There’s a real stigma surrounding older people working in restaurants, unless of course they’re the chef (but even then, when was the last time you saw a chef over the age of 50 aside from Wolfgang Puck?). Why? Whenever I see an older person waiting tables or bartending I feel the same twinge of despair as seeing the old guy at Whole Foods bagging my groceries. It’s one hundred percent the projection of dark thoughts about my own bleak future. I don’t want to be the old, grey guy with the cane and walker behind the bar, but shit, someone has to be, right?

I’m officially the oldest person in the front of the house at Rustic…By a country mile…For awhile there were a few employees that kept me under that designation but now they’re long gone, off to other restaurants where they now are probably the old ones. I wonder why it bothers me so much. I mean, most people work until retirement, so in every office and workplace it means there will be plenty of old farts hanging around.

In comparison to most dudes my age I feel quite young and able to continue. Shit, I’ve already had a good amount of friends from my youth pass on to the next plane of existence. Despite the dread I feel at my current situation I think about the offices I’ve worked in and to me that’s a hell worse than being on my feet for eight hours at a time and having sore elbows and shoulders from shaking cocktails. Yeah, sorry to those people. I look at you guys the way I think you look at me. So, again, I ask myself, “Is it all in my head? Is it just how I view myself and not at all how people view me? And why the hell should I care what people think of me anyway?”

Part of the problem is, most restaurants, especially of late, employ younger people. The word spread, after the pandemic, that restaurants are not the place you want to wile away your twenties. Nope. They don’t take care of you. There’s no increase of wages year after year. You make the same money after a decade as the 22 year old who just got hired. There’s no retirement, pension, 401K matching. My vacation time is my hourly, not the tips I make, so when I take a day off, I make shit. Any money I squirrel away for my elder years is all on me. The money is great but it fluctuates wildly at times depending on any number of reasons.

I could go on and on here about the negative aspects of working in restaurants. But I could also talk about the positives as well. I have the whole day to take care of my son. I mostly enjoy talking to and meeting new people (despite what the curmudgeonly side of me will have you believe). I love food and concocting new drinks. It’s nice to have a creative outlet of some type that gives me a lot of positive feedback. On this side, I could also go on and on. It’s a love/hate relationship you see. That’s how it works.

I’m not using this as a platform to complain, but rather to explain and analyze my own angst and fear. Over the decades in restaurants I’ve seen a few old guys in the front of house, only once in the back of house, and I never, ever, thought of them as old and feeble or sad. Just as wiser people. So I guess maybe, in the throes of my own existential terrors, that’s how I hope I’m viewed.

Walter was the first older dude I ever encountered. A waiter at Trattoria Delia in Burlington who, when he got in the weeds, starting cussing people out in Italian. I was 21 years old and worked in the kitchen and that’s how me and the other guys knew the wave of tickets was about to wash over us. Walter would come into the kitchen to cut bread, the wisps of white hair sprouting from the sides of his bald head, face red, muttering and fuming.

When I worked as a cook at Howard Johnson’s there was this tall, skinny waiter dude named Barry whose long stride ended with an abrupt limp. The swirling rumors told me he had been on the receiving end of a coke deal gone, or he owed the wrong person money and they broke his ankles…The real reason, I’m sure, was probably an old tennis injury or something similar. Barry was an old rocker type from the 60s. Wore all black. Smoked Camel lights. Had long, thinning hair that was a strange mixture of blond and white.

My favorite older dude of all time was Cal. A 50+ year old guy I worked with at Steel & Rye in Milton, MA, outside of Boston. A tall, good looking, jacked man with an air of grace and refinement about him. Well spoken and kind. He owned a sandwich shop where he worked during the day. He was the first waiter I’d ever met who owned a nice house which was right down the street from the restaurant (a really well-to-do, nice neighborhood). I was a bit out of shape back then. Someone had mentioned to me I had man tits and it got under my skin. Cal helped me get it back together. Gave me tips on eating well and the right workouts, which we often chatted about.

My only hope is that I’m remembered much the same as these guys. That instead of being thought of as some old loser/former degenerate I’m held in high esteem. Yeah, I worked with this dry, shaggy, funny guy years ago. Great father, loving husband, used to work here but became an author and now teaches bartending fundamentals class and a Cormac McCarthy seminar at UCLA.

Ah, do you think I forgot about mentioning the one older guy who was a cook? It was during my short tenor at the Red Lobster in my hometown. He was a marathon runner, this weird, short, super muscular German dude who was always in an annoyingly chipper mood in the morning because he didn’t drink. He somehow got away with working in short shorts, and wore them even in the depressing depths of the Vermont winters. No one ever bothered him because he did his job perfectly and everyone was afraid of him. I can see his pallid white, hairy legs now, hear his accent in my ears, “Jah, and now vee vill bread ze shrimps.”