This Is the Least Chaotic Time to Dine at an All-Day Café

The longest I ever waited tables at the same restaurant was about five years, on and off, mostly on. It was a very popular all-day café in Silicon Valley that had been around forever. It was right next to the train station, so we had to deal with three rushes a day, breakfast, lunch and dinner, with concomitant lulls in between each one. Throughout the course of the day, management wanted the restaurant to get increasingly sophisticated, including the waitstaff, but we still had to deal with the same metal mesh tables, chalkboard menu, and very cheap black aprons. They were the kind that attract lint the second you put them on, so there was a limit to how far the crew of mostly teenagers was able to carry the effect.

There’s a major vibe shift, but how do you dress for it?

If you were lucky enough to get assigned to the morning shift, nothing much was expected of you beyond basic, regular friendliness. You could call customers “guys,” hide imperfectly-made pastries behind the register and take a bite in between taking orders, and go to the bathroom without asking permission. Even the swing shift wasn’t too bad. But the evening staff had real managers on the floor, and they expected you to memorize the specials and dress as if we had a company uniform. They didn’t want to provide us with company uniforms, so they’d just send you home if you wore a collared shirt that didn’t seem white enough, that sort of thing. 

There was a serious controversy at one point about whether we were supposed to wear white bras under the white shirt (if we wore bras) or “flesh-toned” bras under the white shirt. Pretty much everybody knows that a “flesh-toned” bra is less noticeable under a white shirt than a white bra, but some of the managers just couldn’t get past the idea of color matching, so eventually the white bras carried the day. You never had to deal with that sort of thing working the breakfast shift.

It just seemed ridiculous, because nothing else about the restaurant transformed from the casual morning experience to the upscale pretensions of the evening experience. We still had to wipe down the same metal café tables in between customers with a wet rag. Worse, we were always supposed to keep a wet rag in the front pocket of those cheap lint-covered aprons, and I could never perfect the art of saturating the rag with just the right amount of water. I always let it get too wet, and then it would soak right through the leg of my pants by the end of every shift, and there is nothing that makes you less likely to contribute to an upscale atmosphere like the sneaking suspicion you are at risk for developing trench foot on your upper thigh.

The pros and cons of working the breakfast shift and the dinner shift

The best part about working the breakfast shift was timing. You arrive to find the place in pretty close to spotless condition. Then you get to go home once the place was a mess, and everybody was shouting at everybody else. “Not my problem! Good luck getting those fingerprints off the dessert case, see you tomorrow.” 

Of course, this also meant having to wake up at 5 a.m. to get to work on time, but into every life a little rain must fall. This way you’d be finished with work by 3 p.m., and while that’s not nothing, it doesn’t do you a lot of good when all your other friends are still at their jobs and you’re ready to go to bed at 6 p.m..

The worst part about working the closing shift was having to show up when the place looked like it was on fire, plus having to clean the whole restaurant front to back once you kicked all the customers out. This could be slightly ameliorated by getting to take him all the leftover pastries, but the daytime shift got first dibs on their way out the door, so some nights you’d hit the jackpot (three ham and cheese croissants, a slice of pie we couldn’t legally sell since it had been sitting out too long but was still perfectly good, a broken cookie). Some nights you’d get nothing, everything good having been commandeered by the morning crew while you were wasting your time memorizing the ingredients in the short rib special.

Everyone hates the closers

This is no accident, of course. Every opener considers the vile closing team their real enemy (the closing team considers the customer their real enemy) and tries to make sure they get all the good pastries for themselves. And they are not exactly wrong to do so, because the closing team almost invariably forgets to clean or lock up something every couple of days, leaving a very unwelcome surprise for the morning team when they try to open the place. That’s not so bad in and of itself, but the real problem is that the closing team isn’t there to get yelled at when the opening team makes the discovery. They won’t even pick up if you call to yell at them. They’re happily asleep, so you can’t vent your spleen properly. 

The best thing you can do is rat them out to management, which of course you won’t do, so you just quietly hate them when they roll in at 3:30 p.m., looking fresh as lilypads and drinking iced coffees they bought at some other, better restaurant while you were stuck emptying the grease trap. They ought to invent a restaurant that never closes, or one that never opens. The problem is trying to do both in the same day.