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Serving Up the Highs and Lows Of Restaurant Life
Personal insights from a former hospitality worker
I miss bar life but would rather papercut my eyeballs than ever return to the colorful chaos of that world.
I’m wistful when I remember the quick money. The mental acuity required to ensure smooth and prompt service on a busy night. Even the crazy stories of drunk college kids and pseudo-celebrities who found their way into the places I worked. But the thought of these days gone by makes me nauseous, too.
As a creative professional freshly graduated from college, I often needed to supplement my sporadic income. Thus, I took the plunge into serving. Enduring hours in a cubicle under fluorescent lights, producing vague work for a bland corporation with a bogus mission statement, sounded like a fate worse than death.
I figured I’d put in a couple of years and my creative endeavors would take off. I wound up inadvertently carving a second career in hospitality — a world I simultaneously loved and hated.
The restaurant industry is the second-largest private sector employer in the U.S. and hospitality employees account for 10% of our workforce. If you’ve never held down a serving or bartending job, chances are, you know someone who has, and either loved or hated their experience. Or…
