December 2023
I spent a lot of the holiday season thinking about restaurant work. I turned 25 this month, and I seem to be settling into the fact of being not merely someone who works in a restaurant right now, but a restaurant worker — someone who will probably work in this industry in some capacity for a significant chunk of my adult life. (Watch me say this and then quit my job within a week, which I’ve been threatening to do almost every day since November.) It’s a shit industry. The hours are either too long or comically short — in the past week, I’ve done both an eleven-hour shift with no break or chance to sit down, and a shift where I got sent home two hours after I arrived — and the pay is a joke, and the physical toll that the work takes on your body is no joke at all. All the same, it’s work that I find fulfilling and rewarding, and I think I want to keep doing it.
My work was open Christmas Day — for a ten-course tasting menu which racked up to a price per head that I couldn’t look at without getting dizzy — and I spent a lot of the day reflecting on that sense of fulfilment. I was the only employee scheduled to work that day outside of management — I jumped between running food and washing dishes, worked nine hours without a break, and had to walk forty minutes each way because, obviously, the buses don’t run on Christmas. I did all that for my regular hourly pay rate — even my shitty cleaning job from this time last year paid me time and a half on Christmas and New Year. On paper, I can see how bad that looks. These sorts of working conditions are endemic to the industry. Half my workplace quit over how poorly managed the Christmas shifts were shaping up to be. When I’m thinking about liking my job — these questions of satisfaction, fulfilment, despite the fact that nothing I accomplish is tangibly mine, my labour does not belong to me — I’m doing so with this desire to make sense of that feeling relative to the material state of the restaurant industry, in a manner that neither diminishes its brutality nor denies the possibility that anyone could ever work in it by choice.
I guess what I’ve been trying to get at lately is a way of articulating the nature of my exploitation — and I use the word exploitation neutrally, as a materialist descriptor of the state of proletarian labour — in a manner that can cohere with the fact that I like the work that I do. At a glance, I would feel inclined to say that liking or disliking a job is largely irrelevant, telegraphing an emotive state that exerts relatively little meaningful force on the material conditions that I actually want to investigate. Yet the industries which run on labour that finds itself classed as ‘unskilled’ — hospitality, retail, customer service, to name just a few — attract a particular reputation for being staffed entirely by people who hate their job, resent every customer with whom they come into contact, and must necessarily move through the world in a state of persistent unhappiness and unrest that doesn’t seem to manifest in those working comfortably middle-class white collar jobs.
To be clear, I don’t believe the claim that all restaurant workers love their job and are there entirely by choice is any more correct and helpful than the one which posits that we and every other member of the working class would all rather be making a living in an office right now if given the option. The relatively low barrier for entry into restaurant work — and a tendency towards illegal or extralegal employment, cash in hand pay, etc. — means that any given restaurant is staffed in pretty significant part by people who don’t have any other available options, be it due to a lack of education, language skills, documentation, or any combination thereof. This lack of mobility is what makes the highly exploitative conditions of the restaurant possible in the first place. Where I think this discussion is more helpful is in challenging this tendency to corner the restaurant worker into a discursive box whereby we have no room to exercise agency within our roles; without agency, we relinquish all responsibility for the way in which we, too, participate in upholding the restaurant as a classed space — as a space which works to preserve and reiterate the social conditions of class division.
To put it another way: if the customer is a metaphysical force of evil imposing on the restaurant worker who always hates being there and always wants to tell the customer to fuck off and die forever, how do we then make sense of the fact that the restaurant worker is tasked with creating the conditions by which the “customer” comes into being in the first place, specifically by eliminating the factors which inhibit the creation of the potential “customer,” including those who will never be “customers” at all?
I wrote a little on Tumblr about what I mean when I say that restaurant workers are expected to participate in a particular fiction of class character in ways which can make us complicit in conditions of hostility towards those more disenfranchised than we are — homeless people, drug users, those considered undesirable by our middle-class clientele. The conditions of the restaurant seek to unperson those people just as much as does the middle-class sensibility that informs the restaurant-goer, and those of us whose work involves keeping the restaurant functional are responsible for greasing the wheels of that process just as much as any other. I guess this is why I think this question of liking the work has relevance to a materialist account of it — it’s far too easy to participate in this narrative whereby the customer is the site of exploitation and the worker is a kind of dancing monkey with whom interaction on the customer’s end can only ever be intrusive or unwanted. It’s the kind of guilt that drives a certain type of person to self-flagellate at the thought of being a customer, or to feel the need to apologise for having particular requests or wanting particular accommodations. It’s the line of argument that informs the seemingly endless cycle of tipping discourse, wherein stating that [American] servers shouldn’t have to participate in this inane and insincere deference to the heinously overblown whims of the guest in order to make any money at work gives way to the claim that any sociability, conversation, engagement induced on the part of the server towards the guest is either a cynical effort to extract extra cash when the time for tipping comes or a desperate plea for the guest to cover the rest of their rent this month. Obviously, none of us like our work. None of us want to make conversation, and none of us have any sincere interest in the food or drink. (That kind of interest is reserved for serious, intellectual people. Food critics, not waiters.)
This line of questioning brings me back to Christmas Day — I enjoyed working Christmas Day. The guests were pleasant and patient, and the tedium of the kitchen was undercut somewhat by a menu that I had never seen before. Keeping track of ten courses for multiple tables at once is the kind of work I genuinely look forward to — where the kind of mental exertion it takes to make sure that the right food goes to the right place at the right time gives way to that kind of satisfaction that drives me towards the work at all. I don’t resent guests who come in on holidays; I don’t imagine them to be personally, vindictively complicit in my having to be at work when I could be at home. (I don’t celebrate Christmas anyway, which I’m sure is informing my position here to some extent.) More to the point, it got me thinking about how little the narrative of the exploitative customer and the downtrodden waiter has to offer for explaining my own relationship to the hospitality industry; how, if I want to be a genuine materialist about it, I need to be able to be honest both about the extent of my complicity and my agency in this line of work.
I don’t love what hospitality represents. What I sell to people is a fantasy of servitude, amplified by the fact that my workplace is on the relatively upscale end of casual dining frequented near-exclusively by those who are middle-class or better. The overlap in class characteristics between those who work at the restaurant and those who dine there is very, very minimal. If you look at the reviews online, half of them bring up things that I’ve never thought about as a person who goes to restaurants for the sake of having a nice meal. They’re thinking about the attentiveness of the staff; the extent to which the (primarily female) waitstaff were smiling and accommodating requests; the friendliness, the deference. There’s a subset of middle-class people who go to restaurants primarily to simulate the experience of having domestic servants, and it’s that subset which I tend to work with. Part of why I started out BOH — and still work BOH half the time — is because I am not friendly or personable. Yet I’m finding recently that I’m able to enjoy what I do whilst making sense of it within this framework; I don’t find that one contradicts the other in a way that I might have as recently as five or six months ago.
I wanted this to be a newsletter about the media I enjoyed this December, but to be honest, it’s been a long, difficult month, and I spent most of it at the restaurant. I promised I would write about Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Piranesi — I finished the former and reread the latter, and I do have the bare bones of my thoughts sketched out, so I hope that I’ll finally get round to that in January. I’m working on a short story that I’m really looking forward to sharing — the other day, I described it to a friend as somewhere between The Sims 2 and Mysterious Skin in terms of sheer vibes, and I think I’ll feel really good about this one if I can nail it. I don’t really do new year’s resolutions, but I guess I’m hoping that this year I can write more, write better, become more astute and precise and technically accomplished.
Happy New Year,
Ave
