I once worked for, what is now, a large hotel chain that had a string of restaurants in the Washington DC/Baltimore area. I started as a “Manager-in-Training.” This required that I learn all of the stations in the restaurant, everything from cashier to dishwasher.
This story begins on a busy Sunday morning; the after church crowd was flooding our restaurant. There was a line out the door, and the dining room and the kitchen were swamped. I was filling in wherever I noticed a slow down or hang up. Meals were starting to back up on the counter. One of the servers, a young girl who had been with us for about a week, looked like she was going to cry. I said, “What can I do to help?” She directed me to a table of six who were sitting patiently without food. I grabbed a coffee pot and started serving refills.
As I walked back into the kitchen, the waitress asked if I would help serve the platters that were sitting under the heat lamps. Now, I will be the first to admit that I have always been rather clumsy. Manipulating 4 or 5 plates on a tray would be no easy task for me, but I said “Sure.” I grabbed a tray and loaded on the French toast, a platter of hot cakes, and several platters of eggs. When I got to the table, I of course didn’t know who got what. The customers were very friendly and directed me. That’s when disaster hit.
As I leaned over to serve the French toast, I tipped the tray ever so slightly to the right, and two beautiful “over easy” eggs slid from their plate, right down the back of a lovely lady who was reaching over to get her coffee cup. Both eggs went down her back; she let out a rather loud “Ohhh.” I was mortified and said I’m so sorry, but she couldn’t get the eggs; by now they were all the way down to the small of her back. She got up, looked horror-stricken, and rushed to the restroom. I took the rest of the food that was still on the tray back to the kitchen.
Of course we comped the table and paid the cleaning bill. The table still left a nice tip. However, that waitress never asked me to help her again. At that point I decided to stay out of the dining room, except for asking people “Is everything OK?”
Tagged as:
accident,
hotel,
owner/manager,
server
