40 each. I need to switch, I can’t work Mondays anymore,” etc.

At one point, I couldn’t take it anymore. I set up a meeting with the owner and Jorge and told them I wanted to go back to waiting tables again. Unbeknownst to them, I had set everything up for myself behind their backs. I had learned to play their sick game and now began to set myself up.

See what happens tomorrow in part two of That Time I Was a GM. 🙂