“I’m doing an experiment,” my friend Ella said, as she splashed some cream of vegetable soup into a bowl. Of the two bowls she was preparing to carry out to a table at the family restaurant where we worked, one contained just enough liquid to cover the bottom of the bowl while the other was brimming.
Walking slowly so that the soup didn’t slop out of the full bowl, Ella made her way to the table. I couldn’t bear to watch the “experiment” – the reaction of two people who got drastically different amounts of soup before their meal – go down. Since we’d started working as waitresses at the small-town restaurant over the summer break from high school, Ella was prone to shaking things up to keep herself from getting too bored.
She returned moments later and dished more soup into the emptier bowl, shrugging her shoulders and laughing.
Working at the restaurant was one of the best part-time jobs I’ve ever had. The place was too small to get too busy – which was good because if it didn’t I wasn’t a skilled enough waitress to handle it.
I was just 16, hired by a Greek man who’d created a multi-page menu replete with items honoring his homeland like spanikopita, but also included a Chinese combo plate, pizza, and a local Saskatchewan delicacy: the hot hamburger (a burger patty on a piece of bread, smothered in gravy). Later, a Chinese couple took it over and several more Asian dishes to the menu (along with several spelling and grammatical errors) but still kept the hodgepodge of Greek, Italianish and North American offerings.
A handful of my friends worked there and the other employees I didn’t know from school were an entertaining bunch of riffraff from around town. At one point, I got my underage brother a job as a dishwasher at the restaurant and was rewarded by constantly having him whining about how the waitresses should help him whenever he worked a closing shift. My brother didn’t last long, but then again, hardly anyone did in the years I worked there on and off. The only server who stuck around was the sinewy head waitress, Debbie, who was later fired when the new owners installed a security camera and caught her pocketing money from the cash register.
Donnie, a middle-aged, full-time dishwasher with a mouth full of teeth in all stages of decay, still works at the restaurant to this day. Last time I was in town he appeared at my mom’s door with some food we’d ordered for delivery. He hadn’t changed a bit. The aviator-style prescription glasses he’d favored back then were still perched on his nose, having managed to span an entire fashion cycle of stylish to nerdy to ironically nerdy to stylish. Unfortunately, the collared button-up shirts he favored never experienced a fashion renaissance. I can still see Donnie leaning up against the waitress station at the restaurant with his ruddy flesh and matted chest hair visible beneath his thin shirt, his face shiny from all the steam the dishwasher gave off.
When things got slow, the waitresses would fill creamers and ketchup bottles while gabbing with Donnie or a cook named Jason. Jason has previously worked at a popular cheese shop in Saskatoon called Bulk Cheese Warehouse, and loved to regale us with tales from his glory days making pasta salad at the shop. No Bulk Cheese Warehouse incident was too insignificant to be turned into an “amusing” daily anecdote to share with us. Once, when I asked him where the pasta featured in our baked ravioli dish came from, he led me back to the panty and hefted an economy-sized can from the shelf. “Let’s just say, thank goodness for Chef Boyardee.”
One of my favorite waitresses was a hardworking and kind woman named Barbara who’d been arrested in a major drug-trafficking sting in town. Coming in for my shift one day one of my signature dark under-eye circles caught the light strangely and Barbra mistook my tiredness for a black eye. “Who hit you?” she asked immediately, seizing my shoulders with both her hands. “Who fucking hit you?!”
Gisele – or Giz, which is what we’d call her behind her back – was a plump beauty who was always good for detailed stories about her old man, which is what she called her boyfriend, not to be confused with her dad. Another girl, Tracy, made me clean out the bathrooms for her while she offered relationship advice. “If you think your boyfriend is cheating on you,” she told me, “tell him you want to take a bath. If his dick floats in the bathwater, you’ll know he cheated because that means it’s empty.” Rock-solid logic if I ever heard it.
Tips were abysmal, but leaving a shift with $8 in cash was still a selling feature for the place. So was the food. We got staff rates on most items, of which I took advantage. Despite many other bad habits I developed while working there, I never snuck French fries off a customer’s plate like I’d seen other girls do when they were hungry, but I was guilty of gobbling down roll after buttered roll and iceberg-lettuce salad ladled with ranch dressing between serving tables. Once in a while, Ella and I would steal a piece of Turtle cheesecake from the cooler and alternate bites, sliding the plate and fork under the hot-chocolate machine so the owners couldn’t see the evidence.
To this day, I still crave food from the restaurant and dine there every time I’m back in Saskatchewan. My family reluctantly tags along, though my mom always likes to note that her friend, the town’s health inspector, never eats there. It’s nice to know some things never change.
Sure, the location is different, but almost 15 years later, the menu is almost exactly the same. The people are different, but I’d bet they’re just as entertaining.
