THE ART OF WAITING
An ode to those who serve

By Cassandra Csencsitz

Of many pandemic-borne lessons, the greatest for restaurants might well be how to recruit and retain a workforce who has learned far easier ways to put food on their own plates.

Without a doubt, our industry’s staffing drought has been Gotham’s biggest challenge these last sixth months. Observing the struggle I’ve found myself—new to restaurant leadership via marriage—thinking about The Art of Waiting and, with our personal stakes incredibly high, marveling at those who do it well. Put simply, the chefs’ and our fates are in their hands.

For months I’ve watched Gotham’s longtime maître d’ Joseph and new GM Daniel perform miracles to staff and train Gotham’s hard-won fledgling service team. I began reckoning the many virtues a strong server must possess, skills taken for granted once a team is well-trained enough to make it look easy and reap the rewards of happy guests. A great waiter must be a convincing actor or a good human being (ideally, they are both!). They must be confident public speakers who don’t talk too much. They must juggle mentally and physically, holding their posture and poise in spite of heavy trays and awkward reaches over thousands of steps. They must be patient with temperamental guests and exacting chefs, protecting the fourth wall between kitchen and dining room. They simply can never (publicly) lose their cool.

Mystified how we would ever reclaim the service level of Gotham past, I recalled Sam Sifton’s praise for our “quiet ceremony” from the 2011 review. He then noted, "A meal at Gotham is about you and your interests, not of those who made it.” This is still very much who we want to be.

A great waiter must be a convincing actor or a good human being (ideally, they are both!).

In the weeks before opening, we anxiously theorized about our ideal “intuitive, tailored, unintrusive” service style. In our (aptly named) mock services, I remembered my own short waitress stint during graduate school in Santa Fe, when I once sloshed skim milk off Steve Martin’s oatmeal onto his shoes. “Oh Mr. Martin, I’m so sorry,” I said, sinking through the floor. He replied with a wink, “You know what they say…no use crying…” Good man, that Steve Martin, but it was back to the host stand for me. Knowing my own limitations, I secretly worried training our new team might be impossible. Then I kept watching Joseph tirelessly rehearse his struggling chorus. And I began to see progress. The orchestra started to flow.

Now that we are enjoying so much positive feedback about our service, every word of it meaning the world, one can bear to look back and reckon how far the team’s come. While many Gotham alumni have returned from the classes of 1984-2020, all our former senior captains moved on, left the industry, or got snapped up by restaurants who reopened before us. But two veteran servers, Tipu and Tapan, who’ve respectively worked at Gotham since 1994 (!) and 2007, helped anchor our new team members, most of whom never even worked in fine dining. One such new and improving head waiter, Jack, also an aspiring actor and French-speaker, had to learn to abstain from introducing himself as Captain Jack. (This is printed lovingly with his permission.) We’ve come a long way…maybe. For it is still a day-to-day staffing and scheduling effort with variables as infinite as the human experience.

But at its best waiting tables IS a wonderful career, a second theatre for those who like to perform, achieve, and celebrate daily. As I got to know our new team, I was thrilled to find Bohemia alive and well in this generation’s practical world. Aspiring visual and performing artists can still support their primary passion and elevated lifestyle with a restaurant career. My husband Bret himself funded the Greek theatre trip we met on bartending (I won’t say which year), among other adventures, and went from producing film and theatre to take a career-changing and defining job with Daniel Boulud. Most members on our team are doing some version of this today.

So why the shortage? We've had to answer this question constantly as folks quizzically empathize and secretly wonder if maybe it’s you. Journalists have cited that many who lost jobs left the city and can’t afford to come back. I have to say that personally I also understand the factor of the “great resignation.” I would position it as the discovery of freedom and the end of employer abuse. Like many others, the restaurant industry must prove itself as not only a lucrative and flexible career but also a joyful, humane, and empowering one.

Anthony Bourdain called our business humbling. You can say that again. On the flip side, working as hard as restaurants call for train a work ethic and the above-described multitasking sang-froid like no other. Everyone knows you can always tell the difference between people who have worked in restaurants and those who haven’t. Even though I balked at waitressing, my years of hosting and coat-checking (crazier than it seems!) later equipped me to train an army of makeup artists in the “Power of Hosting,” my boss’s effort to get them to mimic my hosting reflex, to turn up the hustle and charm, hone their acting skills, make their guests feel like queens.

The best employees. A symbiotic career between hospitality and the arts. At its best, working in a restaurant should be a secure career that makes you feel like an individual star on a fabulous team. Working in fine dining should make you feel in-the-know about the highest levels of food and drink and the people and things that surround those worlds. It’s an elevated education, a network, and hardworking fun that fills you with pride. This is what we want for the next wave of waiters at Gotham, and I see no reason we won’t.

So at our six-month mark since reopening, I’d like to say their names—the names of those on our current waitstaff—with recognition for how far they’ve come. Thank you for dressing up, showing up, not giving up, and for lifting us all up to: 

INSERT ALL FOH NAMES